Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  ‘Whatever it was, she was on the surface when the blizzard started and naturally she tried to get back to her nest. She must have dragged herself through the storm over the ice-covered Siabod rock plateaux, paws and talons tearing at the snow and scanty vegetation, to try to reach warmth and safety before the first was born.

  ‘But we think she was on the wrong side of the slope and had to battle a little way uphill before she could reach back down to a tunnel into the system. She could no doubt have found a burrow or made one long before she became too exhausted to continue, but females with young like to return to the nest they have prepared.

  ‘We can only imagine what happened. Overcome by exhaustion and cold, unable to battle further against the wind and icy snow, she settled down in the blizzard on what was little more than bare rock to give birth to her litter. She must have felt a terrible horror and loneliness out there on the side of Siabod, the sky obscured by snowclouds, the wind ripping at her fur, trying to tear away each tiny mole pup as it was born. We do not know how many there were—four or five, probably. She must have watched their blind struggle desperately as the warmth from her womb was dashed and scurried away from them by the blizzard wind. Perhaps she tried to burrow into the snow to protect her young, but the wind was too strong for any more than an inch or two of snow to settle.

  ‘Into this icy chaos Mandrake was born, struggling from birth to hang on to life, fighting with his siblings from the very start to find a place of warmth among his mother’s teats. She no doubt set her back to the wind, taking the brunt of it herself, to give her young the warmth of her stomach and flanks. For days she fought the cold and wind, never resting for a moment lest one of her young slip out of the protection of her paws into the teeth of the blizzard. The storm continued for nearly eight days, the most vital time in anymole’s life. Blind, furless, vulnerable, how Mandrake must have struggled to keep his place at her teats, unknowingly pushing his siblings out of the way, dashing their heads and snouts with his feeble paws, fighting to suck.

  ‘At some point his mother must have realised that without food her milk would dry up, and yet known that if she left her litter for a second, it would mean certain death for all of them.

  ‘It is hard to imagine that she deliberately decided to sacrifice one of the litter after another in the hope that one at least might survive. But everymole knows that, faced by acute danger, a littering mother will kill and sometimes eat her young. Perhaps what happened was that the weakest of the litter died from lack of milk and exposure and rather than let it lie there to be lost for nothing in the cold, she ate it, hoping that it might give her the nourishment she and the rest of the litter needed. One by one her litter died, exposed in the worst Siabod blizzard in mole memory. One by one she must have eaten them, their blood mingling with the snow and ice. One by one her nipples and teats dried up as the nourishment from the food stored in her body, and from the cannibalism of her own young, gave out.

  ‘Until at last only Mandrake remained, struggling among her cold teats to find one that would yield milk to his desperate suckling. By now his eyes were open, but all he could have seen was the dark of his mother’s fur, the pink of her teats, and the racing, grey blizzard all around. So, from the start, his world was one of extremes. How he must have struggled to keep his place! Not for him the peace and comfort of safe suckling; never for him the unremembered memory of a relaxed mother holding him warm and close. Fighting for life from the very start.

  ‘Did his mother wonder if he must be sacrificed for her own survival? Or did she leave it to the elements, herself finally falling asleep, the freezing wind at her back taking a seeping hold on her body, her last memory being Mandrake trying to suckle her cold teats?

  ‘If that was her last memory, then his first sight might well have been the discovery that his mother was dead. And though he would never know it, she had died to give Mandrake the chance to live, to fight, and to mate. But for him then, there was nothing left but the wind, and the freezing flank of his dead mother. He was too young to think. But think what he must have felt: desolate loneliness, loss, abandonment.

  ‘It was almost certainly on the eighth day of the storm that this moment came, for shortly after, it began to clear, and it is unthinkable that Mandrake could have survived these conditions for more than a few hours. The freak weather conditions that had nearly killed him now reversed to save him. The sun broke out through the stormcast sky and the freezing wet was replaced by thawing warmth. Steam began to rise from the rocks and peat as it does sometimes after a storm in summer. Creature after creature came out from shelter, stretching into the warm, moist air and feeling themselves back into the light. Here a mole, there a vole, above the larks tilting into the breeze with their song hanging again above the flanks of Siabod. And buzzards and ravens.

