Hulver couldn’t feel it, didn’t like it, and couldn’t understand Bracken’s certainty; but he followed after him, for as he watched Bracken’s flanks disappearing upwards into the dark and looked about him at the black tree-shapes with the wide open spaces in between, nothing else seemed as safe. He could feel that Bracken was gaining strength with each moment that passed. There was a power about him that swept Hulver along and he had the feeling that through this mole the Stone was revealing to him a tiny part of its pattern, the whole of which he could not see or feel, although he knew it to be there.
With this feeling, a slow calm fell over him that was never to leave him again. In some way he was watching a battle start, an enormous battle, a terribly dangerous time. It would happen, whatever happened, and his own part in it, if part he had, was best played by his being at peace with himself and the world about him.
‘Hulver!’ The whispered urgency of Bracken’s voice struck Hulver as comic, but with compassion for the youngster he restrained himself from laughing happily. Instead he watched with love as Bracken ran back towards him, to hurry him up, no doubt.
To Bracken, Hulver looked so gentle in the soft night, he expressed such peace and love, that his nerves were suddenly calmed within themselves and his fear and nervousness became as easy to brush away as dust on his fur. ‘Come on,’ said Bracken softly, ‘come on, Hulver!’ But there was no need, for Hulver was already starting up the hill again, and for some reason was chuckling quietly to himself.
As the hill levelled off and they reached its summit, Bracken slowed, almost afraid to advance, for he knew they were now very near the Stone. The windnoise in the trees was high and strong, swinging back from one side above them to the other as the wind billowed from one group of trees to another. It was a mass of great, invisible waves rolling across the top of the wood and way beyond it. ‘There!’ said Hulver, pointing a talon forwards into a clearing ahead of them. ‘There is the Stone.’
And it was, huge and massive, towering upwards, solid in the windy night. Ten or twelve moleyards from it stood an ancient beech tree, its roots plunging along and into the ground, across the clearing’s floor to the Stone itself. From where Bracken crouched, the roots appeared solid waves that had rolled and heaved against the Stone, so that it tilted a little from the tree away towards Uffington.
There was no other tree near it, for the clearing was quite wide, and as they ran across towards the Stone, the windnoise above them fell quieter, staying with the trees at its edge, and Bracken had the impression that he had come into somewhere very quiet and still. But he felt the thunder of the generations and knew that all around him and beyond the clearing the Ancient System stretched forth, its lost tunnels hidden beneath the ages of leaf mould on the spare surface of the hill. He was at the heart of the Ancient System, but more than that; he was home, at the centre, at the true centre of the system into which he had been born.
Hulver crouched down before the Stone and Bracken followed him. Up here the wood defined itself by windnoise. Off to the west lay the pastures, the wind running up off them and then through the massive branches above them. To the east was the escarpment where upward eddies of air met the wind in the trees and the wind tumbled above on the edge of the void. Below them were softer noises of the main wood itself, quieter than this, deeper. By the Stone there was silence, and a calm Bracken had never known anywhere in the wood.
He got up and ran to the edge of the clearing in the direction towards which the Stone tilted: ‘How far is Uffington, Hulver?’ he asked.
Hulver came to his side, both their snouts pointing out through the trees towards the west. Hulver was still breathing heavily from the long climb up from the slopes. ‘A long way, a very long way, but not so far if you have the Stone behind you.’
‘No, it’s not so far, not too far,’ said Bracken to himself, for he could feel Uffington pulling him. ‘It’s not that far, Hulver,’ he said quietly, ‘I can feel it.’
When Hulver used the words ‘not so far if you have the Stone behind you’, he was giving the standard reply senior moles used to give to youngsters who asked the once inevitable question about Uffington. But as Bracken crouched there, Hulver saw it differently from the way in which he had seen it before: perhaps it meant exactly what it said: perhaps Uffington was in some way nearer if you kept the Stone always directly behind you as you progressed towards it. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? And he had been struck by the way in which Bracken had run exactly to the point on the edge of the clearing that lay nearest Uffington, without having been told.
