She didn’t yet dare to eat down there, so she found some worms and took them out into a temporary burrow on the surface nearby. Then she returned and completed her exploration, eventually finding the central burrow, the one where Bracken had crouched miserably after Hulver’s departure for the June elder meeting and which, to her delight, was as deserted as everywhere else. In fact, although the place needed a little dust cleared away at one or two tunnel junctions and the nesting material was old, the whole place seemed to her tired eyes as bright as a primrose, and she sensed a peaceful air about it, which she could not know was one of the legacies left behind by old Hulver.
Rue was overjoyed. Her whole appearance changed from that of the hunched-up, aged mole she was becoming to one full of the joy of a place of her own and something to care for. Indeed, she began to sing a song the like of which these tunnels, and most others on the slopes, had not heard in generations—the song a youngster mole traditionally sings when, after the summer is over and the autumn is setting in, she has found a place of her own and can relax into it for the winter:
‘Rue’s found a cleansome home,
Rue’s got a place.
Let sun and moon and stars go roam,
Rue’s got a place.’
Then, with her tail held higher than it had been for molemonths, she busied herself with replacing the nesting material, shoring up one or two entrances, and, most important of all, finding where the best spots for food were.
Three moleweeks later, when September was well started and the leaves on the beech trees on the surface were beginning to dry and mellow with the onset of autumn, Bracken solved the problem of which tunnel led down to Hulver’s system. He had had difficulties, because the tunnels seemed to have been made deliberately complex here, but slowly, and by occasional recourse to the surface, he made his way in the right direction until the whole pattern fell into place and he found the tunnel that led resolutely down the slopes to the point where Hulver’s system started—or stopped, depending on a mole’s point of view.
He had now developed, almost to a science, his system of sound exploration to establish what lay ahead, and seeing that the tunnel was in softer soil more typical of the lower slopes, he called ahead with a deep roaring sound that travelled well and got a good response in this kind of soil.
The response it gave was the one he hoped for—a clean echo back, though far in the distance. It meant that the tunnel ran down to a dead end, the end being the seal he had seen from the other side in Hulver’s tunnel. He ran on down, occasionally making an uncharacteristic whooping sound from the sheer pleasure of having finally found his way right round the Ancient System and established, he was almost certain, the site of its link with the present Duncton system. This was an important moment for Bracken, not so much because he wanted to go into the present system, but rather because it satisfied the desire he had had since puphood to get a grasp of how the Ancient System related geographically to everything else. ‘Where is the Ancient System—where does it start and where does it go?’ he had once asked Burrhead. Now he would know.
He ran on down the tunnel almost as excited as when he had reached the Stone for the first time. Soon he heard the echo of his pawsteps coming back, pitter pat pat patter, pitter pat pat patter, drumming back to him in an escalating pattern of soft sound as the end of the tunnel got nearer and nearer and then finally came in sight straight ahead of him. As he reached it, he let out a shout of pleasure, for surely the tunnel was the right size, in the right direction… it was just a matter of finding a way through to the other side without leaving any clues for any Duncton mole who might, at some future time, come along.
The sound of his shout echoed back past him and on up the tunnel down which he had just run, where it was lost in the darkness of ever-shifting air currents. The tunnel here was dusty and he saw at once that the seal was as it had appeared on the other side—hard-packed soil. He was at the end! Again he let out a laugh or shout of pleasure, crouching down on the dusty floor of the tunnel with contented relief.
