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The Second Jungle Book

by Rudyard Kipling · English · Gutenberg #1937 · 366,984 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Second Jungle Book

Author: Rudyard Kipling


        
Release date: October 1, 1999 [eBook #1937]
                Most recently updated: October 7, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1937

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK

By Rudyard Kipling




CONTENTS

     How Fear Came
     The Law of the Jungle
     The Miracle of Purun Bhagat
     A Song of Kabir
     Letting in the Jungle
     Mowgli’s Song against People
     The Undertakers
     A Ripple Song
     The King’s Ankus
     The Song of the Little Hunter
     Quiquern
     ‘Angutivaun Taina’
     Red Dog
     Chil’s Song
     The Spring Running
     The Outsong




HOW FEAR CAME

     The stream is shrunk--the pool is dry,
     And we be comrades, thou and I;
     With fevered jowl and dusty flank
     Each jostling each along the bank;
     And by one drouthy fear made still,
     Forgoing thought of quest or kill.
     Now ‘neath his dam the fawn may see,
     The lean Pack-wolf as cowed as he,
     And the tall buck, unflinching, note
     The fangs that tore his father’s throat.
     The pools are shrunk--the streams are dry,
     And we be playmates, thou and I,
     Till yonder cloud--Good Hunting!--loose
     The rain that breaks our Water Truce.

The Law of the Jungle--which is by far the oldest law in the world--has
arranged for almost every kind of accident that may befall the Jungle
People, till now its code is as perfect as time and custom can make
it. You will remember that Mowgli spent a great part of his life in the
Seeonee Wolf-Pack, learning the Law from Baloo, the Brown Bear; and
it was Baloo who told him, when the boy grew impatient at the constant
orders, that the Law was like the Giant Creeper, because it dropped
across every one’s back and no one could escape. “When thou hast lived
as long as I have, Little Brother, thou wilt see how all the Jungle
obeys at least one Law. And that will be no pleasant sight,” said Baloo.

This talk went in at one ear and out at the other, for a boy who spends
his life eating and sleeping does not worry about anything till it
actually stares him in the face. But, one year, Baloo’s words came true,
and Mowgli saw all the Jungle working under the Law.

It began when the winter Rains failed almost entirely, and Ikki, the
Porcupine, meeting Mowgli in a bamboo-thicket, told him that the wild
yams were drying up. Now everybody knows that Ikki is ridiculously
fastidious in his choice of food, and will eat nothing but the very best
and ripest. So Mowgli laughed and said, “What is that to me?”

“Not much NOW,” said Ikki, rattling his quills in a stiff, uncomfortable
way, “but later we shall see. Is there any more diving into the deep
rock-pool below the Bee-Rocks, Little Brother?”

“No. The foolish water is going all away, and I do not wish to break my
head,” said Mowgli, who, in those days, was quite sure that he knew as
much as any five of the Jungle People put together.

“That is thy loss. A small crack might let in some wisdom.” Ikki ducked
quickly to prevent Mowgli from pulling his nose-bristles, and Mowgli
told Baloo what Ikki had said. Baloo looked very grave, and mumbled
half to himself: “If I were alone I would change my hunting-grounds now,
before the others began to think. And yet--hunting among strangers ends
in fighting; and they might hurt the Man-cub. We must wait and see how
the mohwa blooms.”

That spring the mohwa tree, that Baloo was so fond of, never flowered.
The greeny, cream-coloured, waxy blossoms were heat-killed before they
were born, and only a few bad-smelling petals came down when he stood
on his hind legs and shook the tree. Then, inch by inch, the untempered
heat crept into the heart of the Jungle, turning it yellow, brown, and
at last black. The green growths in the sides of the ravines burned up
to broken wires and curled films of dead stuff; the hidden pools sank
down and caked over, keeping the last least footmark on their edges as
if it had been cast in iron; the juicy-stemmed creepers fell away from
the trees they clung to and died at their feet; the bamboos withered,
clanking when the hot winds blew, and the moss peeled off the rocks deep
in the Jungle, till they were as bare and as hot as the quivering blue
boulders in the bed of the stream.

The birds and the monkey-people went north early in the year, for they
knew what was coming; and the deer and the wild pig broke far away to
the perished fields of the villages, dying sometimes before the eyes
of men too weak to kill them. Chil, the Kite, stayed and grew fat, for
there was a great deal of carrion, and evening after evening he
brought the news to the beasts, too weak to force their way to fresh
hunting-grounds, that the sun was killing the Jungle for three days’
flight in every direction.

Mowgli, who had never known what real hunger meant, fell back on stale
honey, three years old, scraped out of deserted rock-hives--honey black
as a sloe, and dusty with dried sugar. He hunted, too, for deep-boring
grubs under the bark of the trees, and robbed the wasps of their new
broods. All the game in the jungle was no more than skin and bone, and
Bagheera could kill thrice in a night, and hardly get a full meal. But
the want of water was the worst, for though the Jungle People drink
seldom they must drink deep.

And the heat went on and on, and sucked up all the moisture, till at
last the main channel of the Waingunga was the only stream that carried
a trickle of water between its dead banks; and when Hathi, the wild
elephant, who lives for a hundred years and more, saw a long, lean blue
ridge of rock show dry in the very centre of the stream, he knew that he
was looking at the Peace Rock, and then and there he lifted up his trunk
and proclaimed the Water Truce, as his father before him had proclaimed
it fifty years ago. The deer, wild pig, and buffalo took up the cry
hoarsely; and Chil, the Kite, flew in great circles far and wide,
whistling and shrieking the warning.

By the Law of the Jungle it is death to kill at the drinking-places
when once the Water Truce has been declared. The reason of this is that
drinking comes before eating. Every one in the Jungle can scramble along
somehow when only game is scarce; but water is water, and when there is
but one source of supply, all hunting stops while the Jungle People go
there for their needs. In good seasons, when water was plentiful, those
who came down to drink at the Waingunga--or anywhere else, for that
matter--did so at the risk of their lives, and that risk made no small
part of the fascination of the night’s doings. To move down so cunningly
that never a leaf stirred; to wade knee-deep in the roaring shallows
that drown all noise from behind; to drink, looking backward over one
shoulder, every muscle ready for the first desperate bound of keen
terror; to roll on the sandy margin, and return, wet-muzzled and well
plumped out, to the admiring herd, was a thing that all tall-antlered
young bucks took a delight in, precisely because they knew that at any
moment Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap upon them and bear them down.
But now all that life-and-death fun was ended, and the Jungle People
came up, starved and weary, to the shrunken river,--tiger, bear, deer,
buffalo, and pig, all together,--drank the fouled waters, and hung above
them, too exhausted to move off.

The deer and the pig had tramped all day in search of something better
than dried bark and withered leaves. The buffaloes had found no wallows
to be cool in, and no green crops to steal. The snakes had left the
Jungle and come down to the river in the hope of finding a stray frog.
They curled round wet stones, and never offered to strike when the nose
of a rooting pig dislodged them. The river-turtles had long ago been
killed by Bagheera, cleverest of hunters, and the fish had buried
themselves deep in the dry mud. Only the Peace Rock lay across the
shallows like a long snake, and the little tired ripples hissed as they
dried on its hot side.

It was here that Mowgli came nightly for the cool and the companionship.
The most hungry of his enemies would hardly have cared for the boy then,
His naked hide made him seem more lean and wretched than any of his
fellows. His hair was bleached to tow colour by the sun; his ribs stood
out like the ribs of a basket, and the lumps on his knees and elbows,
where he was used to track on all fours, gave his shrunken limbs the
look of knotted grass-stems. But his eye, under his matted forelock, was
cool and quiet, for Bagheera was his adviser in this time of trouble,
and told him to go quietly, hunt slowly, and never, on any account, to
lose his temper.

“It is an evil time,” said the Black Panther, one furnace-hot evening,
“but it will go if we can live till the end. Is thy stomach full,
Man-cub?”

“There is stuff in my stomach, but I get no good of it. Think you,
Bagheera, the Rains have forgotten us and will never come again?”

“Not I! We shall see the mohwa in blossom yet, and the little fawns all
fat with new grass. Come down to the Peace Rock and hear the news. On my
back, Little Brother.”

“This is no time to carry weight. I can still stand alone, but--indeed
we be no fatted bullocks, we two.”

Bagheera looked along his ragged, dusty flank and whispered. “Last night
I killed a bullock under the yoke. So low was I brought that I think I
should not have dared to spring if he had been loose. WOU!”

Mowgli laughed. “Yes, we be great hunters now,” said he. “I am very
bold--to eat grubs,” and the two came down together through the
crackling undergrowth to the river-bank and the lace-work of shoals that
ran out from it in every direction.

“The water cannot live long,” said Baloo, joining them. “Look across.
Yonder are trails like the roads of Man.”

On the level plain of the farther bank the stiff jungle-grass had died
standing, and, dying, had mummied. The beaten tracks of the deer and
the pig, all heading toward the river, had striped that colourless plain
with dusty gullies driven through the ten-foot grass, and, early as it
was, each long avenue was full of first-comers hastening to the water.
You could hear the does and fawns coughing in the snuff-like dust.

Up-stream, at the bend of the sluggish pool round the Peace Rock, and
Warden of the Water Truce, stood Hathi, the wild elephant, with his
sons, gaunt and gray in the moonlight, rocking to and fro--always
rocking. Below him a little were the vanguard of the deer; below these,
again, the pig and the wild buffalo; and on the opposite bank, where the
tall trees came down to the water’s edge, was the place set apart for
the Eaters of Flesh--the tiger, the wolves, the panther, the bear, and
the others.

“We are under one Law, indeed,” said Bagheera, wading into the water and
looking across at the lines of clicking horns and starting eyes where
the deer and the pig pushed each other to and fro. “Good hunting, all
you of my blood,” he added, lying own at full length, one flank thrust
out of the shallows; and then, between his teeth, “But for that which is
the Law it would be VERY good hunting.”

The quick-spread ears of the deer caught the last sentence, and a
frightened whisper ran along the ranks. “The Truce! Remember the Truce!”

“Peace there, peace!” gurgled Hathi, the wild elephant. “The Truce
holds, Bagheera. This is no time to talk of hunting.”

“Who should know better than I?” Bagheera answered, rolling his yellow
eyes up-stream. “I am an eater of turtles--a fisher of frogs. Ngaayah!
Would I could get good from chewing branches!”

“WE wish so, very greatly,” bleated a young fawn, who had only been born
that spring, and did not at all like it. Wretched as the Jungle People
were, even Hathi could not help chuckling; while Mowgli, lying on his
elbows in the warm water, laughed aloud, and beat up the scum with his
feet.

“Well spoken, little bud-horn,” Bagheera purred. “When the Truce ends
that shall be remembered in thy favour,” and he looked keenly through
the darkness to make sure of recognising the fawn again.

Gradually the talking spread up and down the drinking-places. One could
hear the scuffling, snorting pig asking for more room; the buffaloes
grunting among themselves as they lurched out across the sand-bars, and
the deer telling pitiful stories of their long foot-sore wanderings in
quest of food. Now and again they asked some question of the Eaters of
Flesh across the river, but all the news was bad, and the roaring hot
wind of the Jungle came and went between the rocks and the rattling
branches, and scattered twigs, and dust on the water.

“The men-folk, too, they die beside their ploughs,” said a young
sambhur. “I passed three between sunset and night. They lay still, and
their Bullocks with them. We also shall lie still in a little.”

“The river has fallen since last night,” said Baloo. “O Hathi, hast thou
ever seen the like of this drought?”

“It will pass, it will pass,” said Hathi, squirting water along his back
and sides.

“We have one here that cannot endure long,” said Baloo; and he looked
toward the boy he loved.

“I?” said Mowgli indignantly, sitting up in the water. “I have no long
fur to cover my bones, but--but if THY hide were taken off, Baloo----”

Hathi shook all over at the idea, and Baloo said severely:

“Man-cub, that is not seemly to tell a Teacher of the Law. Never have I
been seen without my hide.”

“Nay, I meant no harm, Baloo; but only that thou art, as it were, like
the cocoanut in the husk, and I am the same cocoanut all naked. Now that
brown husk of thine----” Mowgli was sitting cross-legged, and explaining
things with his forefinger in his usual way, when Bagheera put out a
paddy paw and pulled him over backward into the water.

“Worse and worse,” said the Black Panther, as the boy rose spluttering.
“First Baloo is to be skinned, and now he is a cocoanut. Be careful that
he does not do what the ripe cocoanuts do.”

“And what is that?” said Mowgli, off his guard for the minute, though
that is one of the oldest catches in the Jungle.

“Break thy head,” said Bagheera quietly, pulling him under again.

“It is not good to make a jest of thy teacher,” said the bear, when
Mowgli had been ducked for the third time.

“Not good! What would ye have? That naked thing running to and fro makes
a monkey-jest of those who have once been good hunters, and pulls the
best of us by the whiskers for sport.” This was Shere Khan, the Lame
Tiger, limping down to the water. He waited a little to enjoy the
sensation he made among the deer on the opposite to lap, growling: “The
jungle has become a whelping-ground for naked cubs now. Look at me,
Man-cub!”

Mowgli looked--stared, rather--as insolently as he knew how, and in
a minute Shere Khan turned away uneasily. “Man-cub this, and Man-cub
that,” he rumbled, going on with his drink, “the cub is neither man nor
cub, or he would have been afraid. Next season I shall have to beg his
leave for a drink. Augrh!”

“That may come, too,” said Bagheera, looking him steadily between the
eyes. “That may come, too--Faugh, Shere Khan!--what new shame hast thou
brought here?”

The Lame Tiger had dipped his chin and jowl in the water, and dark, oily
streaks were floating from it down-stream.

“Man!” said Shere Khan coolly, “I killed an hour since.” He went on
purring and growling to himself.

The line of beasts shook and wavered to and fro, and a whisper went
up that grew to a cry. “Man! Man! He has killed Man!” Then all looked
towards Hathi, the wild elephant, but he seemed not to hear. Hathi never
does anything till the time comes, and that is one of the reasons why he
lives so long.

“At such a season as this to kill Man! Was no other game afoot?” said
Bagheera scornfully, drawing himself out of the tainted water, and
shaking each paw, cat-fashion, as he did so.

“I killed for choice--not for food.” The horrified whisper began again,
and Hathi’s watchful little white eye cocked itself in Shere Khan’s
direction. “For choice,” Shere Khan drawled. “Now come I to drink and
make me clean again. Is there any to forbid?”

Bagheera’s back began to curve like a bamboo in a high wind, but Hathi
lifted up his trunk and spoke quietly.

“Thy kill was from choice?” he asked; and when Hathi asks a question it
is best to answer.

“Even so. It was my right and my Night. Thou knowest, O Hathi.” Shere
Khan spoke almost courteously.

“Yes, I know,” Hathi answered; and, after a little silence, “Hast thou
drunk thy fill?”

“For to-night, yes.”

“Go, then. The river is to drink, and not to defile. None but the Lame
Tiger would so have boasted of his right at this season when--when we
suffer together--Man and Jungle People alike. Clean or unclean, get to
thy lair, Shere Khan!”

The last words rang out like silver trumpets, and Hathi’s three sons
rolled forward half a pace, though there was no need. Shere Khan slunk
away, not daring to growl, for he knew--what every one else knows--that
when the last comes to the last, Hathi is the Master of the Jungle.

“What is this right Shere Khan speaks of?” Mowgli whispered in
Bagheera’s ear. “To kill Man is always, shameful. The Law says so. And
yet Hathi says----”

“Ask him. I do not know, Little Brother. Right or no right, if Hathi had
not spoken I would have taught that lame butcher his lesson. To come
to the Peace Rock fresh from a kill of Man--and to boast of it--is a
jackal’s trick. Besides, he tainted the good water.”

Mowgli waited for a minute to pick up his courage, because no one cared
to address Hathi directly, and then he cried: “What is Shere Khan’s
right, O Hathi?” Both banks echoed his words, for all the People of the
Jungle are intensely curious, and they had just seen something that none
except Baloo, who looked very thoughtful, seemed to understand.

“It is an old tale,” said Hathi; “a tale older than the Jungle. Keep
silence along the banks and I will tell that tale.”

There was a minute or two of pushing a shouldering among the pigs
and the buffalo, and then the leaders of the herds grunted, one after
another, “We wait,” and Hathi strode forward, till he was nearly
knee-deep in the pool by the Peace Rock. Lean and wrinkled and
yellow-tusked though he was, he looked what the Jungle knew him to
be--their master.

“Ye know, children,” he began, “that of all things ye most fear Man;”
 and there was a mutter of agreement.

“This tale touches thee, Little Brother,” said Bagheera to Mowgli.

“I? I am of the Pack--a hunter of the Free People,” Mowgli answered.
“What have I to do with Man?”

“And ye do not know why ye fear Man?” Hathi went on. “This is the
reason. In the beginning of the Jungle, and none know when that was, we
of the Jungle walked together, having no fear of one another. In those
days there was no drought, and leaves and flowers and fruit grew on the
same tree, and we ate nothing at all except leaves and flowers and grass
and fruit and bark.”

“I am glad I was not born in those days,” said Bagheera. “Bark is only
good to sharpen claws.”

“And the Lord of the Jungle was Tha, the First of the Elephants. He drew
the Jungle out of deep waters with his trunk; and where he made furrows
in the ground with his tusks, there the rivers ran; and where he struck
with his foot, there rose ponds of good water; and when he blew through
his trunk,--thus,--the trees fell. That was the manner in which the
Jungle was made by Tha; and so the tale was told to me.”

“It has not lost fat in the telling,” Bagheera whispered, and Mowgli
laughed behind his hand.

“In those days there was no corn or melons or pepper or sugar-cane,
nor were there any little huts such as ye have all seen; and the Jungle
People knew nothing of Man, but lived in the Jungle together, making
one people. But presently they began to dispute over their food, though
there was grazing enough for all. They were lazy. Each wished to eat
where he lay, as sometimes we can do now when the spring rains are good.
Tha, the First of the Elephants, was busy making new jungles and leading
the rivers in their beds. He could not walk in all places; therefore he
made the First of the Tigers the master and the judge of the Jungle, to
whom the Jungle People should bring their disputes. In those days the
First of the Tigers ate fruit and grass with the others. He was as large
as I am, and he was very beautiful, in colour all over like the blossom
of the yellow creeper. There was never stripe nor bar upon his hide in
those good days when this the Jungle was new. All the Jungle People came
before him without fear, and his word was the Law of all the Jungle. We
were then, remember ye, one people.

“Yet upon a night there was a dispute between two bucks--a
grazing-quarrel such as ye now settle with the horns and the
fore-feet--and it is said that as the two spoke together before the
First of the First of the Tigers lying among the flowers, a buck pushed
him with his horns, and the First of the Tigers forgot that he was the
master and judge of the Jungle, and, leaping upon that buck, broke his
neck.

“Till that night never one of us had died, and the First of the Tigers,
seeing what he had done, and being made foolish by the scent of the
blood, ran away into the marshes of the North, and we of the Jungle,
left without a judge, fell to fighting among ourselves; and Tha heard
the noise of it and came back. Then some of us said this and some of us
said that, but he saw the dead buck among the flowers, and asked who
had killed, and we of the Jungle would not tell because the smell of the
blood made us foolish. We ran to and fro in circles, capering and crying
out and shaking our heads. Then Tha gave an order to the trees that hang
low, and to the trailing creepers of the Jungle, that they should mark
the killer of the buck so that he should know him again, and he said,
‘Who will now be master of the Jungle People?’ Then up leaped the Gray
Ape who lives in the branches, and said, ‘I will now be master of the
Jungle.’”

At this Tha laughed, and said, “So be it,” and went away very angry.

“Children, ye know the Gray Ape. He was then as he is now. At the first
he made a wise face for himself, but in a little while he began to
scratch and to leap up and down, and when Tha came back he found the
Gray Ape hanging, head down, from a bough, mocking those who stood
below; and they mocked him again. And so there was no Law in the
Jungle--only foolish talk and senseless words.

