With one final clout, the bigger one turned back to where Bracken lay, to search for food in peace, the other watching from a distance, hoping, perhaps, to pick up a scrap or two.
All this Bracken took in very quickly, and as he did so he felt himself suddenly lifted on to his paws by a sense of anger and outrage. Had he run and run and run from fighting in Duncton only to find himself landing straight into more fighting even in this evil-smelling place?
It was as if his frustration with Rune and Mandrake, at Cairn’s death and the henchmoles, even back to Root and Wheatear—all moles who had faced him in one way or another with fighting from which he had run—had finally boiled over into rage. He snarled, his talons extended, and without any more ado he attacked the bigger mole viciously. There was no fear in what he was doing, and little thought. He simply crashed down his paws and talons, grunting and snarling with each lunge, encouraged to even greater violence by each successful contact with his surprised, and then frightened, adversary. For a moment, the mole fought back, but then, lowering his snout in a gesture of defeat, he turned tail and ran off down the channel, out of the range of Bracken’s sight.
Bracken watched him go, shaking with anger, and then turned to the smaller mole who crouched quite still looking at him. Quite what Bracken expected he did not know—but certainly not the response he got. For, instead of showing any thanks for his deliverance from the bigger mole or any acknowledgement of Bracken’s superiority, or even any fear, he had the nerve to ask ‘What mole are you, and where are you from?’—the traditional greeting of the superior mole to the inferior.
Bracken was so taken aback by this insolence that he very nearly started laying into this mole as well, but then the sight of one so weak and pathetic-looking being so bold struck him as frankly comic.
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ he said. ‘My name’s Bracken, from Duncton Wood.’
This appeared to have as startling an effect on the small mole as his own question had had on Bracken.
He darted forward, limping in a curious way as if he was injured, and exclaimed, ‘You mean the Duncton system?’ Bracken began to nod and then asked: ‘And what mole are you, for Stone’s sake?’
‘Boswell of Uffington,’ the mole replied.
Part Three
Bracken
Chapter Twenty-Five
Uffington! No single word could have heartened Bracken more at that moment. A mole from Uffington! It had always been Hulver’s greatest wish that he should live to see such a thing and now, here in this strange place, Bracken had been led to just such a mole by the Stone’s grace.
His excitement was, however, tinged by a sense of disappointment, for this Boswell did not in any way look as Bracken had imagined one of the legendary moles from Uffington would look. He was small and crippled, his weak paw making him walk in a darting, hobbling way that had his head swinging to the left—the side of his weak paw—then up away from the ground on his right and then down again. His coat was a very dark grey flecked with white and he looked half-starved.
He spoke in a quick staccato way as if he could not get his thoughts out fast enough to keep up with his words, and he had a habit of interrupting Bracken when he spoke with a, ‘Yes, yes,’ as if he knew what he was going to say before he said it. Which, often, he did.
Despite his overt weakness he seemed quite unafraid, although a semblance of fear—very like that he had shown before the other mole—would sometimes cross his face. Bracken soon realised that this was a guise, a kind of mask he wore to appear so pathetic that nomole would wish to persist in attacking. ‘Perhaps that’s why he’s managed to survive,’ thought Bracken, whose only knowledge of crippled moles was that they never survived their first summer because they could not get territory of their own.
Perhaps the most disconcerting quality he had lay in the way his eyes, small and bright as a bark beetle’s wing, fixed Bracken with a gaze so direct and penetrating that at first Bracken felt positively shifty looking at him.
‘So you’re from Duncton, are you?’ said Boswell, before Bracken could get a word in. ‘Just the mole I’ve been looking for.’
‘Well, it would be nice to know a bit more…’
‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Boswell, ‘all in good time. Right now there’s no time. If you want to rest you had better forget it. We’ve got to get out of here as fast as we can.’
‘We’ve got to—’ started Bracken, who had no intention of allying himself to anymole just like that, whether he came from Uffington or not.
‘That’s right. We. You can try it on your own but you won’t succeed.’
It did not take Boswell very long to persuade Bracken that they—and his ‘they’ included the other mole, who now lurked near them looking both angry and fearful at the same time—were in a desperate situation.
The place into which Bracken had fallen was a long, narrow drainage channel made of a smooth unnatural stone, which smelt wrong and had high impassable walls. On one side was the marsh, on the other side an embankment that rose massively upwards and sloped away out of sight. But though Bracken could not see its end, he could smell and hear what was there—creatures whose noise was loud and rumbling, so great, indeed, that the very ground shook with their passing and whose smell was so sick with death that it made a mole’s snout go numb.
‘Roaring owls,’ said Boswell obscurely.
‘Owls?’
‘Seen them myself. I came here down that embankment two nights ago. There’s a flat path at the top, wide as a mole’s system, and the roaring owls fly along just above it. You wait till night comes and you’ll see what I mean.’
By this time the third mole, whom Bracken had driven away, had slunk back within earshot. He seemed to want to join in the discussion and nodded his head when Boswell was describing the owls.
‘Their gaze is so fierce that you can see it at night even down here. It’s like fire,’ he said, creeping over to them.
‘Fire?’ queried Bracken, who had never heard the word.
‘Like hot sun,’ said the other, ‘only it kills everything it touches.’
As if this weren’t enough, they went on to explain that the channel they were in was plagued by carrion crows and the occasional kestrel, which dived and pecked at any creature, alive or dead, caught in it. They had taken a mole only hours before Bracken’s arrival, and constantly squabbled and pecked over a dead hare that lay further away down the channel.
‘There’s no cover here. You can’t burrow. And the stench of the roaring owls is enough to kill a mole,’ exclaimed Boswell.
‘And there’s no food—that’s why…’ The other mole didn’t finish; he didn’t want to remind Bracken of the circumstances of their first meeting.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Bracken, taking the initiative for the first time.
‘Mullion, from the Pasture system. It’s near Duncton Hill.’
‘I have heard of it,’ said Bracken irritably.
‘He hadn’t,’ said Mullion, pointing at Boswell.
They talked for a while—Bracken was too tired to do much else—and kept well in to the side of the channel, using some plant debris as cover. It seemed that Mullion had come over the marshes a week before, when it was frozen, in search of a mole who had left the pastures. A friend of his, he said. As for Boswell, he had made his way along the path used by the roaring owls, nearly been hypnotised by them, and then slipped and tumbled headlong down the embankment, trying to escape crows one night. Bracken wanted to know much more about him and where he had come from and why, but this was not the moment to ask. The lack of food showed on them both, and the fact that Mullion had survived a full week said much for his basic strength.