A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The sound was easy to miss.

That was the thing about it — if Benji had been keeping to the main ride through the wood, nose skimming the tops of the interesting smells left by deer and fox along the broad path, he would have walked straight through Hockley Wood and never heard it at all.

But something had drawn him off the ride.

Not a decision exactly. More the way his paws had simply moved toward a particular smell — deep and earthy and old, different from the loamy richness of the wood floor, different even from the clean mineral smell of the sweet chestnut roots — and he had followed it without quite knowing why, threading through the understorey and the dense hazel, deeper into the wood where the oak and sweet chestnut grew tall on the higher ground and the light came through in long slanted bars.

He had walked this Essex woodland before, but never this far in. The trees here were older — the sweet chestnuts especially, their great twisted trunks rising from stools that were themselves ancient, cut and grown and cut again since Saxon times, each one sending up a ring of new stems from the old root system every coppice cycle, the whole thing so old and settled it seemed less like a tree than a place.

Benji's red collar caught the woodland light as he stopped at the top of a low ridge.

Not a hill. A bank.

A long, straight-edged earth bank running east to west through the wood, its sides dense with roots and moss and the accumulated centuries of undisturbed woodland soil. This was one of the old woodbanks — the medieval boundaries that had divided Hockley's woods into separate holdings when the Earl of Warwick owned Hawkwell Wood and someone else owned Great Bull Wood and the banks marked where one lord's trees ended and another's began. That was hundreds of years ago. The lords were long gone. The bank remained.

And in the bank, worn smooth at the entrance by the passage of many bodies over many years, was a sett.

Benji pressed his nose to the earth.

Warm fur. Old roots. Dry grass. And beneath it all — the deep mineral certainty of a place that had been lived in for a very long time.

He was still crouched at the bank's base, reading it, when the sound began.

A low, rumbling murmur from somewhere deep inside the earth. Not frightening. The most settled sound Benji had ever heard — the sound of something utterly at home.

Then, above it, a different sound.

From somewhere further along the woodbank, toward the old sweet chestnut coppice — thin, high, uncertain. A sound that did not match the settled certainty of the sett at all.

Benji raised his head.

And the broad striped face of a badger appeared at the sett entrance.