Maw Mole

It breaks up through a lane beneath a laden cart, a digger the bulk of a bullock, dark of fur, its forefeet set like a row of hay-forks and its snout opening into a ring of pink and fleshy fingers. Yet it is less the beast the valleys fear than the hole it leaves behind.

Ask the carters of the tithe country and they will tell it of the tithe road, down which, in the weeks after harvest, the wagons come in from the villages to the great barns, by Saint Benedict’s Ford where road and water meet. Twenty years of driving it teach a man how that road should sound beneath his wheels. The tale is told one way only. Under a lane that has carried laden wagons for a hundred years the ground rings hollow beneath one of them; it settles; it gives way in front of the horse. Up from the gap comes a thing the bigness of a bullock, black and wet and furred, with forefeet like hay-forks set in a row and a snout parted into a ring of pink fingers that grope at the air; and whatever has gone in with it, a sheep, a dog, a horse’s leg, goes down with it. That is how Merefield came to lose a wagon of barley, by the carters’ account, and how Tithe End lost a team.

Everything the valleys do about it hangs on the column of the Clearance Roll that receives it, and since the roll is read at quarter sessions, the dispute is heard by all. Beasts taken are parish work, posted from the chest and paid in shillings on the day upon the incumbent’s word. Sinkholes are the Water Court’s, posted as sinkhole recovery at a flat rate that has not moved since 4412 and verified by a man of the Court’s choosing. The vestry wants the mole put down as a beast, it being cheap and quick. The Court wants it put down as a hole, and with reason, for what the belt fears above all is a dead beast in a sinkhole rising again in some spring downhill and miles distant. And so the parish has the hole filled that day, lifting out anything dead before it does. One company, having killed a mole, brought in both verifiers and drew both payments; the vestries hold it against them still.

Of the tithe auditors’ concern in the matter little is said, and that by design. Where a wagon is lost in a lane short of the barns, the question at the heart of every audit is raised, whether the loss lies with the village that grew the barley or with the house that was owed it; and Halden Close would sooner nobody asked it aloud in front of a vestry. The shepherds up on the Wold shoulder in the Sarrum county know the same beast, and nurse a grievance over it. Across on the measures side, any lane that sinks is blamed on the old workings; under the shoulder there are no workings, and there the sunken lanes are blamed upon the mole. The saying to carry away is the carters’: a lane that rings under the wheel has room beneath it. Where one does, they walk the horses across one by one, and take the wagon over afterwards, empty.

As witnesses describe it

Shaped like a mole but immense and dark, its fur slick with wet, it heaves up through a stony lane between the fields. Its forelimbs are enormous and finish in long curved claws, and its snout is a grotesque fleshy pink that opens out in thick bristled lobes. A carter behind has reined in horse and cart; there are a hedge, a dry-stone wall and a farmhouse, and green fields running away under a grey sky.