Duncton Found (119 page)

Grike guardmoles followed her, closer than she ever knew, and forced her sometimes to stop and hide in shadow, stancing over the pup. To keep it warm for one thing. And to be ready to fight with all the strength she had, to the death if need be, to protect it.

Through the night she travelled until, growing tired and fearful for the pup’s safety – for the air was cold, the pup too limp for comfort – she sought safe shelter. She knew it must be somewhere secure and quiet, for the pup would not survive such travel for too long. She must feed it, warm it.

But that first night she found nowhere, and was forced to delve a temporary burrow and use heather for nesting material and dig out a worm or two. These she ate into a pulp, and mushed with spit, and fed as best she could into the pup’s mouth. It seemed that it swallowed nothing, but only mewed and grew weak.

Yet in the morning there he was, curled in the circle of her warmth, pink-grey, his eyes closed, his tiny bones and sinews visible through his nearly transparent skin; suddenly beautiful to her. Her own to nurture the very best she could.

Her spit, with a touch of worm, was still all she had to give, and this she did, judging it best to lie still and keep him warm. Only once she left him, and that briefly to gather worms for them both. She bit their heads to keep the worms from straying far.

Grikes came near, the pup mewed when he should not have done. She huddled in the burrow, and nomole heard them.

But the place was not ideal, and the soil was wet. Not a place to bring up young! She knew she must soon move on. The pup was living at least, though pathetic in his desire for milk and questing at her empty teats.

“I can’t suckle you, my dear. I am too old,” she said. Then more spit and worm she gave, and it had to do.

Four days she was there and then when a warm day came she journeyed on, praying to that greater thing, which she refused to call either Word or Stone, that she would be guided well.

Going east, as Holm had said, had served her well at first but now proved slow and arduous with pup in mouth, and so when she came upon a rough stony way – for roaring owl, perhaps, for it had the distant smell of them – she turned north upon it. At its edge the worms were good, and that night, mercifully warm, she slept among the grass, and the way the pup nestled up to her almost made her weep he was so beautiful.

Despite the dangers all about, and what seemed the impossibility of the pup surviving, Henbane felt happy that night: the happiness moles feel when they have good purpose, and their bodies and their minds are stretched and tried and proving strong. The pup was alive, they were warm, the sky was good across the fell.

“You shall live, my dear, and find a happiness I shall never see or know you had. You shall live!”

The way she had found was straight and went on northward. She followed it the next day and it took her to a derelict twofoot place high on the fell where metal rusted and rattled in the wind, and great tunnels were delved into the slopes. The twofoots seemed all gone.

She looked about, she pondered, she found worms aplenty, and water, and no moles at all.

“This might do,” she said, speaking to the pup who lay flat upon the ground, his paws spread out and struggling to make sense of themselves and the body to which they were attached, his mouth mewing and questing once again.

She picked him up and took him into the echoing tunnels there, huge places, tall and regularly arched, all made by twofoots. They were larger than most of the tunnels of Whern, and seemed to lead a long way into the hillside.

But Henbane did not explore that far, for the air was cold inside and dank, and the ground wet and filled with puddles. There were several of these tunnels and she chose to stay near the one whose entrance faced south and would catch the sun.

Here, in contrast to the fells over which they had come, the ground had been openly delved long since, and a rich variety of plants had come. The rough ground before it was already covered in creeping stonecrop, and where brambles ran there were violets and some primrose. On the sunny banks were all manner of things – tormentil, sweet woodruff and lower down the spread leaves of herb robert whose flowers had not yet come.

It was a gentle spot, a safe spot, and there was evidence of only vole to disturb them. Before them, in an area long since churned flat by roaring owls, the ground was waterlogged and not a place a mole would happily cross. While behind them the banks of the place rose steep and they could not be easily attacked.

“Besieged, perhaps, my dear, but not attacked. There’s the tunnel to escape into, and places in there to hide I’m sure, and plenty of worms hereabout. A good enough place for us.”

She made tunnels into the bank, using some old vole ways and even, in one place, a broken rabbit burrow. It was rough but obscure and good, and to find it a mole would have to have come a long way looking.

“It feels safe here,” she told him, speaking to him as if he understood. It was here, a few days after they arrived, that his eyes opened and it seemed to her they were the most beautiful she had ever seen.

“You
are
beautiful,” she whispered to him, “the most beautiful mole that ever was!” He supped her spit and worm, and soon after his eyes opened he began to crunch in a feeble way at the parts of unchewed worm she gave him.

“You will survive, my dear, you will, and so I must find a name for you.”

For days she pondered it, speaking out all the names she knew, and some she made up, and wondering if they suited him. Tryfan, she tried, of course. And Bracken, too. Even Mayweed of whom Sleekit had spoken, and Wharfe, and
all
the names she knew.

Then one day, the pup well fed and wandering gently here and there and then running back to her, she lay in the sudden warm sun that comes sometimes in May and marks the first of many summer days. Her snout was along her paws, her eyes were closed, the pup was busy, and her snout twitched and scented the small pleasurable scents of spring.

The very pleasant scents; the
sweet
scents.

She opened her eyes, peered to her side and saw that the woodruff was out, its petals white and fragrant, and beneath it the pup snouted up as well, as if he too scented it.

“Sweet woodruff,” she sighed, remembering a time when she was young and her mother Charlock had left her alone and she too had scented at such flowers and her mother had not known their name. It was one of the few happy memories she had.

