Quest for the Faradawn - страница 26

And so it happened that when the moon began to shine that night it found a boy, a badger and a hare still sitting looking down on the wood; each of them silently lost in his own different thoughts. Across the fields a little girl was looking out of her bedroom window at the moon and thinking, as she had done ever since the afternoon, of the strangely beautiful boy she had met by the stream. It seemed like a dream but she knew that it had been real. She couldn’t tell anyone, of course; that would spoil the magic, and it was her secret that she would keep with her always.

The fresh green days of spring passed all too quickly and turned into a hot, hazy, dry summer. Nab spent the long hours of sunshine drowsing in the shade under the tall bracken that covered all the top part of the wood or lying at the foot of one of the great beech trees where the ground always seemed cool and there was plenty of refreshing sorrel and chickweed to nibble at. As evening fell he would make his way slowly back home and then with Brock or Perryfoot or sometimes Rufus the Red he would go searching for food.

The incident by the stream had dominated everyone’s thoughts all summer. At first it had been thought by the elders of the Council that it would be unwise to tell the wood of what had happened for fear of causing panic and even anger at Nab; but it had not been long before rumours had begun to spread and, as most of these wild and exaggerated tales were different, it had eventually been considered the best policy to call a Council Meeting and clear everything up by disclosing the truth. It had been a somewhat unruly meeting with Wythen having to use all his authority to control matters, but Nab, at his first Council and feeling extremely nervous, had given a good account of himself in his attempts to explain exactly what he had done and why he had done it. This, coupled with the fact that most of the woodland animals now knew him and liked him, eventually won the day and it was decided that the only danger was the possibility that the little girl would have told her parents and the Urkku would come searching for him. Thus the guardians of the wood, Warrigal and Brock, were asked to keep an especially careful look-out, but since it was now almost the end of summer and there had been no Urkku in the wood since the affair, it was believed, to everyone’s relief, that the little girl had kept the meeting secret.

The incident had had a particularly marked effect on Nab. Although he had been aware before that he was a different type of animal from any of the others in the wood, it had never before seemed to matter very much. Now he had seen other Urkku he was filled with a curiosity to find out more about them for himself. He thought constantly of the little girl and was unable to clear his mind of his golden image of her as she had stood waving at him and smiling from the banks of the stream with the breeze ruffling her dress and blowing in her hair. But his memory was always bittersweet as he recalled the confused turmoil of emotions that had made him snatch away his hand and run off. He also began to realize, for the first time, that he had not been born in the wood and that he must have two parents somewhere of his own race. Why had they left him under the Great Oak so many seasons ago?

Where did they come from? What were they like? These questions repeated themselves over and over in his mind and he spent much time thinking about them while he was walking through the wood in the evening or musing in the daytime under the bracken. One night Tara had gone into his bush for a talk and found him sitting in a corner looking completely lost in himself. She turned round and without being noticed made her way back to the sett. There she began to dig in the wall where, so many seasons ago, she had buried the multi-coloured shawl in which he had been found. The walls of the sett were rubbed smooth and hard but her strong claws soon felt the cavity in which she had placed it. Taking it out carefully she shook it to get any soil off and then, having repaired the wall, went back up the passage and once more into Nab’s bush. She went up to him and rubbed her nose against his neck. He looked up slowly and stared into her warm black eyes; ‘Hello, it’s nice to see you,’ he said.