Sometime in the night, not too long before dawn, the real blizzard came. Sudden, cold and harsh—a driving and swirling of biting snow that stung a mole’s snout and roared so loud that thinking became hard. The snow barely settled, preferring to race like moving ice across the surface; but then it began to form eddies and drifts to the lee side of the bigger rocks and to spread out from these in scatters of white. Nowhere safe for Rebecca to stop, so on she went, still certain that she could find a place where she could burrow down into stillness for the sake of herself and her litter.
Did she stop now and try to turn back and discover that it was impossible to go back without sliding and falling? Did she think to find a drift of snow and stop for safety there? Did she wander here and there, confused, and know that she was lost? The blizzard grew worse, creating a nightmare dawn in which the only sound is the rushing snow and the wind seems to tear at fur and eyes and talons and tail, flattening a mole that tries to move against it, toppling one over that tries to run with it.
It was sometime then that Bracken awoke and heard the blizzard’s roar. He went immediately to Rebecca’s tunnel, finding even the short run between the two a struggle to cross. But she was not there. He rushed back to Boswell’s burrow, and the two called uselessly, Boswell coming to the entrance and peering out into the racing snow that fell in flurries of cold into his tunnel.
‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ they called, but the blizzard was so loud that they could not even hear each other’s call.
Bracken stepped full out into the blizzard and cried ‘Rebecca!’ for he loved her, she was his love, and as panic and anger came over him at the thought of her loss, he pressed forward up the slope in the direction in which his instinct told him she had gone without even looking back to say a word to Boswell.
‘Bracken! Bracken!’ cried Boswell as the racing blizzard blotted out Bracken’s retreating back and Boswell too tried to go after him, but was too weak and found it hard even to regain access to his tunnels.
While up through the blizzard Bracken went, trusting to his instinct to find Rebecca, who must have gone seeking a birth burrow as females in litter sometimes will. ‘Oh, Rebecca!’ he cried out in despair as the icy, raging snow tore at him. ‘Rebecca!’
She wandered on through the blizzard, no longer in any set direction but disorientated and growing progressively weaker as the effort to find a place, any place she could litter, overcame her. But not here, not here where the snow is thin as ice on the bare rock ground and shadows of half-seen boulders and shapes in the racing snow seem to loom; and where a litter would be lost. Not here!
Somewhere, sometime, Rebecca came across the fresh tracks of another mole in the thin snow. She looked at them disbelievingly until she thought, and then she knew, that it was Bracken, her Bracken, come for her, and she turned to follow them, for they were fresh and the racing snow hadn’t even started to obscure them. ‘Bracken!’ she must have called, trying to follow and catch up with him, ‘Bracken!’
Ahead of her, not knowing she was so close by, he pressed on even faster and called her name despairingly into the wind, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca!’
But try as she might, she was too tired and too heavy to move fast enough, and the tracks raced on ahead of her, beginning to fill with snow, growing fainter before her as Bracken, trying to find her, moved further and further away from her. Then, finally, she lost the tracks and despair began to creep over her as she turned to the right, high above Cwmoer, to go with the wind, which was easier for her. And she knew that soon, in this waste, with the blizzard raging around, she would have to litter as Mandrake’s mother had done. ‘Oh my loves,’ she must have whispered, ‘forgive me, forgive me,’ as she hopelessly sought a place where she might burrow on the black slate plateaux of Siabod.
Off to her left, far off now and growing further away, Bracken pressed on, fearing more and more that he had lost his Rebecca for ever in the snow.
