Rue was a survivor, and recovered fast from her ordeal. With Bracken there to help her seal off her new system and to burrow out one or two new tunnels and entrances, it very soon took shape. Better than that, it gave Bracken an opportunity to put into practice one or two of the subtleties of shape and sound he had observed in the Ancient System as he created a couple of bigger-than-normal tunnels which Rue looked at in surprise and soon adopted with pleasure. Somehow they managed to pick up the sound of the September rustles of beech leaves from the surface, where hints of the autumn were just beginning to show, and carry them on into the more traditional tunnels that were the basis of her new system.
There was change in the air. The distant smell of autumn. And not so distant either when the wind blew, carrying a few beech leaves down to the wood’s floor or scurrying the more crinkled leaves of the few oaks that grew on the slopes along between the trees.
After three moledays, the tunnels began to look spick and span and Rue said, ‘Are these your tunnels?’
It was a strange question, for Bracken had never thought for one moment that they were. His future lay with the Ancient System and his time here was a welcome respite from pursuing his explorations of it to the end. The question was Rue’s way of asking him when he was leaving. She was restless and increasingly proprietorial about the place and wanted him gone. She wanted to dwell in her own place, or so it seemed to Bracken.
He looked wearily in the direction of the higher slopes and knew that he must be off. He was beginning to like Rue now that he had seen the nervousness fall off her to be replaced by the good sense that was her nature. She made a mole feel comfortable, even if not always welcome. But that was the way with some females, Burrhead had once told him. Sometimes he was surprised to find that he even felt aggressive, like an adult male, towards her.
‘Are these your tunnels?’ The question still waited between them. Well, of course they weren’t. He felt he wanted to mock-fight with her and pretend they were and to let their laughter fill the place with sound, as once or twice his laughter had mingled with Wheatear’s when they were very young pups and when Root wasn’t around to break up their games.
‘No, they’re yours. You know that, Rue.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And she got up, restless and a little irritable, and though he didn’t want to go, he felt he should.
Outside, above the biggest beech on the higher slopes, the September sky was changing. Now blue and clear, now white and cloudy, as the morning hesitated over whether it was the remnant of a defeated summer or the vanguard of a new autumn.
‘Well, I’ll go then,’ said Bracken, a little miserably, as he led the way to one of the entrances higher up the slopes. Rue stayed in the burrow as she watched his departure. She was glad to see him go, because there was an uneasy power about him like that of some of the youngsters she had had who had not yet learned their strength and were clumsy in their ignorance. Only this mole’s strength wasn’t physical but something else. He was such a strange mole to be with.
September. Such a funny month for a female who hasn’t mated in the spring. September. And the morning in the sky above seemed to decide to be a part of autumn.
Somewhere near the entrance where Bracken paused, his sense of isolation very rapidly returning, a great plop of rain fell; and then another, almost into the entrance itself, spattering on to Bracken’s face and hiding drops of silver in his fur. With a sigh he left the shelter of the tunnel.
The air Bracken stepped out into was getting heavier by the minute with the pressure of an impending storm, and the blue, clear patches in the sky, now pushed to the end of the wood, were disappearing fast, squeezed out by the heavy grey clouds that darkened the sky and told of the coming of the first autumn storm.
Several more drops of rain, and Bracken turned to look at Rue again, but he couldn’t make her out any more in the shadows of the entrance, so he turned away and set off, swinging spontaneously to the southwest towards the Stone rather than towards the place where he could get back into the Ancient System.
‘If the Stone calls you,’ Hulver had told him, ‘you go to it, because it knows best.’ In his misery and renewed loneliness, as he left Rue and her tunnels behind, the Stone was calling Bracken, and he obeyed its command.
Down among the shadows of her tunnel entrance, Rue watched him go, cursing herself as a fool for letting him go just yet, but remembering with a little giggle, which made her sound almost a youngster again, that males, even strange ones like Bracken, have a habit of coming back again when they are needed. Especially by females.