  ‘Mandrake could easily have died then, taken by one of the predators whose eyes now searched the mountain’s sides again. But perhaps his mother’s instinct to return home when the blizzard broke had been right, for where she had finally lain to litter was not so far from one of the outlying entrances to the Siabod system. And the wind was in the right direction to carry his cries to a mole by the entrance, and a female at that. She was very young and yet she climbed across the slope towards the cries and found Mandrake crying and nestling into the cold body of his mother, surrounded by the pathetic remains of the rest of the litter. She comforted him, warmed him and nudged him down the wet slope into the system. Anymole who saw him that day or in the days following will not forget the sight: eyes open, fur barely grown, head big, paws scrabbling and flailing—lost and untrusting and wild. So he always remained, wild and aggressive.

  ‘As he grew, he took to roaming Siabod’s sides for food. I have seen him myself, the great, fierce Mandrake, silent and evil, leaving the system to search on the surface, fearless of weather or birds. One day he left like that and he has never come back.’

  Such is the record in Uffington as told to Boswell himself so long ago. No more is said about how Mandrake came to leave Siabod and make his way to Duncton Wood. Perhaps he thought he might find something he had once lost in a storm. Who can say?

  Nor can we say how much of this Sarah knew. But if she had but a tiny fraction of the compassion that her daughter Rebecca was to have—and where else would Rebecca have found it?—then in the mating burrow with Mandrake she must have felt his loss and tried to cherish him as, in other circumstances, he might have been cherished at birth: to help him escape the world of blackness into which he had been born and in which he believed he lived.

  At any rate, what is known is that Mandrake chose Sarah for a mate; that he watched her grow big with her litter, that he stayed nearby at the birth; and that he waited brooding, turning, twisting, scratching his face with his talons, never comfortable, in the tunnel outside until the litter showed.

  He came to the burrow entrance—Sarah allowed him no further—and looked at the litter. Three males and a female. He watched her croon to them and he looked at them, pink, comfortable and safe in her nest, her body warmly encircling their snouts and still-pale whiskers wet with her milk. But he seemed interested only in the female, who struggled, paws bending and flexing weakly, questing for milk as the others did. His eyes were on her alone.

  ‘Call her Sarah, after yourself,’ he ordered. ‘It’s a fine, strong name.’

  But Sarah looked up from her litter and straight at him with the same mixture of compassion and strength that the tiny female pup now suckling her was to have in her face when she looked on Bracken at their first meeting many moleyears later.

  ‘Her name will be Rebecca,’ she said.

  Mandrake looked at the tiny, struggling female and back at Sarah, and then back at his daughter again: he who had killed so many moles had once been as helpless as this, but he didn’t think of that; he who had taken so many females had given them pups like this, but he didn’t think of that either; nor did he think that he, whose talons ached with killing
and whose shoulders hung huge and heavy on his body, now craved to lean into the burrow and touch his daughter.

  But though he was not able to think these things and say them to himself, they twisted and turned and racked his heart as he crouched in the tunnel unable to say anything. Mandrake, huge and menacing, unable to cut through the whirling darkness of his mind: impotent.

  Rebecca, tiny, pink and suckling. Alive!

  ‘Call her Rebecca, then,’ he said finally, finding himself unaccountably gasping and breathless and wanting to run away from the burrow. ‘Call her Rebecca!’ he said more loudly, turning back into the tunnel clumsily, feeling more than ever the huge, cumbersome weight of himself on himself and wanting to shake and rip it off.

