A Story of a Mole

This is only a story of a mole. The incident may not figure in that mole’s top ten incidents of its life. It may, on its death-bed, have little or no recollection of what happened in this story, other far more exciting things may have happened to it. And it did not seem an unusually special mole, one about which epics might be written. So a story of a mole.
The college I was studying at gave me a part-time job. I helped out wherever they needed me; in the kitchens, the grounds, the library. In the summer the college put up tourists in the student accommodations. The students hid under the beds all summer. It caused a few scenes when they had to sneak in late at night after the pub. Not really, it was a one year deal at the college, the students stared in September and finished in May. So by one-year I mean one academic year. It offered an access course which was a pre-entry to university. So no need for any hiding under the beds. Or, at least, not during the summer.
If they were short in the kitchens; I worked in the kitchens, like the time one of the women called in sick saying she thought she had ‘that mad cow disease.’ How she could tell, I don’t know. Or I looked after the library. Small college, small library. It looked like the kind of library in in old detective novels, a body with a crooked dagger in its back would have fitted right in with the general ambience. Mainly, though I worked in the grounds cutting grass, thinning out the shrubberies, clearing up whenever one of the centuries-old beech trees collapsed in a gale.
In a way I quite enjoyed the grass-cutting as long as I was using the big red tractor. Young mothers would walk their children in the grounds and little boys would always look at the tractor enviously. I could swagger sitting down. Men didn’t envy me. Women didn’t envy me. Four-year-old boys did.
I could muse for hours as I traced the same patterns on acre after acre of grass. I wrote a play in my head one day, must look it out, I’ll let you know when it gets staged.
The college grounds were the responsibility of Billy. I would go to the door of his little house in the grounds for my orders. Half the time he’d answer half-dressed, getting up early was not his strongest suit. He was pretty laid-back about most things. Not about the moles. The lawns were not stately home quality, but they still were not helped by the little mountain ranges that sprang up. I tried telling Billy how clever they were; how the mounds were constructed so that the air moving over them had to speed up and, like air moving over a wing, that created lift, or in the case of the molehills, suction. That pulled air along the tunnels making them liveable, at least if you were a mole. He didn’t care. He insisted I stop my tractor, get off and knock over the ‘hills with my boot to save the cutting-deck from getting knocked about. As I did so, I would look out for Neolithic arrowheads or Jacobean coins in the soil, it kept my mind off the vandalism. I told Billy that the moles would just excavate more but he didn’t listen.
‘That’s not just tunnelling,’ I said, ‘ that’s civil engineering!’
‘I don’t care, they’re getting right up to the college. The lawn looks like a Martian teenager’s face with a bad attack of blackheads and I’m getting the blame. There are some old traps hanging up in the garage. Look them out and I’ll see if they’re still in working order.’
Not me pal, I’m no mole killer. No molecide I. I let it drop, thinking that he’d probably forget. In the meantime I found the traps and slung them into a far, dark corner of the garage’s attic.
‘I found the mole traps slung into a far, dark corner of the garage attic,’ Billy said to me a couple of days later. ‘I’ve given them a clean and oil and am going set a few, see how we get on.’ He didn’t ask me to do it, knew that I was a nature-boy. The kitchen-staff thought me a little odd as they’d see me head into the woods before breakfast. I lived in the student block and ate in the student canteen, but liked to get in an early walk; see some roe deer or a fox, a kingfisher heading downriver maybe. I’d cross a stubble-field and listen as my boots made flute-like whistles come from every stalk as I walked, my head up watching a buzzard circling.
Billy, when I wasn’t around, put in a few traps. I only realised this when I saw the markers he had placed so that he would find them again; short lengths of cane, little red rags on the top. A few days later I was mooching around the front of the college talking to a few students and tutors. Maybe it was lunchtime, maybe I just couldn’t be bothered doing much because it was a sunny day and the others seemed to be of the same lunch-hour or mind. Billy was there too, hands in pockets, looking for a anyone female to chat up. I took the opportunity of landing him in it.
‘Hey Billy, I’m going to see if your trap caught anything.’ I could hear behind me comments and questions…traps? What traps? What’s he talking about?
I walked over to the nearest marker and turned over the turf. Billy had sliced a spade-wide gap in the tunnel between two molehills and placed the metal cylindrical device. I had forgotten to mention that by oiling the traps, Billy might warn off the moles. It hadn’t worked.
‘You’ve caught one, Billy.’ I think he was as surprised as I was. I could hear more voices..what’s he done? Has he killed something?…What for?…The poor wee thing.
I went down on my knees to look more closely. I could hear Billy walking over the grass toward me.
‘it’s still alive.’ The trap had sprung too soon. The mole was caught only by its snout. I lifted the trap out gently. The metal jaws had snapped too soon at it’s prey. I ran for a cardboard box and managed to open the trap inside it. The mole seemed only to have suffered a bloody nose. It was soon scrabbling around the box as a circle of human heads gathered around to look. Small and covered in dense black fur, huge, for its size, curiously hand-like claws, the bloody nose, it was like a prizefighter in the ring stumbling around, beaten and bloody. I left the crowd behind and took it away. I had only seen one or two live moles before. As I walked I kept looking down into the box. Could it tell? A big bespectacled moon looking down at it. Moles do not like the moon. They come out of their tunnels at night for a walk on the dewy grass, having a snack and getting some air. But not when there is a big moon, bespectacled or not. It picks them out for the eyes of hungry foxes and owls. He kept scrabbling away, probably puzzled at why his claws could find no purchase. I’d quickly stopped thinking ‘it’ and substituted ‘he’, though it or he might have been a she. Hard to sex a mole.
I took the box round the back of the college and through the formal gardens until I reached the rough grass beyond. There were some molehills there. I carefully upended the box over a hill and the mole immediately burrowed its’ way into it and disappeared. Later I remembered that moles are not very keen on houseguests. The mole that lived in that hole was probably very irate to have an unannounced visitor. Maybe killed him. I hope not. I hope that the visitor kept himself to himself for a few hours and, when the sun had set, made its’ way out into the field and established a new home elsewhere far from traps and bespectacled moons.
Billy dug up the rest of the traps. He couldn’t handle the evil looks he was getting, the whispers. And he couldn’t understand the reaction of the crowd. The mole is not a pretty animal, he thought, it is not elegant like the roe deer; not endearing like a squirrel, nor handsome like a fox. Ugly or not, and I thought not, the mole had, the crowd seemed to believe, the right to dig where it pleased and look how it liked and not end in the jaws of a steel trap. And maybe he or she, or his or her ancestors, are still digging beneath the great and ancient beeches that sway and dream in the meadow.