Quite where the content of these days came from he did not know, but it was there alongside him as if a companionable mole were in the tunnel with him. He was restless, impatient, ill-tempered with his weakness, but beneath it all he felt a happy certainty that so much lay ahead for which he, himself, had found the strength. In his molemonths of illness, stretching from the last week of June to the start of August, he had matured a great deal. He could dimly remember, as a pleasant dream, the caresses and gentleness of a mole very close to him, but thought it must be some recreation of his own of the Rebecca of old times Hulver had talked about. He might indeed, had he been asked, have talked of Rebecca the legendary Healer as a real force in the system, so persistent was the idea that she had been there with him. But Rose? No, he never knew that she had been there.
Perhaps, deep down, he knew, but preferred to think that he gave himself the strength to survive, and so forgot.
Certainly he forgot other important things as well. He forgot that he had nearly died. He forgot the swirling forces of evil into whose darkness he had looked. He forgot the power of light by whose strength he had been kept back from the void. He forgot again the memories of puphood that early in his illness had flooded back. In forgetting all these things, he lost as well the lessons they might have taught him, or the releases their memory might have brought.
At the same time, he remembered things as they never were: that he, and only he, had found the power to heal himself; that pain and suffering quickly pass; that Mandrake and Rune were, after all was said and done, just moles. Just moles? Nomole is just a mole. A mole may have to learn a lesson many times before he knows its truth, especially one like Bracken.
He finally woke up one dawn a few moledays into August, knowing that at last he had strength and desire enough to start exploring the Ancient System. Most of all he wanted to get his bearings, for few moles were quite so uncomfortable as Bracken, the greatest explorer of his generation, when they didn’t know exactly where they were.
He ran first to the cliff end of the tunnel, to pay his respects to the spot where he had found a second life and to take one final look into the daylight before plunging back into the unknown tunnels and discoveries behind. Grass, cudweed and brambles hung waving across the tunnel from the surface above. He listened to the soft-loud-soft buzz of nectar-seeking flies and wasps taking advantage of the blue harebells and bright yellow furze that grew on this sunlit eastern part of the wood.
The smell of summer was warm and sweet and it was only then, taking it in, that he realised, by its heavier dryness compared with June, how many molemonths had passed in nightmare illness. Well, now he was better, and the time had come, at last, to explore.
He turned around and started forward on a journey into tunnels and burrows, dangers and marvels, that nomole had ventured near for generations.
It was only when he was well past the furthest point he had reached previously in his search for food that Bracken noticed the deepening quality of sound in the tunnel he was travelling down. It crept forward towards him, at first no more precise than the backwash of a mixed wind in rough grass. But then, with each step he took, its quality became richer. The sound of sliding soil came whispering from the unknown labyrinths beyond; then the moan of wind at some twist or turn, gathered into the tunnel from some distant exposure; into these came the harsher, mysterious creaking of a subterranean tree root in stress—but whether from round the corner or many tunnels away, he could not tell; then the sudden scuttle of a beetle; and mixing with it all, the echo and re-echo of his own pawsteps running forward ahead of him and returning from some wall beyond in the dark.
The wall turned out to be the far side of a much bigger tunnel into which the one he had started from entered at right angles. As he stepped into it, the sounds he had heard redoubled in richness and complexity, and quite took his breath away. If there was any truth in the old mole saying ‘You can tell a mole by the sounds of his tunnels’ then surely the moles who built this system were wise and cunning indeed.
