Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  It wasn’t hard to win a fight when a male was trapped in a temporary burrow with no room to move and all he, Rune, had to do was to power-thrust his talons into the darkness and feel the soft fur, or even better, the vulnerable snout of his opponent yield before him.

  Yet Cairn laughed. He had been in just this position so many times with Stonecrop, who was a master of fighting, that he knew exactly what to do about it. Instead of pushing forward boldly into his opponent’s thrust as most males would have done, he fell back, pushing Rebecca behind him and keeping as far away from the entrance as possible. Rune’s shadow fell across it and, as fast as it did so, Rune plunged forward and round into the entrance, his talons shooting to where Cairn was reared up ready and waiting. They brushed his fur but went no further. There was a momentary pause as Rune puzzled over the contact he had failed to make, and taking advantage of it, Cairn lunged forward into the fleshy part of Rune’s paw, a searing plunge of sharp talons that forced Rune to withdraw with a twist and a cry of pain.

  As he did so, Cairn lunged forward, plunged out of the entrance with his left talon, straight into Rune’s left shoulder and narrowly missing his snout. The whole thing was done with such speed that Cairn was back in the burrow and crouched still and waiting before Rebecca knew what had happened. They could hear the sharp, hurt breathing of Rune in the tunnel beyond, as he fell silent and thought what to do.

  Then all was movement, as Rebecca heard a growling and a snarl, saw a rush forward by Cairn, heard a hissing from Rune and the two moles were attacking each other at the entrance, the dark body of Rune now in full sight, the lighter fur of Cairn contrasting with his blackness. For a moment both fell back; but then Cairn lunged forward again and was out into the tunnel driving Rune back down it towards the entrance. ‘Be careful, Cairn,’ called Rebecca desperately after him. ‘He’s not just a mole, he’s Rune. Be careful.’

  But Cairn was not a defensive fighter and Rune’s retreat gave him the false impression that this was a fight to be easily won. When he heard Rebecca’s voice, Cairn laughed and drove forcibly forward. But Rune, too, was strengthened by its sound.

  Rune saw that the mole he was fighting was young but strong, and no fool, and that it would be cunning, not strength, that defeated him. And for Rune, what was worse and increased his hatred of this mole still more than the fact that he seemed to be Rebecca’s mate was the fact that he was a Pasture mole. The fresh cropped-grass scent on Cairn sickened Rune, used as he was to the rotting of leaf mould in the shadow of the wood in which he habitually slunk.

  So Rune backed slowly away, avoiding the worst of the blows that the young Pasture mole powerfully directed at him, as he worked towards the manoeuvre that would allow him to inflict the fatal talon thrust that he had made his speciality.

  Cairn pressed on, impressed by Rune’s ability to avoid his fastest and most dangerous blows and to use the tunnel to prevent him from getting round and under him; warned, too, by the way Rune seemed to keep even his snarls under control.

  For a moment, almost experimentally, Cairn relaxed in the face of his opponent’s retreat and immediately, without a moment’s hesitation and with no sign of the fear that a mole might mistakenly have thought would go with his retreat, Rune came in with a talon thrust which twisted and tore into Cairn’s cheek, drawing blood on to his face fur, on which a thin trickle wound down to his snout.

  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.

  Each minute that passed left Rebecca more miserable and lost. The sound of the rain seemed to confuse her and drain her of strength, and sh
e had no idea what had happened, where her mate might be or whether or not he might be injured. Once she advanced out into the rain, towards the way they had gone, and called out, ‘Cairn, Cairn…’ but she could only hear rain and see wet foliage and undergrowth. Then she crept back into the burrow to wait a while longer.

