Duncton Found (130 page)

Bailey opened his eyes and saw Furze peering at him.

Bailey wriggled one front paw and then the other.

“I couldn’t see you, Sir!” said Furze.

Bailey wriggled his back paws, extended his talons and snuffled his snout. He was himself but did not feel like “Bailey”. He smiled happily as Furze said, “Funny place to sleep. Are you all right?”

Bailey nodded and knew who he felt like:
bold
Bailey, that’s who he was.

“I’m very well indeed!” were Bailey’s first words as his new self.

Something glistened on the ground a little to one side of him and he knew what it was before he even looked full on it.

“What’s that?” said Furze, as Bailey picked it up.

“It’s a special stone,” he said. “A very special stone.”

He stanced up, looked all about and Furze said, “Where’s Mayweed?”

“He hasn’t gone very far, but he won’t be coming back,” said Bailey, grinning suddenly. He had spoken just as Mayweed might! Other moles are catching!

He tucked the first Stillstone under his paw and turned and headed back towards the barrows. His paws felt light, the air smelt good, the sun was clear, and moledom was all before him.

“Sir, Sir,” said Furze, who seemed to be having trouble keeping up with him, “where are you going?”

“Where am I going, Furze? To Duncton Wood, of course. Where else would a mole go who is going anywhere?”

“But what about me? I mean it was good talking to you and Mayweed for a whole evening. I was thinking we could do it again.”

Bailey stopped.

“I think there’ll be other moles coming,” said Bailey. “Quite a few. One for every Stone you see rising here. They’ll be glad to be welcomed here by you, just as we were. You could make welcoming them your task.”

“Welcoming isn’t much of a task, is it?”

“It’s a very important task, as a matter of fact,” said Bailey, who felt that everything he did, everything he said, was clearer than it ever had been before.

“Well, I’ll miss you, and I’ll look forward to some other moles coming.”

“Good!”

“But I don’t know what I’ll do until then.”

“Be like me, Furze.”

“Like you?” said Furze peering at him.

“Be bold!”

“I always said,” said Starling, “that if and when this happened I would leave the Wen and go back to Duncton Wood.”

“And will you?” asked Heath lazily, basking in the September sun despite the noise all about.

“
We
will!”

“I wish you were joking, Starling, but sadly I know you’re not. When you decide to do something, that is usually that.”

“Just look!” she shouted, pointing a talon across the broken ruins of where an hour before Dunbar’s ancient tunnels lay. “The place will never be the same again and I’m very cross about it.”

Age must be infectious, for both seemed old and a little grey.

Heath looked in a bored way at the great ditch that the yellow roaring owl had been threatening to delve for days, and which was now there before their eyes. Further downslope, the roaring owl was resting noisily, and fuming all about. Twofoots had been about the place for weeks before. Now Dunbar’s tunnels, whose strange, mysterious sound Heath had tentatively explored and left well alone ever since; but which Starling had come to love, were all quite gone. And with them an irreplaceable part of moledom’s lost heritage.

“There’s still the old library,” he said. “They’ve never come near that.”

“Humph!” said Starling.

“And our place is safe enough, and I like it. I don’t want to leave. I’m old. Look at me!”

“You don’t look old at all.” Then she smiled briefly and added, “You weren’t old in the autumn when I got with pup again.”

“You didn’t this spring past, thank the Stone. That’s age.”

“No, Heath, it’s being sensible. Well, maybe we
are
older than we were, but not too old to leave.”

The roaring owl stopped roaring, and peace returned.

Below them, spreading far and wide, lay the Wen, blue, hazy and beautiful in the sunshine.

She stanced down companionably by him and said, “I shall miss it all. I’ve got used to it.”

“I shall miss
you
when you leave,” grumbled Heath. “But you’ve been saying you’d go back to Duncton for years and you never have, and I don’t believe you will. What’s special about this time except that a few old tunnels and burrows have been destroyed? There’s still plenty of room, and anyway we could always follow the youngsters up to the Heath and find a spot there.”

“Too many dogs,” said Starling with distaste. “What’s special this time? I don’t know. Something.”

She looked up at the bright sky and said more softly, “Something
is
special now. I sometimes feel we’ve just been watching over this old place, and guarding what little there is left.”

“Well, the texts are safe enough – Spindle and Mayweed saw to that. I wonder...” He stopped himself from wondering. Heath preferred reveries in the present, not reveries in the past. But Mayweed... he often thought of him.

“Why, what is it, Heath?” said Starling gently, seeing the tears suddenly in his eyes.

He shook his head and pretended to push her comforting paw away. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just me getting old and remembering moles I liked.”

But that night, when Heath was dozing in their burrow, Starling slipped out and climbed up to that spot of ground that lies above Dunbar’s old library in the Wen where moles who wanted to be closer to the Stone went, and none normally disturbed them.

She had first started going there with Feverfew after Tryfan, Spindle, and Mayweed had left, and here they had talked and shared their dreams and hopes.

Not that Starling was much of a dreamer, nor much of one to think of the Stone, though she lived by it as well as anymole, and had brought up her many pups to speak its prayers and rituals, and celebrate its seasons.

