The Willows in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page B

even
“Mole”.
    As Mole’s Nephew wept at the unexpected
generosity and sentiments of his uncle, the Water Rat read the writing through
again and then went down to the river. He peered across and saw the jagged gap
where the ice had broken, and the black deep waters of the river that rushed
and flowed so cruelly there.
    “My friends,” he said at last, “I greatly fear
that we may not see Mole alive again. He must have been trying to get across
the river to help me. He knew how dangerous that would be and yet — and yet he
tried. No doubt he went carefully, but Mole was never a river animal and did
not understand that of all the River’s moods her worst and meanest is when she
is covered in ice. Yet alone as he was, and no doubt afraid, on he went in the
cause of his friends. Not just for me, Otter, but for you as well.”
    The Otter sniffed, and a great big tear rolled
down his face in the dusk.

    “He was the bravest mole I ever knew,” he said.
“He was the truest friend I ever had,” said the Rat. “My uncle was the greatest
mole who ever lived,” said his Nephew.
    For a long time they stood in silence as the
night gathered about them, the flickering light on the willow root a beacon to
light a friend on a journey they could never be part of.
    “But isn’t it possible he climbed back out onto
the bank?” said his Nephew much later.
    “Or that he never fell in in the first place but is somewhere on the other side and the ice broke later?”
said the Otter hopefully.
    “In short, that we have jumped to the wrong
conclusion?” said the ‘Water Rat.
    The others nodded in the dark.
    “Unlikely,” said the Rat finally, as he stared
at the river, utterly still, his grief total and complete.
    Much later still, speaking in a low voice, he
said this:
    “All my life I have lived by the River and I
have known her in all her moods. I have shared with her good times and bad. One
thing she has never failed to do is to talk to me, though sometimes I found it
hard to listen and understand what she said. Today she has been speaking to me
but I did not want to hear what she said. You know what I mean, Otter, it
sometimes just isn’t possible to —”To make sense of things,” said Otter.
    “Exactly Now, we are all tired and over-wrought
and if Mole is still alive there is little good we can do floundering
around in the dark. We shall go back to Mole End. We shall sleep. Then tomorrow
we shall call on Mr Badger and institute a search for Mole, for I shall not be
satisfied till I know what has happened to him one way or the other. Perhaps
tomorrow I can try listening to the River once more — by myself — and perhaps
it will all make more sense.
    “Now we shall put a new candle in Mole’s
lantern, we shall light it, and we shall leave it here in the hope that somehow
or other he will see its light, and know how much he is loved, and how much
missed; and how much we want him back again!”
    They did this with all due ceremony, standing
again in silence with the light flickering on their sombre faces before the Rat
led them silently away from the river bank, back through the night to Mole End.
     
    The ‘Water Rat knew a night of shadows and half-dreams in which, try as
he might, he could not get out of his head memories of Mole sitting so
comfortably on the garden seat in the hot afternoon sun of the summer,
reflecting upon life or, more often than not, upon something better still:
nothing at all.
    “Mole, dear friend,” Rat remembered himself
saying many a time, “this place is too comfortable, too pleasant, and I feel
once more a yearning to get into my boat.”
    “Ratty, I am not at all surprised,” Mole would
reply, “and it would be pleasant, very pleasant, to sit in your boat once more,
with you sculling, which you do so much better than I, trailing a paw in the
placid water, which I do so much better than you.
    “Trouble is, we have to get there, and that
means getting out of this very comfortable