The mole he met was Rebecca, and it would be the first time that Rebecca ever heard the name of Bracken spoken, for her now legendary first meeting with him by the Stone was not to take place until the following September. She had known that an elder meeting was taking place in June and, her curiosity as ever getting the better of her fear of Mandrake, she had dared wait in Barrow Vale to see the elders arrive for the meeting.
Other moles did the same. That was the nice thing about the communal tunnels beneath Barrow Vale. The moment she saw the old mole coming down through the tunnels that led from the slopes, his snout wrinkled and low, his fur ragged and greying, she knew who it was. She ran up to him in the old friendly way she hadn’t dared adopt with anymole during April and May, breathless and smiling. ‘Are you Hulver?’ she asked. He stopped and looked up at her, for she stood more upright and young than he did, and he was so nice. Oh! he was wise and radiated love!
‘I’m Hulver, I can’t deny it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Anyway, nomole else is as old as I am now, so it wasn’t hard to guess. Who are you, my dear?’
She hesitated to say from habit, for moles tended to back away when they found she was Mandrake’s Rebecca. But with Hulver she sensed it didn’t matter. ‘Rebecca,’ she said.
‘Sarah’s daughter!’ he said. ‘And Mandrake’s. You’re a fine-looking female, I must say, though I suppose you’re an adult now, but you all look so young to me. Be the same for you, one day,’ he laughed.
‘Would you tell me about the old times?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Because they say you’re the only one who remembers now, the only one who’s left.’ She dropped her voice a little as she said these last words, because she felt an unaccountable desire to go close to Hulver, to press herself to him, to hold him.
‘It would take a lifetime to tell you even a small part of it,’ he said, ‘and unfortunately I’m in a hurry for the elder meeting.’
‘Oh,’ sighed Rebecca, disappointed. There was so much she wanted to know about things and she felt Hulver could tell her. Indeed, she felt he could answer questions she didn’t even know how to ask. She crouched down near him sadly.
Hulver, too, was affected by their meeting. She seemed so, so… so alive! Eager, and sighing, standing and crouching, sad, loving. ‘Elder meetings never start on time, anyway,’ he thought to himself, settling down comfortably by her as a sign that he would talk for a little at least. ‘I’ll tell you about Rebecca, your namesake, if you like, Rebecca the Healer of the Ancient System.’
Rebecca changed mood again, now sighing contentedly, smiling, peaceful, and closing her eyes as she asked to do when Sarah began to tell her a story.
‘Mind you, I expect you know all about Rebecca; you can hardly fail to in Duncton, since she’s the only claim to fame we seem to have and at least they haven’t forgotten her, though they’ve forgotten everything else that matters.’ Rebecca nodded happily; she had heard all about Rebecca but she didn’t mind hearing it again, not from Hulver.
But Hulver himself didn’t know what he was going to say, since it all came into his mind and out as words without him seeming to have too much to do with it. He felt very peaceful. ‘Most of the stories you’ve heard are nonsense, I’m sure; harmless nonsense, of course. It’s just that we all like a good tale and if there seems to be a gap in the telling of it, we fill it up with something we like to think might have been—and who knows, it might have been!’ Hulver felt as if his words were exploring a tunnel down which he himself had never been.
‘Do you know what I think?’ He asked the question as much of himself as of Rebecca, but she shook her head and crouched even closer to Hulver, whose presence she found she loved, because there was something about his great age and goodness which seemed to grow out of the ground itself and make her feel safe and loved. ‘I believe she did stay here in Duncton for quite a time. I believe that in those days Duncton was a system where a mole like her would want to stay. I believe she loved Duncton Wood as you or I might love Barrow Vale in the spring.
‘Now, what you are going to ask me, in fact, what I ask myself, is why I believe all that. Well, I’ll tell you, my dear, because even if you don’t understand now, one day you will, I’m sure.
