Then Bracken was spotted over on the Eastside, and an exaggerated version got back to Barrow Vale—a wild mole seen on the Ancient System, massive and fearless, who would kill anymole that tried to get near him.
It was enough to get the rumour going even more strongly, and the Eastsiders, a superstitious lot, resurrected an old legend that one day the Stone would send its own mole to bring havoc on the system as a punishment—though for what nomole was certain. And it was from this story that Bracken unwittingly gained himself an awesome name that became the subject of rumour, thrilling fears, and an exodus of youngsters who might otherwise have tried to make territory near the slopes: he became the Stone Mole.
‘Aye, he’s up there all right, you mark my words; and he’ll be down this way, I shouldn’t wonder,’ was how one Barrow Vale gossip put it, his words heavy with complacent warning. ‘Just been biding his time, he has, just waiting for the right moment, and now he’s come. The Eastsiders call him the Stone Mole, and that isn’t such a bad name if you ask me…’
When Mandrake first heard the story, he thought it was amusing, and laughed. Probably some Pasture mole gone astray, he thought. Well, he’d sort it all out when he felt like it. As for Rune, he latched on to anything that had possibilities for his own advancement, and there was a way the Stone Mole rumour could help him. His smile was smug with the potential of it all.
Had Bracken any inkling that such a rumour had gained ground, he would have been amazed. He regretted the contacts with moles he had so unsuccessfully made on two different occasions since he emerged out of the confines of the Ancient System, because he now reckoned that it was best, on the whole, to continue to lie low.
The first, with the mole on the west side of the slopes, was just an accident. Nothing he could do about that. The second was more regrettable, since it was born out of a desire in him to make contact with somemole somewhere after such a long isolation. The two old Eastsiders looked friendly enough—and what a relief it had been to hear mole being talked. It was almost like listening to Hulver himself talking, so learned did they seem. And they used one or two words of the old language that Hulver had sometimes used. Spurred on by the promise of this and their seeming gentleness, he had come out into the open after listening to them for a while, and approached them. When they challenged him with the traditional greeting, he tried to answer as best he could but, well, he wasn’t sure quite where to say he had come from and, anyway, he was so unused to talking to another mole, let alone moles, that somehow he stumbled over his words. Then they looked frightened and ran away from him and he looked back behind him to see if there was some big mole or other creature that was threatening them, not realising that it was he, himself, they were running from.
This incident saddened Bracken, for it made him feel isolated and lost and left him craving contact with another mole, anymole, even more. The idea that they were running from him dawned on him slowly as he scratched his side and felt his fur still hanging loose on his gaunt body, while he thought of the two older moles so plump and sleek who had fled from him.
‘I must look a pretty sight,’ he whispered to himself, snouting first at his flanks, then at his scarred shoulder, and finally rubbing his paws down his thin face.
Bracken did not know it, but he looked a lot better than when he had first emerged from the Ancient System’s tunnel and started to live in the warmer air and wormier soil of the slope surface. But while a mole will normally recover from injury or illness very fast, swinging back from near death to full health in a matter of moledays, one that has been as ill as Bracken had been, both physically and emotionally, may take moleweeks or even moleyears to recover fully. (Just as such illness may be moleyears in the making, so the route back to health may be moleyears in the finding.)
Still, physically at least, he was improving. In the days that followed the distressing incident near the Eastside, he took it easy, eating as much as he could, sleeping a great deal and keeping well hidden. He still wanted to make contact with another mole, more and more so as he began to feel healthier, but he was regaining his normal caution and would try to be more careful next time.
It was perhaps three or four moledays into September before he returned to the Ancient System tunnels by the way he had come out. His intention was to explore the periphery of the tunnels on the slope side so that when, and if, he made contact with a mole again, he would have a good working knowledge of the system’s main routes and be able to escape back into them if he needed to.
