‘It’s time to go,’ said Bracken. ‘Show me the direction, but let me go first, for I’m used to sensing danger and can find my way very quickly.’
They trekked up to the southwest, away from Hulver’s burrow and the danger of Rune. Bracken had imagined his first climb up into the Ancient System, thinking that the sun would be high in the sky and he would walk boldly upwards. Instead, here he was with very real danger about, skulking his way through the twilight. But there was something sweeter than his most delightful imaginings in having as a guide and friend this old mole for whom he was beginning to feel such deep affection and reverence.
It got darker as they rose higher, yet the further they went, the stronger did Bracken feel the pull from the top. He felt it as a good wormhunter feels his prey. They scurried from tree to tree, from root to root, always seeking the darkest shadow. Here and there they came across a bare patch of chalk, white in the evening gloom, and they avoided it for fear that their movement might be seen against it by any predators that lurked in the trees above. Once they passed by a massive tangle of roots rising starkly into the air, the bowl of a tree that had toppled over in some storm. They steered well clear of its long trunk and shattered branches on the ground—what mole could tell what might be nesting there.
As they rose higher, Hulver suddenly stopped and put his paw on Bracken’s shoulder, bringing him to a halt. ‘We are on the Ancient System,’ he whispered. ‘From here it runs upwards and across the hill.’
But Bracken knew it already, for he had sensed they were crossing old forgotten tunnels lost deep beneath the mould and debris of ages. His heart was beating with excitement for he felt as if, after a very long time, he was coming home. He knew the Ancient System was around him, he could feel it. It lay beneath them waiting, as it had waited for generations. And he could feel more than ever the great Stone which they were getting nearer and nearer.
‘We’ll go right to the Stone, now,’ he said quietly to Hulver, ‘and from there we’ll know what to do.’
It was at that moment in the evening when an eyeblink separates day from night. In the moment that a mole might wonder if it is still day, the question is answered by a sudden pall of purple in the sky. Bracken’s snout pointed up through the wood directly towards the Stone, although he had never been there. ‘There is nomole here,’ he told Hulver, certain of himself, ‘and there is none on the Ancient System. Can’t you feel it?’
Hulver couldn’t feel it, didn’t like it, and couldn’t understand Bracken’s certainty; but he followed after him, for as he watched Bracken’s flanks disappearing upwards into the dark and looked about him at the black tree-shapes with the wide open spaces in between, nothing else seemed as safe. He could feel that Bracken was gaining strength with each moment that passed. There was a power about him that swept Hulver along and he had the feeling that through this mole the Stone was revealing to him a tiny part of its pattern, the whole of which he could not see or feel, although he knew it to be there.
With this feeling, a slow calm fell over him that was never to leave him again. In some way he was watching a battle start, an enormous battle, a terribly dangerous time. It would happen, whatever happened, and his own part in it, if part he had, was best played by his being at peace with himself and the world about him.
‘Hulver!’ The whispered urgency of Bracken’s voice struck Hulver as comic, but with compassion for the youngster he restrained himself from laughing happily. Instead he watched with love as Bracken ran back towards him, to hurry him up, no doubt.
To Bracken, Hulver looked so gentle in the soft night, he expressed such peace and love, that his nerves were suddenly calmed within themselves and his fear and nervousness became as easy to brush away as dust on his fur. ‘Come on,’ said Bracken softly, ‘come on, Hulver!’ But there was no need, for Hulver was already starting up the hill again, and for some reason was chuckling quietly to himself.
As the hill levelled off and they reached its summit, Bracken slowed, almost afraid to advance, for he knew they were now very near the Stone. The windnoise in the trees was high and strong, swinging back from one side above them to the other as the wind billowed from one group of trees to another. It was a mass of great, invisible waves rolling across the top of the wood and way beyond it. ‘There!’ said Hulver, pointing a talon forwards into a clearing ahead of them. ‘There is the Stone.’
And it was, huge and massive, towering upwards, solid in the windy night. Ten or twelve moleyards from it stood an ancient beech tree, its roots plunging along and into the ground, across the clearing’s floor to the Stone itself. From where Bracken crouched, the roots appeared solid waves that had rolled and heaved against the Stone, so that it tilted a little from the tree away towards Uffington.
There was no other tree near it, for the clearing was quite wide, and as they ran across towards the Stone, the windnoise above them fell quieter, staying with the trees at its edge, and Bracken had the impression that he had come into somewhere very quiet and still. But he felt the thunder of the generations and knew that all around him and beyond the clearing the Ancient System stretched forth, its lost tunnels hidden beneath the ages of leaf mould on the spare surface of the hill. He was at the heart of the Ancient System, but more than that; he was home, at the centre, at the true centre of the system into which he had been born.
Hulver crouched down before the Stone and Bracken followed him. Up here the wood defined itself by windnoise. Off to the west lay the pastures, the wind running up off them and then through the massive branches above them. To the east was the escarpment where upward eddies of air met the wind in the trees and the wind tumbled above on the edge of the void. Below them were softer noises of the main wood itself, quieter than this, deeper. By the Stone there was silence, and a calm Bracken had never known anywhere in the wood.
He got up and ran to the edge of the clearing in the direction towards which the Stone tilted: ‘How far is Uffington, Hulver?’ he asked.
Hulver came to his side, both their snouts pointing out through the trees towards the west. Hulver was still breathing heavily from the long climb up from the slopes. ‘A long way, a very long way, but not so far if you have the Stone behind you.’
‘No, it’s not so far, not too far,’ said Bracken to himself, for he could feel Uffington pulling him. ‘It’s not that far, Hulver,’ he said quietly, ‘I can feel it.’
When Hulver used the words ‘not so far if you have the Stone behind you’, he was giving the standard reply senior moles used to give to youngsters who asked the once inevitable question about Uffington. But as Bracken crouched there, Hulver saw it differently from the way in which he had seen it before: perhaps it meant exactly what it said: perhaps Uffington was in some way nearer if you kept the Stone always directly behind you as you progressed towards it. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? And he had been struck by the way in which Bracken had run exactly to the point on the edge of the clearing that lay nearest Uffington, without having been told.
‘How do you know where Uffington is?’ asked Hulver curiously. Bracken interested him more and more. ‘I can feel it. If you stand with the Stone behind you,’ said Bracken, ‘you can feel it pulling. Well, you know…’
But Hulver didn’t, though he understood what Bracken was saying better than Bracken himself.
Bracken would have stayed there all night if Hulver had not at last said, ‘Come on, Bracken, we must hide ourselves now. We must find worms to eat and we must rest. There is much for you to learn tomorrow.’