Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  Now she prayed for the Stone’s help that she might be able to aid whatever mole it was that was embroiled in a battle with darkness and death and held so little light in his talons to combat them with.

  She left the clearing and took almost the same route across the Ancient System as the one along which Bracken had fled before Mandrake. She went slowly, too tired to move fast, and snouted this way and that as she went—the drag of disease always strongest straight ahead. The August day was long over, and high summer cloud hid whatever moon there might have been. The beech trees rustled cleanly above her, seeming to echo the dry rustle of the old leaves through which she made her way.

  She could sense the deep past of the Ancient System all around her, rich with the love and suffering that are the residue of generation upon generation of lives.

  Still carrying the ramsons she had picked with Rebecca, Rose found her way to the part of the cliff over which Bracken had fallen, but was confused for a while by the lack of any obvious tunnel entrance. But finally her instinct told her where to dig and she burrowed down quickly, having carefully placed the ramsons clear of where the burrowed soil would fall, and after some tiring digging and a couple of rests, she broke into the tunnel between the cliff face and where Bracken lay. Long before she fully entered the tunnel, she knew that he was there. She could smell the heaviness of disease and hear the terrible rasping sound of the very ill.

  ‘Oh, my dearest,’ she whispered as she entered the tunnel and made her way along it to where she could see Bracken lying. He was huddled to one side of the tunnel, his back paws limp, and his snout and forepaws lost in the darkness ahead. His coat was grimy with dirt and round the terrible wound in his left shoulder were the congealings of blood and the spreading of poison. The tunnel floor about him was grimy with droppings and half-eaten food.

  She touched him very, very gently on his good shoulder and whispered softly to him, but he did not respond at all, his breathing short and painful, his eyes closed, his snout bearing the pallor of near-death.

  She could see how close to death he was, and how deeply he had suffered. Yet she was puzzled by the fact that the injury itself, though deep and unpleasant, was no worse than many she had seen and from which other moles, surely no fitter than Bracken had been, had recovered without any help at all. Such thoughts were natural to Rose, who treated anymole in trouble by trying to see what were the causes of his distress, knowing that more often than not they were different from what the victims themselves thought they were.

  How often had a mole come to her with aches and pains in his shoulders which she had treated by massaging his haunches with comfrey; how often had she treated a loss of smell, the most terrible affliction for anymole, by buffeting the mole’s back? Rose’s treatments often seemed bizarre, but they worked.

  She suspected that Bracken’s illness lay not so much in the wound as in Bracken himself, and perhaps in the way the wound had been inflicted. Clearly, it had been done when he was in a state of distress and weakness… well, she couldn’t very well ask him.

  She began by gently caressing him and grooming his fur, so that slowly she could feel each part of his body relax under her paws and snout until his breathing grew a bit more peaceful and his paws a little less limp. This took her many hours, for he was so weak that she had to be very slow and gentle.

  After this she cleaned the wound itself, using juice from the ramson, whose stinging smell also served to purify the air of the tunnel. He groaned a little when she did this, but not much, though he restlessly moved his head from one side to another in his unconsciousness.

  She let him alone for a while so that she herself might sleep, and the day above had started again and the August sun was well into the beech trees, all yellow, grey and green, before she woke. She scurried up and down the tunnel, found a worm or two for herself and a couple of beetles, and even went to the cliff end of the tunnel whose precipitous drop made her gasp with awe as a morning breeze raced up from the cliff face below. Then, awake and recovered, she went back to Bracken.

  He was alive and young, that was the best she could say. She sensed again the great struggle of darkness and light about him, as if all these conflicting forces were concentrated in his broken body which lay lost in this great place, teetering on the edge of a black void.

  She placed one of her paws on each side of his face, closed her eyes, and began to pass into him her own healing love for life with a force and power she had never used before, or been able to use.

