With a thumping overhead and shouts, the henchmoles did come, not long after, and Curlew tried her old trick on them. ‘There’s disease here, contagious disease,’ she hissed up the tunnel at them.
It worked for a while, until a cold authoritative voice came out of the bitter night to the henchmole who was hesitating.
‘Get down there now or I’ll kill you with my own talons,’ it said. Down in the central burrow, Bracken recognised with a shudder the voice of Rune. So he was here! And then there was a thump and a gasp, and old Curlew was outnumbered and outfought as the henchmoles rushed past her and down to where Bracken crouched.
He raced away along the tunnel she had shown him and out into the night, and chased desperately this way and that across the frozen ground, making as much noise as possible and heading for the north and east towards the marsh. Henchmoles were thick on the ground, and more than once he came face to face with one before twisting away into the dark, saved only by their own confusion at each other’s noise. Sometimes he hid in silence and let them chase around him; then, when they seemed to be drifting back to the west, towards where Rebecca, Violet and Comfrey might be with Mekkins, he would make a noise again and they would swing back towards him.
If the night was cold, the dawn was colder. It rose bleakly on a wood full of hate and fear. There was a hoarfrost on the trees and ground which gave the wood a deceptive white calm but meant that the slightest movement brought a crackling of frozen leaves and vegetation.
Bracken was now very tired and responded with a start of alarm at every movement around him. He wanted to run back, or forwards, or wherever they were and say ‘Here I am. Here! It’s over. You’ve got what you want!’
Then a henchmole moved somewhere and he was off again, paw in front of paw, twisting and turning and trying to think ahead of himself, trying not to drown in his own breathlessness and succumb at last to the tiredness he felt. Noises all around, and white-coated twigs and leaves that would have seemed delicate and beautiful had a mole had time to look.
On through the lightening mauve of dawn, nearer and nearer to the wood’s edge, nearer and nearer now to the marsh. He could sense the dreadful space stretching out somewhere beyond the trees and tried to cut away from it back into the bigger trees. But henchmoles were there, more of them running, distant shouts, nearby sneakings of talons on the frosty ground. He was forced nearer and nearer to the marsh.
Sound to the right and left, the fearful light and space ahead, no other way to go for a desperate mole, paw after paw unsteadily in front of another, shoulders aching with effort.
Then he was out of the wood and tumbling down a short bank under an old wire fence to a wall of alien marsh grass and the smell of the unknown. Off to the right two henchmoles came out of the wood as well, down the bank, looked right and then left and saw him; and they were coming, coming, their paws and
talons pounding, bigger and nearer with each moment. He looked back along the marsh grass to his left towards the west and there were other henchmoles, several, sneaking steadily along towards him. Desperate, he turned around to look back up the bank he had fallen down. It was so steep, and he was so tired, each gasp a pain for life. Perhaps he could make it back into the wood, perhaps his near-dead, aching paws would take him back. Perhaps.
Then Rune was there. Rune out on the bank looking down at him. A nightmare come true. Rune triumphant. Rune about to say something. Rune’s mouth open and his talons ready, as left and right the henchmoles came.
Bracken turned away from them all and faced the still, frosted wall of tall, haggard grass, diving into it and through, a final chase to his own destruction. Through the grass, leaving the shouts, into an alien world where the birds have eerie calls and slow flapping wings and long, sharp beaks enough to kill a mole. Running once more, but with the voices fading at last behind him.
‘He’s gone into the marsh, the silly bugger!’
‘Who was ’e then? Never seen him before.’
‘’E’ll be drownded or eaten ’fore the hour’s done.’
‘Who was he, Rune?’
‘Somemole we’ll wait for, that’s who. So patrol this edge until I’m satisfied he’s gone for good,’ said Rune.
Silence came and the wood was gone for ever behind Bracken as he wearily wended his way over the tussocks and ice of the frozen marsh. No food, no shelter, little hope. Lost in a frozen waste. No good going back.
On he went into a fearful day, with whispers of wind in the reeds above his head, the frozen debris of an alien world at his paws. And hunger bearing down on him. A long day of fear, a night of rustling ahead. Another dawn came, a day of gnawing at dry grass stems and snouting out the dangers that seemed to wait at every turn. Another afternoon. A sudden spell of bright, cold sun that made him feel as vulnerable as a flea on an open paw. Night and cold. Day and fear. A starting up of blustering winds as hunger weakened him step by step. The carcass of a dead and frozen bird, torn by other scavengers more used to the marsh than he. A tearing of teeth at it, something to eat, a frozen survival, and then black crows wheeling from the sky and down at him, and he was off again, shaken by the cawings and wheelings of blacksheen wings.
Then the worst horror, the ultimate fear of everymole in nightmare straits: oozing mud. The wind brought a thaw and that brought a softening to the grasses, and a heaving to the ground. Where it had been solid to his tired paws, it now squelched wet. Where it had supported his weight, it now let him sink. His belly was covered in the slime of mud as finally, and desperately, he dragged himself on. Everything gone, why cling to life? But what makes a mole fight death? What force drags one tired paw before the other?
His progress—to where? he wondered—grew slower. If he stopped, he sank. If he went on, he grew more and more in need of sleep. A great crow dived from the white sky again, wheeling and calling about him. On and on, with talons ready, Bracken tried his best.
His best was just good enough, for as the marsh thawed out behind him, the frost quite gone, and pockets of water appeared again where ice had been, Bracken neared a wall that skirted its northern edge. The grass adjacent to it was a little drier and he was on it, and up to the wall, and suddenly alive for a moment more as the crows wheeled about and he looked for cover. The smell of a hole, damp and cool, and he was chasing to it… along the wall to a great round drainage pipe set into it, and into its dank shelter. Behind, against the white sky, there was the flutter of a black wing, the hang of a dark grey claw, the tap of a death beak. He turned away in fear into the strange round tunnel and started down it, only trying to stop himself when it was too late. For it sloped down steeply, its bottom was slimy with mud and as the sides were too wide for him to reach to grip, he could not stop himself sliding faster and faster down it, a tired anger mounting in him at falling to his death like this.
Then, slipping helplessly towards a bright light where the tunnel ended in a void, he fell tumbling in a shower of mud and water into a stone drainage way, beyond the marsh and the wall.
He opened his eyes into a waking nightmare. For fighting and clawing at each other in the mud and slime that had fallen with him on to the hard ground of the drainage channel were two moles, both intent, it seemed, on finding any worms or other food that had come from the pipe in his fall. There was something wild and desperate about each of them—their fur was unkempt and their flanks thin from starvation—and one of them was rapidly losing the fight. Indeed, so unequal was the struggle that the smaller of the two was simply retreating from the other by the time Bracken first fully realised what was happening.