As for Boswell, he refused Bracken’s offer to help him build tunnels and worked slowly on his own to create his own system—starting it from inside an abandoned rabbit tunnel. Bracken was surprised at how big Boswell insisted on burrowing his tunnels and it was several days before he realised that the feeling of familiarity they gave him, as if he had been there before, came from the fact that they were not unlike some of the tunnels in the Ancient System.
But it did not need this to prompt him to satisfy his curiosity about Uffington. Indeed, he could hardly wait for Boswell to recover from their ordeal before asking him a dozen questions. His curiosity was matched by Boswell’s about Duncton. But asking questions is one thing, giving answers quite another. The fact was that Bracken was not very eager to talk about it in detail. So he merely outlined the system’s geography, described its personality, explained where he had come from, but affected vagueness about the Ancient System and never even mentioned Rebecca.
These glimpses scarcely satisfied Boswell, whose eagerness after so many moleyears to talk to the one mole he had met who knew anything about Duncton was only tempered by Bracken’s almost painful inability to talk in detail about it. He guessed its causes and, with a compassion and wisdom that Bracken did not sense, eventually stopped seeking the information he felt he needed to pursue his quest for Duncton.
In fact, his self-denial in not pressing Bracken surprised Boswell, for if there was one vice of which he was aware in himself it was impatience. Again and again he had caused annoyance and trouble with other moles he had met since leaving Uffington with his habit of saying too directly what he thought, and his habit of jumping five paces ahead of anymole talking to him.
His fault lay in his own quick intelligence, which made it almost painful for him to have to sit and listen to somemole prattling on towards a point that was perfectly obvious the moment he had opened his mouth.
With Bracken he found he did not feel this frustration—not that Bracken’s thinking was so swift and clear that he never wandered in talk; he did, but there was a quality in Bracken that aroused in Boswell feelings he had not known before and swamped any impatience he might have felt. It was as if Bracken had unknowingly opened a tunnel for Boswell into a world of suffering and joy he had never entered before.
The books he had read, the writing he had learned to scribe and interpret, the two works he himself had worked on all seemed quite irrelevant beside the unfamiliar breathless feeling of being on the brink of something when talking with Bracken.
He saw, too, that Bracken himself was not aware that he had this effect—perhaps not even aware of the sufferings and joys whose power was revealed so well in the way he sometimes talked and by the way his eyes would seem to seek out, even in the burrow where they crouched, the moles he mentioned or the places he described so reluctantly, all of which he had so recently left behind.
He mentioned a mole called Hulver, for example, with a tremble in his voice, as if he had not got used to the fact that Hulver had died long before, violently it seemed. Yet when Boswell asked a little more about him, Bracken avoided the subject, saying, ‘He was only an old mole I knew who talked too much!’ But the look in his eyes betrayed how much more Hulver meant to him than that.
Then there was a mole called Rebecca, of whom, when he finally mentioned her, Bracken said, ‘She was a mole I met in a rainstorm by the Stone on top of the hill. She was as lost up there as I was, in a different way, and she touched me.’ Bracken’s voice had lowered when he said this, as his snout had, and for a moment Boswell felt as if he was walking with Bracken through the silence of a forgotten wood that even a single breath would blow away. Which, indeed, it did. For Bracken changed when pressed about Rebecca and laughed about her, pretending she was just ‘one of the Duncton females, and a very pretty one, too’.
It was the same with the Ancient System, which was what Boswell wanted most to know about. Bracken said hardly anything about it, but when it did get mentioned, his whole body seemed to alternate between fear and peace and Boswell felt he was watching a changeable spring day pass by.
It was seeing these things in Bracken that made Boswell, who was so quick with words and so used to the learned cut and thrust of Uffington, understand that the message in something a mole says may lie not in the words spoken, or the sense imparted, but the impulse of feeling behind them, which they themselves may change or distort. The more he spoke with Bracken, the more he had the feeling that the Stone itself had brought them together and that this strange mole was one he would follow wherever he went. It seemed to Boswell that Bracken held in his heart a secret of which he was not aware but whose revelation was a joy and pain to which, in some way, both of them must surrender themselves.
So it was that Boswell’s initial impatience with Bracken’s unwillingness to talk about Duncton in detail gave way to an affectionate silence from whose simplicity Boswell really began to hear the words the other spoke and, through him, the words all moles speak.
There was another way in which his dialogue with Bracken was a new experience for him as well. The fact was that since the preceding September, when he had left Uffington to come to Duncton, a period of several moleyears, he had become increasingly unwilling to talk about the sacred Holy Burrows to anymole. Yet when Bracken started asking him questions so enthusiastically, he found only pleasure in giving him the answers. His reluctance simply vanished.
‘What are they like?’ asked Bracken. ‘And do scribemoles still live there?’
‘They are on the top of a chalk hill many thousands of feet high, which is steep to its north side and gentle to the south. The tunnels are very big and spacious, unlike any tunnels I have seen since elsewhere. It is the most peaceful place I know.’
‘But what are the Holy Burrows?’
‘A group of burrows in the centre of the Uffington system where only moles who have taken certain vows of obedience may live. Fighting is not allowed. Many of the moles there decided to stop talking and live in a silence of contemplation. Those that talk try only to say those things that are essential and truthful.’
‘Are they all White Moles?’ asked Bracken, fascinated by everything Boswell was saying.
‘No, none of them is. There are no White Moles—well, there were once, starting with the first of them all, Linden, the last son of Ballagan, and Vervain…’
‘Yes. They tell that story in our system, though I’ve only heard it vaguely because it’s one normally only for Longest Night and I was… well… nowhere where stories like that were told on Longest Night.’
So, piece by piece, Boswell told Bracken about Uffington and its lore, learning something about it himself too as he talked, for he had never really thought about it objectively before. He realised that he missed the Holy Burrows, the libraries and some of the moles there, like Skeat, whom he had grown up to know so well; yet he saw, too, how ignorant he had been of the world outside and how many of the scribemoles he had known, for all their learning and wit, worshipped the Stone through ignorance rather than wisdom. Perhaps Uffington was as much in decline as so many of the systems he had passed through seemed to be.
‘Why did you leave?’ Bracken had asked. And Boswell had told him, describing as best he could the urge he had felt to leave, though not mentioning that it was to Duncton that he had felt directed to come.
He even recited the text he had found hidden in the depths of the libraries, the indirect cause of his breaking his vows and departing for Duncton.