He looked at her intently and she was wide-eyed before him and wanted, oh how she wanted… and she did! She went up to him and nuzzled him and held him for an instant, her young glossy fur mixing with his own. Oh, she felt such love for him, such awe for his wisdom and the simple way he held his old body. ‘Oh, Hulver,’ she whispered, oh oh oh.
A great sweetness came into Hulver, who had not been touched by another mole for moleyears, and never with such love. Never, ever. Why, she was beautiful—had it taken him so long to see that the only beauty is love? And then, once again, an image of Bracken came into his mind and he found himself saying—or rather whispering, because she was so very close—‘You keep an eye out for Bracken. There’s more to him than a mole might think when they meet him. Much more. He may need your help, Rebecca.’
He broke away from her and they smiled into each other. ‘Perhaps you’ll need his help,’ said Hulver, ‘because that’s how the Stone works, you see. All of us need what you can give, especially you yourself.’
And with this last mysterious comment, Hulver left her, and she found herself full of the strangest love and joy. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, oh.
Bracken stayed fast in Hulver’s burrow for two days after he had gone. There was a good supply of worms, and Hulver’s warning had frightened him enough to make him stay where he was. Indeed, it had put such a fear in him that for those two days Bracken expected some terrible danger to manifest itself at any moment, even in the burrow itself. So he started at every sound and worried at every silence.
By the third day the worms were running out and, anyway, he was getting restless. Even fear can be overtaken by boredom. He could feel that the weather was warm and June-like on the surface, so he went there, never straying far from the tunnel entrance. The entrance nearest Hulver’s burrow was among the beech trees themselves; only below it did they disappear into the oaks and mixed wood that formed the level part of Duncton Wood.
Among the beeches the wood felt different, and he wasn’t sure if he liked it so much. They were lighter and cleaner than oaks and no vegetation grew under them nor cluttering hazel, hawthorn and holly about them. There was a purity in the air and a lack of distracting vegetation on the ground that made a mole think. ‘If the top of the hill is like this,’ Bracken thought, ‘then no wonder the ancient moles were different from us.’ He explored Hulver’s tunnels in all directions and found, as he had suspected, that the system was too large for the old mole to maintain and in places was falling into disrepair.
He noticed that on the east side of Hulver’s system the tunnels were older-looking, less straight and not in such good condition. He deduced from this that Hulver had tied his own tunnels on to another long-abandoned series of tunnels he had found a little higher up the slopes. Bracken was intrigued by this and sought the central home burrow this older system must have had, but he couldn’t find it. Here and there, where tunnels rose up the slopes, he found they were blocked—and blocked a very long time ago, for the barriers looked like tunnel ends rather than mere walls of soil, but by tapping them with his talons he could tell there were more tunnels beyond. He was tempted to burrow a way through, but this would have been discourteous to Hulver.
As his explorations continued (and they spread over several days because he still spent a lot of time in silence in Hulver’s home burrow) a gradual reorientation about the shape of the whole Duncton system took place in his mind. He had, of course, not yet been to some key areas—the Ancient System, the Eastside and the Marsh End. But he became much more aware of them and their relationship to each other than he had been before. As a mole pup sees his own burrow in a different way once he has been outside it into the tunnels, and those differently when he has been on to the surface, so Bracken now saw that the Westside was only a part of the system, and a peripheral part at that.
These thoughts struck him with particular force one morning, the seventh day of Hulver’s absence, as he crouched up on the surface again enjoying the June sun. He had found a few worms, and having eaten them, was ‘listening to the wood’ as Hulver himself often did. The wood was exciting and very alive. Much more sound came from the lower part, where the oak trees started and there were more birds. Up here on the slopes the air seemed clearer than he had ever known, and everything seemed possible. Everything. Bracken crouched facing south towards Barrow Vale far below, his back to the Ancient System above.