“Then Tha called us all together and said: ‘The first of your masters
has brought Death into the Jungle, and the second Shame. Now it is time
there was a Law, and a Law that ye must not break. Now ye shall know
Fear, and when ye have found him ye shall know that he is your master,
and the rest shall follow.’ Then we of the jungle said, ‘What is Fear?’
And Tha said, ‘Seek till ye find.’ So we went up and down the Jungle
seeking for Fear, and presently the buffaloes----”

“Ugh!” said Mysa, the leader of the buffaloes, from their sand-bank.

“Yes, Mysa, it was the buffaloes. They came back with the news that in a
cave in the Jungle sat Fear, and that he had no hair, and went upon his
hind legs. Then we of the Jungle followed the herd till we came to that
cave, and Fear stood at the mouth of it, and he was, as the buffaloes
had said, hairless, and he walked upon his hinder legs. When he saw us
he cried out, and his voice filled us with the fear that we have now of
that voice when we hear it, and we ran away, tramping upon and tearing
each other because we were afraid. That night, so it was told to me, we
of the Jungle did not lie down together as used to be our custom, but
each tribe drew off by itself--the pig with the pig, the deer with the
deer; horn to horn, hoof to hoof,--like keeping to like, and so lay
shaking in the Jungle.

“Only the First of the Tigers was not with us, for he was still hidden
in the marshes of the North, and when word was brought to him of the
Thing we had seen in the cave, he said. ‘I will go to this Thing and
break his neck.’ So he ran all the night till he came to the cave; but
the trees and the creepers on his path, remembering the order that Tha
had given, let down their branches and marked him as he ran, drawing
their fingers across his back, his flank, his forehead, and his jowl.
Wherever they touched him there was a mark and a stripe upon his yellow
hide. AND THOSE STRIPES DO THIS CHILDREN WEAR TO THIS DAY! When he came
to the cave, Fear, the Hairless One, put out his hand and called him
‘The Striped One that comes by night,’ and the First of the Tigers was
afraid of the Hairless One, and ran back to the swamps howling.”

Mowgli chuckled quietly here, his chin in the water.

“So loud did he howl that Tha heard him and said, ‘What is the sorrow?’
And the First of the Tigers, lifting up his muzzle to the new-made sky,
which is now so old, said: ‘Give me back my power, O Tha. I am made
ashamed before all the Jungle, and I have run away from a Hairless One,
and he has called me a shameful name.’ ‘And why?’ said Tha. ‘Because I
am smeared with the mud of the marshes,’ said the First of the Tigers.
‘Swim, then, and roll on the wet grass, and if it be mud it will wash
away,’ said Tha; and the First of the Tigers swam, and rolled and rolled
upon the grass, till the Jungle ran round and round before his eyes, but
not one little bar upon all his hide was changed, and Tha, watching him,
laughed. Then the First of the Tigers said: ‘What have I done that this
comes to me?’ Tha said, ‘Thou hast killed the buck, and thou hast let
Death loose in the Jungle, and with Death has come Fear, so that the
people of the Jungle are afraid one of the other, as thou art afraid of
the Hairless One.’ The First of the Tigers said, ‘They will never fear
me, for I knew them since the beginning.’ Tha said, ‘Go and see.’ And
the First of the Tigers ran to and fro, calling aloud to the deer and
the pig and the sambhur and the porcupine and all the Jungle Peoples,
and they all ran away from him who had been their judge, because they
were afraid.

“Then the First of the Tigers came back, and his pride was broken in
him, and, beating his head upon the ground, he tore up the earth with
all his feet and said: ‘Remember that I was once the Master of the
Jungle. Do not forget me, O Tha! Let my children remember that I was
once without shame or fear!’ And Tha said: ‘This much I will do, because
thou and I together saw the Jungle made. For one night in each year
it shall be as it was before the buck was killed--for thee and for thy
children. In that one night, if ye meet the Hairless One--and his name
is Man--ye shall not be afraid of him, but he shall be afraid of you, as
though ye were judges of the Jungle and masters of all things. Show him
mercy in that night of his fear, for thou hast known what Fear is.’

“Then the First of the Tigers answered, ‘I am content’; but when next
he drank he saw the black stripes upon his flank and his side, and he
remembered the name that the Hairless One had given him, and he was
angry. For a year he lived in the marshes waiting till Tha should keep
his promise. And upon a night when the jackal of the Moon [the Evening
Star] stood clear of the Jungle, he felt that his Night was upon him,
and he went to that cave to meet the Hairless One. Then it happened as
Tha promised, for the Hairless One fell down before him and lay along
the ground, and the First of the Tigers struck him and broke his back,
for he thought that there was but one such Thing in the Jungle, and that
he had killed Fear. Then, nosing above the kill, he heard Tha coming
down from the woods of the North, and presently the voice of the First
of the Elephants, which is the voice that we hear now----”

The thunder was rolling up and down the dry, scarred hills, but
it brought no rain--only heat--lightning that flickered along the
ridges--and Hathi went on: “THAT was the voice he heard, and it said:
‘Is this thy mercy?’ The First of the Tigers licked his lips and said:
‘What matter? I have killed Fear.’ And Tha said: ‘O blind and foolish!
Thou hast untied the feet of Death, and he will follow thy trail till
thou diest. Thou hast taught Man to kill!’

“The First of the Tigers, standing stiffly to his kill, said. ‘He is as
the buck was. There is no Fear. Now I will judge the Jungle Peoples once
more.’

“And Tha said: ‘Never again shall the Jungle Peoples come to thee. They
shall never cross thy trail, nor sleep near thee, nor follow after thee,
nor browse by thy lair. Only Fear shall follow thee, and with a blow
that thou canst not see he shall bid thee wait his pleasure. He shall
make the ground to open under thy feet, and the creeper to twist about
thy neck, and the tree-trunks to grow together about thee higher than
thou canst leap, and at the last he shall take thy hide to wrap his cubs
when they are cold. Thou hast shown him no mercy, and none will he show
thee.’

“The First of the Tigers was very bold, for his Night was still on him,
and he said: ‘The Promise of Tha is the Promise of Tha. He will not take
away my Night?’ And Tha said: ‘The one Night is thine, as I have said,
but there is a price to pay. Thou hast taught Man to kill, and he is no
slow learner.’

“The First of the Tigers said: ‘He is here under my foot, and his back
is broken. Let the Jungle know I have killed Fear.’

“Then Tha laughed, and said: ‘Thou hast killed one of many, but thou
thyself shalt tell the Jungle--for thy Night is ended.’

“So the day came; and from the mouth of the cave went out another
Hairless One, and he saw the kill in the path, and the First of the
Tigers above it, and he took a pointed stick----”

“They throw a thing that cuts now,” said Ikki, rustling down the bank;
for Ikki was considered uncommonly good eating by the Gonds--they called
him Ho-Igoo--and he knew something of the wicked little Gondee axe that
whirls across a clearing like a dragon-fly.

“It was a pointed stick, such as they put in the foot of a pit-trap,”
 said Hathi, “and throwing it, he struck the First of the Tigers deep in
the flank. Thus it happened as Tha said, for the First of the Tigers ran
howling up and down the Jungle till he tore out the stick, and all the
Jungle knew that the Hairless One could strike from far off, and they
feared more than before. So it came about that the First of the Tigers
taught the Hairless One to kill--and ye know what harm that has since
done to all our peoples--through the noose, and the pitfall, and the
hidden trap, and the flying stick and the stinging fly that comes out of
white smoke [Hathi meant the rifle], and the Red Flower that drives us
into the open. Yet for one night in the year the Hairless One fears the
Tiger, as Tha promised, and never has the Tiger given him cause to be
less afraid. Where he finds him, there he kills him, remembering how the
First of the Tigers was made ashamed. For the rest, Fear walks up and
down the Jungle by day and by night.”

“Ahi! Aoo!” said the deer, thinking of what it all meant to them.

“And only when there is one great Fear over all, as there is now, can we
of the Jungle lay aside our little fears, and meet together in one place
as we do now.”

“For one night only does Man fear the Tiger?” said Mowgli.

“For one night only,” said Hathi.

“But I--but we--but all the Jungle knows that Shere Khan kills Man twice
and thrice in a moon.”

“Even so. THEN he springs from behind and turns his head aside as he
strikes, for he is full of fear. If Man looked at him he would run. But
on his one Night he goes openly down to the village. He walks between
the houses and thrusts his head into the doorway, and the men fall on
their faces, and there he does his kill. One kill in that Night.”

“Oh!” said Mowgli to himself, rolling over in the water. “NOW I see
why it was Shere Khan bade me look at him! He got no good of it, for he
could not hold his eyes steady, and--and I certainly did not fall down
at his feet. But then I am not a man, being of the Free People.”

“Umm!” said Bagheera deep in his furry throat. “Does the Tiger know his
Night?”

“Never till the Jackal of the Moon stands clear of the evening
mist. Sometimes it falls in the dry summer and sometimes in the wet
rains--this one Night of the Tiger. But for the First of the Tigers,
this would never have been, nor would any of us have known fear.”

The deer grunted sorrowfully and Bagheera’s lips curled in a wicked
smile. “Do men know this--tale?” said he.

“None know it except the tigers, and we, the elephants--the children of
Tha. Now ye by the pools have heard it, and I have spoken.”

Hathi dipped his trunk into the water as a sign that he did not wish to
talk.

“But--but--but,” said Mowgli, turning to Baloo, “why did not the First
of the Tigers continue to eat grass and leaves and trees? He did but
break the buck’s neck. He did not EAT. What led him to the hot meat?”

“The trees and the creepers marked him, Little Brother, and made him
the striped thing that we see. Never again would he eat their fruit;
but from that day he revenged himself upon the deer, and the others, the
Eaters of Grass,” said Baloo.

“Then THOU knowest the tale. Heh? Why have I never heard?”

“Because the Jungle is full of such tales. If I made a beginning there
would never be an end to them. Let go my ear, Little Brother.”




THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE

Just to give you an idea of the immense variety of the Jungle Law,
I have translated into verse (Baloo always recited them in a sort of
sing-song) a few of the laws that apply to the wolves. There are, of
course, hundreds and hundreds more, but these will do for specimens of
the simpler rulings.

     Now this is the Law of the Jungle--as old and as true as
        the sky;
     And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf
        that shall break it must die.

     As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth
        forward and back--
     For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength
        of the Wolf is the Pack.

     Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink deeply, but
        never too deep;
     And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not
        the day is for sleep.

     The jackal may follow the Tiger, but, Cub, when thy
        whiskers are grown,
     Remember the Wolf is a hunter--go forth and get food
        of thine own.

     Keep peace with the Lords of the Jungle--the Tiger, the
        Panther, the Bear;
     And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the Boar
        in his lair.

     When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither
        will go from the trail,
     Lie down till the leaders have spoken--it may be fair
        words shall prevail.

     When ye fight with a Wolf of the Pack, ye must
        fight him alone and afar,
     Lest others take part in the quarrel, and the Pack be
        diminished by war.

     The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, and where he has
        made him his home,
     Not even the Head Wolf may enter, not even the Council
        may come.

     The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, but where he has
        digged it too plain,
     The Council shall send him a message, and so he shall
        change it again.

     If ye kill before midnight, be silent, and wake not the
        woods with your bay,
     Lest ye frighten the deer from the crops, and the brothers
        go empty away.

     Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs
        as they need, and ye can;
     But kill not for pleasure of killing, and SEVEN TIMES NEVER
        KILL MAN.

     If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker, devour not all in
        thy pride;
     Pack-Right is the right of the meanest; so leave him the
        head and the hide.

     The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack. Ye must
        eat where it lies;
     And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair, or
        he dies.

     The Kill of the Wolf is the meat of the Wolf. He may
        do what he will,
     But, till he has given permission, the Pack may not eat
        of that Kill.

     Cub-Right is the right of the Yearling. From all of his
        Pack he may claim
     Full-gorge when the killer has eaten; and none may
        refuse him the same.

     Lair-Right is the right of the Mother. From all of her
        year she may claim
     One haunch of each kill for her litter, and none may
        deny her the same.

     Cave-Right is the right of the Father--to hunt by himself
        for his own.
     He is freed of all calls to the Pack; he is judged by the
        Council alone.

     Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe
        and his paw,
     In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of the Head
        Wolf is Law.

     Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and
        mighty are they;
     But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch
        and the hump is--Obey!




THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT

     The night we felt the earth would move
       We stole and plucked him by the hand,
     Because we loved him with the love
       That knows but cannot understand.

     And when the roaring hillside broke,
       And all our world fell down in rain,
     We saved him, we the Little Folk;
       But lo! he does not come again!

     Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
       Of such poor love as wild ones may.
     Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
       And his own kind drive us away!

                             Dirge of the Langurs.


There was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of the
semi-independent native States in the north-western part of the country.
He was a Brahmin, so high-caste that caste ceased to have any particular
meaning for him; and his father had been an important official in the
gay-coloured tag-rag and bobtail of an old-fashioned Hindu Court. But
as Purun Dass grew up he felt that the old order of things was changing,
and that if any one wished to get on in the world he must stand well
with the English, and imitate all that the English believed to be good.
At the same time a native official must keep his own master’s favour.
This was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed young Brahmin,
helped by a good English education at a Bombay University, played it
coolly, and rose, step by step, to be Prime Minister of the kingdom.
That is to say, he held more real power than his master the Maharajah.

When the old king--who was suspicious of the English, their railways and
telegraphs--died, Purun Dass stood high with his young successor, who
had been tutored by an Englishman; and between them, though he always
took care that his master should have the credit, they established
schools for little girls, made roads, and started State dispensaries and
shows of agricultural implements, and published a yearly blue-book on
the “Moral and Material Progress of the State,” and the Foreign Office
and the Government of India were delighted. Very few native States take
up English progress altogether, for they will not believe, as Purun Dass
showed he did, that what was good for the Englishman must be twice as
good for the Asiatic. The Prime Minister became the honoured friend
of Viceroys, and Governors, and Lieutenant-Governors, and medical
missionaries, and common missionaries, and hard-riding English officers
who came to shoot in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts of
tourists who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showing
how things ought to be managed. In his spare time he would endow
scholarships for the study of medicine and manufactures on strictly
English lines, and write letters to the “Pioneer”, the greatest Indian
daily paper, explaining his master’s aims and objects.

At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous sums to
the priests when he came back; for even so high-caste a Brahmin as Purun
Dass lost caste by crossing the black sea. In London he met and talked
with every one worth knowing--men whose names go all over the world--and
saw a great deal more than he said. He was given honorary degrees by
learned universities, and he made speeches and talked of Hindu social
reform to English ladies in evening dress, till all London cried, “This
is the most fascinating man we have ever met at dinner since cloths were
first laid.”

When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for the Viceroy
himself made a special visit to confer upon the Maharajah the Grand
Cross of the Star of India--all diamonds and ribbons and enamel; and at
the same ceremony, while the cannon boomed, Purun Dass was made a Knight
Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire; so that his name stood Sir
Purun Dass, K.C.I.E.

That evening, at dinner in the big Viceregal tent, he stood up with the
badge and the collar of the Order on his breast, and replying to the
toast of his master’s health, made a speech few Englishmen could have
bettered.

Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet, he did
a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the
world’s affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood went
back to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to
the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the
subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the
people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can
do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun
Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up
the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man,
was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law
recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,--though he
had never carried a weapon in his life,--and twenty years head of a
household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to
be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and
cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him.
Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer
needs.

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and
brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished
brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the
ground--behind him they were firing salutes from the bastions in honour
of his happy successor. Purun Dass nodded. All that life was ended;
and he bore it no more ill-will or good-will than a man bears to a
colourless dream of the night. He was a Sunnyasi--a houseless, wandering
mendicant, depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so
long as there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar
starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom eaten
even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his personal expenses
for food through any one of the many years in which he had been absolute
master of millions of money. Even when he was being lionised in London
he had held before him his dream of peace and quiet--the long, white,
dusty Indian road, printed all over with bare feet, the incessant,
slow-moving traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under
the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their evening
meal.

When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister took
the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily have found a
bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas, than Purun Dass among
the roving, gathering, separating millions of India.

At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness overtook
him--sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside; sometimes by a
mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis, who are another misty
division of holy men, would receive him as they do those who know what
castes and divisions are worth; sometimes on the outskirts of a little
Hindu village, where the children would steal up with the food
their parents had prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare
grazing-grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsy
camels. It was all one to Purun Dass--or Purun Bhagat, as he called
himself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But unconsciously
his feet drew him away northward and eastward; from the south to
Rohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool to ruined Samanah, and then
up-stream along the dried bed of the Gugger river that fills only when
the rain falls in the hills, till one day he saw the far line of the
great Himalayas.

Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was of
Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way--a Hill-woman, always home-sick for
the snows--and that the least touch of Hill blood draws a man in the end
back to where he belongs.

“Yonder,” said Purun Bhagat, breasting the lower slopes of the Sewaliks,
where the cacti stand up like seven-branched candlesticks-“yonder I
shall sit down and get knowledge”; and the cool wind of the Himalayas
whistled about his ears as he trod the road that led to Simla.

The last time he had come that way it had been in state, with a
clattering cavalry escort, to visit the gentlest and most affable of
Viceroys; and the two had talked for an hour together about mutual
friends in London, and what the Indian common folk really thought of
things. This time Purun Bhagat paid no calls, but leaned on the rail
of the Mall, watching that glorious view of the Plains spread out
forty miles below, till a native Mohammedan policeman told him he was
obstructing traffic; and Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law,
because he knew the value of it, and was seeking for a Law of his own.
Then he moved on, and slept that night in an empty hut at Chota Simla,
which looks like the very last end of the earth, but it was only the
beginning of his journey. He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road, the
little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock, or strutted out
on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep; that dips into warm, wet,
shut-in valleys, and climbs out across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where
the sun strikes like a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, dark
forests where the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and the
pheasant calls to his mate. And he met Thibetan herdsmen with their dogs
and flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of borax on his back,
and wandering wood-cutters, and cloaked and blanketed Lamas from
Thibet, coming into India on pilgrimage, and envoys of little solitary
Hill-states, posting furiously on ring-streaked and piebald ponies, or
the cavalcade of a Rajah paying a visit; or else for a long, clear day
he would see nothing more than a black bear grunting and rooting below
in the valley. When he first started, the roar of the world he had left
still rang in his ears, as the roar of a tunnel rings long after the
train has passed through; but when he had put the Mutteeanee Pass behind
him that was all done, and Purun Bhagat was alone with himself, walking,
wondering, and thinking, his eyes on the ground, and his thoughts with
the clouds.

One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then--it had
been a two-day’s climb--and came out on a line of snow-peaks that banded
all the horizon--mountains from fifteen to twenty thousand feet high,
looking almost near enough to hit with a stone, though they were
fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was crowned with dense, dark
forest--deodar, walnut, wild cherry, wild olive, and wild pear, but
mostly deodar, which is the Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the
deodars stood a deserted shrine to Kali--who is Durga, who is Sitala,
who is sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.

Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, smiled at the grinning statue,
made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the shrine,
spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles, tucked his
bairagi--his brass-handled crutch--under his armpit, and sat down to
rest.

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for
fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses,
with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the
tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of
the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth
stone circles of the threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the
eye was deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise
that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-flank, was
in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop
across the gigantic hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it
was half-way over. A few bands of scattered clouds strung up and down
the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying
out when they were level with the head of the pass. And “Here shall I
find peace,” said Purun Bhagat.

Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down, and as
soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted shrine, the village
priest climbed up the terraced hillside to welcome the stranger.

