‘Tell him,’ whispered Boswell, gulping with the strain of speaking, ‘tell him to find her. Tell him to seek her out.’
‘Oh Boswell,’ said Bracken to himself, desolation coming over him. He got up from the hollow by the stream and stepped out into the wind. He ignored Gelert, who crouched waiting. He snouted into the wind and then southeastwards towards where Duncton Wood lay so many hundreds of molemiles away. The words formed long before the idea did, for the idea was absurd and words are easy: ‘Boswell needs you, Boswell needs you. Can you hear him calling? Give me the strength to heal him,’ and as he spoke the words to himself the spirit of them became stronger in him and he began to feel again the power of the Stone, and then the more specific force of the Duncton Stone, and then a wild Siabod calling off along the top of Cwmoer, wild and harsh in the wind, a call of triumph, and he knew that the impossible was possible. So he turned to great Gelert once more and said ‘Go and find our healer. Go and get Rebecca. Go away from Cwmoer and lead our healer here.’
Gelert reared and shook in fear, his yellow eyes casting about the moor and sky, his flanks trembling at whatever it was this mole, this monster mole, wanted him to do. ‘Go and get Rebecca’… the idea stormed about them. Perhaps Bracken did not ever speak its words. Perhaps their power simply showed itself.
Gelert’s paws scratched at the ground, his great head swayed back and forth as Bracken began to think again of Rebecca and the Stone and some deep sense of calling came to Gelert. He bent his head down to the mole he feared, and sniffed and snouted at him, taking in his scent, and then raised his head and looked across the moor away from Siabod and down into the valleys from where the pulling was coming, aching to find the thing they wanted.
‘Bring Rebecca here. Bring our healer here.’
And Gelert turned at last away from the hold of Cwmoer, down through its falls and rocks by the way these moles had come, away from their cries whose power in breaking him had brought him such strange distress. He bounded down the hills away from them until he found the scent again, and it showed him whatever it was they wanted him to bring back for them.
The Siabod moles heard him before they saw him, a great hound in maddened distress: running over the surface, howling and scratching here and there with his great paws. He surprised some on the surface and they thought themselves dead when his great snout and maw came down on them, sniffing at them. But then he dismissed them, for they were not the scent he was looking for.
The Siabod moles tell of it still, of how Gelert followed the scent of Bracken and Boswell down into the valley the way they had come, and of how they heard his howlings from near the river and then suddenly a thunderous barking, like a hound that has found its prey.
While Celyn himself, who heard the hound and later saw him clear as slate in the sun, made a song of it which told how Gelert came back from the valley carrying a mole that none of them had ever seen or scented before.
Rebecca never spoke of how Gelert found her, or much of her journey to Siabod, though she would have known that in a way Celyn’s song was true. For though Gelert never carried her, he did lead her up the valley and round to Cwmoer, watching over every inch of what to him must have seemed slow progress.
Massive and dangerous though he was, she knew he would never harm her for she was not afraid of him, as Mandrake was not afraid. How can a mole be afraid of a hound who carries such loss and craving as he did? And perhaps he sensed that she was of Mandrake, the monster mole, and that all of them were monsters who had a power that made him tremble. So he watched over her, running forward impatiently, and back to where she was struggling forward, then on again, urging her to come to where those other moles were waiting.
But if she was slow, how could he know that she was with litter? Nomole now knows or will ever know which mole was her mate. Though why she took him is obvious enough because it was spring and mating time, and had not Rebecca suffered enough litterless days
on her own? Perhaps she feared she would never see another mating time. Perhaps she found a male somewhere below Siabod who sensed her desire and had none of the fears the Duncton males had in the presence of their healer.
Her pregnancy was nearing its term when Gelert found her and perhaps she would have let him carry her, as the ballads would have us believe, if she had not been thinking of her young. There are some things about which the histories of Uffington are silent.
