Read Duncton Wood for Free Online Page B

blizzard broke had been right, for where she had finally lain to litter was not so far from one of the outlying entrances to the Siabod system. And the wind was in the right direction to carry his cries to a mole by the entrance, and a female at that. She was very young and yet she climbed across the slope toward the cries and found Mandrake crying and nestling into the cold body of his mother, surrounded by the pathetic remains of the rest of the litter. She comforted him, warmed him and nudged him down the wet slope into the system. Anymole who saw him that day or in the days following will not forget the sight; eyes open, fur barely grown, head big, paws scrabbling and flailing – lost and untrusting and wild. So he always remained, wild and aggressive.
    “As he grew, he took to roaming Siabod’s sides for food. I have seen him myself, the great, fierce Mandrake, silent and evil, leaving the system to search on the surface, fearless of weather or birds. One day he left like that and he has never come back.”
    Such is the record in Uffington as told to Boswell himself so long ago. No more is said about how Mandrake came to leave Siabod and make his way to Duncton Wood. Perhaps he thought he might find something he had once lost in a storm. Who can say?
    Nor can we say how much of this Sarah knew. But if she” had but a tiny fraction of the compassion that her daughter Rebecca was to have – and where else would Rebecca have found it? – then in the mating burrow with Mandrake she must have felt his loss and tried to cherish him as, in other circumstances, he might have been cherished at birth: to help him escape the world of blackness into which he was born and in which he believed he lived.
    At any rate, what is known is that Mandrake chose Sarah for a mate; that he watched her grow big with her litter; that he stayed nearby at the birth; and that he waited brooding, turning, twisting, scratching his face with his talons, never comfortable, in the tunnel outside until the litter showed.
    He came to the burrow entrance – Sarah allowed him no farther – and looked at the litter. Three males and a female. He watched her croon to them and they, pink, comfortable and safe in her nest, her body warndy encircling their snouts and still-pale whiskers wet with her milk. But he. seemed interested only in the female, who struggled, paws bending and flexing weakly, questing for milk as the others did. His eyes were on her alone.
    “Call her Sarah, after yourself,” he ordered. “It’s a fine, strong name.”
    But Sarah looked up from her litter and straight at him with the same mixture of compassion and strength that the tiny female pup now suckling her was to have in her face when she looked on Bracken at their first meeting many moleyears later.
    “Her name will be Rebecca,” she said.
    Mandrake looked at the tiny, struggling female and back at Sarah, and then back at his daughter again: he who had killed so many moles had once been as helpless as this, but he didn’t think of that; he, who had taken so many females, had given them pups like this, but he didn’t think of that either; nor did he think that he, whose talons ached with killing and whose shoulders hung huge and heavy on his body, now craved to lean into the burrow and touch his daughter.
    But though he was not able to think these things and say them to himself, they twisted and turned and racked his heart as he crouched in the tunnel unable to say anything. Mandrake, huge and menacing, unable to cut through the whirling darkness of his mind: impotent.
    Rebecca, tiny, pink and suckling. Alive!
    “Call her Rebecca, then,” he said finally, finding himself unaccountably gasping and breathless and wanting to run away from the burrow. “Call her Rebecca!” he said more loudly, turning back into the tunnel clumsily, feeling more than ever the huge, cumbersome weight of himself on himself and wanting to shake and rip it off.
    “Call her Rebecca!”