When he met Purun Bhagat’s eyes--the eyes of a man used to control
thousands--he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl without a word,
and returned to the village, saying, “We have at last a holy man.
Never have I seen such a man. He is of the Plains--but pale-coloured--a
Brahmin of the Brahmins.” Then all the housewives of the village said,
“Think you he will stay with us?” and each did her best to cook the
most savoury meal for the Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with
buckwheat and Indian corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out
of the stream in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in
the stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger, and
bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and it was a
full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was he going to stay?
asked the priest. Would he need a chela--a disciple--to beg for him? Had
he a blanket against the cold weather? Was the food good?

Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to stay.
That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl be placed
outside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two twisted roots, and
daily should the Bhagat be fed; for the village felt honoured that such
a man--he looked timidly into the Bhagat’s face--should tarry among
them.

That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat’s wanderings. He had come to the
place appointed for him--the silence and the space. After this, time
stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine, could not tell
whether he were alive or dead; a man with control of his limbs, or a
part of the hills, and the clouds, and the shifting rain and sunlight.
He would repeat a Name softly to himself a hundred hundred times, till,
at each repetition, he seemed to move more and more out of his body,
sweeping up to the doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the
door was opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt
he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.

Every morning the filled begging-bowl was laid silently in the crutch of
the roots outside the shrine. Sometimes the priest brought it; sometimes
a Ladakhi trader, lodging in the village, and anxious to get merit,
trudged up the path; but, more often, it was the woman who had cooked
the meal overnight; and she would murmur, hardly above her breath.
“Speak for me before the gods, Bhagat. Speak for such a one, the wife
of so-and-so!” Now and then some bold child would be allowed the honour,
and Purun Bhagat would hear him drop the bowl and run as fast as his
little legs could carry him, but the Bhagat never came down to the
village. It was laid out like a map at his feet. He could see the
evening gatherings, held on the circle of the threshing-floors, because
that was the only level ground; could see the wonderful unnamed green
of the young rice, the indigo blues of the Indian corn, the dock-like
patches of buckwheat, and, in its season, the red bloom of the amaranth,
whose tiny seeds, being neither grain nor pulse, make a food that can be
lawfully eaten by Hindus in time of fasts.

When the year turned, the roofs of the huts were all little squares of
purest gold, for it was on the roofs that they laid out their cobs of
the corn to dry. Hiving and harvest, rice-sowing and husking, passed
before his eyes, all embroidered down there on the many-sided plots of
fields, and he thought of them all, and wondered what they all led to at
the long last.

Even in populated India a man cannot a day sit still before the wild
things run over him as though he were a rock; and in that wilderness
very soon the wild things, who knew Kali’s Shrine well, came back to
look at the intruder. The langurs, the big gray-whiskered monkeys of
the Himalayas, were, naturally, the first, for they are alive with
curiosity; and when they had upset the begging-bowl, and rolled it round
the floor, and tried their teeth on the brass-handled crutch, and made
faces at the antelope skin, they decided that the human being who sat so
still was harmless. At evening, they would leap down from the pines, and
beg with their hands for things to eat, and then swing off in graceful
curves. They liked the warmth of the fire, too, and huddled round it
till Purun Bhagat had to push them aside to throw on more fuel; and
in the morning, as often as not, he would find a furry ape sharing his
blanket. All day long, one or other of the tribe would sit by his side,
staring out at the snows, crooning and looking unspeakably wise and
sorrowful.

After the monkeys came the barasingh, that big deer which is like our
red deer, but stronger. He wished to rub off the velvet of his horns
against the cold stones of Kali’s statue, and stamped his feet when he
saw the man at the shrine. But Purun Bhagat never moved, and, little by
little, the royal stag edged up and nuzzled his shoulder. Purun Bhagat
slid one cool hand along the hot antlers, and the touch soothed the
fretted beast, who bowed his head, and Purun Bhagat very softly rubbed
and ravelled off the velvet. Afterward, the barasingh brought his doe
and fawn--gentle things that mumbled on the holy man’s blanket--or would
come alone at night, his eyes green in the fire-flicker, to take his
share of fresh walnuts. At last, the musk-deer, the shyest and almost
the smallest of the deerlets, came, too, her big rabbity ears erect;
even brindled, silent mushick-nabha must needs find out what the
light in the shrine meant, and drop out her moose-like nose into Purun
Bhagat’s lap, coming and going with the shadows of the fire. Purun
Bhagat called them all “my brothers,” and his low call of “Bhai! Bhai!”
 would draw them from the forest at noon if they were within ear shot.
The Himalayan black bear, moody and suspicious--Sona, who has the
V-shaped white mark under his chin--passed that way more than once; and
since the Bhagat showed no fear, Sona showed no anger, but watched him,
and came closer, and begged a share of the caresses, and a dole of bread
or wild berries. Often, in the still dawns, when the Bhagat would climb
to the very crest of the pass to watch the red day walking along the
peaks of the snows, he would find Sona shuffling and grunting at his
heels, thrusting, a curious fore-paw under fallen trunks, and bringing
it away with a WHOOF of impatience; or his early steps would wake Sona
where he lay curled up, and the great brute, rising erect, would think
to fight, till he heard the Bhagat’s voice and knew his best friend.

Nearly all hermits and holy men who live apart from the big cities have
the reputation of being able to work miracles with the wild things, but
all the miracle lies in keeping still, in never making a hasty movement,
and, for a long time, at least, in never looking directly at a visitor.
The villagers saw the outline of the barasingh stalking like a shadow
through the dark forest behind the shrine; saw the minaul, the Himalayan
pheasant, blazing in her best colours before Kali’s statue; and the
langurs on their haunches, inside, playing with the walnut shells. Some
of the children, too, had heard Sona singing to himself, bear-fashion,
behind the fallen rocks, and the Bhagat’s reputation as miracle-worker
stood firm.

Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed that
all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much he knows
something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing
great and nothing little in this world: and day and night he strove to
think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his
soul had come.

So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone
slab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into a little hole
by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the
tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore
into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast
knew his exact place at the fire. The fields changed their colours with
the seasons; the threshing-floors filled and emptied, and filled again
and again; and again and again, when winter came, the langurs frisked
among the branches feathered with light snow, till the mother-monkeys
brought their sad-eyed little babies up from the warmer valleys with the
spring. There were few changes in the village. The priest was older, and
many of the little children who used to come with the begging-dish sent
their own children now; and when you asked of the villagers how long
their holy man had lived in Kali’s Shrine at the head of the pass, they
answered, “Always.”

Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the Hills for many
seasons. Through three good months the valley was wrapped in cloud
and soaking mist--steady, unrelenting downfall, breaking off into
thunder-shower after thunder-shower. Kali’s Shrine stood above the
clouds, for the most part, and there was a whole month in which the
Bhagat never caught a glimpse of his village. It was packed away under
a white floor of cloud that swayed and shifted and rolled on itself and
bulged upward, but never broke from its piers--the streaming flanks of
the valley.

All that time he heard nothing but the sound of a million little waters,
overhead from the trees, and underfoot along the ground, soaking through
the pine-needles, dripping from the tongues of draggled fern, and
spouting in newly-torn muddy channels down the slopes. Then the sun
came out, and drew forth the good incense of the deodars and the
rhododendrons, and that far-off, clean smell which the Hill people call
“the smell of the snows.” The hot sunshine lasted for a week, and then
the rains gathered together for their last downpour, and the water fell
in sheets that flayed off the skin of the ground and leaped back in
mud. Purun Bhagat heaped his fire high that night, for he was sure his
brothers would need warmth; but never a beast came to the shrine, though
he called and called till he dropped asleep, wondering what had happened
in the woods.

It was in the black heart of the night, the rain drumming like a
thousand drums, that he was roused by a plucking at his blanket, and,
stretching out, felt the little hand of a langur. “It is better here
than in the trees,” he said sleepily, loosening a fold of blanket; “take
it and be warm.” The monkey caught his hand and pulled hard. “Is it
food, then?” said Purun Bhagat. “Wait awhile, and I will prepare some.”
 As he kneeled to throw fuel on the fire the langur ran to the door of
the shrine, crooned and ran back again, plucking at the man’s knee.

“What is it? What is thy trouble, Brother?” said Purun Bhagat, for the
langur’s eyes were full of things that he could not tell. “Unless one of
thy caste be in a trap--and none set traps here--I will not go into that
weather. Look, Brother, even the barasingh comes for shelter!”

The deer’s antlers clashed as he strode into the shrine, clashed against
the grinning statue of Kali. He lowered them in Purun Bhagat’s direction
and stamped uneasily, hissing through his half-shut nostrils.

“Hai! Hai! Hai!” said the Bhagat, snapping his fingers, “Is THIS payment
for a night’s lodging?” But the deer pushed him toward the door, and as
he did so Purun Bhagat heard the sound of something opening with a sigh,
and saw two slabs of the floor draw away from each other, while the
sticky earth below smacked its lips.

“Now I see,” said Purun Bhagat. “No blame to my brothers that they did
not sit by the fire to-night. The mountain is falling. And yet--why
should I go?” His eye fell on the empty begging-bowl, and his face
changed. “They have given me good food daily since--since I came, and,
if I am not swift, to-morrow there will not be one mouth in the valley.
Indeed, I must go and warn them below. Back there, Brother! Let me get
to the fire.”

The barasingh backed unwillingly as Purun Bhagat drove a pine torch deep
into the flame, twirling it till it was well lit. “Ah! ye came to warn
me,” he said, rising. “Better than that we shall do; better than that.
Out, now, and lend me thy neck, Brother, for I have but two feet.”

He clutched the bristling withers of the barasingh with his right hand,
held the torch away with his left, and stepped out of the shrine into
the desperate night. There was no breath of wind, but the rain nearly
drowned the flare as the great deer hurried down the slope, sliding
on his haunches. As soon as they were clear of the forest more of the
Bhagat’s brothers joined them. He heard, though he could not see, the
langurs pressing about him, and behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. The
rain matted his long white hair into ropes; the water splashed beneath
his bare feet, and his yellow robe clung to his frail old body, but he
stepped down steadily, leaning against the barasingh. He was no longer
a holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small
State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life. Down
the steep, plashy path they poured all together, the Bhagat and his
brothers, down and down till the deer’s feet clicked and stumbled on the
wall of a threshing-floor, and he snorted because he smelt Man. Now they
were at the head of the one crooked village street, and the Bhagat beat
with his crutch on the barred windows of the blacksmith’s house, as his
torch blazed up in the shelter of the eaves. “Up and out!” cried Purun
Bhagat; and he did not know his own voice, for it was years since he had
spoken aloud to a man. “The hill falls! The hill is falling! Up and out,
oh, you within!”

“It is our Bhagat,” said the blacksmith’s wife. “He stands among his
beasts. Gather the little ones and give the call.”

It ran from house to house, while the beasts, cramped in the narrow way,
surged and huddled round the Bhagat, and Sona puffed impatiently.

The people hurried into the street--they were no more than seventy souls
all told--and in the glare of the torches they saw their Bhagat holding
back the terrified barasingh, while the monkeys plucked piteously at his
skirts, and Sona sat on his haunches and roared.

“Across the valley and up the next hill!” shouted Purun Bhagat. “Leave
none behind! We follow!”

Then the people ran as only Hill folk can run, for they knew that in a
landslip you must climb for the highest ground across the valley. They
fled, splashing through the little river at the bottom, and panted up
the terraced fields on the far side, while the Bhagat and his brethren
followed. Up and up the opposite mountain they climbed, calling to each
other by name--the roll-call of the village--and at their heels toiled
the big barasingh, weighted by the failing strength of Purun Bhagat.
At last the deer stopped in the shadow of a deep pinewood, five hundred
feet up the hillside. His instinct, that had warned him of the coming
slide, told him he would he safe here.

Purun Bhagat dropped fainting by his side, for the chill of the rain and
that fierce climb were killing him; but first he called to the scattered
torches ahead, “Stay and count your numbers”; then, whispering to the
deer as he saw the lights gather in a cluster: “Stay with me, Brother.
Stay--till--I--go!”

There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter that
grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and the
hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, and
rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep, and true as the deep C
of the organ drowned everything for perhaps five minutes, while the very
roots of the pines quivered to it. It died away, and the sound of the
rain falling on miles of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled
drum of water on soft earth. That told its own tale.

Never a villager--not even the priest--was bold enough to speak to the
Bhagat who had saved their lives. They crouched under the pines and
waited till the day. When it came they looked across the valley and
saw that what had been forest, and terraced field, and track-threaded
grazing-ground was one raw, red, fan-shaped smear, with a few trees
flung head-down on the scarp. That red ran high up the hill of their
refuge, damming back the little river, which had begun to spread into a
brick-coloured lake. Of the village, of the road to the shrine, of the
shrine itself, and the forest behind, there was no trace. For one mile
in width and two thousand feet in sheer depth the mountain-side had come
away bodily, planed clean from head to heel.

And the villagers, one by one, crept through the wood to pray before
their Bhagat. They saw the barasingh standing over him, who fled when
they came near, and they heard the langurs wailing in the branches,
and Sona moaning up the hill; but their Bhagat was dead, sitting
cross-legged, his back against a tree, his crutch under his armpit, and
his face turned to the north-east.

The priest said: “Behold a miracle after a miracle, for in this very
attitude must all Sunnyasis be buried! Therefore where he now is we will
build the temple to our holy man.”

They built the temple before a year was ended--a little stone-and-earth
shrine--and they called the hill the Bhagat’s hill, and they worship
there with lights and flowers and offerings to this day. But they do
not know that the saint of their worship is the late Sir Purun Dass,
K.C.I.E., D.C.L., Ph.D., etc., once Prime Minister of the progressive
and enlightened State of Mohiniwala, and honorary or corresponding
member of more learned and scientific societies than will ever do any
good in this world or the next.




A SONG OF KABIR

     Oh, light was the world that he weighed in his hands!
     Oh, heavy the tale of his fiefs and his lands!
     He has gone from the guddee and put on the shroud,
     And departed in guise of bairagi avowed!

     Now the white road to Delhi is mat for his feet,
     The sal and the kikar must guard him from heat;
     His home is the camp, and the waste, and the crowd--
     He is seeking the Way as bairagi avowed!

     He has looked upon Man, and his eyeballs are clear
     (There was One; there is One, and but One, saith Kabir);
     The Red Mist of Doing has thinned to a cloud--
     He has taken the Path for bairagi avowed!

     To learn and discern of his brother the clod,
     Of his brother the brute, and his brother the God.
     He has gone from the council and put on the shroud
     (“Can ye hear?” saith Kabir), a bairagi avowed!




LETTING IN THE JUNGLE

      Veil them, cover them, wall them round--
        Blossom, and creeper, and weed--
      Let us forget the sight and the sound,
        The smell and the touch of the breed!

      Fat black ash by the altar-stone,
        Here is the white-foot rain,
      And the does bring forth in the fields unsown,
        And none shall affright them again;
      And the blind walls crumble, unknown, o’erthrown
        And none shall inhabit again!


You will remember that after Mowgli had pinned Shere Khan’s hide to
the Council Rock, he told as many as were left of the Seeonee Pack that
henceforward he would hunt in the Jungle alone; and the four children of
Mother and Father Wolf said that they would hunt with him. But it is not
easy to change one’s life all in a minute--particularly in the Jungle.
The first thing Mowgli did, when the disorderly Pack had slunk off, was
to go to the home-cave, and sleep for a day and a night. Then he told
Mother Wolf and Father Wolf as much as they could understand of his
adventures among men; and when he made the morning sun flicker up and
down the blade of his skinning-knife,--the same he had skinned Shere
Khan with,--they said he had learned something. Then Akela and Gray
Brother had to explain their share of the great buffalo-drive in the
ravine, and Baloo toiled up the hill to hear all about it, and Bagheera
scratched himself all over with pure delight at the way in which Mowgli
had managed his war.

It was long after sunrise, but no one dreamed of going to sleep, and
from time to time, during the talk, Mother Wolf would throw up her head,
and sniff a deep snuff of satisfaction as the wind brought her the smell
of the tiger-skin on the Council Rock.

“But for Akela and Gray Brother here,” Mowgli said, at the end, “I could
have done nothing. Oh, mother, mother! if thou hadst seen the black
herd-bulls pour down the ravine, or hurry through the gates when the
Man-Pack flung stones at me!”

“I am glad I did not see that last,” said Mother Wolf stiffly. “It is
not MY custom to suffer my cubs to be driven to and fro like jackals.
_I_ would have taken a price from the Man-Pack; but I would have spared
the woman who gave thee the milk. Yes, I would have spared her alone.”

“Peace, peace, Raksha!” said Father Wolf, lazily. “Our Frog has come
back again--so wise that his own father must lick his feet; and what is
a cut, more or less, on the head? Leave Men alone.” Baloo and Bagheera
both echoed: “Leave Men alone.”

Mowgli, his head on Mother Wolf’s side, smiled contentedly, and said
that, for his own part, he never wished to see, or hear, or smell Man
again.

“But what,” said Akela, cocking one ear--“but what if men do not leave
thee alone, Little Brother?”

“We be FIVE,” said Gray Brother, looking round at the company, and
snapping his jaws on the last word.

“We also might attend to that hunting,” said Bagheera, with a little
switch-switch of his tail, looking at Baloo. “But why think of men now,
Akela?”

“For this reason,” the Lone Wolf answered: “when that yellow chief’s
hide was hung up on the rock, I went back along our trail to the
village, stepping in my tracks, turning aside, and lying down, to make
a mixed trail in case one should follow us. But when I had fouled the
trail so that I myself hardly knew it again, Mang, the Bat, came hawking
between the trees, and hung up above me.” Said Mang, “The village of the
Man-Pack, where they cast out the Man-cub, hums like a hornet’s nest.”

“It was a big stone that I threw,” chuckled Mowgli, who had often amused
himself by throwing ripe paw-paws into a hornet’s nest, and racing off
to the nearest pool before the hornets caught him.

“I asked of Mang what he had seen. He said that the Red Flower blossomed
at the gate of the village, and men sat about it carrying guns. Now _I_
know, for I have good cause,”--Akela looked down at the old dry scars
on his flank and side,--“that men do not carry guns for pleasure.
Presently, Little Brother, a man with a gun follows our trail--if,
indeed, he be not already on it.”

“But why should he? Men have cast me out. What more do they need?” said
Mowgli angrily.

“Thou art a man, Little Brother,” Akela returned. “It is not for US, the
Free Hunters, to tell thee what thy brethren do, or why.”

He had just time to snatch up his paw as the skinning-knife cut deep
into the ground below. Mowgli struck quicker than an average human
eye could follow but Akela was a wolf; and even a dog, who is very far
removed from the wild wolf, his ancestor, can be waked out of deep sleep
by a cart-wheel touching his flank, and can spring away unharmed before
that wheel comes on.

“Another time,” Mowgli said quietly, returning the knife to its sheath,
“speak of the Man-Pack and of Mowgli in TWO breaths--not one.”

“Phff! That is a sharp tooth,” said Akela, snuffing at the blade’s
cut in the earth, “but living with the Man-Pack has spoiled thine eye,
Little Brother. I could have killed a buck while thou wast striking.”

Bagheera sprang to his feet, thrust up his head as far as he could,
sniffed, and stiffened through every curve in his body. Gray Brother
followed his example quickly, keeping a little to his left to get the
wind that was blowing from the right, while Akela bounded fifty yards up
wind, and, half-crouching, stiffened too. Mowgli looked on enviously.
He could smell things as very few human beings could, but he had never
reached the hair-trigger-like sensitiveness of a Jungle nose; and his
three months in the smoky village had set him back sadly. However, he
dampened his finger, rubbed it on his nose, and stood erect to catch the
upper scent, which, though it is the faintest, is the truest.

“Man!” Akela growled, dropping on his haunches.

“Buldeo!” said Mowgli, sitting down. “He follows our trail, and yonder
is the sunlight on his gun. Look!”

