‘Aye, he’s up there all right, you mark my words; and he’ll be down this way, I shouldn’t wonder,’ was how one Barrow Vale gossip put it, his words heavy with complacent warning. ‘Just been biding his time, he has, just waiting for the right moment, and now he’s come. The Eastsiders call him the Stone Mole, and that isn’t such a bad name if you ask me…’
When Mandrake first heard the story, he thought it was amusing, and laughed. Probably some Pasture mole gone astray, he thought. Well, he’d sort it all out when he felt like it. As for Rune, he latched on to anything that had possibilities for his own advancement, and there was a way the Stone Mole rumour could help him. His smile was smug with the potential of it all.
Had Bracken any inkling that such a rumour had gained ground, he would have been amazed. He regretted the contacts with moles he had so unsuccessfully made on two different occasions since he emerged out of the confines of the Ancient System, because he now reckoned that it was best, on the whole, to continue to lie low.
The first, with the mole on the west side of the slopes, was just an accident. Nothing he could do about that. The second was more regrettable, since it was born out of a desire in him to make contact with somemole somewhere after such a long isolation. The two old Eastsiders looked friendly enough—and what a relief it had been to hear mole being talked. It was almost like listening to Hulver himself talking, so learned did they seem. And they used one or two words of the old language that Hulver had sometimes used. Spurred on by the promise of this and their seeming gentleness, he had come out into the open after listening to them for a while, and approached them. When they challenged him with the traditional greeting, he tried to answer as best he could but, well, he wasn’t sure quite where to say he had come from and, anyway, he was so unused to talking to another mole, let alone moles, that somehow he stumbled over his words. Then they looked frightened and ran away from him and he looked back behind him to see if there was some big mole or other creature that was threatening them, not realising that it was he, himself, they were running from.
This incident saddened Bracken, for it made him feel isolated and lost and left him craving contact with another mole, anymole, even more. The idea that they were running from him dawned on him slowly as he scratched his side and felt his fur still hanging loose on his gaunt body, while he thought of the two older moles so plump and sleek who had fled from him.
‘I must look a pretty sight,’ he whispered to himself, snouting first at his flanks, then at his scarred shoulder, and finally rubbing his paws down his thin face.
Bracken did not know it, but he looked a lot better than when he had first emerged from the Ancient System’s tunnel and started to live in the warmer air and wormier soil of the slope surface. But while a mole will normally recover from injury or illness very fast, swinging back from near death to full health in a matter of moledays, one that has been as ill as Bracken had been, both physically and emotionally, may take moleweeks or even moleyears to recover fully. (Just as such illness may be moleyears in the making, so the route back to health may be moleyears in the finding.)
Still, physically at least, he was improving. In the days that followed the distressing incident near the Eastside, he took it easy, eating as much as he could, sleeping a great deal and keeping well hidden. He still wanted to make contact with another mole, more and more so as he began to feel healthier, but he was regaining his normal caution and would try to be more careful next time.
It was perhaps three or four moledays into September before he returned to the Ancient System tunnels by the way he had come out. His intention was to explore the periphery of the tunnels on the slope side so that when, and if, he made contact with a mole again, he would have a good working knowledge of the system’s main routes and be able to escape back into them if he needed to.
It was in this period that Bracken began to perfect his peculiar—some might say unique—talents for exploration and route-finding. He already had an instinctive grasp of the strategy that distinguishes an explorer (able rapidly to establish his sense of place in a widespread system) from an orienteer, able to grasp only the minutiae of tunnel directions in a smaller area. The key to this strategy lies in getting to know the outline of a system before exploring its detail—which was what he was now doing with the Ancient System.
Bracken knew that there were two parts to the Ancient System—superficial summer tunnels which, on the edges, were bigger, forming an all-round peripheral system serving the central core; and a deeper, probably more ancient, set of tunnels, whose area was much more restricted and where food supply was likely to be a major problem except in the winter moleyears, when worms were driven deeper underground. He suspected that the big communal tunnel he had first entered from the cliffside formed a wide encirclement of the whole summer system, and this was soon confirmed by his following it from the slopes right round to the cliffside. It petered out, somewhat, further on, where it turned northwards on the west side and he did not bother to burrow his way through the many roof-falls in there. Instead, he pursued it back past the slopes and north of the Stone clearing where, again, it continued its circle round the whole system and faded again as it turned southwards. From this great circling tunnel there were several routes radiating into the centre.
First, he must find his courage and return to the deeper system where, though he dreaded doing it, he must make his way to the Chamber of Dark Sound and somehow past that long-dead mole.
But before doing that, Bracken decided—perhaps more as a way of delaying the day when he must go back to the deeper tunnels—to find out what tunnels lay between the summer communal route on the east side and the slopes beneath, to where, here and there, the present Duncton system reached. His objective, for he liked to have one, was to make his way to Hulver’s tunnels, for he was convinced that the sealed-off tunnels he had seen in them, and puzzled over, must lead up into the Ancient System. It was there, where Hulver himself had lived and had tried so hard to maintain a living link between the old and the new, that the physical link must lie. Bracken wanted to establish the fact of it before doing anything else.
It was in this period of a moleweek or so that Bracken began to perfect another of his strong talents for exploration and route-finding. His accidental discovery that a mole may use sound to make carved walls ‘speak’ had made him think about the possibility of using sound on ordinary walls in ordinary tunnels.
Of course, he already did this instinctively to some extent, using, for example, the echo-back of his pawsteps from a wall ahead to gauge how far he had to travel before reaching it. But until now Bracken had only done this in the tunnels he knew—and the soil in the Duncton system was too soft and absorbent ever to allow moles there to refine this technique very much. Up here, however, the soil was harder and much more responsive to sound and vibration, and now Bracken began to exploit the fact. He spent long periods trying different sounds on particular stretches of tunnels, learning to read the tunnel ahead from the sound it sent back. A straight tunnel running into a T-junction sent back a much clearer signal than a similar tunnel that had twists and turns; a tunnel with many burrows off it was more muted and richer-sounding than a similar tunnel with simple runs off it; softer soil—of which there were pockets on the Ancient System—was less responsive than harder soil and deeper sounds had to be used on it to get a maximum return of echo. Different sounds had to be used to maximise the information coming back from even clear-sounding tunnels—too sharp a sound, for example, in a responsive tunnel came back so fast and its echo repeated so often that it drowned itself in his own sound, and the information was lost.