  At last she grew fearful for Cairn and this made her fearful for herself. For if he had been defeated, then Rune might come back and find her there. But surely her Cairn could not have been defeated? But perhaps he had been, and she should have tried…

  So, for the first time in her life, questions and worries of life and death began to darken Rebecca’s mind. The truth was that so much had happened to her so happily in the previous twenty-four molehours that the sudden appearance out of a dark sky of Rune had shocked her into being confused and upset. To have had taken from her so violently the very thing she had been seeking for so many molemonths left her frightened and insecure and doubting the very impulse for life and joy that had brought her so trustingly over to the pastures in the first place. Now the deafening rain seemed the mirror of her torrent of fears.

  Until at last, panicked by the threat of Rune’s possible return, she took to the surface again, though uncertain where to go. She turned at first towards the Westside but stopped for fear that Rune, if he was coming back, would come that way. She hesitated before the pastures, for without Cairn and Stonecrop to accompany her there, they seemed dangerous; the more so because a great herd of cattle, which had silently drifted up the pastures through the day, now stood silent and massive beyond the fence, their hooves dirty from the mud that was forming there.

  Miserably she turned yet again, this time towards the slopes to the south—but what could she find there but more desolation and emptiness? Everywhere seemed hopeless now that her mate was gone.

  Such a time may come suddenly to anymole, in any place, at any time. When suddenly the sun’s light is gone and all falls gloomy and dark and each drop of rain that thunders to the ground is a reminder that a mole is for ever alone, seeming for ever lost. But though the sun is gone, there is an unseen light that may seem far off and dim, and whose rays may touch the heart and not the mind. Yet such a light, vague and hard to make out though it is, may draw a mole forward far, far more powerfully than any sun.

  And such a light drew her now, up along the wood’s edge on the western side of the slopes, higher and higher up the hill, where the oaks thinned away to tall beeches, which even in the rain gave the wood a lighter, loftier look. Each massive beech she passed seemed to will her on as it stood, solid and powerful, the green lichen covering its base almost luminescent in the shady light of a darkening afternoon that had taken over from a gloomy morning. She hardly knew where she was going, or that she was going, and when she wandered in her desolation from the path that led her higher and higher, the massive trees seemed to sway her back towards the light that perhaps they could see far more clearly than she could that day. Higher and higher, until the wood’s floor levelled off and she swung in from the pastures towards a great clearing that drummed with the sound of rain. At its centre stood a Stone, enwrapped by the roots of a tree. The Stone itself. And on the west side of the clearing, crouched so still that he might almost have been a part of the wood, was a mole, shiny with rain, smaller than Cairn, who faced away from her as he looked out through the trees to the west.

  * * *

  Bracken had been there for several molehours, from the time the rain had begun to fall, thick and wet. His few days with Rue in Hulver’s old tunnels, which might have left him feeling less lonely after his initial exploration of the Ancient System, had had the opposite effect. He had left her as the rain started, and trekked miserably up the hill towards the Stone, for no reason that he understood. Back to the Stone.

  He had looked at it for a long time, feeling alternately resigned to its impassivity and angry with it just being there and ‘doing’ nothing. Then he was angry with Hulver, who had said that the Stone held everything, a promise which did not seem to be fulfilled now that Bracken was alone and desolate before it.

  Finally Bracken had started to weep tears from a well of lonely desolation so deep that they shook his whole body in their sadness. Tears which mingled with the rain that tumbled on his face and fell with it to the ground which, slowly, took them in and carried his grief for its own. Then he had turned away from the Stone and gone to crouch, still miserable, in the spot to the west side of the clearing which lay towards Uffington where the Holy Moles were said to be.

  Some time later he started to speak to the Stone behind him and to Uffington far off before him, not knowing that what he was doing was praying. He asked for the Stone’s help in his search for strength. He asked for the strength to continue his exploration of the Ancient System. He asked for help.

  At first, the wind lashed the trees, which swayed and whipped each other in the wet, far above where Bracken crouched. But then the wind died and solid rain poured down, the same that seemed to deafen desolate Rebecca as she heard Cairn and Rune disappear deeper into the wood, and it ran in rivulets down the treetrunks round the Stone clearing, turning the leaf mould into a sodden carpet, cold and wet.

