The thrust brought a sudden stillness to both moles as each looked to find a move that would bring the opportunity for real damage to the other.
It was Rune who broke the deadlock. He suddenly turned and thrust back out of the tunnel to the surface, the start of the manoeuvre he had used many times before as a preface to defeating a mole who seemed stronger than he. With a snarling roar, Cairn lunged after his retreating form as Rebecca, who saw the back of him disappearing out to the surface, called urgently, ‘Be careful, he’s Rune.’ She could have made no other word sound so black.
Her warning was right, for Rune knew that in the moment that a mole runs up towards the surface he instinctively hesitates to enter out on to it because he is about to lose the protection of the tunnel’s darkness. In that moment of hesitation, another mole, one waiting as Rune did now, with his talons poised for the kill by the entrance, can thrust back down into the tunnel on the mole who is coming out, and with luck administer a fatal snout-blow.
Rune’s ploy might well have worked but for the chance that the mole he happened to be fighting had fought so many times with Stonecrop, whose prowess as a fighter was almost a legend in the pastures. The trick Rune was trying was an old one and Cairn’s rapid pursuit, powered forward by his back paws so that his front paws could be protectively outstretched, was the answer Stonecrop had devised to it.
Neither mole won this round of fight. Cairn was caught by Rune’s downward thrust as he came charging out, though only on the arm and shoulder, while Rune suffered a wound to his face. Then, on the surface, unrestricted by tunnel or burrow, the two moles rolled into thrusting clinch after cutting lunge, back paws scratching and kicking, front talons trying to plunge a fatal wound.
About them the sky became overshadowed by the threat of a storm, and instead of the light being bright it was, for a morning, almost gloomily dark. While far beyond the trees in whose stormy shade they now fought, the first great drops of rain of a storm started to fall, sporadic at first, but then growing more heavy and persistent.
It was the same rain into which, far off to the east on the slopes, Bracken was at that very moment setting off from Rue’s new burrows for the Stone, which loomed, like the storm itself, over all the moles in Duncton Wood.
As the rain started to fall heavily on them both, Rune sensed that Cairn was the stronger and not much less the cunning, either. Rune might be lucky to find a fatal thrust. His speed might win the day. But he would have to be lucky, and the luck might not run his way, and anyway—why take a risk in killing a mole when there was a much surer way of doing it? There was another mole in Duncton much stronger than either of them who would relish the chance to kill Rebecca’s mate—the more so if he came from the pastures.
So Rune’s dark mind raced as he parried and thrust Cairn’s blows, while the rain fell ever more thickly through the open trees of the wood’s edge on to their fur, mingling with their wounds and blood and obscuring their sight and sense of each other.
Then Cairn charged on Rune once more, stronger and more confident now that he was out in the open, and caught him terribly on the haunch. In that moment, Rune decided that, for the time being, he had had enough. He would retreat into the wood, gradually enough to lure Cairn on with him, and take him slowly and surely towards the haunts of the Westside where this Pasture mole might be killed; and if not there, then lure him even to Mandrake, whose talons would take pleasure in doing the deed and who would surely give Rune credit for bringing this mole to him.
Rune ran back, turned and snarled, and then ran back further into the wood, making Cairn follow as he pursued the bloodlust that told him to kill this dark and vicious Duncton mole, and made him forget Rebecca in the tunnel behind him.
As they retreated into the rain and dark of the wood, she emerged from the tunnel entrance and listened to their noise slowly die away. She wanted to chase after them and join Cairn in his assault on Rune. But in a mating fight, which surely this was, it wasn’t for a female to do more than wait. But everything in Rebecca told her to chase after them, to help her Cairn; yet she stayed, hesitating by the entrance in the rain, confused by the sudden attack but hoping that at any moment Cairn would come back with the blood of Rune on his talons.
But as the stormclouds burgeoned and grew heavier over the pastures and wood, darkening everything with their steady rain, Cairn followed the retreating Rune deeper and deeper into the wood, leaving Rebecca crouched and desolate and quite alone.
