Did she sense that it was to Bracken and Boswell that Gelert was leading her? Did she hear Bracken’s call? Or did her instinct go even deeper and make her sense, as she passed up the shadowy paths of Cwmoer, that above the rock faces an ancient female was watching blindly, sensing that she was there, and then singing a cracked song into the wind in old Siabod, whose words spoke of Mandrake’s return and wove tears into triumph?
Death and life, suffering and triumph are all one, they are all one, and disease or health, they matter not. ‘They are all one’ was the theme of despair behind the jumble of suffering thoughts that overtook Boswell in the dreadful days following Gelert’s departure.
While Bracken, between searching for food and forcing Boswell to eat what he could, tried to say no, no, no, no in so many different ways and so to halt the slide into despair and death towards which Boswell’s thoughts seemed to be leading him.
There is an intimacy between moles in a death burrow when one mole lies dying and another uselessly watches every shiver of pain, every weak smile of bravery, every shaking of fear, every sliding into puppish cries and sees the blood and the vomit and the messing that accompanies the evaporation of life. An intimacy and a secretiveness which afterwards make the healthy one forget what he saw and heard and smelt. Just as a mother forgets the mess her pup once caused, so does a mole who watches a loved one near death not feel disgust at the ugliness that goes with a body’s decline.
So Boswell, so Bracken. But a decline from wounds is different from a decline from disease or age; its danger, and what may weigh the balance down, lies in the loss of spirit that dies with wounds—for without the will that made the first pup cry, nomole would ever have raised its head and laughed at the world about it.
So Boswell now. The days dragged by and Bracken barely slept. He talked to his beloved Boswell in images of warmth, answering each of Boswell’s weakening despairs with whispered memories of life that he had seen or they had seen together.
Boswell’s wound coursed deeply down his back, and though it did not fester or poison it seemed to have ripped out his will to live. He lay belly down, for any other position caused him worse pain, with his snout on one side to ease his breathing. His paws became as floppy as a pup’s and of the food, mushed up, that Bracken tried to feed him, only a small part went down—the rest dribbling back out of his weak mouth.
But at least Boswell sometimes asked if Rebecca was coming, and that, surely, said that he was still looking to a life beyond his pain.
Bracken dug out a temporary burrow for them both, but it was so shallow and the tunnel so short that the light of day came in. And the cold of night as well. Days ran into nights which lost themselves in days, but there were so many times when Boswell seemed so weak that it was minutes that Bracken prayed for, not whole days.
‘Let him hold on for one more hour… let him live until the rain has stopped… let him stay until the first light of dawn…’ So Bracken pleaded with the Stone, begging that his friend might hold on to life until Rebecca came.
Until, at last, after eight days of waiting, Gelert returned. His paws were cut and bloody, his coat was covered in mud and grit and there were great cuts and gashes across his face where he had plunged through blackthorn and brambles, and a terrible cut under his left flank where, in leaping over some obstruction, the cut of steel had caught him.
But he had led Rebecca in safety over the molemiles, a journey that moles still celebrate with gratitude and pride, and he took her to the ground by the temporary burrow as gently as he had led her. Who she was, or what she was for, he did not know; but his journey was done and the cliffs of Cwmoer no longer seemed to want to press down upon him; and the great moles that had threatened him from the shadows were gone. He scratched at the ground, waited until Bracken came, and then turned wearily back down the track, his tail low and his body dragging with fatigue, to hide in his own lair where he could forget these moles, or try to, and dream of summer days when no trouble such as they brought would bother him.
The first thing Bracken noticed about Rebecca was that she was with litter, and not his litter. The second was that she was not the mole, the fictitious female, he had created in his imagination in the long moleyears of their separation. This was not the mole he had prayed for, whose memory had comforted him, whose caress had become in his mind like the music of water or wind. She was tired, she was older, she was worried.
‘Rebecca!’ he said, a little hostile.