  ‘Call her Rebecca!’ he shouted, gasping for air, running down the tunnel and out of the nearest entrance on to the surface in Barrow Vale. ‘Rebecca!’ he roared, as if he could not escape the name, slashing the base of an oak tree with his talons as he charged blindly into it.

  Sarah heard him, licking her young, curling them into her and sighing in satisfaction. ‘Rebecca,’ she whispered, ‘Rebecca,’ as gently in the darkness of the burrow as, for the briefest of hidden moments, Mandrake had once whispered to her, ‘Sarah.’

  From the first, Rebecca held a strange fascination for Mandrake, who would often stare at her from the tunnel by the burrow where Sarah nursed her litter. Sarah would sometimes waken and find him there, or see his black shadow move away down the tunnel as if, seeing her beginning to awaken, he didn’t want to be seen simply watching over his daughter.

  Yet as the days and molemonths went by, no one would have guessed, least of all Mandrake himself, that he loved Rebecca with a passion as strong as a gale across a moor. For he treated her harshly, disciplining her unmercifully to try, it seemed, to break her down to a mole of obedience. At first it was easy, for she was but a tiny pup who quailed and backed away from his deep-voiced commands. Her paws would fall over themselves in their anxiety to escape from her great father as she ran desperately back for the protection of her mother’s flanks.

  Sarah would hold her and say, ‘She’s only a pup, only a young thing.’ But this made little impact on Mandrake.

  ‘A pup will do what I say, as I want,’ he would roar, glowering darkly at the cowering Rebecca. But never once did he try to wrest her from Sarah, or hit her when she was young.

  Such threats had their effect and for a long time Rebecca did Mandrake’s will, frightened of him not only when he was there, but also when he was out in the system with Rune or other henchmoles doing system business.

  She grew quickly, so that by late autumn she was already nearing adult size. Not as big as moles born the preceding spring, but not so small that she could not put up a fair fight if necessary, though the youngsters still fought for fun rather than in earnest. The real fighting came only with the mating season or when one mole was trying to wrest away another mole’s territory. She stayed in her home burrow longer than the young of spring litters, who could take advantage of the good summer weather to leave their mothers and find their own territory. Rebecca stayed at home, close by Sarah and Mandrake, kept innocent, childlike and cowed by Mandrake’s continual aggression towards her.

  Through the following January and early February, when the wood was at its bleakest, it seemed to her that almost everything was bleak, for she could never please her father. It was then that there occurred an incident about which she never told another mole until years, lifetimes, later and that deepened forever her relationship with Mandrake.

  In mid-February the weather turned suddenly bitterly cold and hoarfrost delicately picked out the stalks and veins of the decaying leaves on the wood’s floor. While other moles slept and kept warm, or grumbled at the cold as they hurried to find food, Rebecca snouted about on the surface, awed by the chill beauty of the frostbound wood. Then the lightest of snowflakes began to fall, feathering down through the leafless black branches from a grey sky, settling for a second on the back of her paw before melting with her warmth. As she tried to catch them falling about her she seemed to dance with delight in the silent wood.

  ‘Like it, do you, girl? Think it’s fun?’

  It was Mandrake on the surface behind her, interrupting her reverie, angry. She had done something wrong again but she had no idea what. He came closer, his heavy paws destroying the delicate patterns of frost on an oak leaf she had looked at moments before.

  ‘Think it’s pretty, don’t you?’

  His voice was getting louder and she wanted to get away. ‘You think this snow’s just here for your special pleasure? Well, come with me…’

  She wanted to run from him, to get away from his anger and his voice that was getting louder. She wanted the safety of Sarah. But looking up at his angry gaze she could not move a paw but in the direction in which he pointed—towards the pastures. But she didn’t want to go there.

  ‘Please can I go back to the home burrow?’

  Mandrake cuffed her not once or twice but several times, so that her head stung and she found herself running tearfully before him towards the pastures, through a wood in which the snow that had once fallen delicate and light was beginning to swirl and whose trees were starting to strain before a blizzard.

