Even so, they must have sensed that she was leaving them for the surface, because they stumbled bleating after her when she left, despite her smiles and love words to them, and the female had to quiet them with her own words. ‘There, there, she’s not going far, you silly things; she’ll come back, so don’t you go fearing over that. Shhh, my darlings, shhh.’
What a night it was! Warm and clear, with a moon that shone as powerfully as a sun, and beech-tree branches that swayed against it high above the gathering moles, the shiny sides of the beech leaves shimmering with pale light in a faint breeze.
What excitement for them all to know they were going to hear the ritual as it should be spoken, by Bracken who had travelled off so far—all the way to Uffington and further, so they said—and who was taught the ritual by as fine an elder as Duncton Wood had ever seen, name of Hulver!
Youngsters from early litters were brought up to the clearing and crouched about in groups or scampered when they shouldn’t, wondering what the fuss was about until they saw the Stone and were awed by its great size and the way it seemed to move against the rising moon.
How many mothers whispered, ‘Now don’t you forget what you’re going to be seeing and hearing tonight, because this is for you, this is, and Duncton’s honoured to have a mole like Bracken here to say those holy words he learned when he was scarcely older than you are now! So don’t you forget!’ And strange to say, although their puppish eyes wandered here and there, and they thought mainly of play and worms and chasing their siblings through the tunnels, there was many a youngster who did always remember that special night.
But there was one who was not there—not on the surface, anyway—who would have an even more special reason to remember the Midsummer Night when Bracken spoke the ritual: Tryfan.
He was not only bigger than his siblings, he was now also by far the most adventurous; and even the most careful of the females can lose track of a single pup when she’s trying to keep track of four of them at once. So, as they scampered round in Rebecca’s burrow, the female looking after them did not see Tryfan scramble out into the tunnel.
Did he go looking for Rebecca, or was it just the excitement of exploring the tunnels once again? He himself was never able to say, for all he could remember were snatches of images, moments of places, wondrous and fearful incidents such as any pup remembers of something that happened when he was very young and which made an impression for a lifetime upon him.
He remembered the sound of his siblings’ play, suddenly distant, and wondering why he was alone; he remembered the tunnels seeming huge and chalky and looking around behind him and hearing his lonely bleat echo about him, confusing him. He remembered running into tunnels that felt old as time, and curving round and seeing chalk dust on his paws.
He heard the murmur of moles on the surface above where the moles were collecting, carried by some tunnel wind or rootway of vibration, down to where he actually was—the round, circular tunnel that surrounded the Chamber of Echoes, the tunnel from which Bracken had first started his exploration of the central core of the Ancient System. Now Bracken’s son, Tryfan, wandered there alone, and tiny, his fur too young to show, snouting this way and that and not knowing where he was.
Moleyears later Tryfan remembered finding himself in the Chamber of Echoes itself, his pawsounds and whimpers echoing around him as if there were a whole lot of youngsters lost like him, but not one of them near enough to give him comfort.
‘But then, all of a sudden, even though I was lost and should really have been very frightened, I knew it was all right,’ he was to recall. ‘I didn’t know what it was then, but I know now, as I know that Midsummer Night is the night for the blessing on the young, when the Stone gives them its protection. That’s what it did for me.’
As Tryfan was later to remember, there shone in the confusing tunnels around him a light—not all around him but from somewhere ahead—and with its white glimmer on his snout and pale fur he turned to face it and ran towards it without question, knowing he would be quite, quite safe—just as he would have done had he heard Rebecca calling for him: ‘Tryfan, my love, I’m here!’
So he scampered towards the light, but whenever he thought he had reached it, he found it was ahead of him again, until he was in a great chamber, bigger than the place of echoes, with swaying, sliding tree roots all around, towering high into the darkness above him and plunging into crevices along whose edge he teetered, led forward among them by the light.
How long this took he never knew, but eventually he was beyond the roots and inside the hollow of a great tree from whose heights echoed down the faintest sound of wind among beech leaves and the murmur of adult voices chanting and saying prayers.
