They heard his voice from the tussocks above before they saw him: ‘Beth yw eich enwau, a’ch cyfundrefn?’ They did not understand the language at all, though from its tone and his stance it was obvious what it meant.
‘We’ve come from Capel Garmon,’ said Bracken, to make things simple.
‘In peace,’ added Boswell.
‘Dieithriaid i Siabod, paham yr ydych yma?’ His words were a question, but that was all they could tell. They waited in silence. If he was a Siabod mole, he was not what either of them had expected, which was a mole as big as Mandrake, and as fierce.
He was thin and wiry and had a wizened, suspicious expression on his face that spelt distrust. His snout was mean and pinched, and his fur looked more like a bedraggled teasel than anything else. His small black eyes travelled rapidly over them, taking in their strength, their relative size, Boswell’s crippled paw, their position (which was lower than he, down by the water), and generally giving them the feeling that they were being picked over by the snoutiest little mole they had ever come across.
Then Boswell spoke again. ‘Siabod?’ he asked.
The mole stared at them, his eyes flickering from one to the other, the faintest wrinkles of contempt forming in minute folds down the furless part of his snout.
‘Southerners, are you?’ he asked, speaking in ordinary mole so they could understand, but in such a way that the question was also an accusation and with a harsh, mocking accent to the words.
But before they had time to reply, he darted back into the grass from which he had emerged, and by the time Bracken had climbed up to it, was gone. Bracken called after him, shouted out that they intended no harm and asked him to come back, but the only reply lay in whatever words a mole cared to divine in the rushing and rippling of the cold, indifferent river.
‘He’s gone,’ said Bracken.
‘Let’s press on,’ said Boswell, ‘as you have said more than once. Anyway, he’ll be back.’
‘Yes, and with other moles. He was a Siabod, all right. He spoke with the same accent Mandrake had,’ said Bracken.
‘Well, I can’t see where else he can be from up here,’ said Boswell, running along a little behind, ‘and that must have been Siabod he was speaking and—’
‘He was so pathetic,’ said Bracken contemptuously. ‘He reminded me of nothing more than a wireworm in a tunnel when you expected to see a lobworm. Nasty little character he was. I mean, he might have helped us…’ The anger in Bracken’s words reflected his apprehension about what they might soon face.
They pressed on, a new life flowing through them now that they had made contact, if contact it was, with somemole, however contemptible he seemed to Bracken.
Indeed, they were so full of the encounter and the discussion of the possibilities of the first mole bringing others, and their decision just to push forward and see what happened, that they hardly noticed that the wood on their side of the river suddenly gave way to clear, rough pasture, while the valley widened out to their left into a gentler slope. As they moved forward, their snouts to the ground ahead and not looking up at the prospect that very slowly began to loom before them, they did not notice that beyond the now gentler valley side, off to their left, what looked like a mist was beginning to swirl in, swath after swath, among the upper branches of the highest trees. Not mist but low cloud, whose lower edge smoked like moist grass caught by fire, while beyond the gaps in these low clouds there was not more sky but a grim, great blackness, spattered here and there with specks of pure white, that rose soaring high and massive like a wall above the valley: a mountain.
Because the mist was so pervasive and changeable, it would have been impossible, even had Bracken and Boswell been aware of the scene looming so high beyond them, to make out the complete shape of the gloomy heights above the valley side.
But no sooner were they conscious that the valley had widened and that the quality of windsound had grown deeper and heavier than the mist began to fall in waves towards them into the valley. At first it was only a thin veil that softened and deadened the russet and grey slopes behind it, but as it crept, swirled and surged lower, its higher parts grew thicker and the valley sides above them were lost in an impenetrable murk like the opaque off-white that slinks across the eyes of the creature going blind with age.
Then, faster than a forest fire, more silent than snow in the night, more unexpected than an owl’s attack, the mist was down across the ground where they crouched, racing and running between them in cold and clammy fronds, robbing everything of colour before masking everything in grey.
It was like no mist either of them had ever seen on the chalk downland they knew, where a mist generally came with cold, still air and a mole waited patiently for it to go. This one was moving and racing and challenging, a living mist that disorientated a mole by putting its chill around his snout and forming mysterious shapes in its layered depths that seemed to move around him, or make him feel he was moving when he was, in fact, crouching still.
‘Boswell?’ called Bracken to his friend, who, though only a few moleyards away, was becoming obscured by the thickening white between them that not only cut off sight and smell but muffled and distorted sound as well.
‘Boswell, stay close to me or we’ll get separated.’
When the two moles came together, each noticed that the other’s fur was coated with the finest of condensation and that their talons were shiny and wet with it.
With no reference points of sight or smell around them but the now-muffled river, they instinctively tried burrowing, but the ground was so wet and full of flat, granular stones that jarred the shallowest talon thrust that they gave it up.
‘I don’t like this one bit,’ said Bracken, looking around at the mist in which the light intensity continually changed as the layers between them and the sky thickened or thinned with the run of the breeze. ‘I’ve never felt so exposed in my life. Let’s make for the river and we can find a temporary burrow in its bank.’
Bracken started off one way, then paused and, shaking his head, went another before stopping and moving in yet a third.
‘I think the river’s that way,’ said Boswell, pointing in a fourth direction.
‘No, I can distinctly hear it that way,’ said Bracken, pointing somewhere else and resolutely leading them towards where the sound of the river seemed, possibly, to come from. The mist moved about them, drifting one way, racing another, fading before them so that they caught a glimpse of a scatter of grey rock for a moment before it disappeared again, or a stand of grass appeared to their left or right.
Then they heard voices, harsh and quick, somewhere ahead; or was it behind? Siabod voices.
They stopped, snouting about themselves in confusion, and for the first time in their long journey together found they were totally lost. They could hear the river but not find it, and the only reference point they really had was each other.
‘Best thing to do,’ said Bracken in a voice that made it quite clear that it was what he was going to do whatever else happened, ‘is to crouch still and wait until it clears. And if those were moles we heard, I hope they find us, because they can lead us to somewhere safe.’
He looked in the direction of the sky above them, seeking out a lighter part of the mist and hoping it might clear. Then the voices came back, from somewhere else, and there was a sudden rush and squeal of a massive herring gull in and out of the mist above them.
Time was as obscured as place, and neither mole could have said whether it was ten minutes or two hours before the mist began to clear as suddenly as it had come. First they were able to see a greater distance along the ground as one patch moved off and was not so quickly replaced by another. Then the swirls above them parted for a moment to reveal, quite unexpectedly, a hint of a blue sky. The light brightened around them, and soon they were able to make out the direction of the sun itself, though it was too diffused to show its shape. The mist suddenly cleared to their right, bringing the sound of the river clearly to them once more, and there it lay, quite a way below them; without realising it, they had moved across the valley and a little way up its side in their wandering. They were about to start off towards the river when a voice sang out of the light mist that still lay ahead of them: ‘It’s lost you are, is it?’