But these herbal forays were interspersed by long periods of simply sitting still in her own tunnels or at their entrances, learning about the wood nearest to her. Its summer noises were less frenetic than the spring’s, but fuller and richer. Very near one of her tunnel entrances were a couple of small oaks with patches of bramble and ground ivy nearby, and here, just before she herself arrived, a pair of nightingales settled to breed and raise their young. As the summer moved into July, she grew to love their ferreting busyness as they grubbed among the undergrowth for spiders and worms, an activity often followed by the rich jug-jug-chooc-chooc of song, ascending to a powerful crescendo pioo-pioo which she could hear in her deepest burrow. A night was blessed that began with their song.
Often ‘her’ nightingales joined the chorus that woke with her at dawn as a colourful medley from a blackbird or two joined the sounds of nuthatch, wren and tit, and the soft, distant cooing of wood pigeon over on the wood’s edge. The birds scurried about the dead leaves on the wood’s floor or flittered among living leaves above. And the smells of fresh growth! She loved that best of all as she and the woods grew into the season together.
In this summer period she grew used to sounds that had frightened her at first—the scurrying of a hedgehog, often blindly running right past her snout, or the sudden buzz in her face of a flying beetle or searching wasp.
One reason she tended to keep near her own tunnels was that if she was caught too far away by hunger or tiredness, she had to make a temporary burrow in a place whose noises were strange and threatening. It was a long time before she revisited the Eastside, for example, because when she stayed there overnight, she happened on a mating fight between a couple of badgers who sounded, in their thumping rushes and shrill, eerie screams, as if they were about to fall through the burrow roof on to her. They were, in fact, many moleyards away in the slopes of a bank where they had dug their own massive burrows, but how was she to know, never having heard them before? Worse than their terrible sounds was their rank smell, which wafted sickeningly into the tiny burrow and made her tremble and sweat with fear in the darkness.
But far, far worse were the chilling sounds of tawny owls hooting at night. They cast a terrible fear into her. She knew little of them beyond the fact that they were the mole’s most terrible enemy in Duncton in summer and were the taloned death that came with silent suddenness out of the darkness above. There were one or two moles in Duncton—and Rebecca had heard one of them tell his tale—who had been caught by owl but by some freak chance escaped, talon-torn but alive. Some of the older moles said that to touch such a mole brought you luck, but Rebecca had been too shy to seek that privilege.
Mandrake came to visit her two or three times in June and July. He always claimed to be just passing and pretended to have no interest in her doings. He sat about for a while, asked her a few monosyllabic questions, cast his glowering glance about her system, and was off as suddenly as he had come. She sensed that in his own gruff way he was keeping an eye on her, and that gave her pleasure as well.
One hot July evening, when every insect in the wood seemed busy, Mekkins passed her way and she heard for the first time of the deaths of Hulver and Bindle. On Mandrake’s orders the story had been kept dark for weeks past, but the idle summer months are a time for gossip and chatter and such a tale must eventually come out.
Mekkins, who felt the whole story to be a shadow on Duncton, would have preferred to keep silent about it with Rebecca. She was so young, so innocent, so full of the joy of the season, that telling her seemed as shameful as trampling on a wood anemone. But she was so overjoyed to see him, though he knew her only passingly, and fixed him with such an open gaze that he found it impossible to tell a lie when she suddenly asked, ‘Where can I find Hulver, the elder?’
He hesitated to answer, playing for time with ‘Why?’ She told him how Hulver had talked to her before the June elder meeting and told him the legend of Rebecca the Healer, and about a mole called Bracken who was somewhere up on the slopes. Hulver had told her about Bracken with such a curious passion that she had taken to heart his odd suggestion that she should make sure that Bracken was all right.