“Sweet woodruff,” she said once more, and then, looking at the pup, she knew his name at last: “Woodruff, that’s what it must be.” She watched him with great pleasure, and when he came near she encircled him in her paws and whispered again and again, “Woodruff,” until his darkening cheeks wrinkled, his growing paws scrabbled and he struggled free and went to the puddle’s edge and surveyed it as if it was a mighty lake.

That place was where Woodruffs puphood passed, and where he first spoke words, and learnt that tunnels have echoes, and rain hurts when it falls hard, and live beetles are near impossible to catch, and adults are warm things to run to when things hurt.

That place, it might be said, was where Henbane grew young again, as she tried to give Woodruff a puphood and security she never had herself.

In that place they saw the weather warm, and the puddle that had been Woodruffs lake, in which he learnt to play, turn dry. There they saw the brambles flower, there Woodruff watched his first bumble bee; and there, one never-forgotten evening, they watched a fox pass through.

Grikes came twice, and once quite close, but so careful had Henbane been about not leaving signs, so marginal did the little place they lived seem, that they were not found. The first time was when Woodruff was too young to care, but the second was more fraught....

“There’s two moles here,” was the simple and chilling way he announced their arrival. He had been playing out in the open when suddenly he had seen them and dashed back to her.

She had grabbed him and pressed him in among the grass and stared around and saw them over by one of the twofoot tunnel entrances. They were great dark guard-moles with thick talons and heavy snouts who snuffled and peered about the place, and then moved nearer where they lay.

Henbane and Woodruff watched them, absolutely still, the youngster’s eyes wide with fear. The guardmoles laughed deeply and tussled with one another and their strength was obvious and unlike anything he had ever seen before.

Then they turned and came straight towards them, and Woodruff felt Henbane tensing ready to fight and she whispered, “If they come you must run, run anywhere.”

For the first time he had realised it was possible that one day he might lose her, and he was still as death.

But the guardmoles stopped, were distracted by rock and water sounds down in the nearer twofoot tunnel, and after an interminable wait in which they shuffled and peered here and there, they turned and left.

There was nothing Henbane could do to stop the nightmares that came after that but be there and offer comfort. The image of the grikes stayed with the young mole, and he lost a little confidence and stayed close to her for days. Woodruff had discovered fear, and it did not easily leave him.

It was some time then, in the molemonths of early May, in an effort to combat this first and seemingly disastrous sight of other moles, that Henbane decided to tell him stories of the real moles and moledom that she had known.

“Other moles have siblings, and neighbours, fathers and all sorts of moles,” she said “and there are....”

“And big moles,” he said.

“Yes, there are some of those....”

“Who are not nice....”

“Some of them aren’t, but most of them are, my dear. Your grandfather Tryfan, for example, was a big mole, much bigger than the ones who came here, and he was not one to hurt others at all even though he could have done if he wanted.”

“What did he look like? What did he do?”

Woodruff saw Henbane’s eyes soften, he heard her voice go gentle, he felt her paw reach out to him, and he was lost in the tale she told and began to learn about moles other than grikes.

In this way, as the summer days passed by, Henbane discovered in herself stories that she barely knew she knew, and gave them willingly to Woodruff, as if to make up for the family and life his puphood and youth did not have.

At first these tales were light and simple things, but gradually, as the moleweeks and months went by and Woodruff grew a little older, her tales became more fulsome, richer, and told of the light and dark that had been Henbane’s life.

In the telling of them her old passion returned, she seemed to live the characters she portrayed for him and in but a few words could turn the twofoot tunnel that loomed nearby into the darkest parts of Whern; and transform the pretty bank in which they lived into the warmest, quietest glade in Duncton Wood.

It was perhaps inevitable that in this world she made for Woodruff, Whern should be the dark place and Duncton the place of light. Inevitable that names like Scirpus and Rune, Weed and Charlock should be names he was made to doubt and fear, while others, like Tryfan and Spindle and a few of the Duncton moles she remembered Tryfan telling her about – Comfrey was one, old Maundy another – became in the world she made for him moles to whom in imagination he ran and found love and safety.

A few there were who were not so dark or light as these – moles like Wrekin, her commander in the south, and others that she knew.

But there was one whose role in the stories that she told evolved and changed as those precious, loving, mole-months went by, and that was Boswell, whom she had known in Whern, and observed.

“Is Boswell in this one?” the youngster would ask eagerly as she began a new tale, for he always liked a tale that ended (if it had not begun) with some account of the old White Mole who limped and had gentle eyes, and who, though often impatient, was always there and would always be.

“Yes, my love, I think somehow he’ll be in this one today... “she would say. Or, sometimes, just to be mischievous, “I don’t think he is, but you never know with Boswell, do you?”

“No!” Woodruff would say excitedly. Adding a little later, as the tale drew ominously near its close
without
Boswell having made an appearance, “He will be there, won’t he? At the end?”

How Henbane loved her Woodruff then, and how impossible for her imagination to deny him the appearance of that strange White Mole of whom her own memory was so strong.

Had she not herself taken him into custody at Uffington? Had she not, through him, begun to discover that slow and painful yet infinitely rich other way of being which her rearing in the Word so long denied her: the way of truth? Had not knowledge of him at Providence Fall in Whern, where her father kept him, made her heart open to the love that Tryfan finally brought?

How then could she deny Woodruff the gift that Boswell gave her? Boswell was part of her history, part of what she was.

In this way, and barely knowing what she did, Henbane gave to Woodruff the father that life itself had denied him, and as time went by she found that in the games that Woodruff played with the characters she described, Boswell was the arbiter and final recourse when all seemed confused, all lost; all still to be found. Boswell was the strength and safety in his world.