Duncton Wood

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Authors: William Horwood
Tags: Fiction, General
interest and the fact that he had exhausted the exploration possibilities of westside and Barrow Vale that led him to strike out toward the slopes one day.
     

   6  
    T HERE were far fewer moles there, and after several visits, getting higher each time, he began to see that he would have to explore in a different way. For one thing, the higher he got, the more he found the mixed oaks and elms and safe undergrowth he had been used to giving way to open beech wood with its disconcerting layer of rustling beech leaves, which gave away every movement if a mole wanted to travel fast. The burrows and tunnels in this borderland had a curious, derelict air that, at first, Bracken found depressing. Tunnel after tunnel would be abandoned and dusty, or taken over by weasels or voles, though only for a short way past their entrances. Or he would find a system that had recently been lived in, for scraps of worms remained, or the entrances weren’t grown over, or he could smell the demarcation marks left by their occupants, faint but discernible. But rarely any moles.
    Then there were large areas where no mole seemed to have burrowed, though quite why, he couldn’t work out. When he was there, he began to feel he would never see anymole here at all, and even found himself talking to himself on occasion, almost as if he missed company.
    All this meant that he found the slopes wearing and at first could only take a short while of them, scampering back to the westside as quickly as he could – running down communal tunnels where they helped him and over the surface if a tunnel route meant a confrontation he preferred to avoid. It was so tiring placating moles!
    May slid into June and he was no longer a pup. Root and Wheatear were nearly adult in size and tried more and more to behave like them, too, which meant they would ignore him totally, attack him, or push him out of the way. If he found worms when they had none, for example, they would simply take them from him, talons raised above his vulnerable snout as a warning that they meant business.
    He sensed his time in the burrow was running out, so to try to extend it he exaggerated yet further his juvenile pose, going about in the defensive stance of a timid, placatory mole. Burrhead began to call him “young Bracken,” as a way of differentiating him from Root and Wheatear, who seemed in his terms to be growing up normally. Bracken, he was beginning to think, was in some way backward and hardly worth getting into a lather about any more. He obviously wasn’t going to last long once the summer came and the new generation started its search for territory.
    “He won’t stand a chance against this spring’s lot,” Burrhead told Aspen one day at the end of May. “But every litter has its wrongun’s.” Aspen nodded, but she was not so sure. Bracken was a disappointment and yet, well, “He’s not so stupid as he sometimes seems, you know – he knows much more about the system than either of the other two – in fact he knows more than I do.” But this was just a disguise for her true feelings about Bracken, which were those of many a female for the weakest of her litter: compassion mixed with hope that they might turn out better in the. end. And he did like her stories, which was more than she could say for Root and Wheat-ear, for all their stolid, moleworthy qualities.
    But she didn’t say any of this to Burrhead because it just wasn’t worth it, and she was losing interest in them all. The litter would be gone soon and they had the summer to get through, when she’d be on her own much more, and she was looking forward to it. Sensing these things. Bracken spent more and more time away from the home burrow and began to consider carefully where he might go when he finally left it. He had no desire to compete with the likes of Root for a place in the westside. He wasn’t crazy I
    Nor did he know enough about the north or the east-side yet to make plans in that

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