It was no more than a splash of sunlight, for a fraction of a second,
on the brass clamps of the old Tower musket, but nothing in the Jungle
winks with just that flash, except when the clouds race over the sky.
Then a piece of mica, or a little pool, or even a highly-polished leaf
will flash like a heliograph. But that day was cloudless and still.

“I knew men would follow,” said Akela triumphantly. “Not for nothing
have I led the Pack.”

The four cubs said nothing, but ran down hill on their bellies, melting
into the thorn and under-brush as a mole melts into a lawn.

“Where go ye, and without word?” Mowgli called.

“H’sh! We roll his skull here before mid-day!” Gray Brother answered.

“Back! Back and wait! Man does not eat Man!” Mowgli shrieked.

“Who was a wolf but now? Who drove the knife at me for thinking he might
be Man?” said Akela, as the four wolves turned back sullenly and dropped
to heel.

“Am I to give reason for all I choose to, do?” said Mowgli furiously.

“That is Man! There speaks Man!” Bagheera muttered under his whiskers.
“Even so did men talk round the King’s cages at Oodeypore. We of the
Jungle know that Man is wisest of all. If we trusted our ears we should
know that of all things he is most foolish.” Raising his voice, he
added, “The Man-cub is right in this. Men hunt in packs. To kill one,
unless we know what the others will do, is bad hunting. Come, let us see
what this Man means toward us.”

“We will not come,” Gray Brother growled. “Hunt alone, Little Brother.
WE know our own minds. The skull would have been ready to bring by now.”

Mowgli had been looking from one to the other of his friends, his chest
heaving and his eyes full of tears. He strode forward to the wolves,
and, dropping on one knee, said: “Do I not know my mind? Look at me!”

They looked uneasily, and when their eyes wandered, he called them back
again and again, till their hair stood up all over their bodies, and
they trembled in every limb, while Mowgli stared and stared.

“Now,” said he, “of us five, which is leader?”

“Thou art leader, Little Brother,” said Gray Brother, and he licked
Mowgli’s foot.

“Follow, then,” said Mowgli, and the four followed at his heels with
their tails between their legs.

“This comes of living with the Man-Pack,” said Bagheera, slipping down
after them. “There is more in the Jungle now than Jungle Law, Baloo.”

The old bear said nothing, but he thought many things.

Mowgli cut across noiselessly through the Jungle, at right angles to
Buldeo’s path, till, parting the undergrowth, he saw the old man, his
musket on his shoulder, running up the trail of overnight at a dog-trot.

You will remember that Mowgli had left the village with the heavy weight
of Shere Khan’s raw hide on his shoulders, while Akela and Gray Brother
trotted behind, so that the triple trail was very clearly marked.
Presently Buldeo came to where Akela, as you know, had gone back and
mixed it all up. Then he sat down, and coughed and grunted, and made
little casts round and about into the Jungle to pick it up again, and,
all the time he could have thrown a stone over those who were watching
him. No one can be so silent as a wolf when he does not care to be
heard; and Mowgli, though the wolves thought he moved very clumsily,
could come and go like a shadow. They ringed the old man as a school
of porpoises ring a steamer at full speed, and as they ringed him they
talked unconcernedly, for their speech began below the lowest end of the
scale that untrained human beings can hear. [The other end is bounded by
the high squeak of Mang, the Bat, which very many people cannot catch at
all. From that note all the bird and bat and insect talk takes on.]

“This is better than any kill,” said Gray Brother, as Buldeo stooped
and peered and puffed. “He looks like a lost pig in the Jungles by the
river. What does he say?” Buldeo was muttering savagely.

Mowgli translated. “He says that packs of wolves must have danced round
me. He says that he never saw such a trail in his life. He says he is
tired.”

“He will be rested before he picks it up again,” said Bagheera coolly,
as he slipped round a tree-trunk, in the game of blindman’s-buff that
they were playing. “NOW, what does the lean thing do?”

“Eat or blow smoke out of his mouth. Men always play with their mouths,”
 said Mowgli; and the silent trailers saw the old man fill and light
and puff at a water-pipe, and they took good note of the smell of the
tobacco, so as to be sure of Buldeo in the darkest night, if necessary.

Then a little knot of charcoal-burners came down the path, and naturally
halted to speak to Buldeo, whose fame as a hunter reached for at least
twenty miles round. They all sat down and smoked, and Bagheera and
the others came up and watched while Buldeo began to tell the story of
Mowgli, the Devil-child, from one end to another, with additions and
inventions. How he himself had really killed Shere Khan; and how Mowgli
had turned himself into a wolf, and fought with him all the afternoon,
and changed into a boy again and bewitched Buldeo’s rifle, so that the
bullet turned the corner, when he pointed it at Mowgli, and killed one
of Buldeo’s own buffaloes; and how the village, knowing him to be the
bravest hunter in Seeonee, had sent him out to kill this Devil-child.
But meantime the village had got hold of Messua and her husband, who
were undoubtedly the father and mother of this Devil-child, and had
barricaded them in their own hut, and presently would torture them to
make them confess they were witch and wizard, and then they would be
burned to death.

“When?” said the charcoal-burners, because they would very much like to
be present at the ceremony.

Buldeo said that nothing would be done till he returned, because the
village wished him to kill the Jungle Boy first. After that they would
dispose of Messua and her husband, and divide their lands and buffaloes
among the village. Messua’s husband had some remarkably fine buffaloes,
too. It was an excellent thing to destroy wizards, Buldeo thought; and
people who entertained Wolf-children out of the Jungle were clearly the
worst kind of witches.

But, said the charcoal-burners, what would happen if the English heard
of it? The English, they had heard, were a perfectly mad people, who
would not let honest farmers kill witches in peace.

Why, said Buldeo, the head-man of the village would report that Messua
and her husband had died of snake-bite. THAT was all arranged, and the
only thing now was to kill the Wolf-child. They did not happen to have
seen anything of such a creature?

The charcoal-burners looked round cautiously, and thanked their stars
they had not; but they had no doubt that so brave a man as Buldeo would
find him if any one could. The sun was getting rather low, and they had
an idea that they would push on to Buldeo’s village and see that wicked
witch. Buldeo said that, though it was his duty to kill the Devil-child,
he could not think of letting a party of unarmed men go through the
Jungle, which might produce the Wolf-demon at any minute, without his
escort. He, therefore, would accompany them, and if the sorcerer’s child
appeared--well, he would show them how the best hunter in Seeonee dealt
with such things. The Brahmin, he said, had given him a charm against
the creature that made everything perfectly safe.

“What says he? What says he? What says he?” the wolves repeated every
few minutes; and Mowgli translated until he came to the witch part of
the story, which was a little beyond him, and then he said that the man
and woman who had been so kind to him were trapped.

“Does Man trap Man?” said Bagheera.

“So he says. I cannot understand the talk. They are all mad together.
What have Messua and her man to do with me that they should be put in
a trap; and what is all this talk about the Red Flower? I must look
to this. Whatever they would do to Messua they will not do till Buldeo
returns. And so----” Mowgli thought hard, with his fingers playing round
the haft of the skinning-knife, while Buldeo and the charcoal-burners
went off very valiantly in single file.

“I go hot-foot back to the Man-Pack,” Mowgli said at last.

“And those?” said Gray Brother, looking hungrily after the brown backs
of the charcoal-burners.

“Sing them home,” said Mowgli, with a grin; “I do not wish them to be at
the village gates till it is dark. Can ye hold them?”

Gray Brother bared his white teeth in contempt. “We can head them round
and round in circles like tethered goats--if I know Man.”

“That I do not need. Sing to them a little, lest they be lonely on the
road, and, Gray Brother, the song need not be of the sweetest. Go with
them, Bagheera, and help make that song. When night is shut down, meet
me by the village--Gray Brother knows the place.”

“It is no light hunting to work for a Man-cub. When shall I sleep?” said
Bagheera, yawning, though his eyes showed that he was delighted with the
amusement. “Me to sing to naked men! But let us try.”

He lowered his head so that the sound would travel, and cried a long,
long, “Good hunting”--a midnight call in the afternoon, which was quite
awful enough to begin with. Mowgli heard it rumble, and rise, and fall,
and die off in a creepy sort of whine behind him, and laughed to himself
as he ran through the Jungle. He could see the charcoal-burners huddled
in a knot; old Buldeo’s gun-barrel waving, like a banana-leaf, to every
point of the compass at once. Then Gray Brother gave the Ya-la-hi!
Yalaha! call for the buck-driving, when the Pack drives the nilghai, the
big blue cow, before them, and it seemed to come from the very ends of
the earth, nearer, and nearer, and nearer, till it ended in a shriek
snapped off short. The other three answered, till even Mowgli could have
vowed that the full Pack was in full cry, and then they all broke
into the magnificent Morning-song in the Jungle, with every turn, and
flourish, and grace-note that a deep-mouthed wolf of the Pack knows.
This is a rough rendering of the song, but you must imagine what it
sounds like when it breaks the afternoon hush of the Jungle:--

     One moment past our bodies cast
       No shadow on the plain;
     Now clear and black they stride our track,
       And we run home again.
     In morning hush, each rock and bush
       Stands hard, and high, and raw:
     Then give the Call: “Good rest to all
       That keep The Jungle Law!”

     Now horn and pelt our peoples melt
       In covert to abide;
     Now, crouched and still, to cave and hill
       Our Jungle Barons glide.
     Now, stark and plain, Man’s oxen strain,
       That draw the new-yoked plough;
     Now, stripped and dread, the dawn is red
       Above the lit talao.

     Ho! Get to lair! The sun’s aflare
       Behind the breathing grass:
     And cracking through the young bamboo
       The warning whispers pass.
     By day made strange, the woods we range
       With blinking eyes we scan;
     While down the skies the wild duck cries
       “The Day--the Day to Man!”

     The dew is dried that drenched our hide
       Or washed about our way;
     And where we drank, the puddled bank
       Is crisping into clay.
     The traitor Dark gives up each mark
       Of stretched or hooded claw;
     Then hear the Call: “Good rest to all
       That keep the Jungle Law!”

But no translation can give the effect of it, or the yelping scorn the
Four threw into every word of it, as they heard the trees crash when
the men hastily climbed up into the branches, and Buldeo began repeating
incantations and charms. Then they lay down and slept, for, like all who
live by their own exertions, they were of a methodical cast of mind; and
no one can work well without sleep.

Meantime, Mowgli was putting the miles behind him, nine to the hour,
swinging on, delighted to find himself so fit after all his cramped
months among men. The one idea in his head was to get Messua and her
husband out of the trap, whatever it was; for he had a natural mistrust
of traps. Later on, he promised himself, he would pay his debts to the
village at large.

It was at twilight when he saw the well-remembered grazing-grounds, and
the dhak-tree where Gray Brother had waited for him on the morning that
he killed Shere Khan. Angry as he was at the whole breed and community
of Man, something jumped up in his throat and made him catch his breath
when he looked at the village roofs. He noticed that every one had come
in from the fields unusually early, and that, instead of getting to
their evening cooking, they gathered in a crowd under the village tree,
and chattered, and shouted.

“Men must always be making traps for men, or they are not content,” said
Mowgli. “Last night it was Mowgli--but that night seems many Rains ago.
To-night it is Messua and her man. To-morrow, and for very many nights
after, it will be Mowgli’s turn again.”

He crept along outside the wall till he came to Messua’s hut, and looked
through the window into the room. There lay Messua, gagged, and bound
hand and foot, breathing hard, and groaning: her husband was tied to the
gaily-painted bedstead. The door of the hut that opened into the street
was shut fast, and three or four people were sitting with their backs to
it.

Mowgli knew the manners and customs of the villagers very fairly. He
argued that so long as they could eat, and talk, and smoke, they would
not do anything else; but as soon as they had fed they would begin to be
dangerous. Buldeo would be coming in before long, and if his escort had
done its duty, Buldeo would have a very interesting tale to tell. So he
went in through the window, and, stooping over the man and the woman,
cut their thongs, pulling out the gags, and looked round the hut for
some milk.

Messua was half wild with pain and fear (she had been beaten and stoned
all the morning), and Mowgli put his hand over her mouth just in time
to stop a scream. Her husband was only bewildered and angry, and sat
picking dust and things out of his torn beard.

“I knew--I knew he would come,” Messua sobbed at last. “Now do I KNOW
that he is my son!” and she hugged Mowgli to her heart. Up to that time
Mowgli had been perfectly steady, but now he began to tremble all over,
and that surprised him immensely.

“Why are these thongs? Why have they tied thee?” he asked, after a
pause.

“To be put to the death for making a son of thee--what else?” said the
man sullenly. “Look! I bleed.”

Messua said nothing, but it was at her wounds that Mowgli looked, and
they heard him grit his teeth when he saw the blood.

“Whose work is this?” said he. “There is a price to pay.”

“The work of all the village. I was too rich. I had too many cattle.
THEREFORE she and I are witches, because we gave thee shelter.”

“I do not understand. Let Messua tell the tale.”

“I gave thee milk, Nathoo; dost thou remember?” Messua said timidly.
“Because thou wast my son, whom the tiger took, and because I loved thee
very dearly. They said that I was thy mother, the mother of a devil, and
therefore worthy of death.”

“And what is a devil?” said Mowgli. “Death I have seen.”

The man looked up gloomily, but Messua laughed. “See!” she said to her
husband, “I knew--I said that he was no sorcerer. He is my son--my son!”

“Son or sorcerer, what good will that do us?” the man answered. “We be
as dead already.”

“Yonder is the road to the Jungle”--Mowgli pointed through the window.
“Your hands and feet are free. Go now.”

“We do not know the Jungle, my son, as--as thou knowest,” Messua began.
“I do not think that I could walk far.”

“And the men and women would be upon our backs and drag us here again,”
 said the husband.

“H’m!” said Mowgli, and he tickled the palm of his hand with the tip
of his skinning-knife; “I have no wish to do harm to any one of this
village--YET. But I do not think they will stay thee. In a little while
they will have much else to think upon. Ah!” he lifted his head and
listened to shouting and trampling outside. “So they have let Buldeo
come home at last?”

“He was sent out this morning to kill thee,” Messua cried. “Didst thou
meet him?”

“Yes--we--I met him. He has a tale to tell and while he is telling it
there is time to do much. But first I will learn what they mean. Think
where ye would go, and tell me when I come back.”

He bounded through the window and ran along again outside the wall
of the village till he came within ear-shot of the crowd round the
peepul-tree. Buldeo was lying on the ground, coughing and groaning,
and every one was asking him questions. His hair had fallen about his
shoulders; his hands and legs were skinned from climbing up trees,
and he could hardly speak, but he felt the importance of his position
keenly. From time to time he said something about devils and singing
devils, and magic enchantment, just to give the crowd a taste of what
was coming. Then he called for water.

“Bah!” said Mowgli. “Chatter--chatter! Talk, talk! Men are
blood-brothers of the Bandar-log. Now he must wash his mouth with water;
now he must blow smoke; and when all that is done he has still his story
to tell. They are very wise people--men. They will leave no one to guard
Messua till their ears are stuffed with Buldeo’s tales. And--I grow as
lazy as they!”

He shook himself and glided back to the hut. Just as he was at the
window he felt a touch on his foot.

“Mother,” said he, for he knew that tongue well, “what dost THOU here?”

“I heard my children singing through the woods, and I followed the one I
loved best. Little Frog, I have a desire to see that woman who gave thee
milk,” said Mother Wolf, all wet with the dew.

“They have bound and mean to kill her. I have cut those ties, and she
goes with her man through the Jungle.”

“I also will follow. I am old, but not yet toothless.” Mother Wolf
reared herself up on end, and looked through the window into the dark of
the hut.

In a minute she dropped noiselessly, and all she said was: “I gave thee
thy first milk; but Bagheera speaks truth: Man goes to Man at the last.”

“Maybe,” said Mowgli, with a very unpleasant look on his face; “but
to-night I am very far from that trail. Wait here, but do not let her
see.”

“THOU wast never afraid of ME, Little Frog,” said Mother Wolf, backing
into the high grass, and blotting herself out, as she knew how.

“And now,” said Mowgli cheerfully, as he swung into the hut again, “they
are all sitting round Buldeo, who is saying that which did not happen.
When his talk is finished, they say they will assuredly come here with
the Red--with fire and burn you both. And then?”

“I have spoken to my man,” said Messua. “Khanhiwara is thirty miles from
here, but at Khanhiwara we may find the English--”

“And what Pack are they?” said Mowgli.

“I do not know. They be white, and it is said that they govern all
the land, and do not suffer people to burn or beat each other without
witnesses. If we can get thither to-night, we live. Otherwise we die.”

“Live, then. No man passes the gates to-night. But what does HE do?”
 Messua’s husband was on his hands and knees digging up the earth in one
corner of the hut.

“It is his little money,” said Messua. “We can take nothing else.”

“Ah, yes. The stuff that passes from hand to hand and never grows
warmer. Do they need it outside this place also?” said Mowgli.

The man stared angrily. “He is a fool, and no devil,” he muttered. “With
the money I can buy a horse. We are too bruised to walk far, and the
village will follow us in an hour.”

“I say they will NOT follow till I choose; but a horse is well thought
of, for Messua is tired.” Her husband stood up and knotted the last
of the rupees into his waist-cloth. Mowgli helped Messua through the
window, and the cool night air revived her, but the Jungle in the
starlight looked very dark and terrible.

“Ye know the trail to Khanhiwara?” Mowgli whispered.

They nodded.

“Good. Remember, now, not to be afraid. And there is no need to go
quickly. Only--only there may be some small singing in the Jungle behind
you and before.”

“Think you we would have risked a night in the Jungle through anything
less than the fear of burning? It is better to be killed by beasts than
by men,” said Messua’s husband; but Messua looked at Mowgli and smiled.

“I say,” Mowgli went on, just as though he were Baloo repeating an old
Jungle Law for the hundredth time to a foolish cub--“I say that not a
tooth in the Jungle is bared against you; not a foot in the Jungle is
lifted against you. Neither man nor beast shall stay you till you come
within eye-shot of Khanhiwara. There will be a watch about you.” He
turned quickly to Messua, saying, “HE does not believe, but thou wilt
believe?”

“Ay, surely, my son. Man, ghost, or wolf of the Jungle, I believe.”

“HE will be afraid when he hears my people singing. Thou wilt know and
understand. Go now, and slowly, for there is no need of any haste. The
gates are shut.”

Messua flung herself sobbing at Mowgli’s feet, but he lifted her very
quickly with a shiver. Then she hung about his neck and called him every
name of blessing she could think of, but her husband looked enviously
across his fields, and said: “IF we reach Khanhiwara, and I get the ear
of the English, I will bring such a lawsuit against the Brahmin and old
Buldeo and the others as shall eat the village to the bone. They shall
pay me twice over for my crops untilled and my buffaloes unfed. I will
have a great justice.”

Mowgli laughed. “I do not know what justice is, but--come next Rains.
and see what is left.”

They went off toward the Jungle, and Mother Wolf leaped from her place
of hiding.

“Follow!” said Mowgli; “and look to it that all the Jungle knows these
two are safe. Give tongue a little. I would call Bagheera.”

The long, low howl rose and fell, and Mowgli saw Messua’s husband flinch
and turn, half minded to run back to the hut.

“Go on,” Mowgli called cheerfully. “I said there might be singing. That
call will follow up to Khanhiwara. It is Favour of the Jungle.”

Messua urged her husband forward, and the darkness shut down on them and
Mother Wolf as Bagheera rose up almost under Mowgli’s feet, trembling
with delight of the night that drives the Jungle People wild.

“I am ashamed of thy brethren,” he said, purring. “What? Did they not
sing sweetly to Buldeo?” said Mowgli.

“Too well! Too well! They made even ME forget my pride, and, by the
Broken Lock that freed me, I went singing through the Jungle as though I
were out wooing in the spring! Didst thou not hear us?”

“I had other game afoot. Ask Buldeo if he liked the song. But where
are the Four? I do not wish one of the Man-Pack to leave the gates
to-night.”

