He stopped and snouted about into the blizzard all around, trying to make contact with his love. Great falls of black rock now rose above him, covered in ice and with the thin half-snow of the blizzard swirling like white mist across their sheer faces. He did feel a pull from far, far off to the northwest, a pull that he wrongly thought might be his Rebecca calling. So he turned towards it and away from his Rebecca, not knowing that up there, through the wastes, far off, stood the great Stones of Castell y Gwynt, which had waited for mole for so long. He thought he could feel his Rebecca there, and so he stumbled forward across the rocks and moors where the wind was so strong that only the thinnest layer of snow settled. He prayed to the Stones for his Rebecca as he began the terrible trek that, unbeknown to him, would grant the last wishes of Skeat that the Stone should be honoured even in these wastes; and that would fulfil his promise to the scribemoles of Uffington and Boswell as well. But he only thought of Rebecca and of how somehow, somewhere, he had lost her.
While Rebecca, lost now above Cwmoer in the whiteout of the blizzard, finally gave up her futile search for safety and settled into the thin snow, her back curled against the bitter wind, as one by one her litter began to be born and from their very first moment she battled to protect their lives just as Mandrake’s mother had once battled so bravely to protect his.
It was three full days before Boswell was able and strong enough to move from his burrow out into the blizzard. He had thought a thousand times of what he should do, knowing that he did not have the strength to go upslope into the storm, and the only possibility seemed to slip and slide his way back down through Cwmoer and try to find Gelert of Siabod who perhaps would know what to do. But he never could find him, wandering lower and lower down Cwmoer in his weakness from the wound until the time came that he had to find food and so give up the search. Soon afterwards he knew he would never find the strength to go back up into the blizzard wastes above Cwmoer. He had lost Bracken, lost Rebecca. The seventh Stillstone, the seventh Book… they were not after all his to find. He found that he could not even return to Siabod, for the way by which he had come so recently with Celyn and Bracken was blocked by snow and ice. So he turned his back on Siabod and pointed his snout back to the south, towards Uffington. Asking himself as he left, those futile questions to the Stone that anymole asks in the face of pointless tragedy, all of which begin with ‘Why?’
That same day, Bracken, nearing starvation, found to his surprise that he was dropping rapidly into a valley where the snow was thicker, and he was able to burrow into its silence out of the blizzard. If the soil beneath had been anything else but wormless peat, he might have stayed still and waited for the blizzard to pass. But it was peat, and so on he had to go—sometimes through the snow itself, sometimes out on the surface where its depth was shallow. Until, at last, he was in a river valley where the soil was rich with food under the layer of snow.
For a whole day he was too tired and shocked to do more than rest and eat and regain his strength. But when he had, the pull from the northwest continued. What called him on? He knew it was no longer the hope of finding Rebecca, for Siabod was now far behind him. He crouched clear of the snow’s edge by the river and looked across it through the continuing wind, sensing more great heights beyond him. His snout travelled the length of the great ridge on the far side of the valley and he began to know that there, where such power seemed to come from, must stand the Stones he had been sent to reach. ‘Castell y Gwynt… Tryfan… Rebecca.’ He whispered the names into the wind, careless of his own life now that Rebecca was gone, and knowing that this was his final trek.
Even so, he shivered as he looked about the worm-full tunnels he had made by the river, and then up to the wastes from which he had no expectation of ever returning. He remembered something Celyn had said about the final climb to the Stones having to be done fast because the ground was wormless and then, impulsively, he was off—up the river to a bridge, across a way which even the roaring owls seemed to have abandoned to the snow, and then climbing once again with growing despair in his heart. So far to go, so little time.
