It did not occur to him, as he made his rambling approach through the peripheral tunnels towards Hulver’s old system, that another mole might have occupied them. But so it was. She was a female, and her name was Rue, and in her time she had littered well. Then, in the early summer, Mandrake himself had loomed, one terrible day, into her burrow and turned her out of the cosy tunnels beyond Barrow Vale, which she had occupied for moleyears, to make way for his darling daughter, Rebecca.
Rue didn’t have a chance, and believed Mandrake’s growling threat that if she so much as showed herself on Rebecca’s territory or anywhere near Barrow Vale, he would maim or kill her.
She had already been distressed by her inability to litter that spring, though she had mated more than once. The sounds of other pup cries upset her and gradually she found she ate less and that her heart was not in keeping the burrows and tunnel tidy, though she was normally a very neat mole.
Already dispirited, she was easy prey to Mandrake’s will and so became yet another victim of his unpredictable moods. Rue suddenly found herself competing with the new crop of youngsters for territory. She was a small mole and, coming as she did originally from the Eastside, was not a great fighter. She certainly wasn’t weak or even gentle, like some of the Eastside moles, but she was no match for the bigger Duncton ones. The system she had won for herself, and that Rebecca had taken over, lay between two richer ones held by stronger moles and to some extent was neutral territory—perhaps that was why she had managed to hold on to it so long.
May, June and July were one long nightmare for Rue as she scratched about for a living wherever she could. Cut off by Mandrake’s threat from her friends and the territory she knew, she became scraggy and dishevelled, and her eyes began to wear the look of a female on the way to defeat—one who faces a mateless future and a territoryless death. She might have made for the Marsh End nearest where she had been brought up, but that was moleyears and moleyears before, in times that she had long stopped thinking of, and in her present state it seemed a hazardous journey to make. And Marshenders do not take kindly to strangers. Driven from one tunnel to the next, barely escaping with her life more than once, so real are the threats to an ageing mole who falls from territory and grace, she slowly found herself in August making towards the one place where old moles may, before the shadow of age creeps right over them, find a temporary security and some vague hope—the slopes.
For younger moles the name is literally dreadful, for it puts into their minds the possibility that they, too, might one day wake up with aches in their backs and shoulders and find that they cannot move, or hear, so well as once they could. But Rue was nowhere near that stage, though to all outward appearances she might have seemed to be.
She grubbed about the quiet surface of the slopes, fearful of the owls said to haunt the heights above, running from temporary hide to temporary burrow, meeting aggression from one or two Slopesiders whose tunnels she crossed until, one day, she came to a tunnel that smelt empty and deserted.
It was an outlier from Hulver’s old system and had not been reoccupied by any other mole since he had gone from it for ever in June.
She waited by it for three moledays, keeping her snout low and listening with care to see if there was a mole somewhere about. Badgers she heard, from the humpy ground somewhere towards the Eastside; crows she heard and saw; a fox prowled past quite close, but she smelt him long before he came and did not even bother to hide as youngsters often did before they learned better, because she knew that a fox will not touch a mole. ‘A fox may be a mole’s best friend, when his path with ours doth wend’ said the old Eastside proverb she had learned when she was a pup. The fox sniffed about and tiptoed away.
Apart from that, nothing. So, after three moledays, Rue made her way timidly towards Hulver’s old tunnels and could smell the emptiness all around. ‘Oh!’ she sighed, though she hardly dared let the relief sound in her voice.
Suddenly bold, she darted this way and that in the tunnels, snouting out one tunnel after another, running from burrow to burrow. There was a whiff of weasel at the end of one, only faint, but she sealed it off all the same.
