‘It’s far off, far to the west. I’ve never met a mole who’s been there, though I talked to some when I was your age who claimed to have met moles who had.’
‘What do they do there?’ Bracken wanted to know. ‘What moles live with the White Moles? Do you know anything about scribe moles, like Aspen mentioned in her stories?’
The questions tumbled from him in a flow that sometimes made Hulver feel old and helpless, for there were so many questions he didn’t know the answers to and, what was worse, had never thought of finding the answers to.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never known,’ he would say. ‘The scribes came from there, I know that!’
‘Yes, but what do scribemoles do?’ Bracken would persist. ‘They write the stories that moles want to remember and the prayers and blessings that true moles love. They go out from Uffington to remind us of the Stone.’
‘Have they ever been here?’ asked Bracken tirelessly, and Hulver told him what he knew of that.
So Bracken learned much from what Hulver talked about, but more without knowing it from the gentle way the old mole lived, looking for worms, openly seeking the Stone’s help, pausing sometimes to tell Bracken to listen to the sound of ‘this beloved wood’. Often just crouching and making Bracken do the same, even though he found it irksome crouching in silence when he could be doing something or talking.
‘Which is why I make you do it,’ Hulver would tell him mysteriously.
One day Hulver shocked Bracken by announcing that it was time for the June elder meeting and he would be gone for five or six days—‘even though they don’t listen to what I say, with Mandrake hard upon them.’
Just before he left, he spoke to Bracken very seriously. ‘Stay here quietly, live in my burrow silently as I have been teaching you to do, for though, being Midsummer, this should be a time of great happiness, I fear there is much danger about. I can smell it, so take care.’
A chill came over Bracken’s heart at this, for the sudden prospect of being alone again made him recognise the joy he had been living with in the last few days with Hulver, who, seeing fear cross his face, softly touched his shoulder with his paw and said, ‘There is danger, but you are strong enough to face it. You will never face an evil you have not the strength to master. When I come back there will be a lot to do and you will have much to learn,’ Hulver told him finally. ‘I am going to take you up to the Ancient System. Meanwhile, do not be lulled by the June sun. There is danger in the system and I fear you may suffer in its coming, so be careful.’
Hulver turned and ran a little way down the slope before disappearing down a tunnel leading to far-off Barrow Vale. He hated to leave Bracken, for he had rejoiced in their friendship too.
Bracken watched him go, and with an enormous sense of loss turned back down into Hulver’s tunnels and along to his burrow, where he crouched, shaken and desolate. A terrible dark fear began to seep into him and he shivered, despite the June warmth. He had never felt so alone. In the darkness he tried to find words to comfort himself, the fear swirling about him, but they had gone. Then the fear took him over until it felt like a black cloud that would burst and explode inside him, and he found himself crying and desolate, repeating between his sobs lines from the first grace he had heard Hulver speak:
‘Let no mole adown my body
That may hurt my sorrowing soul.’
And though he did not know it, it was the first prayer to the Stone that he ever spoke. Slowly it calmed him until he was able to think of Hulver again and not himself. He changed the ‘my’ to ‘his’ and said the grace again, hoping it might go down through the tunnels with Hulver to the elder meeting at Barrow Vale, where it might protect him.
But Hulver met another mole and had a conversation with her, before he joined the other elders. It was a meeting that affected him very much and caused him to think that Bracken was a more special mole than he might otherwise have thought.
The mole he met was Rebecca, and it would be the first time that Rebecca ever heard the name of Bracken spoken, for her now legendary first meeting with him by the Stone was not to take place until the following September. She had known that an elder meeting was taking place in June and, her curiosity as ever getting the better of her fear of Mandrake, she had dared wait in Barrow Vale to see the elders arrive for the meeting.
Other moles did the same. That was the nice thing about the communal tunnels beneath Barrow Vale. The moment she saw the old mole coming down through the tunnels that led from the slopes, his snout wrinkled and low, his fur ragged and greying, she knew who it was. She ran up to him in the old friendly way she hadn’t dared adopt with anymole during April and May, breathless and smiling. ‘Are you Hulver?’ she asked. He stopped and looked up at her, for she stood more upright and young than he did, and he was so nice. Oh! he was wise and radiated love!
‘I’m Hulver, I can’t deny it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Anyway, nomole else is as old as I am now, so it wasn’t hard to guess. Who are you, my dear?’
She hesitated to say from habit, for moles tended to back away when they found she was Mandrake’s Rebecca. But with Hulver she sensed it didn’t matter. ‘Rebecca,’ she said.
‘Sarah’s daughter!’ he said. ‘And Mandrake’s. You’re a fine-looking female, I must say, though I suppose you’re an adult now, but you all look so young to me. Be the same for you, one day,’ he laughed.
‘Would you tell me about the old times?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Because they say you’re the only one who remembers now, the only one who’s left.’ She dropped her voice a little as she said these last words, because she felt an unaccountable desire to go close to Hulver, to press herself to him, to hold him.
‘It would take a lifetime to tell you even a small part of it,’ he said, ‘and unfortunately I’m in a hurry for the elder meeting.’
‘Oh,’ sighed Rebecca, disappointed. There was so much she wanted to know about things and she felt Hulver could tell her. Indeed, she felt he could answer questions she didn’t even know how to ask. She crouched down near him sadly.
Hulver, too, was affected by their meeting. She seemed so, so… so alive! Eager, and sighing, standing and crouching, sad, loving. ‘Elder meetings never start on time, anyway,’ he thought to himself, settling down comfortably by her as a sign that he would talk for a little at least. ‘I’ll tell you about Rebecca, your namesake, if you like, Rebecca the Healer of the Ancient System.’
Rebecca changed mood again, now sighing contentedly, smiling, peaceful, and closing her eyes as she asked to do when Sarah began to tell her a story.
‘Mind you, I expect you know all about Rebecca; you can hardly fail to in Duncton, since she’s the only claim to fame we seem to have and at least they haven’t forgotten her, though they’ve forgotten everything else that matters.’ Rebecca nodded happily; she had heard all about Rebecca but she didn’t mind hearing it again, not from Hulver.
But Hulver himself didn’t know what he was going to say, since it all came into his mind and out as words without him seeming to have too much to do with it. He felt very peaceful. ‘Most of the stories you’ve heard are nonsense, I’m sure; harmless nonsense, of course. It’s just that we all like a good tale and if there seems to be a gap in the telling of it, we fill it up with something we like to think might have been—and who knows, it might have been!’ Hulver felt as if his words were exploring a tunnel down which he himself had never been.
‘Do you know what I think?’ He asked the question as much of himself as of Rebecca, but she shook her head and crouched even closer to Hulver, whose presence she found she loved, because there was something about his great age and goodness which seemed to grow out of the ground itself and make her feel safe and loved. ‘I believe she did stay here in Duncton for quite a time. I believe that in those days Duncton was a system where a mole like her would want to stay. I believe she loved Duncton Wood as you or I might love Barrow Vale in the spring.