“What need of the Four, then?” said Bagheera, shifting from foot to
foot, his eyes ablaze, and purring louder than ever. “I can hold them,
Little Brother. Is it killing at last? The singing and the sight of the
men climbing up the trees have made me very ready. Who is Man that we
should care for him--the naked brown digger, the hairless and toothless,
the eater of earth? I have followed him all day--at noon--in the white
sunlight. I herded him as the wolves herd buck. I am Bagheera! Bagheera!
Bagheera! As I dance with my shadow, so danced I with those men. Look!”
 The great panther leaped as a kitten leaps at a dead leaf whirling
overhead, struck left and right into the empty air, that sang under the
strokes, landed noiselessly, and leaped again and again, while the
half purr, half growl gathered head as steam rumbles in a boiler. “I
am Bagheera--in the jungle--in the night, and my strength is in me. Who
shall stay my stroke? Man-cub, with one blow of my paw I could beat thy
head flat as a dead frog in the summer!”

“Strike, then!” said Mowgli, in the dialect of the village, NOT the
talk of the Jungle, and the human words brought Bagheera to a full stop,
flung back on haunches that quivered under him, his head just at the
level of Mowgli’s. Once more Mowgli stared, as he had stared at the
rebellious cubs, full into the beryl-green eyes till the red glare
behind their green went out like the light of a lighthouse shut off
twenty miles across the sea; till the eyes dropped, and the big head
with them--dropped lower and lower, and the red rasp of a tongue grated
on Mowgli’s instep.

“Brother--Brother--Brother!” the boy whispered, stroking steadily and
lightly from the neck along the heaving back. “Be still, be still! It is
the fault of the night, and no fault of thine.”

“It was the smells of the night,” said Bagheera penitently. “This air
cries aloud to me. But how dost THOU know?”

Of course the air round an Indian village is full of all kinds of
smells, and to any creature who does nearly all his thinking through his
nose, smells are as maddening as music and drugs are to human beings.
Mowgli gentled the panther for a few minutes longer, and he lay down
like a cat before a fire, his paws tucked under his breast, and his eyes
half shut.

“Thou art of the Jungle and NOT of the Jungle,” he said at last. “And I
am only a black panther. But I love thee, Little Brother.”

“They are very long at their talk under the tree,” Mowgli said, without
noticing the last sentence. “Buldeo must have told many tales. They
should come soon to drag the woman and her man out of the trap and put
them into the Red Flower. They will find that trap sprung. Ho! ho!”

“Nay, listen,” said Bagheera. “The fever is out of my blood now. Let
them find ME there! Few would leave their houses after meeting me. It is
not the first time I have been in a cage; and I do not think they will
tie ME with cords.”

“Be wise, then,” said Mowgli, laughing; for he was beginning to feel as
reckless as the panther, who had glided into the hut.

“Pah!” Bagheera grunted. “This place is rank with Man, but here is just
such a bed as they gave me to lie upon in the King’s cages at Oodeypore.
Now I lie down.” Mowgli heard the strings of the cot crack under the
great brute’s weight. “By the Broken Lock that freed me, they will think
they have caught big game! Come and sit beside me, Little Brother; we
will give them ‘good hunting’ together!”

“No; I have another thought in my stomach. The Man-Pack shall not know
what share I have in the sport. Make thine own hunt. I do not wish to
see them.”

“Be it so,” said Bagheera. “Ah, now they come!”

The conference under the peepul-tree had been growing noisier and
noisier, at the far end of the village. It broke in wild yells, and
a rush up the street of men and women, waving clubs and bamboos and
sickles and knives. Buldeo and the Brahmin were at the head of it, but
the mob was close at their heels, and they cried, “The witch and the
wizard! Let us see if hot coins will make them confess! Burn the hut
over their heads! We will teach them to shelter wolf-devils! Nay, beat
them first! Torches! More torches! Buldeo, heat the gun-barrels!”

Here was some little difficulty with the catch of the door. It had been
very firmly fastened, but the crowd tore it away bodily, and the light
of the torches streamed into the room where, stretched at full length on
the bed, his paws crossed and lightly hung down over one end, black
as the Pit, and terrible as a demon, was Bagheera. There was one
half-minute of desperate silence, as the front ranks of the crowd clawed
and tore their way back from the threshold, and in that minute
Bagheera raised his head and yawned--elaborately, carefully, and
ostentatiously--as he would yawn when he wished to insult an equal.
The fringed lips drew back and up; the red tongue curled; the lower jaw
dropped and dropped till you could see half-way down the hot gullet; and
the gigantic dog-teeth stood clear to the pit of the gums till they rang
together, upper and under, with the snick of steel-faced wards shooting
home round the edges of a safe. Next instant the street was empty;
Bagheera had leaped back through the window, and stood at Mowgli’s
side, while a yelling, screaming torrent scrambled and tumbled one over
another in their panic haste to get to their own huts.

“They will not stir till day comes,” said Bagheera quietly. “And now?”

The silence of the afternoon sleep seemed to have overtaken the village;
but, as they listened, they could hear the sound of heavy grain-boxes
being dragged over earthen floors and set down against doors. Bagheera
was quite right; the village would not stir till daylight. Mowgli sat
still, and thought, and his face grew darker and darker.

“What have I done?” said Bagheera, at last coming to his feet, fawning.

“Nothing but great good. Watch them now till the day. I sleep.” Mowgli
ran off into the Jungle, and dropped like a dead man across a rock, and
slept and slept the day round, and the night back again.

When he waked, Bagheera was at his side, and there was a newly-killed
buck at his feet. Bagheera watched curiously while Mowgli went to work
with his skinning-knife, ate and drank, and turned over with his chin in
his hands.

“The man and the woman are come safe within eye-shot of Khanhiwara,”
 Bagheera said. “Thy lair mother sent the word back by Chil, the Kite.
They found a horse before midnight of the night they were freed, and
went very quickly. Is not that well?”

“That is well,” said Mowgli.

“And thy Man-Pack in the village did not stir till the sun was high this
morning. Then they ate their food and ran back quickly to their houses.”

“Did they, by chance, see thee?”

“It may have been. I was rolling in the dust before the gate at dawn,
and I may have made also some small song to myself. Now, Little Brother,
there is nothing more to do. Come hunting with me and Baloo. He has new
hives that he wishes to show, and we all desire thee back again as of
old. Take off that look which makes even me afraid! The man and woman
will not be put into the Red Flower, and all goes well in the Jungle. Is
it not true? Let us forget the Man-Pack.”

“They shall be forgotten in a little while. Where does Hathi feed
to-night?”

“Where he chooses. Who can answer for the Silent One? But why? What is
there Hathi can do which we cannot?”

“Bid him and his three sons come here to me.”

“But, indeed, and truly, Little Brother, it is not--it is not seemly
to say ‘Come,’ and ‘Go,’ to Hathi. Remember, he is the Master of the
Jungle, and before the Man-Pack changed the look on thy face, he taught
thee the Master-words of the Jungle.”

“That is all one. I have a Master-word for him now. Bid him come to
Mowgli, the Frog: and if he does not hear at first, bid him come because
of the Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore.”

“The Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore,” Bagheera repeated two or three
times to make sure. “I go. Hathi can but be angry at the worst, and
I would give a moon’s hunting to hear a Master-word that compels the
Silent One.”

He went away, leaving Mowgli stabbing furiously with his skinning-knife
into the earth. Mowgli had never seen human blood in his life before
till he had seen, and--what meant much more to him--smelled Messua’s
blood on the thongs that bound her. And Messua had been kind to
him, and, so far as he knew anything about love, he loved Messua as
completely as he hated the rest of mankind. But deeply as he loathed
them, their talk, their cruelty, and their cowardice, not for anything
the Jungle had to offer could he bring himself to take a human life, and
have that terrible scent of blood back again in his nostrils. His plan
was simpler, but much more thorough; and he laughed to himself when he
thought that it was one of old Buldeo’s tales told under the peepul-tree
in the evening that had put the idea into his head.

“It WAS a Master-word,” Bagheera whispered in his ear. “They were
feeding by the river, and they obeyed as though they were bullocks. Look
where they come now!”

Hathi and his three sons had arrived, in their usual way, without a
sound. The mud of the river was still fresh on their flanks, and Hathi
was thoughtfully chewing the green stem of a young plantain-tree that he
had gouged up with his tusks. But every line in his vast body showed to
Bagheera, who could see things when he came across them, that it was not
the Master of the Jungle speaking to a Man-cub, but one who was afraid
coming before one who was not. His three sons rolled side by side,
behind their father.

Mowgli hardly lifted his head as Hathi gave him “Good hunting.” He kept
him swinging and rocking, and shifting from one foot to another, for
a long time before he spoke; and when he opened his mouth it was to
Bagheera, not to the elephants.

“I will tell a tale that was told to me by the hunter ye hunted to-day,”
 said Mowgli. “It concerns an elephant, old and wise, who fell into a
trap, and the sharpened stake in the pit scarred him from a little above
his heel to the crest of his shoulder, leaving a white mark.” Mowgli
threw out his hand, and as Hathi wheeled the moonlight showed a long
white scar on his slaty side, as though he had been struck with a
red-hot whip. “Men came to take him from the trap,” Mowgli continued,
“but he broke his ropes, for he was strong, and went away till his
wound was healed. Then came he, angry, by night to the fields of
those hunters. And I remember now that he had three sons. These things
happened many, many Rains ago, and very far away--among the fields of
Bhurtpore. What came to those fields at the next reaping, Hathi?”

“They were reaped by me and by my three sons,” said Hathi.

“And to the ploughing that follows the reaping?” said Mowgli.

“There was no ploughing,” said Hathi.

“And to the men that live by the green crops on the ground?” said
Mowgli.

“They went away.”

“And to the huts in which the men slept?” said Mowgli.

“We tore the roofs to pieces, and the Jungle swallowed up the walls,”
 said Hathi.

“And what more?” said Mowgli.

“As much good ground as I can walk over in two nights from the east to
the west, and from the north to the south as much as I can walk over in
three nights, the Jungle took. We let in the Jungle upon five villages;
and in those villages, and in their lands, the grazing-ground and the
soft crop-grounds, there is not one man to-day who takes his food from
the ground. That was the Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore, which I and
my three sons did; and now I ask, Man-cub, how the news of it came to
thee?” said Hathi.

“A man told me, and now I see even Buldeo can speak truth. It was well
done, Hathi with the white mark; but the second time it shall be done
better, for the reason that there is a man to direct. Thou knowest the
village of the Man-Pack that cast me out? They are idle, senseless, and
cruel; they play with their mouths, and they do not kill the weaker for
food, but for sport. When they are full-fed they would throw their own
breed into the Red Flower. This I have seen. It is not well that they
should live here any more. I hate them!”

“Kill, then,” said the youngest of Hathi’s three sons, picking up a tuft
of grass, dusting it against his fore-legs, and throwing it away, while
his little red eyes glanced furtively from side to side.

“What good are white bones to me?” Mowgli answered angrily. “Am I the
cub of a wolf to play in the sun with a raw head? I have killed Shere
Khan, and his hide rots on the Council Rock; but--but I do not know
whither Shere Khan is gone, and my stomach is still empty. Now I
will take that which I can see and touch. Let in the Jungle upon that
village, Hathi!”

Bagheera shivered, and cowered down. He could understand, if the worst
came to the worst, a quick rush down the village street, and a right and
left blow into a crowd, or a crafty killing of men as they ploughed in
the twilight; but this scheme for deliberately blotting out an entire
village from the eyes of man and beast frightened him. Now he saw why
Mowgli had sent for Hathi. No one but the long-lived elephant could plan
and carry through such a war.

“Let them run as the men ran from the fields of Bhurtpore, till we have
the rain-water for the only plough, and the noise of the rain on the
thick leaves for the pattering of their spindles--till Bagheera and I
lair in the house of the Brahmin, and the buck drink at the tank behind
the temple! Let in the Jungle, Hathi!”

“But I--but we have no quarrel with them, and it needs the red rage
of great pain ere we tear down the places where men sleep,” said Hathi
doubtfully.

“Are ye the only eaters of grass in the Jungle? Drive in your peoples.
Let the deer and the pig and the nilghai look to it. Ye need never show
a hand’s-breadth of hide till the fields are naked. Let in the Jungle,
Hathi!”

“There will be no killing? My tusks were red at the Sack of the Fields
of Bhurtpore, and I would not wake that smell again.”

“Nor I. I do not wish even their bones to lie on the clean earth. Let
them go and find a fresh lair. They cannot stay here. I have seen and
smelled the blood of the woman that gave me food--the woman whom they
would have killed but for me. Only the smell of the new grass on their
door-steps can take away that smell. It burns in my mouth. Let in the
Jungle, Hathi!”

“Ah!” said Hathi. “So did the scar of the stake burn on my hide till we
watched the villages die under in the spring growth. Now I see. Thy war
shall be our war. We will let in the jungle!”

Mowgli had hardly time to catch his breath--he was shaking all over with
rage and hate before the place where the elephants had stood was empty,
and Bagheera was looking at him with terror.

“By the Broken Lock that freed me!” said the Black Panther at last. “Art
THOU the naked thing I spoke for in the Pack when all was young?
Master of the Jungle, when my strength goes, speak for me--speak for
Baloo--speak for us all! We are cubs before thee! Snapped twigs under
foot! Fawns that have lost their doe!”

The idea of Bagheera being a stray fawn upset Mowgli altogether, and he
laughed and caught his breath, and sobbed and laughed again, till he had
to jump into a pool to make himself stop. Then he swam round and round,
ducking in and out of the bars of the moonlight like the frog, his
namesake.

By this time Hathi and his three sons had turned, each to one point of
the compass, and were striding silently down the valleys a mile away.
They went on and on for two days’ march--that is to say, a long sixty
miles--through the Jungle; and every step they took, and every wave of
their trunks, was known and noted and talked over by Mang and Chil and
the Monkey People and all the birds. Then they began to feed, and fed
quietly for a week or so. Hathi and his sons are like Kaa, the Rock
Python. They never hurry till they have to.

At the end of that time--and none knew who had started it--a rumour went
through the Jungle that there was better food and water to be found in
such and such a valley. The pig--who, of course, will go to the ends of
the earth for a full meal--moved first by companies, scuffling over the
rocks, and the deer followed, with the small wild foxes that live on
the dead and dying of the herds; and the heavy-shouldered nilghai moved
parallel with the deer, and the wild buffaloes of the swamps came after
the nilghai. The least little thing would have turned the scattered,
straggling droves that grazed and sauntered and drank and grazed again;
but whenever there was an alarm some one would rise up and soothe them.
At one time it would be Ikki the Porcupine, full of news of good feed
just a little farther on; at another Mang would cry cheerily and flap
down a glade to show it was all empty; or Baloo, his mouth full of
roots, would shamble alongside a wavering line and half frighten, half
romp it clumsily back to the proper road. Very many creatures broke back
or ran away or lost interest, but very many were left to go forward. At
the end of another ten days or so the situation was this. The deer and
the pig and the nilghai were milling round and round in a circle of
eight or ten miles radius, while the Eaters of Flesh skirmished round
its edge. And the centre of that circle was the village, and round the
village the crops were ripening, and in the crops sat men on what they
call machans--platforms like pigeon-perches, made of sticks at the top
of four poles--to scare away birds and other stealers. Then the deer
were coaxed no more. The Eaters of Flesh were close behind them, and
forced them forward and inward.

It was a dark night when Hathi and his three sons slipped down from the
Jungle, and broke off the poles of the machans with their trunks; they
fell as a snapped stalk of hemlock in bloom falls, and the men that
tumbled from them heard the deep gurgling of the elephants in their
ears. Then the vanguard of the bewildered armies of the deer broke down
and flooded into the village grazing-grounds and the ploughed fields;
and the sharp-hoofed, rooting wild pig came with them, and what the deer
left the pig spoiled, and from time to time an alarm of wolves would
shake the herds, and they would rush to and fro desperately, treading
down the young barley, and cutting flat the banks of the irrigating
channels. Before the dawn broke the pressure on the outside of the
circle gave way at one point. The Eaters of Flesh had fallen back and
left an open path to the south, and drove upon drove of buck fled along
it. Others, who were bolder, lay up in the thickets to finish their meal
next night.

But the work was practically done. When the villagers looked in the
morning they saw their crops were lost. And that meant death if they did
not get away, for they lived year in and year out as near to starvation
as the Jungle was near to them. When the buffaloes were sent to graze
the hungry brutes found that the deer had cleared the grazing-grounds,
and so wandered into the Jungle and drifted off with their wild mates;
and when twilight fell the three or four ponies that belonged to the
village lay in their stables with their heads beaten in. Only Bagheera
could have given those strokes, and only Bagheera would have thought of
insolently dragging the last carcass to the open street.

The villagers had no heart to make fires in the fields that night, so
Hathi and his three sons went gleaning among what was left; and where
Hathi gleans there is no need to follow. The men decided to live on
their stored seed-corn until the rains had fallen, and then to take
work as servants till they could catch up with the lost year; but as
the grain-dealer was thinking of his well-filled crates of corn, and the
prices he would levy at the sale of it, Hathi’s sharp tusks were picking
out the corner of his mud-house, and smashing open the big wicker chest,
leeped with cow-dung, where the precious stuff lay.

When that last loss was discovered, it was the Brahmin’s turn to speak.
He had prayed to his own Gods without answer. It might be, he said,
that, unconsciously, the village had offended some one of the Gods of
the Jungle, for, beyond doubt, the Jungle was against them. So they sent
for the head-man of the nearest tribe of wandering Gonds--little, wise,
and very black hunters, living in the deep Jungle, whose fathers came of
the oldest race in India--the aboriginal owners of the land. They made
the Gond welcome with what they had, and he stood on one leg, his bow in
his hand, and two or three poisoned arrows stuck through his top-knot,
looking half afraid and half contemptuously at the anxious villagers
and their ruined fields. They wished to know whether his Gods--the Old
Gods--were angry with them and what sacrifices should be offered. The
Gond said nothing, but picked up a trail of the Karela, the vine that
bears the bitter wild gourd, and laced it to and fro across the temple
door in the face of the staring red Hindu image. Then he pushed with his
hand in the open air along the road to Khanhiwara, and went back to his
Jungle, and watched the Jungle People drifting through it. He knew that
when the Jungle moves only white men can hope to turn it aside.

There was no need to ask his meaning. The wild gourd would grow where
they had worshipped their God, and the sooner they saved themselves the
better.

But it is hard to tear a village from its moorings. They stayed on as
long as any summer food was left to them, and they tried to gather nuts
in the Jungle, but shadows with glaring eyes watched them, and rolled
before them even at mid-day; and when they ran back afraid to their
walls, on the tree-trunks they had passed not five minutes before the
bark would be stripped and chiselled with the stroke of some great
taloned paw. The more they kept to their village, the bolder grew the
wild things that gambolled and bellowed on the grazing-grounds by the
Waingunga. They had no time to patch and plaster the rear walls of the
empty byres that backed on to the Jungle; the wild pig trampled them
down, and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbows
over the new-won ground, and the coarse grass bristled behind the vines
like the lances of a goblin army following a retreat. The unmarried men
ran away first, and carried the news far and near that the village was
doomed. Who could fight, they said, against the Jungle, or the Gods
of the Jungle, when the very village cobra had left his hole in the
platform under the peepul-tree? So their little commerce with the
outside world shrunk as the trodden paths across the open grew fewer
and fainter. At last the nightly trumpetings of Hathi and his three sons
ceased to trouble them; for they had no more to be robbed of. The crop
on the ground and the seed in the ground had been taken. The outlying
fields were already losing their shape, and it was time to throw
themselves on the charity of the English at Khanhiwara.

