Above him he heard a mighty roar of triumph from Mandrake. But then, hardly realising what was happening, he felt his front paws fall suddenly forwards into an emptiness in the cliff face and caught hold of a surface. And he was flailing again, pulling himself forwards, back paws again in contact with the cliff face, pulling, heaving, shoving himself up until he finally lay on the smooth, flat floor of a tunnel exposed by some winter cliff fall, whose ancient dark depth echoed back his gulps for air and life. From above him came the thumping of paws and more paws, as Rune and Mekkins, Dogwood and Burrhead joined Mandrake at the cliff’s edge, and looked over into the blackness of its void.
‘He has gone, gone to his death,’ screamed Mandrake. ‘I caught him with my talon before he went and ripped his flesh.’ And then Mandrake laughed terribly into the darkness beyond.
‘Which mole was it?’ asked Mekkins, wondering at the courage and strength of the three moles they had killed that night.
‘It was Bracken,’ hissed Rune into the darkness beyond them. ‘The mole I found in Hulver’s tunnels. I should have killed him then but I did not wish to warn Hulver that something was wrong. I should have killed him painfully then.’
‘It was Bracken, was it!’ exclaimed Burrhead, trying to sound angry. But there was a hint of surprise in his voice, mingled with a touch of pride. He could not believe that it was his own strange son, whom he thought had been killed after leaving the home burrow without a word, who had given Mandrake so much trouble before his end. ‘Best say no more,’ Burrhead thought.
Bracken heard them move off across the floor of the wood, back towards the slopes. Painfully he raised himself up, his left shoulder now stiff and almost lame, and pointed his snout forwards into the Ancient System, which, after so many generations, had at last opened its tunnels to a mole again.
Rebecca’s bleak mateless spring had become an early summer of delights. When Sarah’s litter by Mandrake arrived in April, Rebecca had the excuse she wanted to leave the home burrow to scrape a living for herself in her own tunnels. She had wondered whether to leave Barrow Vale altogether, to get away from Mandrake, but when it came to that, she had no real desire to do so. Perhaps she sensed that beneath his brutal hostility to her he loved her, the very viciousness of his assaults a sign of how deep his feelings ran.
Certainly she was pleased when he gruffly took her aside at the end of April to say, ‘You’ll be leaving the home burrow now, but you’ll not go far, Rebecca—I want to keep an eye on you. There’s a burrow not far from here which I’ll show you…’
She was surprised that one should be so conveniently free, and only long afterwards found out that Mandrake had driven away the mole who occupied it—an older female called Rue—threatening her with death if she tried to win it back. Not knowing this and flattered by Mandrake’s sudden interest in her wellbeing, she settled down happily to wait for summer. She cleared out the runs and burrows in her new tunnels, replacing the nesting material with sweet-smelling grasses and leaves she found on the wood’s floor. She opened up a new entrance which caught the morning sun, and another which threw light and fresh, cool air into her burrows towards the end of day.
All this occupied her so much that she hardly missed not seeing Sarah during May and early June, by which time Sarah’s second litter was beginning to roam, and the two became friends again. They would talk of flowers and trees, and Sarah would tell her the ways of shrews and voles, laughing at their fights and antics. She warned of weasels and owls.
The flowers that had carpeted the wood’s floor in spring died away as the trees above began to leaf, blocking the sun so that a heavier, duller undergrowth took their place. Rebecca, growing bolder as each summer day advanced, took to seeking out flowers and sunlight on the pasture edge, and in one or two more open places towards the Marsh End. She would have liked to explore deeper into the Marsh End itself, among the danker darkness of its trees, but there was a musty smell about the place, which she did not like on a summer’s day, created by the moss and fungi that grew about the one or two rotting trees and many fallen branches.