  He was for her at once the frailest pup she had ever touched and all the hurt moles who had ever asked her for help. He was, too, all the many moles who had never asked her, not knowing they were troubled, to whom she had given her healing love.

  There was no prayer in the meaning of the words she spoke, which were a running brook of love sounds and gentleness, of ‘My love, my dear, my sweet thing, creature of love, my laughter, my whole-souled joy’… The prayer lay in her whole being and it did not ask for help but praised the divine power that could still hold on to such life in so much suffering.

  Her prayer, and the love of it, flowed through Bracken and beyond them both to the forgotten burrows and tunnels on whose edge he lay. Perhaps, too, it travelled out into the trees of the Ancient System, which now stood dappled in a morning sun, and it danced with the light and caressed the smooth grey branches of the beech trees and whispered amid the shining green of their leaves.

  How long Rose gave herself to the healing of Bracken she never knew, for she was lost to the world as she did it. But long before she had finished, the sun on the surface declined towards the pastures and a wood pigeon had flapped and cooed in the evening light.

  When, finally, she took her paws from Bracken’s head, her ageing fur was running with sweat and hung with exhaustion, and she looked as if she had been on a journey to the edge of life itself, and only just been able to return.

  All her strength was gone. She was too tired even to find food and to wonder whether, after all, she had done enough. She simply lay down where she was, one of her paws touching his neck and her old body close to him—and fell asleep. She stirred sometimes when he stirred, and whispered gentleness into his ears and battling soul.

  For three days, perhaps four, Rose stayed tending Bracken and cherishing the life in him back to hope and light. Nomole can be certain of the time it took, and Boswell of Uffington, in the account he later scribed, says that there are events in moles’ lives against which the measure of time becomes measureless, and ‘this one meeting between the loving Rose and Bracken of Duncton Wood was surely one of them’.

  However, the day came when Rose knew that Bracken, though not fully healed, was at least safe—as safe as a mole can ever be against the force of evil. His breathing became deeper and more rhythmic, his weak paws now moved restlessly with life, his groans no longer held the agony she had first heard in them. He stirred at last into consciousness and whispered words of Hulver and Rebecca the Healer… ‘Rebecca, Rebecca…’ though he did not seem to know that Rose was there with him.

  At last she left him, still only on the verge of conscious health again, finding first for him in the tunnels some food which she placed ready at his side. So many times she had left a mole like this, healed as best she knew how but seeming so vulnerable before the rest of the journey into health and wholeness which, finally, they must make for themselves. Never had she been so reluctant to leave a mole, and never had she said the ancient journey blessing of Rebecca the Healer with such appeal to the forces of light and love which abound in even the darkest places:

  ‘May the healing of Rebecca

  Encompass your going and returning;

  The peace of the White Moles be yours in the travel

  And may you return home safeguarded.’

  And she might have said the blessing for herself as well, for she had a long journey to her own burrow before her and was very weary—more tired than she had ever been.

  She left t
he tunnel by the way she had come, covered over the entrance she had made with leaf litter and soil, and tried to shake the fatigue from her old body. It was dusk, a good time to travel at least, but it was an effort even to put one paw in front of the other as she made for the Stone—the first stage of her journey.

  ‘I’m getting old,’ she said to herself, ‘and a little weary. Why, my home burrow has never seemed quite so far away as it does now.’ The atmosphere among the great trees of the Ancient System was much calmer than when she had arrived, and less confused.

  When she reached the Stone clearing it was night, and she paused there to rest and reflect, feeling the richness of Duncton stretching beyond the slopes beneath her. Something very powerful was going on, bigger than the system she loved, perhaps even more important than all the moles who lived there or had made their lives there in the past, and whom she had so long cared for and tended.

  So much was changing. She had known of the change even before Mandrake came—indeed, she saw that he was a part of it and not a cause of it. Hulver and Bindle were both gone, killed near this very spot, and other old moles she knew were all gone as well.

