What lay straight ahead higher up the valley they could not sense, though its total distance, judging from the quality of windsound, and the occasional bird cry in it, and what they had seen already from Y Wrach’s tunnels, was perhaps six or seven molemiles—a five hour trek.
‘Let’s press on as fast as we can to the head of the valley so that when we get there we’ll have enough time and strength left to find a place for rest and food,’ said Bracken. ‘If this famous hound of theirs is here, so be it! There’s nothing we can do about that. At least there’s plenty of slate to hide away under out of reach of his legendary paws!’ Bracken’s lightheartedness was a poor cover for the unease he felt at the start of this grim journey.
They set off quickly, finding their way to a wide, slaty track that had the smell of roaring owls about it, with the stream on one side and the slate tip on the other. There were patches of sheep’s fescue and matgrass here and there, a welcome break from the snow and slate, but otherwise their way was bleak and steep. The higher they got, the more oppressive they found the towering tip on their right—and even more so because flurries of snow occasionally slid off the great flakes of grey and rusty-brown slate of which it was formed, while in several places along the track there had been rock slips from the tip and great pieces of slate, many twice as thick as a mole and many times longer, had spilled across the track, giving the whole area an atmosphere of oppressive instability.
After an hour’s steady climb in which they used outgrowths of grass for cover as much as possible, the slope levelled off and the track slued round to the left on to a bridge over the stream and then round the left side of a long lake that filled the valley floor ahead of them. Although its water was clear, it appeared cold and black because of the reflection in it of the towering slate cliffs that rose bleakly on its far edge. Impatient little wavelets lapped at the edge of the lake near the track on which they travelled: the whole effect was black and chill.
Here and there on the lake, though a mole could not see it, there were runs of icy white, where the reflections of the precipitous backdrop took in a steep side of snow-covered grass between the cliffs.
To their left the peat gave way to shallow, rocky slopes covered in drier grass and studded here and there by the only cheerful colour in the whole miserable scene, the bright yellow petals of squat tormentil. But behind this grass, too, the slope gradually steepened, rising eventually to more overhangs of rock, or sheer black-grey faces where only an occasional raven or crow moved, visible only when it rose high enough to break out across the dull white sky.
Bracken and Boswell now moved faster, for the track was exposed ground, only pausing to rest at a spot where a rivulet ran under the track in the peat to join the lake. They expected to find food there but were unlucky, and all they could do was to rest and snout out at the sky for predators.
Then on they went, right along the edge of the lake, until that too lay behind them and they were rising again, back among great steep jumbles of snow-covered slate tips that edged the now increasingly rough and rocky track.
They might by now have been lulled by the sheer uneventfulness of the journey into thinking that its dangers had been exaggerated had they not quite suddenly moved into a bank of the heavy odour of some creature they had never faced before, whose path must have crossed the slaty track a short time previously. Its scent had something of the wild deadness of the thick brown peat and something more of the savagery of a carnivore; worse, it held the vaguest hint of that stupefying smell that goes with roaring owl and which, if a mole is not careful, will dull his snout into senselessness.
They retreated off the track for a while, taking refuge by some loose slates amongst which matgrass was growing, and snouted out for a stronger indication of the scent, listening for movement or vibration.
‘What creature was it?’ asked Bracken.
Boswell shrugged and shook his head. He was frankly frightened. But as he watched Bracken stir and eventually snout out of the protection of the grass, he admired again, as he had admired so many times before, his friend’s obstinate courage. So often it had been the only thing that had led him, Boswell of Uffington, a scribemole who was meant to know so much, forward into new awareness and wisdom.
There was a kind of courage Boswell had seen in moles many times that was born of ignorance and stupidity. Give such a mole a task, tell him to get on with it, and off he goes. But Bracken? He was not stupid, he had so many things he understood and sought to live for, and yet on he went in the wake of this fearful odour.
‘Truly the Stone was wise to have bound me to Bracken,’ thought Boswell, following with something near a rueful grin.
They very soon found they had good cause to fear, for as the path took them nearer to the stark rock face at the end of Cwmoer, leaving the lake now some way behind and below them, they moved straight into the terrible smell again, this time finding as well the awesome tracks of the creature that had made it. Each impression was at least half the size of a mole and comprised the five padmarks like a dog’s, which at their forward edge had an additional deep gashline in the snow where a claw had left its mark. The space between each print was three or four times wider than they had seen in any other creature’s tracks and bigger by far than the tracks of even the biggest fox or badger, while the weight of the creature was such that, whereas their own tracks in the snow just broke the surface, these pressed right through to the black slate beneath. They looked like dog, but a monstrous dog, and one whose size would block out the very sky.
They now took a path that prudently meandered from side to side of the track to seek out a route ahead that went as near as possible to growths of matgrass or slate crevices in case quick refuge was needed.
The pawmarks they had seen crossed their track and rose impossibly in great, leaping bounds up the steep side of the slate tip and over its distant top. Here and there, though the two moles could not see it, the heaviness of the creature had been too much for the sometimes delicately balanced slates, and the tracks were marked by slidings of snow and slate that had avalanched down the face of the tip with its passing.
A hovering kestrel might have seen, in the wastes of Cwmoer below, how the tracks dropped down on the far side of the tip, bounded up another, wandered here and there after the smell of sheep, and then dropped back lower down the valley, padding across the snow-layered grass and rocks until they cut back on to the very same track up which Bracken and Boswell had laboured an hour or so before.
A kestrel might have left it at that, but a carrion crow, who knows how to seek out death and feed off it, might have seen that the tracks then ran clumsily back and forth across the fresh moletracks, the snow beside them stirred and messed by the sniffing and slobbering of some great maw, until finally and inexorably they began to follow back up the track after the scent the moles had left behind.
Meanwhile, Bracken and Boswell were beginning to get tired. They seemed to have climbed and climbed all day, with never a sniff of food before them. The walls of the valley had closed in and now forced the track, and them, round to the left, past a bluff that cut off any view of the lake below and then up a much steeper incline on the right-hand side of the now narrowing valley. Below them the head stream of the cwm rushed icily down in the direction they had come. They began to regret not following it up because, as Celyn had suggested, they might have found food somewhere along it. Now it was too late, for the route down the valley side to it would be too steep and slippery, and so they pushed on up the track, hoping that finally it would reach the head of the valley and rejoin the river again.