  And the noise! The endless random drumming of the rain drowning every other sound—not a scurrying fox, or a scampering rabbit, or a scuffling mole could be heard above the noise. Until, when it seemed to Bracken that all creatures save only himself had found temporary refuge in their burrows, the wood was as still in the rain as a lost and forgotten tunnel.

  Then a peace crept slowly over Bracken. A peace that was mingled with the sighs of the understanding that came with the knowledge that he was alone and that moles like Mandrake and Rune, who could chase after a Stone Mole that did not exist, were surely no less alone than he. A peace that came with the certainty that it didn’t matter where he lived, and if the Stone had brought him to the Ancient System, he might just as well explore it to the end.

  So, as Rebecca began her own weary ascent of the hill in the rain, Bracken fell into the peace that follows the tears of a prayer spoken truly from a heart surrounded by suffering and darkness. The words that Hulver had taught him now came back and each one seemed to carry a meaning for him which he had not seen when he first recited them:

  ‘The grace of form

  The grace of goodness

  The grace of suffering

  The grace of wisdom

  The grace of true words

  The grace of trust

  The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’

  Then his mind fell silent for a time and he saw for a moment past the impenetrable, impassive face of the Stone into the world of trust and love beyond it.

  * * *

  Weary, her wet paws sore, her mind dazed and upset, Rebecca crouched down in the Stone clearing looking up at the Stone, unafraid of the strange mole who crouched off to her right in the pouring rain. She stared at the Stone for a long time, wondering at its size and majesty, losing herself in its strength.

  Finally she grew cold and shivery, but found that her panic and confusion had gone, and she just wanted to get back to the tunnels of Duncton where she could shelter for a while and then try to find Cairn again.

  She approached the mole on the edge of the clearing carefully, for fear of disturbing him, for he seemed not to have noticed her. There was a patch of sanicle into which she went and made her way round to him. At first she might almost have thought he was dead, so still did he crouch, looking away through the trees somewhere out to the west. But rain seems to sink into a dead creature, leaving no light, whereas with this mole there was about him the light of the few brighter parts of the sky which lay over to the west and were reflected in the sheen of his wet fur.

  She watched him longer than she intended, for a great sense of peace seemed to come from him, even though he was small and hunched and seemed, in a way, almost afraid. She wondered for a moment who he might be and decided he must be one of the Pasture moles. The thought that
he might be Bracken never occurred to her, for her idea of Bracken was that he would be at least as big as Stonecrop or Mandrake, and quite unafraid. She wanted to get dry and warm again and back to the Duncton tunnels. But she needed help to get there, for the strength that had carried her up the hill had deserted her now, and she was weary.

  Little by little the heavy rain began to fade and the drumming noise it had been making for so long became a patter again as individual droplets, falling through the trees that surrounded them, could be heard once more. Slowly the sky began to lighten from the west.

  As this happened, the mole Rebecca was watching turned to face her, looking at her in an abstracted kind of way. Neither could have known how unutterably weary the other was. But just as Bracken sensed that the mole before him was anxious and lost, so Rebecca sensed that he, too, had been lost and lonely. It gave her the strength to speak to him, and in other circumstances would have been enough for Rebecca to run forward and make his eyes light up with her own vital joy, just as she had done sometimes with her brothers, and Mekkins, and Rose. And even, had she known it, with Mandrake.

  But she was too tired to follow this impulse and instead came forward just a little and said ‘I’m lost. How do I get back into the system?’

  The mention of the word ‘system’ made Bracken look past her in its general direction down the slopes, as he remembered that it really was no longer his system. He was not of it. He had little desire or need to return to it, but then, what did it matter? And anyway, it was a pleasant feeling to have a mole ask him to do something to help. He looked at Rebecca and thought to himself that he wanted to help her because she… well, there was something warm about her that… but he didn’t have words for it, or even clear thoughts.