  She was cold and Mandrake was wild; her teeth chattered in fear. If she opened her mouth as she ran, to gain breath as Mandrake rushed her through the wood, the bitter wind seemed to want to blow her apart.

  Then she was at the wood’s edge and forced by Mandrake to gaze out on to the pastures, whose grass was grey with a thin layer of snow over which more snow whined with the blizzard.

  ‘Still think it’s pretty, still think it’s something to dance to?’ roared Mandrake above the wind.

  Then he pushed her out from the protection of the wood into the killer wind and her screams and sobs lost themselves in its wild bitterness, and her tears were part of the stinging blizzard snow. Until she was so far out from the wood that it was lost behind her in the storm and the only solid thing she could see was the dark shape of Mandrake himself, crouched like a black rock against the wind, snow swirling around him.

  Mandrake seemed no longer interested in her, turning his attention instead to the blizzard and raising a paw against it as if searching for something beyond it that was threatening him and which he hated and would defy.

  ‘Thought you could kill me, you bastard; thought Mandrake would yield. Siabod, you’re nothing, your Stones are a nothing, Gelert is nothing, you…’ And then he began to roar and rage at the blizzard, his language changing into the harsh tongue of Siabod, whose words were like talon thrusts. He was no longer immobile rock but a moving mass of dark shadow and anger raging at the bitter wind and ignoring the harsh snow that flailed against his snout and mouth. But his roars began to get more high-pitched and wilted before the wind into what seemed the bleatings and mewings of a creature lost, and Rebecca’s fear was gone.

  She wanted to reach out and take him to her, tell him he was safe, and so she shouted, ‘Mandrake! Mandrake!’ into the deafening wind. He turned to her and she saw that in his eyes, so menacing before, there was a terrible fear and a loss so great that she could only reach out to it…

  He hit her as she came to him, the look of loss replaced again by anger, and then he turned her to the wind and snow and shouted into her above the sound of the blizzard, ‘This is what I faced, this is the force you face, and you, Rebecca, will never yield to it because you are part of me who knew Siabod once and defied its death…’ and she wanted to cry, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t it, it isn’t, it isn’t,’ but she was too young to know the words and the words only cried inside her and so she sobbed and struggled to get free. But she never forgot what she was unable to say, just as she never forgot the power of his grip as he forced her to face the blizzard wind. Nor could she forget the strangest thing—how safe she felt as he held her there.

  That was what happened to Rebecca with Mandrake in mid-February, and what mole
can doubt that in those wild half-remembered moments her love for him grew deep? Had he not shown her something of himself?

  Yet what a shuddering memory it soon became, and how much more afraid of him she grew.

  Still, through that bleak winter there were some comforts. Sarah would sit with her and tell stories about her family. She would play with her brothers when Mandrake was not about (he preferred to keep her separate when he was there), usually leading them in the games they played, for she had a good imagination and could always think of something to do.

  As yet she had none of the grace of her mother, Sarah, every movement betraying an anxiousness to please Mandrake, even when he was not there. It unsettled her, too, that other moles’ approach to her was unpredictable, because of who she was: some were extra nice to her, thinking it might pay dividends with Mandrake. Others, especially the females, were inclined to be bitchy, making remarks about ‘certain moles who think a lot of themselves and have it easy’. Or, as one of them put it to a friend in Barrow Vale, loudly enough for Rebecca to hear: ‘She’s got all the worst qualities of both of them: stuck up as her mother and as heavy-pawed as Mandrake.’

  Faced by such comments, Rebecca at first cried and hid herself away, taking minor tunnels to avoid meeting adult moles if she went out. But as February advanced she grew brasher, though no less sensitive, and would walk boldly past the gossips, affecting total indifference to them.

  But towards the third week of February, everything started to change as the earliest spring began and there was much less of the chatter and idleness that had characterised the winter years. Rebecca began to go out on to the surface more, cheered by the growing lightness of the spring days.