No one group lived on the slopes above the main system below the top of the hill. Just a few older, hardy moles, who liked to tell stories of the old days and who ekedout a scraggy living in the poorer chalky soil there. Many went mateless in the spring, and few pup cries were heard there in the April weeks.
Nomole knew the whole system—it was too large—but all knew and loved its centre: Barrow Vale. Here the elder burrows lay, and in early spring white anemones glistened between the trees before the bluebell carpet came, mirroring a clear spring sky.
At Barrow Vale a pocket of gravelly soil caused the oaks to thin out, creating a natural open space warmed by the sun in summer, white and silent in the snow of deep winter, always the last place of light in the wood at nightfall. Being wormscarce because of the poor soil, its tunnels were communal and everymole went there without fear. It was a place of gossip and chatter, where young moles met to play and venture out, often for their first time, on to the surface. It was relatively safe from predators, too, for the tunnels that radiated from it to all parts of the system made for early warning of an approaching danger long before it arrived.
As for owls, the most fearsome enemies of the moles, they rarely came there, preferring the wood’s edge where they could wait in the trees and dive down on their prey clear of the branches. So, for a Duncton mole, Barrow Vale was a place of security to go back to from time to time.
Yet it had also become something of a trap as well. For long, long before, when the system had been smaller, up on top of the hill, with the Stone as the natural centre, the lie of the land had made the moles outward-looking, seeking new places, eager to follow their snouts into the distance. But lower Duncton Wood was worm-rich and safe, so it was foolishness to want to go outside it.
Inevitably there were dark stories of those who had tried and always, so it seemed, met a terrible end. Some had actually been seen being torn in the talons of an owl almost the moment they set paw on to the pastures; some had died of sadness, others had suffocated in the mud of the marsh.
But generally, few moles concerned themselves with these places or such fears: they kept their snouts clean, fought for their own patch, found and ate their worms, slept in their dark burrows, and pulled themselves through the long moleyears of winter until, blinking but aggressive, they came out in spring for the mating time.
Each full moon represented the passing of another moleyear, with the Longest Day at Midsummer the happiest time and the Longest Night—at the end of the third week of December—the darkest and most treacherous: a time to placate the Stone with prayers and to celebrate the safe passage into the start of the new cycle of seasons in the snug safety of a warm home burrow. A time to tell stories of fights gone by, and worms and mates to come. A time to survive.
A place to survive! By the time Rebecca and Bracken were born, that was all the once proud Duncton system had become. Its pride was all in the past when, setting out from the shadow of the great Stone, many a young adult male ventured forth from Duncton Wood carrying its name far off to other systems. Inspired by the talk of scribemoles, many of them headed for the Holy Burrows of Uffington, others simply wanted to show that they could live for a while alone, or in other systems, and then come back with new experience and wisdom to their home system. And how exciting it was when one returned! Word would go round the chalky tunnels of the Ancient System and many would gather about him and give him worms for encouragement as he told his stories. Of fights and strange places and different customs. A very few were able to tell how at Uffington they had had the honour to see, perhaps even to touch, one of the legendary White Moles said to live there.
But that was past. Even the oldest mole in the system, Hulver the elder, could not remember a time when a mole had left the system and returned, or a time when the system had been visited by a friendly mole. Hulver himself rarely talked of the past—he tried but had found that the ears of the new generations seemed increasingly deaf and he had given up. He preferred to mutter and sing to himself, picking out his hard life as one of the isolated moles who lived in the worm-poor slopes below the hilltop.
