‘He was super!’ Curlew told Rebecca later. ‘Gosh, he was amazing. They all went straight for him and he sort of smiled at them, and calm as you please, he raised one paw and hit the first one, then the second, then the third, and the first one fell back and hit the fourth one and then they were all crying and it was fantastic!’
‘Then Rose started crying again,’ added Curlew disdainfully.
‘Why?’ asked Rebecca.
‘She said because she was so proud of Tryfan but I said she was being stupid. Mind you, he was pretty good!’
There was another occasion, too, more dangerous and more mysterious, when Tryfan appeared when he was needed, but the truth of which neither Bracken nor Rebecca ever got at, and even then they only heard about it from Comfrey, to whom Tryfan went afterwards.
It seemed that Beech and Rose had run into a pack of weasels one day on the wood’s edge, when they were exploring a tunnel they shouldn’t have been in. Perhaps they were not used to weasel scent. What happened wasn’t clear, but Beech and Rose came back to Rebecca’s tunnels frightened out of their lives and had nightmares for a long time afterwards. All they could say was that weasels had attacked them.
‘Nearly k-k-killed them, more like,’ Comfrey told Bracken later, when he reported how Tryfan had come to him with vicious cuts and bites on his shoulder and forehead. ‘He wouldn’t say anything to me, but I’m pretty certain he came just in t-t-time to save them both and must have fought off the weasels single-pawed, b-b-because I doubt if the other two were any good.’
But try as they did, they could never get Tryfan to tell them what had happened. He liked to keep his silence.
He grew very close to Comfrey, and the two of them would spend days in silence together, or Tryfan would ask Comfrey to explain things about plants and show him where he got them.
Tryfan took to spending long periods by the Stone, both at day and night, and would ask Bracken and Rebecca to explain things about it to him which the others never asked. What was it for? Were there others like it? What was inside it?
He was fascinated by Uffington and by the stories of scribemoles, just as Bracken had been, though Bracken could never tell him enough about Boswell and the things he had said. Yet strangely, from Bracken’s point of view, Tryfan never wanted to go down to the Chamber of Dark Sound, or be shown—or even told—anything about the Chamber of Echoes or the Chamber of Roots. It was the one thing that seemed to upset him.
Then, one day in mid-August, he was gone, just like that, as mole youngsters will. And soon the others left as well, Rose and Curlew to the slopes and Beech over to near the Eastside where he had found friends. But they did not know where Tryfan went and of them all they missed him the most.
Yet it would not be true to say that Bracken and Rebecca were sad to see them go. For Rebecca especially, their departure marked the start of a period of great quiet and contentment. She had nurtured her young, cherished them through illness and growing up, and seen them leave in August as fine a quartet of youngsters as any mother could wish to have borne.
But she wanted, and no longer felt it wrong to want it, the peace of long days of solitude and the love that Bracken, living so nearby, made with her.
As for Bracken, he had watched over the raising of his young from a distance as male moles always must, but had taken care to protect Rebecca if she needed it, showing that he was always there.
It was a time in which he grew closer and closer to the Stone, as things that Boswell and Hulver and so many other moles had said to him began to fall into a kind of pattern, whose shapes were finally as simple as the way in which he now began to live.
He still loved to explore, only now it was to the Old Wood he went, where the system had been in his puphood; retracing old tunnels, seeing how the burnt wood was beginning to grow alive with saplings and birds once more and wondering about things he had done and not done.
Yet, quiet and nearly anonymous though Bracken and Rebecca now became, it would be wrong to think that they had no influence on the system. No conscious influence, it is true; but their love, or the sense of it that pervaded all of the system, now began to work a slow miracle in Duncton Wood. Without knowing it, they created an atmosphere in the Ancient System and in the slopes and beyond, where the wood was beginning to be recolonised, that moles from other nearby systems seemed to sense and came to, as they might to untunnelled, worm-full soil.