But more than that... why, that had been more Feverfew’s thing. She had been the one with dreams. She had been the one who followed the call of the eastern star.

“Not me,” sniffed Starling, discovering she was fighting back some unaccustomed tears.

But something had changed and she did not know what it was. Not having pups this spring past, perhaps, which meant that despite all her protests to Heath and his worry about age, she too was getting old.

“Has this been my life?” she whispered to herself, staring across the Wen, all lit up with lights and to her even more beautiful than in the daytime, with its familiar night-time roar and orange glow on the clouds above.

She had become the acknowledged elder of the place, and it had been her young that had ventured off to Hampstead Heath and come back and brought others with them, so that now there were new moles in both places, and each system survived.

“That was my work and Heath’s,” she said.

High above the stars were bright, the air gentle on her snout, and she sniffed again and did not mind the tears that came.

“In autumn Duncton must be so beautiful, and if we left now...” She could just remember the great trees with the light all shimmery, and Lorren and Bailey to keep charge of and Bailey saying, “Look! Look!” He had always looked at so much and she had envied him the things he seemed to see.

Some of her male pups had reminded her of him, with their wide eyes and eagerness, and trust. Their heart-stopping trust.

Up the slope and out of the darkness Heath came.

“I was worried about you,” he said.

She heard his voice, she saw his warm, familiar shape, but only when his paw reached out to her did her snout go low, and her tears freely come, and she whispered, “I failed him, I wasn’t there when he needed me, I failed him, Heath.”

Heath was silent for a time, and let her weep. It wasn’t a thing she often did.

“A mole never forgets some moles he’s known. With me it’s my sister Haize, lost in the Wen, and that madcap Mayweed. I’d do anything to see them again. With you it’s Bailey and Lorren, isn’t it? You know why you never went back? Guilt. Fear as well, probably, but guilt mainly. Well, the way Mayweed told it there was nothing you could have done, nor any other mole.”

“But he trusted me, Heath. Reason does not restore broken trust, only love does. I failed him.”

“And all those pups you’ve loved and raised? And me? And all of us here in the Wen, and those up on the Heath? There’s none would call
you
a failing, mole! But as for Bailey, I can’t help you there. And anyway, I suppose I feel I failed Haize. But then, being a very much older mole than you, I’ve got used to it.”

She smiled, and felt loved, and brushed a paw where her tears had been. But then....

“Heath?”

“Starling?”

“Thank you! But would you mind if I ask you to leave me now? I suddenly want to be alone. Please don’t mind.”

Heath grinned in the dark.

“Feel like that myself often enough! But if you do decide to leave I’ll be coming with you. You’d never make it through the Wen alone, and anyway, I’d like to see Duncton Wood.”

Then with a squeeze of her paw he was gone.

She felt sudden excitement and gazed up at the stars all bright above her. She
was
loved, and she had done right by all her pups, and it was wrong what the yellow roaring owl had done... and, and, and.

And suddenly she knew the time was right to leave. There was more for her out beyond the Wen – if she could get there – than there was here. She had been the one to stay, first when Tryfan left and then when Feverfew had gone. Now others could stay because it was
her
time to leave.

She ran down the slope, not old at all, and into where Heath was trying to sleep, and she prodded him to wakefulness.

“We’re leaving, you and I. We’ve been here too long.”

“Have we?” said Heath.

They lay in silence together, Heath dozing, but Starling’s mind was racing.

“We’ll take some of the texts in the library with us, the ones Spindle said were old.”

“They’re all old.”

“Well, the old, old ones then. And....”

In the darkness Heath smiled.

“And how will we find our way out of the Wen?” he asked.

“The same way Feverfew did, because I’m sure she did. The Stone will guide us, won’t it?”

“It’s what I was hoping!” said Heath.

Chapter Forty-One

All summer long there was a steady arrival of moles in Duncton Wood so that by October it was beginning to have the feel of a system once more.

Many were younger moles born locally, who had left their home burrows earlier in the summer and were looking for a good place to be, and learning that Duncton Wood was accessible again thought they would try it out.

A few of the arrivals, who came from the pastures beyond the cross-under and south of it, preferred to take up residence on the pastures below the wood, drifting to the better ground that lies west of the High Wood where the soil is more wormful. But most followed Whortle and Wren to the Eastside and settled into long-discarded burrows there.

In fact these two moles, and their offspring, Dewberry, Rush, and the studious Kale, proved solid and dependable additions to the system from the start, for Wren’s sense of determined responsibility was balanced by Whortle’s kindness and sense of fun, and if he could be stubborn and go off in a huff by himself once in a while, well, a system wasn’t worth the name if it couldn’t cope with that. And anyway, at such times, which usually arose when Wren was ordering Whortle about too much, he ended up passing the time of day with Romney or any other male he could find, and helping them out in some way.

As for working the communal tunnels, what had begun as a joke with Wren had become his special concern by the time the autumn came. “Going a Whortle” was the expression moles began to use of the task of renovating yet another stretch of communal tunnel that moles found abandoned from the long years of neglect the system had suffered.

Wren’s youngsters had all found places of their own by late summer and after trying various combinations of tunnels and burrows were all well ensconced in time for the autumn, and the places they chose reflected their different characters.