‘That’s wot I thought exactly, only I didn’t like to say because, well, you don’t like to carp when things seem all right about a particular mole even though you yourself have your own doubts…’ And so forth.
Comfrey, of course, was their darling again and now that Rebecca was definitely out of the running, there was no doubt in anymole’s mind who the healer was.
It all made Comfrey smile, but he didn’t mind because, like Rebecca, he healed and listened and cared for them for no other reason than that he wanted to—it was the Stone he tried to listen to, not the changing words of other moles.
Rebecca’s litter came one night two hours before dawn in early June and was the last to be born that summer. Its birth was quick and joyous, all four pups being nudged at and licked to start their tiny scrabble into life almost before a mole could blink.
It was her third litter and the second she had reared, and she did it as simply as eating or breathing.
Bracken heard the births and stayed nearby but did not enter her burrow, much though he wanted to. But a day or two after they came and their bleats and mewing were beginning to carry, she called out for him and he came slowly into her tunnels to look at them.
How big he seemed to her, crouching at the burrow entrance and looking in wonder at the four pups who seemed to be permanently trying to untie the knot into which they had tied themselves as pink, soft paws and questing snouts jostled and pushed at soft, furless bodies and they climbed over each other with innocent indifference.
Rebecca had three of their names already—Rose and Curlew for the two females and Beech for the smaller of the males. This last was a common name and Rebecca knew it had always been Bracken’s favourite tree to shelter by, so he did not bother to tell her that one of Rue’s litter by him had been called the same.
As for the fourth, she hesitated over what name to give it, wondering if she might not choose the name of one of the moles they had both loved—Mekkins or Boswell.
Bracken shook his head. It wouldn’t have been right. This mole did not look (if pups can look like anything) like either of them. He was, in fact, the largest of the litter and though not the quickest to fight his way through a scrabble for a suckle (that was Curlew’s place), he was always close behind.
Bracken watched indifferently—names didn’t mean much to him. In fact, he was thinking of something else, as fathers often do when faced by the wonder of new life they have not borne themselves yet have helped to create and before which they may often feel a curious impotence. ‘Can these pups really live to be adult?’ they think, as they gaze in awe at the weak, blind things that carry life in every single movement they make.
The four rolled and tangled up before him and Bracken’s mind took him back to the blizzard on Moel Siabod and he wondered how such tiny things—for Rebecca’s Siabod litter could have been no bigger—could ever have survived conditions in which he himself had nearly died. The thought was horrifying. For a moment their paws all piled on top of each other and then splayed out in tiny protracted talons, and he thought of the great rock splinters and fragments near Castell y Gwynt; and the mixing of their mewings seemed like the winds he had heard howling there.
Then suddenly, for a moment, the so-far-unnamed mole scrabbled his way to the top, his snout shooting up above them all, his paws clutching out into thin air and failing to catch on to anything to stop him falling back down again, away from Bracken, and behind the pile formed by the other three.
It seemed to Bracken that he was back beside the desolate Stones near Siabod and slipping and falling as his son had just done, down into the nameless cwm with the great peak of Tryfan which was, for that moment, his son’s tiny snout, above him and he falling away from it. He shivered with the memory and yet felt the wonder again of seeing Tryfan.
‘Call him Tryfan,’ said Bracken simply.
‘Yes,’ said Rebecca, not needing to ask the reason. ‘Tryfan, sweet thing; Tryfan, my love…’ It was the first of their pups Bracken heard Rebecca talk to by name.
Close though Rebecca’s tunnels were to the Stone, the litter seemed too young to go up to it out on the surface a few weeks later, when Bracken was to speak the Midsummer ritual once again.
But they sensed the excitement and knew that the adults were doing something special, for all of them were restless and fractious that day, bleating especially loudly and mewing for no reason at all.
In fact, by Midsummer Night they had already started to wander far and wide in Rebecca’s tunnels and she often had to round them up and shoo them back to her main burrow because she still liked them all to sleep together. Because of this, one of the females from the system agreed to come to watch over them while Rebecca went up for the ritual itself at midnight, so that she would know they were safe.
