Duncton Wood by William Horwood Page A

which were now heavy with bud. Anemones, celandine, daffodils were almost everywhere. Some days, it was true, the sky would be gray and dark with the air around the trees and undergrowth heavy and still. But only some days. Increasingly she would poke her snout out of a tunnel entrance early in the morning and see a magical, light, swirling mist running through the wood, white and pink as the sun broke through it. The buds and flowers about her seemed to be opening, reaching up through the light mist to the sun beyond.
    “Oh!” she sighed. “How beautiful!” Near her a cluster of celandine, yellow petals half open, reached up softly to the sky. The mist thinned before her eyes until it was almost gone, and she ran across the surface among the trees feeling she was part of the spring excitement of the wood. From afar off to the eastside, the soft caw-caws of rooks carried to her, long and slow compared with the trilling of the blackbirds and thrush that darted in and out among the trees as excited as she was. She ran to the center of Barrow Vale to watch the wood wake up as the last of the thin wisps of mist swirled away into the sunshine. A warm, moist, nutty smell had replaced the rotting smell of winter, which she now saw, for the first time, was unpleasant and hung about the tunnels still.
    Duncton Wood spread away all around her – over to the westside and the east, down to the south where her brothers had gotten lost, and up toward the slopes leading to the top of Duncton Hill. Oh, she wanted to sing and dance and call everymole together and celebrate! Duncton Wood! The name was magical in the sunlight. The winter’s years have gone! She laughed, or rather smiled aloud, her joy shaking among the yellow petals of the celandine which were now open, and echoed in the constant calls and whistles of the birds. The great oaks, round and solid at their bases, rose high about the edge of Barrow Vale, and somewhere among their branches a woodpecker drummed its territorial rights from a tree and then flew direct to another oak to drum again.
    “It’s my wood,” she whispered to herself, joyfully. “My wood!”
    “And mine too,” said a voice behind her, the voice of Rune. She turned round, startled, but as’ usual found it hard to see him immediately, so good was he at hiding in impenetrable shadows, even on a sunny day.
    “You shouldn’t be here, you know,” he said coldly, but with a smile to his voice that only seemed to underline the threat it carried.
    To Rebecca, Rune, who still smelled of winter, spoiled everything she was enjoying about the morning, and so she ran off without a word, across Barrow Vale. Rune followed urgently, easily keeping up with her but hanging behind two or three paws’ distance. Rune wanted Rebecca, he wanted to mate with her. His desire was not lust, for Rune did not give way to simple lust, the lust he felt for any female in mid-March, but a kind of sick sensuality based on the fact that she was Mandrake’s daughter. He felt, in some way, that his position in the system gave him the right to take her and also that it would make him equal with Mandrake.
    Sensing at least some of this, Rebecca’s joy in the morning died within her and she ran anxiously down into the tunnels toward her home burrow, trying not to appear too disturbed by Rune’s presence. He followed behind her, the sound of his paws on the tunnel floor liquid and smooth. Her breath became irregular; she could smell Rune behind her and hear his chill voice calling after her “Rebecca, Rebecca, I was only joking about you not being allowed out on Barrow Vale. Stay and talk.”
    Rebecca scurried on, ready now to turn with her talons on Rune and draw his blood if she had to. Imperceptibly the scamper along the tunnels turned into a chase, until they were traveling at speed, and Rebecca had to think very fast to twist and turn in the right direction. Sometimes Rune would disappear down a turn in the tunnel, only to