‘Rebecca is the wild flower that grows in spring, whose leaves are the freshest green; she is as strong and graceful as the tallest grass that grows down the Marsh End. Rebecca’s laughter and dance are like the sun dappling the wood’s floor when the trees sway lightly in the summer wind. Hers is the love of life itself, and love with her is as big and strong as a great oak tree, with a thousand branches for its feelings and a million trembling leaves for its caresses. And because your heart was open to hers, the love you found was far, far greater than the love each of you gave. If Rebecca were here now, she would take away your agony and desolation because she would be all you need, and all you are. As you are, and have been, for her…’
Bracken spoke to Cairn with the same voice of power that had come from him once in the Stone clearing, on Midsummer Night; the voice of an adult who is blessed for a moment to see far beyond himself. A voice that spoke words that drew on his own heart’s deepest yearnings and gave the answers to his heart’s own despairs. Expressing to Cairn the love that lies waiting in everymole.
‘But Rebecca is here, Cairn, for she has touched your heart for ever with her love. There is nothing you can know or feel that she has not already given you and with which you are not already touched. Hers is the love in the very earth and burrows in which we live and sleep: hers is the sun that warms us in the morning: hers is the bliss of sleep that brings us peace and sees our troubles through. She is there in the pastures where you and Stonecrop ran, as she has always been and always will be; she is behind us in the wood among the trees and flowers; she is the love in which you made your life. She is here, Cairn, she is here with you now.’
But Cairn did not hear Bracken’s final words, for in the peace that Bracken brought him, his agonies were gone and his injuries mattered no more.
He died with Bracken’s paw on his back, holding him close, the fur of their flanks mingling as one.
‘She is there in the pastures,’ Bracken had said, and Cairn had run there to join her, to dance with his Rebecca again across the dew-touched grass, their paws warmed at last in a rising sun. They had run and danced with Stonecrop in the warmth of the sun, which grew lighter and brighter about them until all was pure and white; and all that remained was the pattern of their dance on the pastures by Duncton Wood, where their paws and bodies had caught the morning dew.
The sun set slowly behind the distant hills, casting reds and pinks into the darkening sky above, while the vales beneath Duncton Hill grew misty blue before they fell into darkness. As the last light of the sun faded from the trees that rose behind Bracken, he finally took his paw from Cairn’s back and moved away from his body.
He felt a terrible desolation. It was as if Cairn had gone to the world of the living, leaving him in a place of the dead.
He crept away from Cairn’s cold body back into the wood and across to the Stone. For a time, as darkness fell, he stayed there, his tail moving restlessly this way and that as the only sign of how unsettled and without a place he felt.
He wanted another mole to talk to him, as he had talked to Cairn. He wanted to be touched by another mole. He wanted thereby to find that last portion of the courage he would need to return to the Ancient System, as he knew he very soon must.
But not yet—not now; not with the bleak reality of Cairn’s death and the lost warmth of those words of love he himself had spoken and which hung over him like a shroud.
But there was a mole who knew who he was and who might, for a short time, give him the reminder of life that he needed—Rue. When the thought came to him in the darkness, he did not hesitate over its possibility for one moment, but ran busily out of the Stone clearing and diagonally down across the slopes, wondering if she would be surprised to see him again so soon.
Up on the pastures, Stonecrop resolutely continued the search for his brother which he had started in the afternoon, calling Cairn’s name softly into the wood. Cairn had been gone too long and there was a smell of danger in the air that worried Stonecrop. He had delayed, not out of fear of Duncton Wood, for Stonecrop had little fear of anything, but out of affection and reverence for his brother’s privacy.
But finally he had gone into the wood and found the temporary burrow where he could tell his brother had been, and where there were signs of fighting. There was fear and terror in the air of the burrow that put a dreadful urgency into Stonecrop’s search.
