‘If it’s going to come, then let it come,’ he used to mutter to the Stone as he passed it by on leaving her burrows. And there came a day, at the start of February, when it did.
There is a way to kill a mole that is so unimaginably cruel that even an owl might quail before the thought of it. Moles who live in systems plagued by it call it, quite simply, the Talon. But most, living in woods and distant fields as they do, have no name for it, and when, by terrible chance, they happen on it, or it on them, then their imagination can barely take in its harsh reality.
It is called a harpoon trap. It has long, sharp prongs set on a spring which are poised above a tunnel in which a pawplate is set. The tunnel is blocked. The mole reopens it, touches the plate and down plunges the unseen Talon, which pierces and squashes at one and the same cruel time. A lucky mole dies at once. But through the paw, or shoulder, or flank, many unlucky ones are impaled, often too shocked even to struggle, and death comes on them with agonising slowness.
By February, Bracken had reached a system on the chalk no more than twenty moledays from Duncton. Drawn as ever by the ancient sarsen stones that follow the chalk, he came one day to a field that seemed almost too good to be true. Open and flat, used as pasture for sheep in the summer and rich with worms as a result, and empty of moles. Off to one side of it stood a great circle of stones, which gave him comfort for he liked their presence, and since he liked to travel in stages—resting at a good place when he could find one—he decided to make the field his own.
It already had a few old tunnels in it but no sign of mole at all. Perhaps he should have been suspicious; perhaps he was tired, and as he came nearer and nearer to Duncton, his mind was excited at approaching so near his home system after so long away and wondering what he might find.
The field was good and he enjoyed prospecting it and then finally starting his tunnels over near the Stones, where another mole had left off. One day, two days, four days passed, and a heavy hoarfrost came. The ground grew white and hard, and as the worms tunnelled down deeper he followed suit, throwing up on the surface great heaps of reddish soil conspicuous against the frost.
He ate well and slept long, putting off renewing his journey as long as he could. Then a day came when he found a tunnel burrowed out the evening before, which was blocked and smelt strange. Badgers? Rabbits? Weasels? He shrugged and sighed and started to build it up again, ignoring the strange smell, for he had scented more dangerous things than that.
A forward step, a shiny, sinking flatness where the floor should have been, a click of steel, and from above came a piercing, lunging shock, so painful that he seemed himself to be the scream he screamed as it entered his right shoulder and impaled him to the floor.
To what does a mole turn when a prong of steel thrusts through his body and sticks him to a tunnel floor, cutting through his veins and arteries and breaking through the joints and bones on which so much of his life depends?
As the agony came piercing into him, Bracken began a cry for help no other mole could ever have understood, for it was distorted with such terrible pain; it was a name, the only name that finally, when he had come right to the edge of life itself, he thought of as protection: ‘Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca,’ he screamed. And even though he knew that she was dead, he cried out her name that she might come to him, to help her love; his love, Rebecca.
Like the other moles in Duncton, Comfrey heard Rebecca’s terrible scream of pain echo down the tunnels of the Ancient System that February day. But while the others quailed before it and ran to their burrows in fear, he turned towards it, running, running to help Rebecca, crying out that he was coming, running into her screams.
He found her out on the surface, running wildly this way and that among the roots of the leafless trees, crying out and sobbing, ‘No, no, no, no,’ and writhing in a terrible pain and saying, ‘Help him, help him, oh help him,’ and not seeming to see Comfrey or hear him as he asked what it was, what was wrong, what he could do, what was hurting her, and he tried to hold her still to find out what it was—because he could see nothing.
But she was racked with pain, and ran in sobbing agony here and there as if she was trying to find something, or shake something off, and then screaming Bracken’s name over and over and saying, ‘Help him, help him, help him,’ her breath coming out in great gasping sobs of pain, her face contorted with it as if she were possessed by an evil that she could not fight.
‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ Comfrey shouted at her to try to stop her, but the more he called her name, the worse she seemed to get, until her talons cut and dug into the roots she passed and leaf litter flew from under the crazed scrabbling of her desperate paws.