  It occurred to her that she was one of the oldest moles in Duncton or on the pastures and she found herself thinking again, ‘I am getting old!’ She looked down at her paws and rubbed her snout and face against them, smiling gently at the silly thought. For above her, the tilted Stone rose in the night, the great tree roots black around its base, and she chided herself with the thought that nomole was ever old in the Stone. ‘Why, you mustn’t make me say such foolish things!’ she said to the Stone, in the chatty way she always spoke to it. ‘Or even let me think them.’

  With that she began to make her way slowly and carefully down the slopes by the edge of the wood, taking her thoughts and ageing body to the warmth of her home burrow. And to sleep.

  Chapter Eleven

  Rose had chosen the moment of her departure wisely, for the following dawn Bracken finally awoke with a clear head but a terribly weakened body. He was aching and wretched, and a little ill-tempered, but at least he could see and hear the waking world around him. See, that is, the dawning light coming into the tunnel, and hear the morning breeze by the cliff and a chorus of wrens and greenfinch and the chunter of a young jackdaw somewhere among the trees.

  His shoulder still hurt terribly, but the pain was now confined to the wound itself and did not spread evilly through his body to his very eyes, and snout, and sensibility. He could control it.

  He had the feeling that he was not alone, for the burrow smelt fresh and lived in. Curious! He dozed and awoke and dozed again, until he finally awoke hungry as a pup. And there was food ready for him. Strange. ‘I must have got it for myself,’ he thought, though he couldn’t remember… anything.

  Yes… yes he could. Illness and dark and a great red cardinal beetle that was coming to him and struggling with him… and a worm and a black beetle much bigger than he that were trying to destroy him, take him away… Bracken shuddered and started to eat the food, asking no more questions of himself.

  Though he was hungry, he managed less than half a worm. He was so unused to eating. But he managed to nibble at the stem of a… but he didn’t know the plant’s name. It tasted fresh and good. Strange again. He looked around the tunnel, half expecting to see a friendly mole, but there was none—just high, arching walls and a well-made floor that stretched into the darkness ahead.

  For a moment he wanted to raise himself fully to his paws and start exploring the Ancient System which, he realised with a thrill, now lay ahead for him to explore whenever he wanted. But the moment he tried to move, he knew how weak he was and it was several days before he felt able to do more than struggle painfully up and down the tunnel he was already in, picking up what food he could find.

  They were strange days of pain and content. His shoulder hurt whenever he moved and yet a restlessness to get started drove him on to use it more and more, despite the pain. In doing so, he learned that pain is a clumsy word, describing as one something that is a thousand feelings, not all of them unpleasant. The ache in his head, the searing pain if he worked his shoulder too much, the dull moaning of his stomach as it became used to food again—they were all different. He learned to welcome the step into pain that he had to take when he awoke and stretched his limbs and worked himself back into his body.

  Quite where the content of these days came from he did not know, but it was there alongside him as if a companionable mole were in the tunnel with him. He was restless, impatient, ill-tempered with his weakness, but beneath it all he felt a happy certainty that so much lay ahead for which he, himself, had found the strength. In his molemonths of illness, stretching from the last week of June to the start of August, he had matured a great deal. He could dimly remember, as a pleasant dream, the caresses and gentleness of a mole very close to him, but thought it must be some recreation of his own of the Rebecca of old times Hulver had talked about. He might indeed, had he been asked, have talked of Rebecca the legendary Healer as a real force in the system, so persistent was the idea that she had been there with him. But Rose? No, he never knew that she had been there.

  Perhaps, deep down, he knew, but preferred to think that he gave himself the strength to survive, and so forgot.

  Certainly he forgot other important things as well. He forgot that he had nearly died. He forgot the swirling forces of evil into whose darkness he had looked. He forgot the power of light by whose strength he had been kept back from the void. He forgot again the memories of puphood that early in his illness had flooded back. In forgetting all these things, he lost as well the lessons they might have taught him, or the releases their memory might have brought.

