Yet Boswell was a healer, too, and as he gained in strength, his own acceptance of her great love of life, which most moles found so hard to face, helped her through her final days before her litter came. Not many males, certainly very, very few scribemoles, have ever been so close to a female with litter as Boswell was in those strange healing days.
For Rebecca herself, the only hardship was Bracken’s uneasy companionship to them both: he made another burrow for himself nearby and unstintingly found them food and whatever herbs he could that might be of help. When the weather grew colder, as it did two days after her arrival, he reburrowed the tunnels to insulate Boswell’s burrow better.
But there was an air of distrust about Bracken’s contact with Rebecca which put an impassable barrier between them so that, although both ached for an expression of love, neither knew how it could be given. The fact that she was with litter made him angry and turned and twisted in his mind and put a barrier of suspicion and jealousy before his eyes.
The time came when Rebecca made a burrow of her own and began gathering what nesting material she could from the sparse vegetation that grew by the stream where they lived. She did not want to litter there, for there was something grim and desolate about Siabod, but she did not trust herself to move back down through Cwmoer, even with Bracken’s help, and anyway, Boswell was still weak.
The weather turned colder and a bitter wind blew and began to put a layer of verglas on the rocks near their tunnels so that they became slippery and unsafe for even the steadiest talon. The matgrass snapped and crackled in the cold, darkness fell swiftly, the sun seemed lost for ever, and the snow that had fallen the night before they had first come up Cwmoer, having half melted with the rain, had now permanently frozen on the rocks where it had stayed or lay dry and shiny among the tussocks of grass. Late spring in Siabod seemed to bring harsher weather than the cruellest winter in Duncton.
Now that Rebecca was living and spending more time in her own burrow, Bracken talked to Boswell more and found he was beginning to recover fast. As ever, Boswell was aware of, and upset by, his friend’s distrust of Rebecca. Could they never see that the love they had was as strong as the sunshine? Why was Bracken such a fool, and Rebecca, who knew so much, unable to make Bracken see their love?
‘Look after her, Bracken, because she needs your help, you know. I sometimes think you don’t know how much she loves you…’
Bracken shrugged. ‘She’s more concerned with the litter of hers than anything else,’ he said, betraying his real feelings. ‘But, of course, I’ll do what I can. But a nesting female doesn’t want males hanging about, everymole knows that. They like to get on with it themselves.’
It was night, and the wind stirred, fretting at the tunnel entrances, seeming to find a way into even the warmest spots. Outside the stream rushed and dashed against the rocks, grass chattered against the entrances, a night when only the most peaceful moles can fall easily to sleep.
Boswell was worried and concerned, but he didn’t know what about. Bracken
crouched, talking to him in stops and starts, eyes flickering about the burrow, sentences cut off by the howl of the wind outside.
Rebecca, separated from them by two tunnels and the short surface run between, stirred restlessly. Her tail switched back and forth. She couldn’t get her body comfortable now that it was so full and her litter was nosing and nuzzling and turning inside her, limbs pushing under her smooth belly fur. She didn’t like this Siabod. She didn’t want her young born here among dark, peaty soil and slate fragments that cut a careless mole. She shuddered to think now of the dark falls of rock in Cwmoer beneath them and the Siabod heights, somewhere over the moor beyond, from where the peat-coloured river rushed down.
She wanted Bracken there, nearer than he was. She wanted to hear him stir outside, and not the wind. She wanted to call his name and know that he was there to say the silly things that mean so much; the silly things no male but Cairn had ever said to her when she was very young.
‘Bracken, Bracken, Bracken,’ she whispered, looking at her swollen sides and trying to invoke not a mole so much as a peace and silence she had known when they had touched together by the glimmering Stillstone. She started to cry and then stopped, and then started again. She wanted him to come to her without being called. She wanted her litter to come in the warmth of his trust. She was so restless, so confused, and the burrow wasn’t right any more, not here with those black slates outside in whose shadow Mandrake had been born.
She stirred yet again, rising clumsily to her paws and going first to the tunnel and then to the entrance and then snouting outside against the bitter wind that came down the moor. She looked over through the darkness towards where the entrances to Bracken’s and Boswell’s burrows lay and wished that Bracken was there on the surface to greet her.
She wished he would come over to her and whisper to her and hustle her back into the warmth of her burrow and say it was all right, it didn’t matter where her litter was born. But she was restless and turned away upslope from the stream, thinking that perhaps there might be a better place for her litter nearby, where the soil was less cold and a burrow could be free of these slates. She moved restlessly along, almost talking aloud to herself, telling her young that it wouldn’t be long now and that she loved them and they shouldn’t be afraid; though she was—yes, she was—so afraid.
‘Bracken, follow me, follow me,’ she entreated as she moved higher and higher in the darkness up the slopes to find somewhere better. The wind grew steadily colder, but Rebecca didn’t notice; indeed, she was almost hot with sudden energy as she moved on steadily away from the safety of her burrow out on to the moor that rose round and above the quarried cliffs of Cwmoer.
Then, unnoticed, the first whipping sleets of snow came rushing with the wind. She laughed into the wind. She felt hot and alive in it and as the sleety snow whipped along more strongly through the darkness, she did not care.
‘I’ll find a place for them soon,’ she said to herself, the grass changing to grassy rock, the flat turning to a slope that grew steeper and steeper as she contoured it, the cwm off to her right. ‘There is a better place… but I haven’t quite found it,’ she kept telling herself. The stream suddenly stopped her forward movement and she climbed up along it until the ground grew flatter where it had fanned out into braids of streamlets running among soft, boggy grass and moss, and she crossed it.
So Rebecca wandered, higher and higher up the slopes of Siabod to where the soils were thin as old fur and the return down the rocks that she was able to climb so easily became more and more difficult.
Perhaps she rested. Perhaps she drank at the chill water of the innumerable streamlets that coursed down the slopes and which she crossed without difficulty; always she must have been looking for soil and a place for a burrow that reminded her more of the peace and warmth of Duncton Wood. Until sometime in the night, as dawn approached, the energy that preceded the start of the birth of her litter must have begun to fail and Rebecca must have started to feel tired and desperate.
Sometime in the night, not too long before dawn, the real blizzard came. Sudden, cold and harsh—a driving and swirling of biting snow that stung a mole’s snout and roared so loud that thinking became hard. The snow barely settled, preferring to race like moving ice across the surface; but then it began to form eddies and drifts to the lee side of the bigger rocks and to spread out from these in scatters of white. Nowhere safe for Rebecca to stop, so on she went, still certain that she could find a place where she could burrow down into stillness for the sake of herself and her litter.