He soon asked Hulver to take him up to the Ancient System, but Hulver always refused, one excuse following the other: ‘I’m too tired today for such a climb… it’s wormscarce up there at the moment, better wait a while… there’s nothing much to see that I can’t describe… too many owls now because moles have been gone too long.’ But all this didn’t put off Bracken, who only became more determined to go.
But there were other things to talk about as well. It was from Hulver that he first learned of Uffington, where the Holy Burrows were, and where mysterious White Moles were said to roam.
‘It’s far off, far to the west. I’ve never met a mole who’s been there, though I talked to some when I was your age who claimed to have met moles who had.’
‘What do they do there?’ Bracken wanted to know. ‘What moles live with the White Moles? Do you know anything about scribe moles, like Aspen mentioned in her stories?’
The questions tumbled from him in a flow that sometimes made Hulver feel old and helpless, for there were so many questions he didn’t know the answers to and, what was worse, had never thought of finding the answers to.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never known,’ he would say. ‘The scribes came from there, I know that!’
‘Yes, but what do scribemoles do?’ Bracken would persist. ‘They write the stories that moles want to remember and the prayers and blessings that true moles love. They go out from Uffington to remind us of the Stone.’
‘Have they ever been here?’ asked Bracken tirelessly, and Hulver told him what he knew of that.
So Bracken learned much from what Hulver talked about, but more without knowing it from the gentle way the old mole lived, looking for worms, openly seeking the Stone’s help, pausing sometimes to tell Bracken to listen to the sound of ‘this beloved wood’. Often just crouching and making Bracken do the same, even though he found it irksome crouching in silence when he could be doing something or talking.
‘Which is why I make you do it,’ Hulver would tell him mysteriously.
One day Hulver shocked Bracken by announcing that it was time for the June elder meeting and he would be gone for five or six days—‘even though they don’t listen to what I say, with Mandrake hard upon them.’
Just before he left, he spoke to Bracken very seriously. ‘Stay here quietly, live in my burrow silently as I have been teaching you to do, for though, being Midsummer, this should be a time of great happiness, I fear there is much danger about. I can smell it, so take care.’
A chill came over Bracken’s heart at this, for the sudden prospect of being alone again made him recognise the joy he had been living with in the last few days with Hulver, who, seeing fear cross his face, softly touched his shoulder with his paw and said, ‘There is danger, but you are strong enough to face it. You will never face an evil you have not the strength to master. When I come back there will be a lot to do and you will have much to learn,’ Hulver told him finally. ‘I am going to take you up to the Ancient System. Meanwhile, do not be lulled by the June sun. There is danger in the system and I fear you may suffer in its coming, so be careful.’
Hulver turned and ran a little way down the slope before disappearing down a tunnel leading to far-off Barrow Vale. He hated to leave Bracken, for he had rejoiced in their friendship too.
Bracken watched him go, and with an enormous sense of loss turned back down into Hulver’s tunnels and along to his burrow, where he crouched, shaken and desolate. A terrible dark fear began to seep into him and he shivered, despite the June warmth. He had never felt so alone. In the darkness he tried to find words to comfort himself, the fear swirling about him, but they had gone. Then the fear took him over until it felt like a black cloud that would burst and explode inside him, and he found himself crying and desolate, repeating between his sobs lines from the first grace he had heard Hulver speak:
‘Let no mole adown my body
That may hurt my sorrowing soul.’
And though he did not know it, it was the first prayer to the Stone that he ever spoke. Slowly it calmed him until he was able to think of Hulver again and not himself. He changed the ‘my’ to ‘his’ and said the grace again, hoping it might go down through the tunnels with Hulver to the elder meeting at Barrow Vale, where it might protect him.
But Hulver met another mole and had a conversation with her, before he joined the other elders. It was a meeting that affected him very much and caused him to think that Bracken was a more special mole than he might otherwise have thought.
