‘How do you know that he’s all right?’ asked Bracken when Medlar had led him back to the Holy Burrows.
‘He takes his food,’ said Medlar simply. ‘He has been there ever since he came back in August. He asked that he might be allowed to go there, for he felt that though he had failed in his quest for the seventh Stillstone and the Book, he might find something there that would bring him closer to the Stone.’
‘But why?’ cried out Bracken bitterly. ‘That isn’t where life is! Not there in that dead, lost place.’
‘No,’ said Medlar, ‘but for some moles it may be the place where life is found. Always remember that the trial Boswell is now facing alone is the equal of any you have faced. You can fight another mole or a blizzard and know that you have won; but you should know, Bracken, how hard it is to face yourself in silence and seek out the truth that is inside your heart and soul. So pray for him, and try to bear your loss with compassion for him.’
Later Medlar said, ‘He told me that he knew where the seventh Stillstone was, and what the subject of the seventh Book is. Do you?’
So Bracken told him what he and Rebecca had seen beneath the Duncton Stone, and how he and Boswell had talked about the seventh Book.
‘It was a long time ago, and though we told him where it is, I don’t think he knew what the Book’s subject was. I don’t think so… but perhaps something has told him since. Will he ever come out of the Silent Burrows, as you did, Medlar?’
‘Only the Stone knows that. Nomole—not even I!—can ask him. Many moles never come out, and their burrows are finally sealed. We believe that such moles have found the silence of the Stone. Others know, as I knew, when to come out, for their task may be different. As for Boswell, nomole can know. But trust the Stone if you can, Bracken, as I have learned to do.’
Bracken was silent for a long time, and the two moles crouched together, the sacred peace of one bringing peace for a while to the restless heart of the other.
‘What shall I do, Medlar? What is there left to do?’ asked Bracken eventually.
Medlar smiled and touched Bracken’s paw. ‘If I thought you might become a scribemole I would say so. But I do not believe that this is your way. Go back to Duncton, Bracken, and make your home there again.’
‘But Rebecca is gone, and so much of the wood burned down… what is Duncton for me now?’
‘I cannot tell you,’ said Medlar, ‘but I know it is a question that does have an answer. Go back to Duncton and give the moles there your love and wisdom, as you say Rebecca once did.’
To Bracken it seemed bleak advice, but what else was there to do? He was grateful to Medlar for having the wisdom to show him the burrows in which Boswell was now sealed, though their silence seemed to him a terrible thing and a cold kind of holiness. ‘Oh, Boswell,’ he murmured as finally, not even waiting to regain his full strength, he left Uffington and turned east into the restless November wind, towards Duncton.
Rebecca’s return to Duncton Wood had been as much a miracle to the Duncton moles as her departure had been a mystery. She had come back off the pastures one autumn day as easy as you please, in the company of a wiry kind of a mole called Bran who spoke with a harsh accent and whose laugh, when it came, was as cunning as a wind in gorse.
He stayed a while, seemed unimpressed by what he saw, wouldn’t say a word about Rebecca’s journey or what she had been up to, and then, when November came, finally left.
Her return established once and for all time Comfrey’s status as a mole whose eccentric isolation and abstracted habits seemed to have given him special gifts of wisdom and foresight. He had always said Rebecca would come back. Now he found the reverence they held him in embarrassing because there wasn’t anything special in what he did or said: he just listened to the Stone. And anyway, Rebecca was never going to leave Duncton for ever, just like that: so there seemed no call for any fuss and bother.
He accepted Rebecca back rather as a pup takes it as a complete matter of course that his mother will return, even if she’s been gone a rather long time. And for most of the moles her return was just a nine days’ wonder. She was their healer, wasn’t she? A mole could always turn to her. In fact, come to think of it, it was just a little bit cheeky of her ever to have pushed off like that for so long…
Longest Night passed, the second since the one with Bracken, and chill January ran into freezing February. The cycle of seasons again.
Bit by bit she told Comfrey what had happened, and on those days when he knew that she was mourning Bracken, who must have been lost up on the slopes of Siabod looking for her, he made sure he was close by and quiet, just so she knew that she was loved.
But always, at the back of his mind, was the fear that the day would come when she would slide down into that black despair he had seen once before, and he wondered if he would have the strength again to see her through.
‘If it’s going to come, then let it come,’ he used to mutter to the Stone as he passed it by on leaving her burrows. And there came a day, at the start of February, when it did.
There is a way to kill a mole that is so unimaginably cruel that even an owl might quail before the thought of it. Moles who live in systems plagued by it call it, quite simply, the Talon. But most, living in woods and distant fields as they do, have no name for it, and when, by terrible chance, they happen on it, or it on them, then their imagination can barely take in its harsh reality.
It is called a harpoon trap. It has long, sharp prongs set on a spring which are poised above a tunnel in which a pawplate is set. The tunnel is blocked. The mole reopens it, touches the plate and down plunges the unseen Talon, which pierces and squashes at one and the same cruel time. A lucky mole dies at once. But through the paw, or shoulder, or flank, many unlucky ones are impaled, often too shocked even to struggle, and death comes on them with agonising slowness.
By February, Bracken had reached a system on the chalk no more than twenty moledays from Duncton. Drawn as ever by the ancient sarsen stones that follow the chalk, he came one day to a field that seemed almost too good to be true. Open and flat, used as pasture for sheep in the summer and rich with worms as a result, and empty of moles. Off to one side of it stood a great circle of stones, which gave him comfort for he liked their presence, and since he liked to travel in stages—resting at a good place when he could find one—he decided to make the field his own.
It already had a few old tunnels in it but no sign of mole at all. Perhaps he should have been suspicious; perhaps he was tired, and as he came nearer and nearer to Duncton, his mind was excited at approaching so near his home system after so long away and wondering what he might find.
The field was good and he enjoyed prospecting it and then finally starting his tunnels over near the Stones, where another mole had left off. One day, two days, four days passed, and a heavy hoarfrost came. The ground grew white and hard, and as the worms tunnelled down deeper he followed suit, throwing up on the surface great heaps of reddish soil conspicuous against the frost.
He ate well and slept long, putting off renewing his journey as long as he could. Then a day came when he found a tunnel burrowed out the evening before, which was blocked and smelt strange. Badgers? Rabbits? Weasels? He shrugged and sighed and started to build it up again, ignoring the strange smell, for he had scented more dangerous things than that.