His route took him by Hulver’s old system and it was as he passed near it that he felt the faintest of vibrations and smelt the faintest of cheerful scents. He stopped and snouted about, glad to know there was life here again and then, finding an entrance, he went down into it, careful to make plenty of noise so as not to take any mole by surprise.
Any mole? Moles more like! The place was alive with the sound of pups, bleating and mewing and stirring, and the sound of a mother shushing them still.
Pups on the slopes! It was the first time he had ever heard of such a thing and if there was one thing in the world to raise his spirits a little at that moment, it was their sound.
There was a scurrying and muttering somewhere in the tunnels ahead where the litter was. Then a mole came running aggressively down the tunnel at him, stopping ready with her talons raised.
‘It’s all right,’ he said gently, ‘I’m not here for harm, just to pass the time of day like. I’m Mekkins the elder, from the Marsh End.’
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Rue.
‘I’ve been to the Stone.’
‘Oh!’ She sounded surprised and came closer and snouted at him.
‘Sounds like you got yourself a litter,’ said Mekkins cheerfully. ‘Can I look?’
She nodded. She knew of Mekkins. He was all right, played fair, they said.
‘Got a worm or two to spare?’ asked Mekkins, pressing his luck.
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ said Rue. ‘But as it happens I have.’
She turned round and ran on before him, back to her litter, and he followed very slowly, knowing how sensitive mothers can be.
Her burrow was a joy to look into. There she was, curled up with four pups suckling at her teats, bleating occasionally when they lost their grip, wrestling with each other for the best place, and milk spattering their pink snouts and pale young whiskers. Their eyes were blind and their paws as floppy as wet grass. Rue twittered and whiffled at them, guiding their mouths to her nipples and cooing love sounds at their feeble antics. One of the pups did a mewing cartwheel backwards and Rue laughed fondly, saying, ‘Come on, my sweet,’ pulling him back. It was only as she lifted him up to her nipples that Mekkins saw that there was a fifth pup there, smaller than the rest, lost among the melee of the paws and questing snouts. He was feeble and lacked the vigour of the others, seeming unable even to suck.
‘The runt,’ said Rue matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve tried to make him feed but he only manages when the rest take a break and that isn’t often. He’s growing weaker by the hour. There’s always a weak one in a litter of five. Of course, he’s a male—they’re always the ones.’
But Mekkins wasn’t listening. He was thinking, his mind was racing, and an idea was forming swifter than lightning. An idea so ridiculous that he might make it work.
He took a tentative step into the burrow, at which Rue immediately tensed. ‘There’s a female I know,’ he said at last, ‘who lost her litter. She’s ill from want of suck. That’s why I went to the Stone—to ask it to help her.’ He looked meaningfully at the little feeble pup being climbed all over by the other four. Its mews were too weak for him to hear them above their noise, but he could see its mouth desperately forming the sounds.
Rue looked at him. ‘What you’re saying is that he might survive with her, whereas he definitely won’t with me. You may be right and you may be wrong.’ Slowly Rue relaxed.
She went back to tending the more vigorous four and somehow shifted a bit so the fifth fell away and got lost by itself in the nesting material between Rue and Mekkins. Slowly, with great care, he eased himself towards the little thing. Rue studiously ignored them both.
Then Mekkins gently bent down to the tiny pup, took it up in his mouth by the scruff of the neck, and lifted it off the ground. It swung loose from his mouth, eyes blind and paws waving weakly. Mekkins hesitated for only a moment before turning to the entrance and going back into the tunnel and then, as fast as he could go, down to its entrance. Rue did not even look up after he had gone. ‘My sweet things,’ she whispered to the healthy four, ‘my loves.’
As Mekkins was about to exit on the surface, he heard sounds behind him and thinking that Rue had, after all, changed her mind, turned round to face her and found himself looking into the face of a young adult male, with grey fur and wary eyes. The pup hung in the air between them.
‘Take care of him,’ said the young male. His voice was strong but strangely haunting, and it made Mekkins stop quite still, for surely he had heard it before. Before high summer he had heard it… coming out of the dark on Midsummer Night, coming from the Stone clearing. The voice of Bracken. Feeling suddenly that he and the system were in the grip of forces whose power and destiny were beyond imagining, Mekkins sensed the pup in his mouth stir feebly and then he was gone, up into the light of early morning, racing down the slopes, running with the little pup swinging helplessly in front of him, as he made desperately, without pause, for the distant isolated place where Rebecca lay dying.
Never had the smell of decaying wood and rotting leaf mould—the smell of the most forsaken part of Duncton Wood—felt so good to Mekkins. It meant that he was back.
Down then into Curlew’s dark tunnels, along to her burrow, desperate eyes at its entrance looking to see if Rebecca… if Rebecca was… and a gasp from Curlew that had a thousand different feelings in it.
Mekkins placed the pup at Rebecca’s belly, nudging it to her hard and swollen nipples, pushing it forward almost clumsily in his desperation to see it take suck. And when it did not, whispering to Rebecca, whose eyes were closed and whose breathing was shallow, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca! I’ve brought you a pup!’
‘They’ve all gone,’ she moaned in a dead voice. ‘All gone.’
‘He’s here. Look at him. Look at him,’ whispered Mekkins gently, his eyes looking hopelessly to Curlew as the pup, too feeble to suck on its own, fell back to the shadows of her belly, its own tiny belly hurrying in and out, in and out, as if its life were being gasped away.
‘Just look at him, my dear,’ said Curlew, her snout caressing Rebecca’s face. ‘Just try.’
But Rebecca was not even interested, and try as they did, the pup could not seem to suck at her nipples, though it mewed softly and its mouth opened to try.
‘Rebecca,’ said Mekkins, again desperately, ‘please listen, my love. Try to help him. Try to give him your love. He needs you.’
But still she only stirred slightly and though she looked round at the pup for a moment, she seemed to have no interest.
Mekkins sought for something to say, just as he had searched for something to say at the Stone. His eyes were wild, his mind distraught, and he searched desperately about until, suddenly, the words of Bracken came to him again. ‘Take care of him,’ he had said and he saw an image of Bracken’s face, looking at him so deeply.
Mekkins turned back to Rebecca once more, put his snout to her ear, and said urgently: ‘You must try. You must try. The pup is Bracken’s young. He’s Bracken’s pup!’
What mole can say how soon a pup knows that its mother is gone? However it is, and will always be, the pup suddenly bleated out its sense of eternal loss. Not the quiet mewing that had been too soft to hear in Rue’s burrow, nor the feeble bleats he had made while trying to reach Rebecca’s teats. But the loud cry into the wilderness of loss, so that as Mekkins said ‘He’s Bracken’s pup’ Rebecca seemed to hear the pup’s cry as if it was her own.