Native fashion, they delayed their departure from one day to another
till the first Rains caught them and the unmended roofs let in a flood,
and the grazing-ground stood ankle deep, and all life came on with a
rush after the heat of the summer. Then they waded out--men, women,
and children--through the blinding hot rain of the morning, but turned
naturally for one farewell look at their homes.

They heard, as the last burdened family filed through the gate, a crash
of falling beams and thatch behind the walls. They saw a shiny,
snaky black trunk lifted for an instant, scattering sodden thatch. It
disappeared, and there was another crash, followed by a squeal. Hathi
had been plucking off the roofs of the huts as you pluck water-lilies,
and a rebounding beam had pricked him. He needed only this to unchain
his full strength, for of all things in the Jungle the wild elephant
enraged is the most wantonly destructive. He kicked backward at a mud
wall that crumbled at the stroke, and, crumbling, melted to yellow
mud under the torrent of rain. Then he wheeled and squealed, and tore
through the narrow streets, leaning against the huts right and left,
shivering the crazy doors, and crumpling up the caves; while his
three sons raged behind as they had raged at the Sack of the Fields of
Bhurtpore.

“The Jungle will swallow these shells,” said a quiet voice in the
wreckage. “It is the outer wall that must lie down,” and Mowgli, with
the rain sluicing over his bare shoulders and arms, leaped back from a
wall that was settling like a tired buffalo.

“All in good time,” panted Hathi. “Oh, but my tusks were red at
Bhurtpore; To the outer wall, children! With the head! Together! Now!”

The four pushed side by side; the outer wall bulged, split, and fell,
and the villagers, dumb with horror, saw the savage, clay-streaked
heads of the wreckers in the ragged gap. Then they fled, houseless and
foodless, down the valley, as their village, shredded and tossed and
trampled, melted behind them.

A month later the place was a dimpled mound, covered with soft, green
young stuff; and by the end of the Rains there was the roaring jungle in
full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before.




MOWGLI’S SONG AGAINST PEOPLE

     I will let loose against you the fleet-footed vines--
     I will call in the Jungle to stamp out your lines!
         The roofs shall fade before it,
           The house-beams shall fall,
         And the Karela, the bitter Karela,
           Shall cover it all!

     In the gates of these your councils my people shall sing,
     In the doors of these your garners the Bat-folk shall cling;
         And the snake shall be your watchman,
           By a hearthstone unswept;
         For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
           Shall fruit where ye slept!

     Ye shall not see my strikers; ye shall hear them and guess;
     By night, before the moon-rise, I will send for my cess,
         And the wolf shall be your herdsman
           By a landmark removed,
         For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
           Shall seed where ye loved!

     I will reap your fields before you at the hands of a host;
     Ye shall glean behind my reapers, for the bread that is lost,
         And the deer shall be your oxen
           By a headland untilled,
         For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
           Shall leaf where ye build!

     I have untied against you the club-footed vines,
     I have sent in the Jungle to swamp out your lines.
         The trees--the trees are on you!
           The house-beams shall fall,
         And the Karela, the bitter Karela,
            Shall cover you all!




THE UNDERTAKERS

        When ye say to Tabaqui, “My Brother!” when ye call the
            Hyena to meat,
        Ye may cry the Full Truce with Jacala--the Belly that runs
            on four feet.
                                                  Jungle Law

“Respect the aged!”

“It was a thick voice--a muddy voice that would have made you shudder--a
voice like something soft breaking in two. There was a quaver in it, a
croak and a whine.

“Respect the aged! O Companions of the River--respect the aged!”

Nothing could be seen on the broad reach of the river except a
little fleet of square-sailed, wooden-pinned barges, loaded with
building-stone, that had just come under the railway bridge, and were
driving down-stream. They put their clumsy helms over to avoid the
sand-bar made by the scour of the bridge-piers, and as they passed,
three abreast, the horrible voice began again:

“O Brahmins of the River--respect the aged and infirm!”

A boatman turned where he sat on the gunwale, lifted up his hand, said
something that was not a blessing, and the boats creaked on through
the twilight. The broad Indian river, that looked more like a chain
of little lakes than a stream, was as smooth as glass, reflecting the
sandy-red sky in mid-channel, but splashed with patches of yellow and
dusky purple near and under the low banks. Little creeks ran into the
river in the wet season, but now their dry mouths hung clear above
water-line. On the left shore, and almost under the railway bridge,
stood a mud-and-brick and thatch-and-stick village, whose main street,
full of cattle going back to their byres, ran straight to the river, and
ended in a sort of rude brick pier-head, where people who wanted to
wash could wade in step by step. That was the Ghaut of the village of
Mugger-Ghaut.

Night was falling fast over the fields of lentils and rice and cotton
in the low-lying ground yearly flooded by the river; over the reeds
that fringed the elbow of the bend, and the tangled jungle of the
grazing-grounds behind the still reeds. The parrots and crows, who had
been chattering and shouting over their evening drink, had flown inland
to roost, crossing the out-going battalions of the flying-foxes; and
cloud upon cloud of water-birds came whistling and “honking” to
the cover of the reed-beds. There were geese, barrel-headed and
black-backed, teal, widgeon, mallard, and sheldrake, with curlews, and
here and there a flamingo.

A lumbering Adjutant-crane brought up the rear, flying as though each
slow stroke would be his last.

“Respect the aged! Brahmins of the River--respect the aged!”

The Adjutant half turned his head, sheered a little in the direction of
the voice, and landed stiffly on the sand-bar below the bridge. Then you
saw what a ruffianly brute he really was. His back view was immensely
respectable, for he stood nearly six feet high, and looked rather like a
very proper bald-headed parson. In front it was different, for his Ally
Sloper-like head and neck had not a feather to them, and there was a
horrible raw-skin pouch on his neck under his chin--a hold-all for the
things his pick-axe beak might steal. His legs were long and thin and
skinny, but he moved them delicately, and looked at them with pride as
he preened down his ashy-gray tail-feathers, glanced over the smooth of
his shoulder, and stiffened into “Stand at attention.”

A mangy little Jackal, who had been yapping hungrily on a low bluff,
cocked up his ears and tail, and scuttered across the shallows to join
the Adjutant.

He was the lowest of his caste--not that the best of jackals are good
for much, but this one was peculiarly low, being half a beggar, half a
criminal--a cleaner-up of village rubbish-heaps, desperately timid or
wildly bold, everlastingly hungry, and full of cunning that never did
him any good.

“Ugh!” he said, shaking himself dolefully as he landed. “May the red
mange destroy the dogs of this village! I have three bites for each flea
upon me, and all because I looked--only looked, mark you--at an old shoe
in a cow-byre. Can I eat mud?” He scratched himself under his left ear.

“I heard,” said the Adjutant, in a voice like a blunt saw going through
a thick board--“I HEARD there was a new-born puppy in that same shoe.”

“To hear is one thing; to know is another,” said the Jackal, who had a
very fair knowledge of proverbs, picked up by listening to men round the
village fires of an evening.

“Quite true. So, to make sure, I took care of that puppy while the dogs
were busy elsewhere.”

“They were VERY busy,” said the Jackal. “Well, I must not go to the
village hunting for scraps yet awhile. And so there truly was a blind
puppy in that shoe?”

“It is here,” said the Adjutant, squinting over his beak at his full
pouch. “A small thing, but acceptable now that charity is dead in the
world.”

“Ahai! The world is iron in these days,” wailed the Jackal. Then his
restless eye caught the least possible ripple on the water, and he went
on quickly: “Life is hard for us all, and I doubt not that even our
excellent master, the Pride of the Ghaut and the Envy of the River----”

“A liar, a flatterer, and a Jackal were all hatched out of the same
egg,” said the Adjutant to nobody in particular; for he was rather a
fine sort of a liar on his own account when he took the trouble.

“Yes, the Envy of the River,” the Jackal repeated, raising his voice.
“Even he, I doubt not, finds that since the bridge has been built good
food is more scarce. But on the other hand, though I would by no means
say this to his noble face, he is so wise and so virtuous--as I, alas I
am not----”

“When the Jackal owns he is gray, how black must the Jackal be!”
 muttered the Adjutant. He could not see what was coming.

“That his food never fails, and in consequence----”

There was a soft grating sound, as though a boat had just touched in
shoal water. The Jackal spun round quickly and faced (it is always
best to face) the creature he had been talking about. It was a
twenty-four-foot crocodile, cased in what looked like treble-riveted
boiler-plate, studded and keeled and crested; the yellow points of his
upper teeth just overhanging his beautifully fluted lower jaw. It
was the blunt-nosed Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, older than any man in the
village, who had given his name to the village; the demon of the ford
before the railway bridge, came--murderer, man-eater, and local fetish
in one. He lay with his chin in the shallows, keeping his place by an
almost invisible rippling of his tail, and well the Jackal knew that one
stroke of that same tail in the water would carry the Mugger up the bank
with the rush of a steam-engine.

“Auspiciously met, Protector of the Poor!” he fawned, backing at every
word. “A delectable voice was heard, and we came in the hopes of sweet
conversation. My tailless presumption, while waiting here, led me,
indeed, to speak of thee. It is my hope that nothing was overheard.”

Now the Jackal had spoken just to be listened to, for he knew flattery
was the best way of getting things to eat, and the Mugger knew that
the Jackal had spoken for this end, and the Jackal knew that the Mugger
knew, and the Mugger knew that the Jackal knew that the Mugger knew, and
so they were all very contented together.

The old brute pushed and panted and grunted up the bank, mumbling,
“Respect the aged and infirm!” and all the time his little eyes burned
like coals under the heavy, horny eyelids on the top of his triangular
head, as he shoved his bloated barrel-body along between his crutched
legs. Then he settled down, and, accustomed as the Jackal was to his
ways, he could not help starting, for the hundredth time, when he saw
how exactly the Mugger imitated a log adrift on the bar. He had even
taken pains to lie at the exact angle a naturally stranded log would
make with the water, having regard to the current of the season at the
time and place. All this was only a matter of habit, of course, because
the Mugger had come ashore for pleasure; but a crocodile is never quite
full, and if the Jackal had been deceived by the likeness he would not
have lived to philosophise over it.

“My child, I heard nothing,” said the Mugger, shutting one eye. “The
water was in my ears, and also I was faint with hunger. Since the
railway bridge was built my people at my village have ceased to love me;
and that is breaking my heart.”

“Ah, shame!” said the Jackal. “So noble a heart, too! But men are all
alike, to my mind.”

“Nay, there are very great differences indeed,” the Mugger answered
gently. “Some are as lean as boat-poles. Others again are fat as
young ja--dogs. Never would I causelessly revile men. They are of all
fashions, but the long years have shown me that, one with another, they
are very good. Men, women, and children--I have no fault to find with
them. And remember, child, he who rebukes the World is rebuked by the
World.”

“Flattery is worse than an empty tin can in the belly. But that which we
have just heard is wisdom,” said the Adjutant, bringing down one foot.

“Consider, though, their ingratitude to this excellent one,” began the
Jackal tenderly.

“Nay, nay, not ingratitude!” the Mugger said. “They do not think for
others; that is all. But I have noticed, lying at my station below the
ford, that the stairs of the new bridge are cruelly hard to climb, both
for old people and young children. The old, indeed, are not so worthy of
consideration, but I am grieved--I am truly grieved--on account of the
fat children. Still, I think, in a little while, when the newness of the
bridge has worn away, we shall see my people’s bare brown legs bravely
splashing through the ford as before. Then the old Mugger will be
honoured again.”

“But surely I saw Marigold wreaths floating off the edge of the Ghaut
only this noon,” said the Adjutant.

Marigold wreaths are a sign of reverence all India over.

“An error--an error. It was the wife of the sweetmeat-seller. She loses
her eyesight year by year, and cannot tell a log from me--the Mugger of
the Ghaut. I saw the mistake when she threw the garland, for I was lying
at the very foot of the Ghaut, and had she taken another step I might
have shown her some little difference. Yet she meant well, and we must
consider the spirit of the offering.”

“What good are marigold wreaths when one is on the rubbish-heap?” said
the Jackal, hunting for fleas, but keeping one wary eye on his Protector
of the Poor.

“True, but they have not yet begun to make the rubbish-heap that shall
carry ME. Five times have I seen the river draw back from the village
and make new land at the foot of the street. Five times have I seen the
village rebuilt on the banks, and I shall see it built yet five times
more. I am no faithless, fish-hunting Gavial, I, at Kasi to-day and
Prayag to-morrow, as the saying is, but the true and constant watcher of
the ford. It is not for nothing, child, that the village bears my name,
and ‘he who watches long,’ as the saying is, ‘shall at last have his
reward.’”

“_I_ have watched long--very long--nearly all my life, and my reward has
been bites and blows,” said the Jackal.

“Ho! ho! ho!” roared the Adjutant.

     “In August was the Jackal born;
        The Rains fell in September;
     ‘Now such a fearful flood as this,’
        Says he, ‘I can’t remember!’”

There is one very unpleasant peculiarity about the Adjutant. At
uncertain times he suffers from acute attacks of the fidgets or cramp
in his legs, and though he is more virtuous to behold than any of the
cranes, who are all immensely respectable, he flies off into wild,
cripple-stilt war-dances, half opening his wings and bobbing his bald
head up and down; while for reasons best known to himself he is very
careful to time his worst attacks with his nastiest remarks. At the last
word of his song he came to attention again, ten times adjutaunter than
before.

The Jackal winced, though he was full three seasons old, but you cannot
resent an insult from a person with a beak a yard long, and the power of
driving it like a javelin. The Adjutant was a most notorious coward, but
the Jackal was worse.

“We must live before we can learn,” said the Mugger, “and there is this
to say: Little jackals are very common, child, but such a mugger as I am
is not common. For all that, I am not proud, since pride is destruction;
but take notice, it is Fate, and against his Fate no one who swims or
walks or runs should say anything at all. I am well contented with Fate.
With good luck, a keen eye, and the custom of considering whether a
creek or a backwater has an outlet to it ere you ascend, much may be
done.”

“Once I heard that even the Protector of the Poor made a mistake,” said
the Jackal viciously.

“True; but there my Fate helped me. It was before I had come to my
full growth--before the last famine but three (by the Right and Left of
Gunga, how full used the streams to be in those days!). Yes, I was young
and unthinking, and when the flood came, who so pleased as I? A little
made me very happy then. The village was deep in flood, and I swam above
the Ghaut and went far inland, up to the rice-fields, and they were deep
in good mud. I remember also a pair of bracelets (glass they were,
and troubled me not a little) that I found that evening. Yes, glass
bracelets; and, if my memory serves me well, a shoe. I should have
shaken off both shoes, but I was hungry. I learned better later. Yes.
And so I fed and rested me; but when I was ready to go to the river
again the flood had fallen, and I walked through the mud of the main
street. Who but I? Came out all my people, priests and women and
children, and I looked upon them with benevolence. The mud is not a good
place to fight in. Said a boatman, ‘Get axes and kill him, for he is the
Mugger of the ford.’ ‘Not so,’ said the Brahmin. ‘Look, he is driving
the flood before him! He is the godling of the village.’ Then they
threw many flowers at me, and by happy thought one led a goat across the
road.”

“How good--how very good is goat!” said the Jackal.

“Hairy--too hairy, and when found in the water more than likely to hide
a cross-shaped hook. But that goat I accepted, and went down to the
Ghaut in great honour. Later, my Fate sent me the boatman who had
desired to cut off my tail with an axe. His boat grounded upon an old
shoal which you would not remember.”

“We are not ALL jackals here,” said the Adjutant. “Was it the shoal made
where the stone-boats sank in the year of the great drouth--a long shoal
that lasted three floods?”

“There were two,” said the Mugger; “an upper and a lower shoal.”

“Ay, I forgot. A channel divided them, and later dried up again,” said
the Adjutant, who prided himself on his memory.

“On the lower shoal my well-wisher’s craft grounded. He was sleeping in
the bows, and, half awake, leaped over to his waist--no, it was no more
than to his knees--to push off. His empty boat went on and touched again
below the next reach, as the river ran then. I followed, because I knew
men would come out to drag it ashore.”

“And did they do so?” said the Jackal, a little awe-stricken. This was
hunting on a scale that impressed him.

“There and lower down they did. I went no farther, but that gave me
three in one day--well-fed manjis (boatmen) all, and, except in the
case of the last (then I was careless), never a cry to warn those on the
bank.”

“Ah, noble sport! But what cleverness and great judgment it requires!”
 said the Jackal.

“Not cleverness, child, but only thought. A little thought in life
is like salt upon rice, as the boatmen say, and I have thought deeply
always. The Gavial, my cousin, the fish-eater, has told me how hard it
is for him to follow his fish, and how one fish differs from the other,
and how he must know them all, both together and apart. I say that is
wisdom; but, on the other hand, my cousin, the Gavial, lives among his
people. MY people do not swim in companies, with their mouths out of the
water, as Rewa does; nor do they constantly rise to the surface of the
water, and turn over on their sides, like Mohoo and little Chapta; nor
do they gather in shoals after flood, like Batchua and Chilwa.”

“All are very good eating,” said the Adjutant, clattering his beak.

“So my cousin says, and makes a great to-do over hunting them, but
they do not climb the banks to escape his sharp nose. MY people are
otherwise. Their life is on the land, in the houses, among the cattle.
I must know what they do, and what they are about to do; and adding the
tail to the trunk, as the saying is, I make up the whole elephant. Is
there a green branch and an iron ring hanging over a doorway? The old
Mugger knows that a boy has been born in that house, and must some
day come down to the Ghaut to play. Is a maiden to be married? The old
Mugger knows, for he sees the men carry gifts back and forth; and she,
too, comes down to the Ghaut to bathe before her wedding, and--he is
there. Has the river changed its channel, and made new land where there
was only sand before? The Mugger knows.”

“Now, of what use is that knowledge?” said the Jackal. “The river has
shifted even in my little life.” Indian rivers are nearly always moving
about in their beds, and will shift, sometimes, as much as two or three
miles in a season, drowning the fields on one bank, and spreading good
silt on the other.

“There is no knowledge so useful,” said the Mugger, “for new land means
new quarrels. The Mugger knows. Oho! the Mugger knows. As soon as the
water has drained off, he creeps up the little creeks that men think
would not hide a dog, and there he waits. Presently comes a farmer
saying he will plant cucumbers here, and melons there, in the new land
that the river has given him. He feels the good mud with his bare
toes. Anon comes another, saying he will put onions, and carrots, and
sugar-cane in such and such places. They meet as boats adrift meet,
and each rolls his eye at the other under the big blue turban. The old
Mugger sees and hears. Each calls the other ‘Brother,’ and they go to
mark out the boundaries of the new land. The Mugger hurries with them
from point to point, shuffling very low through the mud. Now they begin
to quarrel! Now they say hot words! Now they pull turbans! Now they lift
up their lathis (clubs), and, at last, one falls backward into the mud,
and the other runs away. When he comes back the dispute is settled, as
the iron-bound bamboo of the loser witnesses. Yet they are not grateful
to the Mugger. No, they cry ‘Murder!’ and their families fight with
sticks, twenty a-side. My people are good people--upland Jats--Malwais
of the Bet. They do not give blows for sport, and, when the fight is
done, the old Mugger waits far down the river, out of sight of the
village, behind the kikar-scrub yonder. Then come they down, my
broad-shouldered Jats--eight or nine together under the stars, bearing
the dead man upon a bed. They are old men with gray beards, and voices
as deep as mine. They light a little fire--ah! how well I know that
fire!--and they drink tobacco, and they nod their heads together forward
in a ring, or sideways toward the dead man upon the bank. They say the
English Law will come with a rope for this matter, and that such a man’s
family will be ashamed, because such a man must be hanged in the great
square of the Jail. Then say the friends of the dead, ‘Let him hang!’
and the talk is all to do over again--once, twice, twenty times in the
long night. Then says one, at last, ‘The fight was a fair fight. Let us
take blood-money, a little more than is offered by the slayer, and we
will say no more about it.’ Then do they haggle over the blood-money,
for the dead was a strong man, leaving many sons. Yet before amratvela
(sunrise) they put the fire to him a little, as the custom is, and the
dead man comes to me, and HE says no more about it. Aha! my children,
the Mugger knows--the Mugger knows--and my Malwah Jats are a good
people!”

