Indeed, the stench of fear was so unpleasant in the abandoned burrow that he could not stay in it and ran out on to the surface. He moved carefully about the area of trampled vegetation around the tunnel entrance trying to work out what had happened. He had no fear at all of Duncton moles discovering him there, for he was powerful and strong, bigger and more solid than Cairn. So he searched the little clearing without fear, working out where Cairn had gone.
He must have been injured, or he would have returned to the pastures. He would not have gone deeper into the woods, for fear of other Duncton moles. Stonecrop searched the area between the tunnel entrance and the wood’s edge and finally found a clue of disturbed and bloodied vegetation that suggested that Cairn had been that way, keeping to the cover by the wood’s edge and heading uphill.
Stonecrop’s progress was slow, for he stopped every few yards to call and shout about, knowing that his brother might be so injured that he was unable to respond to his call. So it was that the evening was late, the night had come and Bracken was long gone, before Stonecrop finally found Cairn’s body.
Even in death he recognised his brother’s beloved scent, the scent of openness and freedom and of running through sparse earth and fresh grass. He was shocked by how terribly injured Cairn had been and dazed by the fact that he would never play and mock-fight and laugh with Cairn again. He looked out at the dark pastures, so overcome by a sense of unreality that he almost expected Cairn to come running over to him and say, ‘It’s all a joke. That’s not me.’ But it was, and at last he sank down into a crouch, too full of grief to move, or think, or do anything.
Much later a chill breeze made him shiver and he got up stiffly. He snouted at the long grass and fence that formed an immediate backdrop to where his brother lay, and heard the rustlings and swayings of the great beech trees above, now lost in the darkness, and anger began to overtake him at last. He hated the dark wood where so much evil seemed to happen and he now hated everymole within it. Nothing, not even the beguiling Rebecca mole, was worth his brother’s life. His breath came more quickly, he seemed to grow even bigger in his anger, and had anything moved before him at that moment, he would certainly have attacked it. But nothing moved and only his brother was there, still and cold. And not his brother any more.
‘You should have called for me,’ he whispered. ‘I would have come. I would always have come.’ Then he did what seemed a strange thing—he took one of his brother’s front paws in his mouth and dragged the body out on to the pastures. It was no longer stiff; that stage had passed, and its limbs and head flopped in the grass as he dragged it along, moving with some difficulty as he was going backwards. At last he seemed satisfied with the distance he had gone and let the paw drop, looking up in the direction of the treetops he could not see. ‘Better to be owl fodder on the pastures he loved than prey to some skulking scavenger in the grass,’ he was thinking.
He looked again at the injuries and thought bitterly, ‘He must have been killed in a mating fight, but by two moles from the look of it. We don’t fight like that on the pastures—we don’t need to.’
With that he turned back down the hill, keeping very close to the edge of the wood and moving as fast as he could. He had one last job to do before he returned to the Pasture tunnels.
He made his way back to Rebecca’s temporary burrow and went straight down it again and crouched there very still. He breathed in the sickening odour left there by Cairn’s attackers—it was so unpleasant that it made him a little dizzy—until the fear it had initially put into even him was replaced by the anger he had felt up on top of the hill. He breathed it in so that he would never forget it, for he knew it was the scent of the Duncton mole who had killed his brother.
‘I’ll know you for a Duncton mole if ever I meet you,’ Stonecrop whispered menacingly into the tunnels, ‘and I won’t forget the smell of this wood either. I hope neither was the last odour that my brother smelt but I won’t mind if they are mine, so long as my talons first reach the mole whose stench this is.’
When he was quite sure he would know the smell again, and that it would cause him anger and not fear, he ran as quickly as he could out of the tunnel, across to the wood’s edge, and out into the fresh air of the pastures.
