The flowers that had carpeted the wood’s floor in spring died away as the trees above began to leaf, blocking the sun so that a heavier, duller undergrowth took their place. Rebecca, growing bolder as each summer day advanced, took to seeking out flowers and sunlight on the pasture edge, and in one or two more open places towards the Marsh End. She would have liked to explore deeper into the Marsh End itself, among the danker darkness of its trees, but there was a musty smell about the place, which she did not like on a summer’s day, created by the moss and fungi that grew about the one or two rotting trees and many fallen branches.
But these herbal forays were interspersed by long periods of simply sitting still in her own tunnels or at their entrances, learning about the wood nearest to her. Its summer noises were less frenetic than the spring’s, but fuller and richer. Very near one of her tunnel entrances were a couple of small oaks with patches of bramble and ground ivy nearby, and here, just before she herself arrived, a pair of nightingales settled to breed and raise their young. As the summer moved into July, she grew to love their ferreting busyness as they grubbed among the undergrowth for spiders and worms, an activity often followed by the rich jug-jug-chooc-chooc of song, ascending to a powerful crescendo pioo-pioo which she could hear in her deepest burrow. A night was blessed that began with their song.
Often ‘her’ nightingales joined the chorus that woke with her at dawn as a colourful medley from a blackbird or two joined the sounds of nuthatch, wren and tit, and the soft, distant cooing of wood pigeon over on the wood’s edge. The birds scurried about the dead leaves on the wood’s floor or flittered among living leaves above. And the smells of fresh growth! She loved that best of all as she and the woods grew into the season together.
In this summer period she grew used to sounds that had frightened her at first—the scurrying of a hedgehog, often blindly running right past her snout, or the sudden buzz in her face of a flying beetle or searching wasp.
One reason she tended to keep near her own tunnels was that if she was caught too far away by hunger or tiredness, she had to make a temporary burrow in a place whose noises were strange and threatening. It was a long time before she revisited the Eastside, for example, because when she stayed there overnight, she happened on a mating fight between a couple of badgers who sounded, in their thumping rushes and shrill, eerie screams, as if they were about to fall through the burrow roof on to her. They were, in fact, many moleyards away in the slopes of a bank where they had dug their own massive burrows, but how was she to know, never having heard them before? Worse than their terrible sounds was their rank smell, which wafted sickeningly into the tiny burrow and made her tremble and sweat with fear in the darkness.
But far, far worse were the chilling sounds of tawny owls hooting at night. They cast a terrible fear into her. She knew little of them beyond the fact that they were the mole’s most terrible enemy in Duncton in summer and were the taloned death that came with silent suddenness out of the darkness above. There were one or two moles in Duncton—and Rebecca had heard one of them tell his tale—who had been caught by owl but by some freak chance escaped, talon-torn but alive. Some of the older moles said that to touch such a mole brought you luck, but Rebecca had been too shy to seek that privilege.
Mandrake came to visit her two or three times in June and July. He always claimed to be just passing and pretended to have no interest in her doings. He sat about for a while, asked her a few monosyllabic questions, cast his glowering glance about her system, and was off as suddenly as he had come. She sensed that in his own gruff way he was keeping an eye on her, and that gave her pleasure as well.
One hot July evening, when every insect in the wood seemed busy, Mekkins passed her way and she heard for the first time of the deaths of Hulver and Bindle. On Mandrake’s orders the story had been kept dark for weeks past, but the idle summer months are a time for gossip and chatter and such a tale must eventually come out.
Mekkins, who felt the whole story to be a shadow on Duncton, would have preferred to keep silent about it with Rebecca. She was so young, so innocent, so full of the joy of the season, that telling her seemed as shameful as trampling on a wood anemone. But she was so overjoyed to see him, though he knew her only passingly, and fixed him with such an open gaze that he found it impossible to tell a lie when she suddenly asked, ‘Where can I find Hulver, the elder?’
He hesitated to answer, playing for time with ‘Why?’ She told him how Hulver had talked to her before the June elder meeting and told him the legend of Rebecca the Healer, and about a mole called Bracken who was somewhere up on the slopes. Hulver had told her about Bracken with such a curious passion that she had taken to heart his odd suggestion that she should make sure that Bracken was all right.
As Mekkins looked at her, free from the threat of Mandrake—with whom she had been the last time he saw her—he felt he had never seen such light radiance in a female before. He tried to say that he didn’t know about Hulver or Bracken, that perhaps they were up on the slopes, that he was old now and… but one by one the lies dried up before her simple gaze. Mekkins was clever, a survivor, one well used to telling half-truths to get his way. But, well, there are times when a mole wearies of the effort of not telling the truth, and he admired the stand Hulver had made too much to want to tell any lies about him. And he remembered the strong adult voice of that strange mole, Bracken, whom none of them had ever quite seen, who had cried out from the clearing those ritual words of the Midsummer blessing, words that had often come back to him: The grace of whole-souled loveliness… and now, before the radiant Rebecca he could tell nothing but the truth. As she gazed happily at him, with joy in her movements and life radiating from her, Mekkins felt a poverty in his own spirit about the murders by the Stone, and his snout lowered as his gaze fell to the wood’s floor.
Slowly, and with a low voice, he told her exactly what had happened on Midsummer Night—as far as he understood it. He ended finally with a description of the shock that had run through the elders when, en route back to Barrow Vale, they were stopped short by the voice of an unknown mole uttering the sevenfold blessing loud and clear through the wood after them. ‘The grace… the grace… ’ He could hear the words now.
‘What mole said them?’ asked Rebecca, who crouched by him, listening, still and sombre.
‘Bracken, Burrhead’s son, we think it must have been him.’ Rebecca’s heart seemed to stop when he said Bracken’s name, and every word Mekkins spoke seemed to be of great importance. Mekkins described the chase Bracken had led them on, speaking of the bravery of one so young as if it were a legend and not something that had happened only a short time before.
‘Who is he?’ whispered Rebecca, almost to herself. ‘Who is he?’
Mekkins repeated that he was Burrhead’s son, one of Aspen’s spring litter; but that was not what Rebecca meant. She explained that Hulver had said of Bracken that Rebecca the Healer had led them to one another. Now here he was again, the only mole in Duncton, so it seemed, who could lead Mandrake on a chase and get away with it.
‘Oh, but ’e didn’t!’ exclaimed Mekkins. ‘’E was killed. He ran clean over the chalk cliff edge trying to escape from Mandrake.’
The hot July sun was suddenly cold. Every insect in the wood froze to its spot. The evening breeze ceased. The air was loud with anger.
Rebecca had listened in silence to Mekkins’ miserable tale. She had heard him out in peace as he described the hunt for the most venerable mole in the system and his subsequent murder with Bindle. But now, with the news of Bracken’s death in her ears, she reared up in terrible anger and for the first time attacked, really attacked, another mole, and her talons descended on Mekkins. She tore at him as if he were evil itself. And as she did so, she began to weep, striking out blindly through her tears.