  At the same time, he remembered things as they never were: that he, and only he, had found the power to heal himself; that pain and suffering quickly pass; that Mandrake and Rune were, after all was said and done, just moles. Just moles? Nomole is just a mole. A mole may have to learn a lesson many times before he knows its truth, especially one like Bracken.

  He finally woke up one dawn a few moledays into August, knowing that at last he had strength and desire enough to start exploring the Ancient System. Most of all he wanted to get his bearings, for few moles were quite so uncomfortable as Bracken, the greatest explorer of his generation, when they didn’t know exactly where they were.

  He ran first to the cliff end of the tunnel, to pay his respects to the spot where he had found a second life and to take one final look into the daylight before plunging back into the unknown tunnels and discoveries behind. Grass, cudweed and brambles hung waving across the tunnel from the surface above. He listened to the soft-loud-soft buzz of nectar-seeking flies and wasps taking advantage of the blue harebells and bright yellow furze that grew on this sunlit eastern part of the wood.

  The smell of summer was warm and sweet and it was only then, taking it in, that he realised, by its heavier dryness compared with June, how many molemonths had passed in nightmare illness. Well, now he was better, and the time had come, at last, to explore.

  He turned around and started forward on a journey into tunnels and burrows, dangers and marvels, that nomole had ventured near for generations.

  * * *

  It was only when he was well past the furthest point he had reached previously in his search for food that Bracken noticed the deepening quality of sound in the tunnel he was travelling down. It crept forward towards him, at first no more precise than the backwash of a mixed wind in rough grass. But then, with each step he took, its quality became richer. The sound of sliding soil came whispering from the unknown labyrinths beyond; then the moan of wind at some twist or turn, gathered into the tunnel from some distant exposure; into these came the harsher, mysterious creaking of a subterranean tree root in stress—but whether from round the corner or many tunnels away, he could not tell; then the sudden scuttle of a beetle; and mixing with it all, the echo and re-echo of his own pawsteps running forward ahead of him a
nd returning from some wall beyond in the dark.

  The wall turned out to be the far side of a much bigger tunnel into which the one he had started from entered at right angles. As he stepped into it, the sounds he had heard redoubled in richness and complexity, and quite took his breath away. If there was any truth in the old mole saying ‘You can tell a mole by the sounds of his tunnels’ then surely the moles who built this system were wise and cunning indeed.

  For when a mole burrows a tunnel, he takes heed of the acoustics it creates—not for his entertainment, but so that he may gauge from the sounds it carries to him at any one point potential danger or possible food. A tunnel has to be good to carry the vibrations of a worm more than fifty moleyards; it has to be superbly designed to carry the slinking of a rival much more than one hundred moleyards. This being so, the air currents in a system are very important—for while earth vibrations may carry fifty moleyards and sound in a still system perhaps two hundred, air currents help carry sound a great deal further, and scent as well. But air currents do not happen—they are designed, and it was this aspect of the tunnel into which he entered that impressed Bracken. For the air currents were subtle and complex, the moles having acquired the difficult art (in many systems long forgotten) of creating tunnels in which air flows in different directions at different levels—as water may do in a river, or wind often does in a steep valley.

  The advantage of such air currents to a mole who knows them is that they allow him to ‘read’ his tunnels in two directions at once, and sometimes, if he is at an intersection or crosstunnel, even more.

  At first Bracken could not easily interpret the sounds he heard or the scents either. That would take time. Though from the scents he could tell that there were no moles about, nor did he expect any. There were, however, other animal smells—voles, certainly, but they’d grab any temporary burrow they could get, and if that included the entrance to a deserted mole tunnel, well and good; the more sinister, sharp smell of weasel came to him, too, though from a long, long way off; but nothing else that was specific, except for the clean, dry smell of fresh vegetation whose roots and scent he realised must enter the Ancient System in many places.