“They are too close--too narrow in the hand for my crop,” croaked the
Adjutant. “They waste not the polish on the cow’s horn, as the saying
is; and, again, who can glean after a Malwai?”

“Ah, I--glean--THEM,” said the Mugger.

“Now, in Calcutta of the South, in the old days,” the Adjutant went on,
“everything was thrown into the streets, and we picked and chose. Those
wore dainty seasons. But to-day they keep their streets as clean as the
outside of an egg, and my people fly away. To be clean is one thing;
to dust, sweep, and sprinkle seven times a day wearies the very Gods
themselves.”

“There was a down-country jackal had it from a brother, who told me,
that in Calcutta of the South all the jackals were as fat as otters in
the Rains,” said the Jackal, his mouth watering at the bare thought of
it.

“Ah, but the white-faces are there--the English, and they bring dogs
from somewhere down the river in boats--big fat dogs--to keep those same
jackals lean,” said the Adjutant.

“They are, then, as hard-hearted as these people? I might have known.
Neither earth, sky, nor water shows charity to a jackal. I saw the tents
of a white-face last season, after the Rains, and I also took a new
yellow bridle to eat. The white-faces do not dress their leather in the
proper way. It made me very sick.”

“That was better than my case,” said the Adjutant. “When I was in my
third season, a young and a bold bird, I went down to the river where
the big boats come in. The boats of the English are thrice as big as
this village.”

“He has been as far as Delhi, and says all the people there walk on
their heads,” muttered the Jackal. The Mugger opened his left eye, and
looked keenly at the Adjutant.

“It is true,” the big bird insisted. “A liar only lies when he hopes
to be believed. No one who had not seen those boats COULD believe this
truth.”

“THAT is more reasonable,” said the Mugger. “And then?”

“From the insides of this boat they were taking out great pieces of
white stuff, which, in a little while, turned to water. Much split off,
and fell about on the shore, and the rest they swiftly put into a house
with thick walls. But a boatman, who laughed, took a piece no larger
than a small dog, and threw it to me. I--all my people--swallow without
reflection, and that piece I swallowed as is our custom. Immediately I
was afflicted with an excessive cold which, beginning in my crop, ran
down to the extreme end of my toes, and deprived me even of speech,
while the boatmen laughed at me. Never have I felt such cold. I danced
in my grief and amazement till I could recover my breath and then
I danced and cried out against the falseness of this world; and the
boatmen derided me till they fell down. The chief wonder of the matter,
setting aside that marvellous coldness, was that there was nothing at
all in my crop when I had finished my lamentings!”

The Adjutant had done his very best to describe his feelings after
swallowing a seven-pound lump of Wenham Lake ice, off an American
ice-ship, in the days before Calcutta made her ice by machinery; but
as he did not know what ice was, and as the Mugger and the Jackal knew
rather less, the tale missed fire.

“Anything,” said the Mugger, shutting his left eye again--“ANYTHING is
possible that comes out of a boat thrice the size of Mugger-Ghaut. My
village is not a small one.”

There was a whistle overhead on the bridge, and the Delhi Mail
slid across, all the carriages gleaming with light, and the shadows
faithfully following along the river. It clanked away into the dark
again; but the Mugger and the Jackal were so well used to it that they
never turned their heads.

“Is that anything less wonderful than a boat thrice the size of
Mugger-Ghaut?” said the bird, looking up.

“I saw that built, child. Stone by stone I saw the bridge-piers rise,
and when the men fell off (they were wondrous sure-footed for the most
part--but WHEN they fell) I was ready. After the first pier was made
they never thought to look down the stream for the body to burn. There,
again, I saved much trouble. There was nothing strange in the building
of the bridge,” said the Mugger.

“But that which goes across, pulling the roofed carts! That is strange,”
 the Adjutant repeated. “It is, past any doubt, a new breed of bullock.
Some day it will not be able to keep its foothold up yonder, and will
fall as the men did. The old Mugger will then be ready.”

The Jackal looked at the Adjutant and the Adjutant looked at the Jackal.
If there was one thing they were more certain of than another, it was
that the engine was everything in the wide world except a bullock. The
Jackal had watched it time and again from the aloe hedges by the side of
the line, and the Adjutant had seen engines since the first locomotive
ran in India. But the Mugger had only looked up at the thing from below,
where the brass dome seemed rather like a bullock’s hump.

“M--yes, a new kind of bullock,” the Mugger repeated ponderously,
to make himself quite sure in his own mind; and “Certainly it is a
bullock,” said the Jackal.

“And again it might be----” began the Mugger pettishly.

“Certainly--most certainly,” said the Jackal, without waiting for the
other to finish.

“What?” said the Mugger angrily, for he could feel that the others knew
more than he did. “What might it be? _I_ never finished my words. You
said it was a bullock.”

“It is anything the Protector of the Poor pleases. I am HIS servant--not
the servant of the thing that crosses the river.”

“Whatever it is, it is white-face work,” said the Adjutant; “and for my
own part, I would not lie out upon a place so near to it as this bar.”

“You do not know the English as I do,” said the Mugger. “There was a
white-face here when the bridge was built, and he would take a boat
in the evenings and shuffle with his feet on the bottom-boards, and
whisper: ‘Is he here? Is he there? Bring me my gun.’ I could hear him
before I could see him--each sound that he made--creaking and puffing
and rattling his gun, up and down the river. As surely as I had picked
up one of his workmen, and thus saved great expense in wood for the
burning, so surely would he come down to the Ghaut, and shout in a loud
voice that he would hunt me, and rid the river of me--the Mugger of
Mugger-Ghaut! ME! Children, I have swum under the bottom of his boat for
hour after hour, and heard him fire his gun at logs; and when I was well
sure he was wearied, I have risen by his side and snapped my jaws in his
face. When the bridge was finished he went away. All the English hunt in
that fashion, except when they are hunted.”

“Who hunts the white-faces?” yapped the Jackal excitedly.

“No one now, but I have hunted them in my time.”

“I remember a little of that Hunting. I was young then,” said the
Adjutant, clattering his beak significantly.

“I was well established here. My village was being builded for the third
time, as I remember, when my cousin, the Gavial, brought me word of rich
waters above Benares. At first I would not go, for my cousin, who is a
fish-eater, does not always know the good from the bad; but I heard my
people talking in the evenings, and what they said made me certain.”

“And what did they say?” the Jackal asked.

“They said enough to make me, the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, leave water
and take to my feet. I went by night, using the littlest streams as they
served me; but it was the beginning of the hot weather, and all streams
were low. I crossed dusty roads; I went through tall grass; I climbed
hills in the moonlight. Even rocks did I climb, children--consider this
well. I crossed the tail of Sirhind, the waterless, before I could
find the set of the little rivers that flow Gungaward. I was a month’s
journey from my own people and the river that I knew. That was very
marvellous!”

“What food on the way?” said the Jackal, who kept his soul in his little
stomach, and was not a bit impressed by the Mugger’s land travels.

“That which I could find--COUSIN,” said the Mugger slowly, dragging each
word.

Now you do not call a man a cousin in India unless you think you can
establish some kind of blood-relationship, and as it is only in old
fairy-tales that the Mugger ever marries a jackal, the Jackal knew for
what reason he had been suddenly lifted into the Mugger’s family circle.
If they had been alone he would not have cared, but the Adjutant’s eyes
twinkled with mirth at the ugly jest.

“Assuredly, Father, I might have known,” said the Jackal. A mugger
does not care to be called a father of jackals, and the Mugger of
Mugger-Ghaut said as much--and a great deal more which there is no use
in repeating here.

“The Protector of the Poor has claimed kinship. How can I remember the
precise degree? Moreover, we eat the same food. He has said it,” was the
Jackal’s reply.

That made matters rather worse, for what the Jackal hinted at was that
the Mugger must have eaten his food on that land-march fresh and fresh
every day, instead of keeping it by him till it was in a fit and proper
condition, as every self-respecting mugger and most wild beasts do when
they can. Indeed, one of the worst terms of contempt along the River-bed
is “eater of fresh meat.” It is nearly as bad as calling a man a
cannibal.

“That food was eaten thirty seasons ago,” said the Adjutant quietly. “If
we talk for thirty seasons more it will never come back. Tell us, now,
what happened when the good waters were reached after thy most wonderful
land journey. If we listened to the howling of every jackal the business
of the town would stop, as the saying is.”

The Mugger must have been grateful for the interruption, because he went
on, with a rush:

“By the Right and Left of Gunga! when I came there never did I see such
waters!”

“Were they better, then, than the big flood of last season?” said the
Jackal.

“Better! That flood was no more than comes every five years--a handful
of drowned strangers, some chickens, and a dead bullock in muddy water
with cross-currents. But the season I think of, the river was low,
smooth, and even, and, as the Gavial had warned me, the dead English
came down, touching each other. I got my girth in that season--my
girth and my depth. From Agra, by Etawah and the broad waters by
Allahabad----”

“Oh, the eddy that set under the walls of the fort at Allahabad!” said
the Adjutant. “They came in there like widgeon to the reeds, and round
and round they swung--thus!”

He went off into his horrible dance again, while the Jackal looked on
enviously. He naturally could not remember the terrible year of the
Mutiny they were talking about. The Mugger continued:

“Yes, by Allahabad one lay still in the slack-water and let twenty go
by to pick one; and, above all, the English were not cumbered with
jewellery and nose-rings and anklets as my women are nowadays. To
delight in ornaments is to end with a rope for a necklace, as the saying
is. All the muggers of all the rivers grew fat then, but it was my Fate
to be fatter than them all. The news was that the English were being
hunted into the rivers, and by the Right and Left of Gunga! we believed
it was true. So far as I went south I believed it to be true; and I went
down-stream beyond Monghyr and the tombs that look over the river.”

“I know that place,” said the Adjutant. “Since those days Monghyr is a
lost city. Very few live there now.”

“Thereafter I worked up-stream very slowly and lazily, and a little
above Monghyr there came down a boatful of white-faces--alive! They
were, as I remember, women, lying under a cloth spread over sticks, and
crying aloud. There was never a gun fired at us, the watchers of the
fords in those days. All the guns were busy elsewhere. We could hear
them day and night inland, coming and going as the wind shifted. I rose
up full before the boat, because I had never seen white-faces alive,
though I knew them well--otherwise. A naked white child kneeled by the
side of the boat, and, stooping over, must needs try to trail his hands
in the river. It is a pretty thing to see how a child loves running
water. I had fed that day, but there was yet a little unfilled space
within me. Still, it was for sport and not for food that I rose at the
child’s hands. They were so clear a mark that I did not even look when I
closed; but they were so small that though my jaws rang true--I am sure
of that--the child drew them up swiftly, unhurt. They must have passed
between tooth and tooth--those small white hands. I should have caught
him cross-wise at the elbows; but, as I said, it was only for sport and
desire to see new things that I rose at all. They cried out one after
another in the boat, and presently I rose again to watch them. The boat
was too heavy to push over. They were only women, but he who trusts
a woman will walk on duckweed in a pool, as the saying is: and by the
Right and Left of Gunga, that is truth!”

“Once a woman gave me some dried skin from a fish,” said the Jackal. “I
had hoped to get her baby, but horse-food is better than the kick of a
horse, as the saying is. What did thy woman do?”

“She fired at me with a short gun of a kind I have never seen before or
since. Five times, one after another” (the Mugger must have met with an
old-fashioned revolver); “and I stayed open-mouthed and gaping, my head
in the smoke. Never did I see such a thing. Five times, as swiftly as I
wave my tail--thus!”

The Jackal, who had been growing more and more interested in the story,
had just time to leap back as the huge tail swung by like a scythe.

“Not before the fifth shot,” said the Mugger, as though he had never
dreamed of stunning one of his listeners--“not before the fifth shot
did I sink, and I rose in time to hear a boatman telling all those
white women that I was most certainly dead. One bullet had gone under
a neck-plate of mine. I know not if it is there still, for the reason I
cannot turn my head. Look and see, child. It will show that my tale is
true.”

“I?” said the Jackal. “Shall an eater of old shoes, a bone-cracker,
presume, to doubt the word of the Envy of the River? May my tail be
bitten off by blind puppies if the shadow of such a thought has crossed
my humble mind! The Protector of the Poor has condescended to inform me,
his slave, that once in his life he has been wounded by a woman. That is
sufficient, and I will tell the tale to all my children, asking for no
proof.”

“Over-much civility is sometimes no better than over-much discourtesy,
for, as the saying is, one can choke a guest with curds. I do NOT desire
that any children of thine should know that the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut
took his only wound from a woman. They will have much else to think of
if they get their meat as miserably as does their father.”

“It is forgotten long ago! It was never said! There never was a white
woman! There was no boat! Nothing whatever happened at all.”

The Jackal waved his brush to show how completely everything was wiped
out of his memory, and sat down with an air.

“Indeed, very many things happened,” said the Mugger, beaten in his
second attempt that night to get the better of his friend. (Neither bore
malice, however. Eat and be eaten was fair law along the river, and the
Jackal came in for his share of plunder when the Mugger had finished
a meal.) “I left that boat and went up-stream, and, when I had reached
Arrah and the back-waters behind it, there were no more dead English.
The river was empty for a while. Then came one or two dead, in red
coats, not English, but of one kind all--Hindus and Purbeeahs--then five
and six abreast, and at last, from Arrah to the North beyond Agra, it
was as though whole villages had walked into the water. They came out
of little creeks one after another, as the logs come down in the Rains.
When the river rose they rose also in companies from the shoals they
had rested upon; and the falling flood dragged them with it across the
fields and through the Jungle by the long hair. All night, too, going
North, I heard the guns, and by day the shod feet of men crossing fords,
and that noise which a heavy cart-wheel makes on sand under water; and
every ripple brought more dead. At last even I was afraid, for I said:
‘If this thing happen to men, how shall the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut
escape?’ There were boats, too, that came up behind me without sails,
burning continually, as the cotton-boats sometimes burn, but never
sinking.”

“Ah!” said the Adjutant. “Boats like those come to Calcutta of the
South. They are tall and black, they beat up the water behind them with
a tail, and they----”

“Are thrice as big as my village. MY boats were low and white; they beat
up the water on either side of them and were no larger than the boats
of one who speaks truth should be. They made me very afraid, and I
left water and went back to this my river, hiding by day and walking
by night, when I could not find little streams to help me. I came to
my village again, but I did not hope to see any of my people there.
Yet they were ploughing and sowing and reaping, and going to and fro in
their fields, as quietly as their own cattle.”

“Was there still good food in the river?” said the Jackal.

“More than I had any desire for. Even I--and I do not eat mud--even
I was tired, and, as I remember, a little frightened of this constant
coming down of the silent ones. I heard my people say in my village
that all the English were dead; but those that came, face down, with the
current were NOT English, as my people saw. Then my people said that it
was best to say nothing at all, but to pay the tax and plough the land.
After a long time the river cleared, and those that came down it had
been clearly drowned by the floods, as I could well see; and though it
was not so easy then to get food, I was heartily glad of it. A little
killing here and there is no bad thing--but even the Mugger is sometimes
satisfied, as the saying is.”

“Marvellous! Most truly marvellous!” said the Jackal. “I am become fat
through merely hearing about so much good eating. And afterward what, if
it be permitted to ask, did the Protector of the Poor do?”

“I said to myself--and by the Right and Left of Gunga! I locked my jaws
on that vow--I said I would never go roving any more. So I lived by the
Ghaut, very close to my own people, and I watched over them year after
year; and they loved me so much that they threw marigold wreaths at my
head whenever they saw it lift. Yes, and my Fate has been very kind to
me, and the river is good enough to respect my poor and infirm presence;
only----”

“No one is all happy from his beak to his tail,” said the Adjutant
sympathetically. “What does the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut need more?”

“That little white child which I did not get,” said the Mugger, with a
deep sigh. “He was very small, but I have not forgotten. I am old now,
but before I die it is my desire to try one new thing. It is true they
are a heavy-footed, noisy, and foolish people, and the sport would be
small, but I remember the old days above Benares, and, if the child
lives, he will remember still. It may be he goes up and down the bank
of some river, telling how he once passed his hands between the teeth of
the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, and lived to make a tale of it. My Fate has
been very kind, but that plagues me sometimes in my dreams--the thought
of the little white child in the bows of that boat.” He yawned, and
closed his jaws. “And now I will rest and think. Keep silent, my
children, and respect the aged.”

He turned stiffly, and shuffled to the top of the sand-bar, while the
Jackal drew back with the Adjutant to the shelter of a tree stranded on
the end nearest the railway bridge.

“That was a pleasant and profitable life,” he grinned, looking up
inquiringly at the bird who towered above him. “And not once, mark you,
did he think fit to tell me where a morsel might have been left along
the banks. Yet I have told HIM a hundred times of good things wallowing
down-stream. How true is the saying, ‘All the world forgets the Jackal
and the Barber when the news has been told!’ Now he is going to sleep!
Arrh!”

“How can a jackal hunt with a Mugger?” said the Adjutant coolly. “Big
thief and little thief; it is easy to say who gets the pickings.”

The Jackal turned, whining impatiently, and was going to curl himself
up under the tree-trunk, when suddenly he cowered, and looked up through
the draggled branches at the bridge almost above his head.

“What now?” said the Adjutant, opening his wings uneasily.

“Wait till we see. The wind blows from us to them, but they are not
looking for us--those two men.”

“Men, is it? My office protects me. All India knows I am holy.” The
Adjutant, being a first-class scavenger, is allowed to go where he
pleases, and so this one never flinched.

“I am not worth a blow from anything better than an old shoe,” said the
Jackal, and listened again. “Hark to that footfall!” he went on. “That
was no country leather, but the shod foot of a white-face. Listen
again! Iron hits iron up there! It is a gun! Friend, those heavy-footed,
foolish English are coming to speak with the Mugger.”

“Warn him, then. He was called Protector of the Poor by some one not
unlike a starving Jackal but a little time ago.”

“Let my cousin protect his own hide. He has told me again and again
there is nothing to fear from the white-faces. They must be white-faces.
Not a villager of Mugger-Ghaut would dare to come after him. See, I said
it was a gun! Now, with good luck, we shall feed before daylight. He
cannot hear well out of water, and--this time it is not a woman!”

A shiny barrel glittered for a minute in the moonlight on the girders.
The Mugger was lying on the sand-bar as still as his own shadow, his
fore-feet spread out a little, his head dropped between them, snoring
like a--mugger.

A voice on the bridge whispered: “It’s an odd shot--straight down
almost--but as safe as houses. Better try behind the neck. Golly! what
a brute! The villagers will be wild if he’s shot, though. He’s the deota
[godling] of these parts.”

“Don’t care a rap,” another voice answered; “he took about fifteen of my
best coolies while the bridge was building, and it’s time he was put
a stop to. I’ve been after him in a boat for weeks. Stand by with the
Martini as soon as I’ve given him both barrels of this.”

“Mind the kick, then. A double four-bore’s no joke.”

“That’s for him to decide. Here goes!”

There was a roar like the sound of a small cannon (the biggest sort of
elephant-rifle is not very different from some artillery), and a double
streak of flame, followed by the stinging crack of a Martini, whose long
bullet makes nothing of a crocodile’s plates. But the explosive bullets
did the work. One of them struck just behind the Mugger’s neck, a
hand’s-breadth to the left of the backbone, while the other burst a
little lower down, at the beginning of the tail. In ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred a mortally-wounded crocodile can scramble to deep water
and get away; but the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut was literally broken into
three pieces. He hardly moved his head before the life went out of him,
and he lay as flat as the Jackal.

