So Bracken proceeded on his explorations, testing different sounds, trying out different thumps and scratches with his paws, and generally making enough noise to frighten a whole system of moles, let alone one, had they been there. But to Bracken it seemed that nomole would ever be there and, protected by his sense of isolation (though often regarding the fact of it as a curse), he went on in his humming, sounding, scratching, thumping way, turning the art of exploration into a science.
It did not occur to him, as he made his rambling approach through the peripheral tunnels towards Hulver’s old system, that another mole might have occupied them. But so it was. She was a female, and her name was Rue, and in her time she had littered well. Then, in the early summer, Mandrake himself had loomed, one terrible day, into her burrow and turned her out of the cosy tunnels beyond Barrow Vale, which she had occupied for moleyears, to make way for his darling daughter, Rebecca.
Rue didn’t have a chance, and believed Mandrake’s growling threat that if she so much as showed herself on Rebecca’s territory or anywhere near Barrow Vale, he would maim or kill her.
She had already been distressed by her inability to litter that spring, though she had mated more than once. The sounds of other pup cries upset her and gradually she found she ate less and that her heart was not in keeping the burrows and tunnel tidy, though she was normally a very neat mole.
Already dispirited, she was easy prey to Mandrake’s will and so became yet another victim of his unpredictable moods. Rue suddenly found herself competing with the new crop of youngsters for territory. She was a small mole and, coming as she did originally from the Eastside, was not a great fighter. She certainly wasn’t weak or even gentle, like some of the Eastside moles, but she was no match for the bigger Duncton ones. The system she had won for herself, and that Rebecca had taken over, lay between two richer ones held by stronger moles and to some extent was neutral territory—perhaps that was why she had managed to hold on to it so long.
May, June and July were one long nightmare for Rue as she scratched about for a living wherever she could. Cut off by Mandrake’s threat from her friends and the territory she knew, she became scraggy and dishevelled, and her eyes began to wear the look of a female on the way to defeat—one who faces a mateless future and a territoryless death. She might have made for the Marsh End nearest where she had been brought up, but that was moleyears and moleyears before, in times that she had long stopped thinking of, and in her present state it seemed a hazardous journey to make. And Marshenders do not take kindly to strangers. Driven from one tunnel to the next, barely escaping with her life more than once, so real are the threats to an ageing mole who falls from territory and grace, she slowly found herself in August making towards the one place where old moles may, before the shadow of age creeps right over them, find a temporary security and some vague hope—the slopes.
For younger moles the name is literally dreadful, for it puts into their minds the possibility that they, too, might one day wake up with aches in their backs and shoulders and find that they cannot move, or hear, so well as once they could. But Rue was nowhere near that stage, though to all outward appearances she might have seemed to be.
She grubbed about the quiet surface of the slopes, fearful of the owls said to haunt the heights above, running from temporary hide to temporary burrow, meeting aggression from one or two Slopesiders whose tunnels she crossed until, one day, she came to a tunnel that smelt empty and deserted.
It was an outlier from Hulver’s old system and had not been reoccupied by any other mole since he had gone from it for ever in June.
She waited by it for three moledays, keeping her snout low and listening with care to see if there was a mole somewhere about. Badgers she heard, from the humpy ground somewhere towards the Eastside; crows she heard and saw; a fox prowled past quite close, but she smelt him long before he came and did not even bother to hide as youngsters often did before they learned better, because she knew that a fox will not touch a mole. ‘A fox may be a mole’s best friend, when his path with ours doth wend’ said the old Eastside proverb she had learned when she was a pup. The fox sniffed about and tiptoed away.
Apart from that, nothing. So, after three moledays, Rue made her way timidly towards Hulver’s old tunnels and could smell the emptiness all around. ‘Oh!’ she sighed, though she hardly dared let the relief sound in her voice.
Suddenly bold, she darted this way and that in the tunnels, snouting out one tunnel after another, running from burrow to burrow. There was a whiff of weasel at the end of one, only faint, but she sealed it off all the same.
She didn’t yet dare to eat down there, so she found some worms and took them out into a temporary burrow on the surface nearby. Then she returned and completed her exploration, eventually finding the central burrow, the one where Bracken had crouched miserably after Hulver’s departure for the June elder meeting and which, to her delight, was as deserted as everywhere else. In fact, although the place needed a little dust cleared away at one or two tunnel junctions and the nesting material was old, the whole place seemed to her tired eyes as bright as a primrose, and she sensed a peaceful air about it, which she could not know was one of the legacies left behind by old Hulver.
Rue was overjoyed. Her whole appearance changed from that of the hunched-up, aged mole she was becoming to one full of the joy of a place of her own and something to care for. Indeed, she began to sing a song the like of which these tunnels, and most others on the slopes, had not heard in generations—the song a youngster mole traditionally sings when, after the summer is over and the autumn is setting in, she has found a place of her own and can relax into it for the winter:
‘Rue’s found a cleansome home,
Rue’s got a place.
Let sun and moon and stars go roam,
Rue’s got a place.’
Then, with her tail held higher than it had been for molemonths, she busied herself with replacing the nesting material, shoring up one or two entrances, and, most important of all, finding where the best spots for food were.
Three moleweeks later, when September was well started and the leaves on the beech trees on the surface were beginning to dry and mellow with the onset of autumn, Bracken solved the problem of which tunnel led down to Hulver’s system. He had had difficulties, because the tunnels seemed to have been made deliberately complex here, but slowly, and by occasional recourse to the surface, he made his way in the right direction until the whole pattern fell into place and he found the tunnel that led resolutely down the slopes to the point where Hulver’s system started—or stopped, depending on a mole’s point of view.
He had now developed, almost to a science, his system of sound exploration to establish what lay ahead, and seeing that the tunnel was in softer soil more typical of the lower slopes, he called ahead with a deep roaring sound that travelled well and got a good response in this kind of soil.
The response it gave was the one he hoped for—a clean echo back, though far in the distance. It meant that the tunnel ran down to a dead end, the end being the seal he had seen from the other side in Hulver’s tunnel. He ran on down, occasionally making an uncharacteristic whooping sound from the sheer pleasure of having finally found his way right round the Ancient System and established, he was almost certain, the site of its link with the present Duncton system. This was an important moment for Bracken, not so much because he wanted to go into the present system, but rather because it satisfied the desire he had had since puphood to get a grasp of how the Ancient System related geographically to everything else. ‘Where is the Ancient System—where does it start and where does it go?’ he had once asked Burrhead. Now he would know.