She touched him very, very gently on his good shoulder and whispered softly to him, but he did not respond at all, his breathing short and painful, his eyes closed, his snout bearing the pallor of near-death.
She could see how close to death he was, and how deeply he had suffered. Yet she was puzzled by the fact that the injury itself, though deep and unpleasant, was no worse than many she had seen and from which other moles, surely no fitter than Bracken had been, had recovered without any help at all. Such thoughts were natural to Rose, who treated anymole in trouble by trying to see what were the causes of his distress, knowing that more often than not they were different from what the victims themselves thought they were.
How often had a mole come to her with aches and pains in his shoulders which she had treated by massaging his haunches with comfrey; how often had she treated a loss of smell, the most terrible affliction for anymole, by buffeting the mole’s back? Rose’s treatments often seemed bizarre, but they worked.
She suspected that Bracken’s illness lay not so much in the wound as in Bracken himself, and perhaps in the way the wound had been inflicted. Clearly, it had been done when he was in a state of distress and weakness… well, she couldn’t very well ask him.
She began by gently caressing him and grooming his fur, so that slowly she could feel each part of his body relax under her paws and snout until his breathing grew a bit more peaceful and his paws a little less limp. This took her many hours, for he was so weak that she had to be very slow and gentle.
After this she cleaned the wound itself, using juice from the ramson, whose stinging smell also served to purify the air of the tunnel. He groaned a little when she did this, but not much, though he restlessly moved his head from one side to another in his unconsciousness.
She let him alone for a while so that she herself might sleep, and the day above had started again and the August sun was well into the beech trees, all yellow, grey and green, before she woke. She scurried up and down the tunnel, found a worm or two for herself and a couple of beetles, and even went to the cliff end of the tunnel whose precipitous drop made her gasp with awe as a morning breeze raced up from the cliff face below. Then, awake and recovered, she went back to Bracken.
He was alive and young, that was the best she could say. She sensed again the great struggle of darkness and light about him, as if all these conflicting forces were concentrated in his broken body which lay lost in this great place, teetering on the edge of a black void.
She placed one of her paws on each side of his face, closed her eyes, and began to pass into him her own healing love for life with a force and power she had never used before, or been able to use.
He was for her at once the frailest pup she had ever touched and all the hurt moles who had ever asked her for help. He was, too, all the many moles who had never asked her, not knowing they were troubled, to whom she had given her healing love.
There was no prayer in the meaning of the words she spoke, which were a running brook of love sounds and gentleness, of ‘My love, my dear, my sweet thing, creature of love, my laughter, my whole-souled joy’… The prayer lay in her whole being and it did not ask for help but praised the divine power that could still hold on to such life in so much suffering.
Her prayer, and the love of it, flowed through Bracken and beyond them both to the forgotten burrows and tunnels on whose edge he lay. Perhaps, too, it travelled out into the trees of the Ancient System, which now stood dappled in a morning sun, and it danced with the light and caressed the smooth grey branches of the beech trees and whispered amid the shining green of their leaves.
How long Rose gave herself to the healing of Bracken she never knew, for she was lost to the world as she did it. But long before she had finished, the sun on the surface declined towards the pastures and a wood pigeon had flapped and cooed in the evening light.
When, finally, she took her paws from Bracken’s head, her ageing fur was running with sweat and hung with exhaustion, and she looked as if she had been on a journey to the edge of life itself, and only just been able to return.
All her strength was gone. She was too tired even to find food and to wonder whether, after all, she had done enough. She simply lay down where she was, one of her paws touching his neck and her old body close to him—and fell asleep. She stirred sometimes when he stirred, and whispered gentleness into his ears and battling soul.
For three days, perhaps four, Rose stayed tending Bracken and cherishing the life in him back to hope and light. Nomole can be certain of the time it took, and Boswell of Uffington, in the account he later scribed, says that there are events in moles’ lives against which the measure of time becomes measureless, and ‘this one meeting between the loving Rose and Bracken of Duncton Wood was surely one of them’.
However, the day came when Rose knew that Bracken, though not fully healed, was at least safe—as safe as a mole can ever be against the force of evil. His breathing became deeper and more rhythmic, his weak paws now moved restlessly with life, his groans no longer held the agony she had first heard in them. He stirred at last into consciousness and whispered words of Hulver and Rebecca the Healer… ‘Rebecca, Rebecca…’ though he did not seem to know that Rose was there with him.
At last she left him, still only on the verge of conscious health again, finding first for him in the tunnels some food which she placed ready at his side. So many times she had left a mole like this, healed as best she knew how but seeming so vulnerable before the rest of the journey into health and wholeness which, finally, they must make for themselves. Never had she been so reluctant to leave a mole, and never had she said the ancient journey blessing of Rebecca the Healer with such appeal to the forces of light and love which abound in even the darkest places:
‘May the healing of Rebecca
Encompass your going and returning;
The peace of the White Moles be yours in the travel
And may you return home safeguarded.’
And she might have said the blessing for herself as well, for she had a long journey to her own burrow before her and was very weary—more tired than she had ever been.
She left the tunnel by the way she had come, covered over the entrance she had made with leaf litter and soil, and tried to shake the fatigue from her old body. It was dusk, a good time to travel at least, but it was an effort even to put one paw in front of the other as she made for the Stone—the first stage of her journey.
‘I’m getting old,’ she said to herself, ‘and a little weary. Why, my home burrow has never seemed quite so far away as it does now.’ The atmosphere among the great trees of the Ancient System was much calmer than when she had arrived, and less confused.
When she reached the Stone clearing it was night, and she paused there to rest and reflect, feeling the richness of Duncton stretching beyond the slopes beneath her. Something very powerful was going on, bigger than the system she loved, perhaps even more important than all the moles who lived there or had made their lives there in the past, and whom she had so long cared for and tended.
So much was changing. She had known of the change even before Mandrake came—indeed, she saw that he was a part of it and not a cause of it. Hulver and Bindle were both gone, killed near this very spot, and other old moles she knew were all gone as well.