Rune’s ploy might well have worked but for the chance that the mole he happened to be fighting had fought so many times with Stonecrop, whose prowess as a fighter was almost a legend in the pastures. The trick Rune was trying was an old one and Cairn’s rapid pursuit, powered forward by his back paws so that his front paws could be protectively outstretched, was the answer Stonecrop had devised to it.
Neither mole won this round of fight. Cairn was caught by Rune’s downward thrust as he came charging out, though only on the arm and shoulder, while Rune suffered a wound to his face. Then, on the surface, unrestricted by tunnel or burrow, the two moles rolled into thrusting clinch after cutting lunge, back paws scratching and kicking, front talons trying to plunge a fatal wound.
About them the sky became overshadowed by the threat of a storm, and instead of the light being bright it was, for a morning, almost gloomily dark. While far beyond the trees in whose stormy shade they now fought, the first great drops of rain of a storm started to fall, sporadic at first, but then growing more heavy and persistent.
It was the same rain into which, far off to the east on the slopes, Bracken was at that very moment setting off from Rue’s new burrows for the Stone, which loomed, like the storm itself, over all the moles in Duncton Wood.
As the rain started to fall heavily on them both, Rune sensed that Cairn was the stronger and not much less the cunning, either. Rune might be lucky to find a fatal thrust. His speed might win the day. But he would have to be lucky, and the luck might not run his way, and anyway—why take a risk in killing a mole when there was a much surer way of doing it? There was another mole in Duncton much stronger than either of them who would relish the chance to kill Rebecca’s mate—the more so if he came from the pastures.
So Rune’s dark mind raced as he parried and thrust Cairn’s blows, while the rain fell ever more thickly through the open trees of the wood’s edge on to their fur, mingling with their wounds and blood and obscuring their sight and sense of each other.
Then Cairn charged on Rune once more, stronger and more confident now that he was out in the open, and caught him terribly on the haunch. In that moment, Rune decided that, for the time being, he had had enough. He would retreat into the wood, gradually enough to lure Cairn on with him, and take him slowly and surely towards the haunts of the Westside where this Pasture mole might be killed; and if not there, then lure him even to Mandrake, whose talons would take pleasure in doing the deed and who would surely give Rune credit for bringing this mole to him.
Rune ran back, turned and snarled, and then ran back further into the wood, making Cairn follow as he pursued the bloodlust that told him to kill this dark and vicious Duncton mole, and made him forget Rebecca in the tunnel behind him.
As they retreated into the rain and dark of the wood, she emerged from the tunnel entrance and listened to their noise slowly die away. She wanted to chase after them and join Cairn in his assault on Rune. But in a mating fight, which surely this was, it wasn’t for a female to do more than wait. But everything in Rebecca told her to chase after them, to help her Cairn; yet she stayed, hesitating by the entrance in the rain, confused by the sudden attack but hoping that at any moment Cairn would come back with the blood of Rune on his talons.
But as the stormclouds burgeoned and grew heavier over the pastures and wood, darkening everything with their steady rain, Cairn followed the retreating Rune deeper and deeper into the wood, leaving Rebecca crouched and desolate and quite alone.
Each minute that passed left Rebecca more miserable and lost. The sound of the rain seemed to confuse her and drain her of strength, and she had no idea what had happened, where her mate might be or whether or not he might be injured. Once she advanced out into the rain, towards the way they had gone, and called out, ‘Cairn, Cairn…’ but she could only hear rain and see wet foliage and undergrowth. Then she crept back into the burrow to wait a while longer.
At last she grew fearful for Cairn and this made her fearful for herself. For if he had been defeated, then Rune might come back and find her there. But surely her Cairn could not have been defeated? But perhaps he had been, and she should have tried…
So, for the first time in her life, questions and worries of life and death began to darken Rebecca’s mind. The truth was that so much had happened to her so happily in the previous twenty-four molehours that the sudden appearance out of a dark sky of Rune had shocked her into being confused and upset. To have had taken from her so violently the very thing she had been seeking for so many molemonths left her frightened and insecure and doubting the very impulse for life and joy that had brought her so trustingly over to the pastures in the first place. Now the deafening rain seemed the mirror of her torrent of fears.
Until at last, panicked by the threat of Rune’s possible return, she took to the surface again, though uncertain where to go. She turned at first towards the Westside but stopped for fear that Rune, if he was coming back, would come that way. She hesitated before the pastures, for without Cairn and Stonecrop to accompany her there, they seemed dangerous; the more so because a great herd of cattle, which had silently drifted up the pastures through the day, now stood silent and massive beyond the fence, their hooves dirty from the mud that was forming there.
Miserably she turned yet again, this time towards the slopes to the south—but what could she find there but more desolation and emptiness? Everywhere seemed hopeless now that her mate was gone.
Such a time may come suddenly to anymole, in any place, at any time. When suddenly the sun’s light is gone and all falls gloomy and dark and each drop of rain that thunders to the ground is a reminder that a mole is for ever alone, seeming for ever lost. But though the sun is gone, there is an unseen light that may seem far off and dim, and whose rays may touch the heart and not the mind. Yet such a light, vague and hard to make out though it is, may draw a mole forward far, far more powerfully than any sun.
And such a light drew her now, up along the wood’s edge on the western side of the slopes, higher and higher up the hill, where the oaks thinned away to tall beeches, which even in the rain gave the wood a lighter, loftier look. Each massive beech she passed seemed to will her on as it stood, solid and powerful, the green lichen covering its base almost luminescent in the shady light of a darkening afternoon that had taken over from a gloomy morning. She hardly knew where she was going, or that she was going, and when she wandered in her desolation from the path that led her higher and higher, the massive trees seemed to sway her back towards the light that perhaps they could see far more clearly than she could that day. Higher and higher, until the wood’s floor levelled off and she swung in from the pastures towards a great clearing that drummed with the sound of rain. At its centre stood a Stone, enwrapped by the roots of a tree. The Stone itself. And on the west side of the clearing, crouched so still that he might almost have been a part of the wood, was a mole, shiny with rain, smaller than Cairn, who faced away from her as he looked out through the trees to the west.
Bracken had been there for several molehours, from the time the rain had begun to fall, thick and wet. His few days with Rue in Hulver’s old tunnels, which might have left him feeling less lonely after his initial exploration of the Ancient System, had had the opposite effect. He had left her as the rain started, and trekked miserably up the hill towards the Stone, for no reason that he understood. Back to the Stone.