“Thunder and lightning! Lightning and thunder!” said that miserable
little beast. “Has the thing that pulls the covered carts over the
bridge tumbled at last?”

“It is no more than a gun,” said the Adjutant, though his very
tail-feathers quivered. “Nothing more than a gun. He is certainly dead.
Here come the white-faces.”

The two Englishmen had hurried down from the bridge and across to the
sand-bar, where they stood admiring the length of the Mugger. Then a
native with an axe cut off the big head, and four men dragged it across
the spit.

“The last time that I had my hand in a Mugger’s mouth,” said one of the
Englishmen, stooping down (he was the man who had built the bridge), “it
was when I was about five years old--coming down the river by boat to
Monghyr. I was a Mutiny baby, as they call it. Poor mother was in the
boat, too, and she often told me how she fired dad’s old pistol at the
beast’s head.”

“Well, you’ve certainly had your revenge on the chief of the clan--even
if the gun has made your nose bleed. Hi, you boatmen! Haul that head up
the bank, and we’ll boil it for the skull. The skin’s too knocked about
to keep. Come along to bed now. This was worth sitting up all night for,
wasn’t it?”

*****

Curiously enough, the Jackal and the Adjutant made the very same remark
not three minutes after the men had left.




A RIPPLE SONG

     Once a ripple came to land
       In the golden sunset burning--
     Lapped against a maiden’s hand,
       By the ford returning.

     Dainty foot and gentle breast--
       Here, across, be glad and rest.
     “Maiden, wait,” the ripple saith.
       “Wait awhile, for I am Death!”

     “Where my lover calls I go--
       Shame it were to treat him coldly--
     ‘Twas a fish that circled so,
       Turning over boldly.”

     Dainty foot and tender heart,
       Wait the loaded ferry-cart.
     “Wait, ah, wait!” the ripple saith;
       “Maiden, wait, for I am Death!”

     “When my lover calls I haste--
       Dame Disdain was never wedded!”
      Ripple-ripple round her waist,
       Clear the current eddied.

     Foolish heart and faithful hand,
       Little feet that touched no land.
     Far away the ripple sped,
       Ripple--ripple--running red!




THE KING’S ANKUS

     These are the Four that are never content, that have never
         been filled since the Dews began--
     Jacala’s mouth, and the glut of the Kite, and the hands of the
         Ape, and the Eyes of Man.
                                 Jungle Saying.

Kaa, the big Rock Python, had changed his skin for perhaps the
two-hundredth time since his birth; and Mowgli, who never forgot that
he owed his life to Kaa for a night’s work at Cold Lairs, which you may
perhaps remember, went to congratulate him. Skin-changing always makes
a snake moody and depressed till the new skin begins to shine and look
beautiful. Kaa never made fun of Mowgli any more, but accepted him, as
the other Jungle People did, for the Master of the Jungle, and brought
him all the news that a python of his size would naturally hear. What
Kaa did not know about the Middle Jungle, as they call it,--the life
that runs close to the earth or under it, the boulder, burrow, and
the tree-bole life,--might have been written upon the smallest of his
scales.

That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa’s great coils,
fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all looped and twisted
among the rocks just as Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed
himself under Mowgli’s broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really
resting in a living arm-chair.

“Even to the scales of the eyes it is perfect,” said Mowgli, under his
breath, playing with the old skin. “Strange to see the covering of one’s
own head at one’s own feet!”

“Ay, but I lack feet,” said Kaa; “and since this is the custom of all
my people, I do not find it strange. Does thy skin never feel old and
harsh?”

“Then go I and wash, Flathead; but, it is true, in the great heats I
have wished I could slough my skin without pain, and run skinless.”

“I wash, and ALSO I take off my skin. How looks the new coat?”

Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense back.
“The Turtle is harder-backed, but not so gay,” he said judgmatically.
“The Frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very
beautiful to see--like the mottling in the mouth of a lily.”

“It needs water. A new skin never comes to full colour before the first
bath. Let us go bathe.”

“I will carry thee,” said Mowgli; and he stooped down, laughing, to
lift the middle section of Kaa’s great body, just where the barrel was
thickest. A man might just, as well have tried to heave up a two-foot
water-main; and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amusement. Then the
regular evening game began--the Boy in the flush of his great strength,
and the Python in his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against the
other for a wrestling match--a trial of eye and strength. Of course,
Kaa could have crushed a dozen Mowglis if he had let himself go; but he
played carefully, and never loosed one-tenth of his power. Ever since
Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling, Kaa had
taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing else could.
Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa’s
shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him by
the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both
quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as
it flung backward feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to
and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful,
statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and
struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. “Now! now! now!”
 said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli’s quick hand
could not turn aside. “Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here,
and here! Are thy hands numb? Here again!”

The game always ended in one way--with a straight, driving blow of the
head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn the
guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the
least use in trying.

“Good hunting!” Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away
half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full
of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake’s pet bathing-place--a
deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by
sunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle-fashion, without a sound,
and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back,
his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks,
and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa’s
diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest
on Mowgli’s shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool
water.

“It is VERY good,” said Mowgli at last, sleepily. “Now, in the Man-Pack,
at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon hard pieces of
wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having carefully shut out all the
clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heavy heads and made evil songs
through their noses. It is better in the Jungle.”

A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them “Good
hunting!” and went away.

“Sssh!” said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered something. “So
the Jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?”

“Not all,” said Mowgli, laughing; “else there would be a new and strong
Shere Khan to kill once a moon. Now, I could kill with my own hands,
asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished the sun to shine in
the middle of the Rains, and the Rains to cover the sun in the deep of
summer; and also I have never gone empty but I wished that I had killed
a goat; and also I have never killed a goat but I wished it had been
buck; nor buck but I wished it had been nilghai. But thus do we feel,
all of us.”

“Thou hast no other desire?” the big snake demanded.

“What more can I wish? I have the Jungle, and the favour of the Jungle!
Is there more anywhere between sunrise and sunset?”

“Now, the Cobra said----” Kaa began. “What cobra? He that went away just
now said nothing. He was hunting.”

“It was another.”

“Hast thou many dealings with the Poison People? I give them their own
path. They carry death in the fore-tooth, and that is not good--for they
are so small. But what hood is this thou hast spoken with?”

Kaa rolled slowly in the water like a steamer in a beam sea. “Three or
four moons since,” said he, “I hunted in Cold Lairs, which place thou
hast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled shrieking past the tanks
and to that house whose side I once broke for thy sake, and ran into the
ground.”

“But the people of Cold Lairs do not live in burrows.” Mowgli knew that
Kaa was telling of the Monkey People.

“This thing was not living, but seeking to live,” Kaa replied, with
a quiver of his tongue. “He ran into a burrow that led very far. I
followed, and having killed, I slept. When I waked I went forward.”

“Under the earth?”

“Even so, coming at last upon a White Hood [a white cobra], who spoke of
things beyond my knowledge, and showed me many things I had never before
seen.”

“New game? Was it good hunting?” Mowgli turned quickly on his side.

“It was no game, and would have broken all my teeth; but the White Hood
said that a man--he spoke as one that knew the breed--that a man would
give the breath under his ribs for only the sight of those things.”

“We will look,” said Mowgli. “I now remember that I was once a man.”

“Slowly--slowly. It was haste killed the Yellow Snake that ate the sun.
We two spoke together under the earth, and I spoke of thee, naming thee
as a man. Said the White Hood (and he is indeed as old as the Jungle):
‘It is long since I have seen a man. Let him come, and he shall see all
these things, for the least of which very many men would die.’”

“That MUST be new game. And yet the Poison People do not tell us when
game is afoot. They are an unfriendly folk.”

“It is NOT game. It is--it is--I cannot say what it is.”

“We will go there. I have never seen a White Hood, and I wish to see the
other things. Did he kill them?”

“They are all dead things. He says he is the keeper of them all.”

“Ah! As a wolf stands above meat he has taken to his own lair. Let us
go.”

Mowgli swam to bank, rolled on the grass to dry himself, and the two
set off for Cold Lairs, the deserted city of which you may have heard.
Mowgli was not the least afraid of the Monkey People in those days,
but the Monkey People had the liveliest horror of Mowgli. Their tribes,
however, were raiding in the Jungle, and so Cold Lairs stood empty and
silent in the moonlight. Kaa led up to the ruins of the queens’ pavilion
that stood on the terrace, slipped over the rubbish, and dived down
the half-choked staircase that went underground from the centre of
the pavilion. Mowgli gave the snake-call,--“We be of one blood, ye and
I,”--and followed on his hands and knees. They crawled a long distance
down a sloping passage that turned and twisted several times, and at
last came to where the root of some great tree, growing thirty feet
overhead, had forced out a solid stone in the wall. They crept through
the gap, and found themselves in a large vault, whose domed roof had
been also broken away by tree-roots so that a few streaks of light
dropped down into the darkness.

“A safe lair,” said Mowgli, rising to his firm feet, “but over-far to
visit daily. And now what do we see?”

“Am I nothing?” said a voice in the middle of the vault; and Mowgli saw
something white move till, little by little, there stood up the hugest
cobra he had ever set eyes on--a creature nearly eight feet long,
and bleached by being in darkness to an old ivory-white. Even the
spectacle-marks of his spread hood had faded to faint yellow. His eyes
were as red as rubies, and altogether he was most wonderful.

“Good hunting!” said Mowgli, who carried his manners with his knife, and
that never left him.

“What of the city?” said the White Cobra, without answering the
greeting. “What of the great, the walled city--the city of a hundred
elephants and twenty thousand horses, and cattle past counting--the city
of the King of Twenty Kings? I grow deaf here, and it is long since I
heard their war-gongs.”

“The Jungle is above our heads,” said Mowgli. “I know only Hathi and his
sons among elephants. Bagheera has slain all the horses in one village,
and--what is a King?”

“I told thee,” said Kaa softly to the Cobra,--“I told thee, four moons
ago, that thy city was not.”

“The city--the great city of the forest whose gates are guarded by the
King’s towers--can never pass. They builded it before my father’s father
came from the egg, and it shall endure when my son’s sons are as white
as I! Salomdhi, son of Chandrabija, son of Viyeja, son of Yegasuri, made
it in the days of Bappa Rawal. Whose cattle are YE?”

“It is a lost trail,” said Mowgli, turning to Kaa. “I know not his
talk.”

“Nor I. He is very old. Father of Cobras, there is only the Jungle here,
as it has been since the beginning.”

“Then who is HE,” said the White Cobra, “sitting down before me,
unafraid, knowing not the name of the King, talking our talk through a
man’s lips? Who is he with the knife and the snake’s tongue?”

“Mowgli they call me,” was the answer. “I am of the Jungle. The wolves
are my people, and Kaa here is my brother. Father of Cobras, who art
thou?”

“I am the Warden of the King’s Treasure. Kurrun Raja builded the stone
above me, in the days when my skin was dark, that I might teach death
to those who came to steal. Then they let down the treasure through the
stone, and I heard the song of the Brahmins my masters.”

“Umm!” said Mowgli to himself. “I have dealt with one Brahmin already,
in the Man-Pack, and--I know what I know. Evil comes here in a little.”

“Five times since I came here has the stone been lifted, but always to
let down more, and never to take away. There are no riches like these
riches--the treasures of a hundred kings. But it is long and long since
the stone was last moved, and I think that my city has forgotten.”

“There is no city. Look up. Yonder are roots of the great trees tearing
the stones apart. Trees and men do not grow together,” Kaa insisted.

“Twice and thrice have men found their way here,” the White Cobra
answered savagely; “but they never spoke till I came upon them groping
in the dark, and then they cried only a little time. But ye come with
lies, Man and Snake both, and would have me believe the city is not, and
that my wardship ends. Little do men change in the years. But I change
never! Till the stone is lifted, and the Brahmins come down singing the
songs that I know, and feed me with warm milk, and take me to the light
again, I--I--_I_, and no other, am the Warden of the King’s Treasure!
The city is dead, ye say, and here are the roots of the trees? Stoop
down, then, and take what ye will. Earth has no treasure like to these.
Man with the snake’s tongue, if thou canst go alive by the way that thou
hast entered it, the lesser Kings will be thy servants!”

“Again the trail is lost,” said Mowgli coolly. “Can any jackal have
burrowed so deep and bitten this great White Hood? He is surely mad.
Father of Cobras, I see nothing here to take away.”

“By the Gods of the Sun and Moon, it is the madness of death upon the
boy!” hissed the Cobra. “Before thine eyes close I will allow thee this
favour. Look thou, and see what man has never seen before!”

“They do not well in the Jungle who speak to Mowgli of favours,” said
the boy, between his teeth; “but the dark changes all, as I know. I will
look, if that please thee.”

He stared with puckered-up eyes round the vault, and then lifted up from
the floor a handful of something that glittered.

“Oho!” said he, “this is like the stuff they play with in the Man-Pack:
only this is yellow and the other was brown.”

He let the gold pieces fall, and move forward. The floor of the vault
was buried some five or six feet deep in coined gold and silver that had
burst from the sacks it had been originally stored in, and, in the long
years, the metal had packed and settled as sand packs at low tide. On it
and in it and rising through it, as wrecks lift through the sand, were
jewelled elephant-howdahs of embossed silver, studded with plates of
hammered gold, and adorned with carbuncles and turquoises. There were
palanquins and litters for carrying queens, framed and braced with
silver and enamel, with jade-handled poles and amber curtain-rings;
there were golden candlesticks hung with pierced emeralds that quivered
on the branches; there were studded images, five feet high, of forgotten
gods, silver with jewelled eyes; there were coats of mail, gold inlaid
on steel, and fringed with rotted and blackened seed-pearls; there
were helmets, crested and beaded with pigeon’s-blood rubies; there were
shields of lacquer, of tortoise-shell and rhinoceros-hide, strapped
and bossed with red gold and set with emeralds at the edge; there were
sheaves of diamond-hilted swords, daggers, and hunting-knives; there
were golden sacrificial bowls and ladles, and portable altars of a shape
that never sees the light of day; there were jade cups and bracelets;
there were incense-burners, combs, and pots for perfume, henna, and
eye-powder, all in embossed gold; there were nose-rings, armlets,
head-bands, finger-rings, and girdles past any counting; there were
belts, seven fingers broad, of square-cut diamonds and rubies, and
wooden boxes, trebly clamped with iron, from which the wood had fallen
away in powder, showing the pile of uncut star-sapphires, opals,
cat’s-eyes, sapphires, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and garnets within.

The White Cobra was right. No mere money would begin to pay the value of
this treasure, the sifted pickings of centuries of war, plunder, trade,
and taxation. The coins alone were priceless, leaving out of count all
the precious stones; and the dead weight of the gold and silver alone
might be two or three hundred tons. Every native ruler in India to-day,
however poor, has a hoard to which he is always adding; and though, once
in a long while, some enlightened prince may send off forty or fifty
bullock-cart loads of silver to be exchanged for Government securities,
the bulk of them keep their treasure and the knowledge of it very
closely to themselves.

But Mowgli naturally did not understand what these things meant. The
knives interested him a little, but they did not balance so well as
his own, and so he dropped them. At last he found something really
fascinating laid on the front of a howdah half buried in the coins.
It was a three-foot ankus, or elephant-goad--something like a small
boat-hook. The top was one round, shining ruby, and eight inches of
the handle below it were studded with rough turquoises close together,
giving a most satisfactory grip. Below them was a rim of jade with a
flower-pattern running round it--only the leaves were emeralds, and
the blossoms were rubies sunk in the cool, green stone. The rest of
the handle was a shaft of pure ivory, while the point--the spike and
hook--was gold-inlaid steel with pictures of elephant-catching; and the
pictures attracted Mowgli, who saw that they had something to do with
his friend Hathi the Silent.

The White Cobra had been following him closely.

“Is this not worth dying to behold?” he said. “Have I not done thee a
great favour?”

“I do not understand,” said Mowgli. “The things are hard and cold, and
by no means good to eat. But this”--he lifted the ankus--“I desire to
take away, that I may see it in the sun. Thou sayest they are all thine?
Wilt thou give it to me, and I will bring thee frogs to eat?”

The White Cobra fairly shook with evil delight. “Assuredly I will give
it,” he said. “All that is here I will give thee--till thou goest away.”

“But I go now. This place is dark and cold, and I wish to take the
thorn-pointed thing to the Jungle.”

“Look by thy foot! What is that there?” Mowgli picked up something white
and smooth. “It is the bone of a man’s head,” he said quietly. “And here
are two more.”

“They came to take the treasure away many years ago. I spoke to them in
the dark, and they lay still.”

“But what do I need of this that is called treasure? If thou wilt
give me the ankus to take away, it is good hunting. If not, it is good
hunting none the less. I do not fight with the Poison People, and I was
also taught the Master-word of thy tribe.”

“There is but one Master-word here. It is mine!”

Kaa flung himself forward with blazing eyes. “Who bade me bring the
Man?” he hissed.

“I surely,” the old Cobra lisped. “It is long since I have seen Man, and
this Man speaks our tongue.”

“But there was no talk of killing. How can I go to the Jungle and say
that I have led him to his death?” said Kaa.

“I talk not of killing till the time. And as to thy going or not going,
there is the hole in the wall. Peace, now, thou fat monkey-killer! I
have but to touch thy neck, and the Jungle will know thee no longer.
Never Man came here that went away with the breath under his ribs. I am
the Warden of the Treasure of the King’s City!”

“But, thou white worm of the dark, I tell thee there is neither king nor
city! The Jungle is all about us!” cried Kaa.

“There is still the Treasure. But this can be done. Wait awhile, Kaa of
the Rocks, and see the boy run. There is room for great sport here. Life
is good. Run to and fro awhile, and make sport, boy!”

Mowgli put his hand on Kaa’s head quietly.

“The white thing has dealt with men of the Man-Pack until now. He does
not know me,” he whispered. “He has asked for this hunting. Let him have
it.” Mowgli had been standing with the ankus held point down. He flung
it from him quickly and it dropped crossways just behind the great
snake’s hood, pinning him to the floor. In a flash, Kaa’s weight was
upon the writhing body, paralysing it from hood to tail. The red eyes
burned, and the six spare inches of the head struck furiously right and
left.

“Kill!” said Kaa, as Mowgli’s hand went to his knife.

“No,” he said, as he drew the blade; “I will never kill again save for
food. But look you, Kaa!” He caught the snake behind the hood, forced
the mouth open with the blade of the knife, and showed the terrible
poison-fangs of the upper jaw lying black and withered in the gum. The
White Cobra had outlived his poison, as a snake will.

“THUU” (“It is dried up”--Literally, a rotted out tree-stump), said
Mowgli; and motioning Kaa away, he picked up the ankus, setting the
White Cobra free.

“The King’s Treasure needs a new Warden,” he said gravely. “Thuu, thou
hast not done well. Run to and fro and make sport, Thuu!”

“I am ashamed. Kill me!” hissed the White Cobra.

“There has been too much talk of killing. We will go now. I take the
thorn-pointed thing, Thuu, because I have fought and worsted thee.”

“See, then, that the thing does not kill thee at last. It is Death!
Remember, it is Death! There is enough in that thing to kill the men of
all my city. Not long wilt thou hold it, Jungle Man, nor he who takes it
from thee. They will kill, and kill, and kill for its sake! My strength
is dried up, but the ankus will do my work. It is Death! It is Death! It
is Death!”

Mowgli crawled out through the hole into the passage again, and the last
that he saw was the White Cobra striking furiously with his harmless
fangs at the stolid golden faces of the gods that lay on the floor, and
hissing, “It is Death!”

They were glad to get to the light of day once more; and when they
were back in their own Jungle and Mowgli made the ankus glitter in the
morning light, he was almost as pleased as though he had found a bunch
of new flowers to stick in his hair.

“This is brighter than Bagheera’s eyes,” he said delightedly, as he
twirled the ruby. “I will show it to him; but what did the Thuu mean
when he talked of death?”

“I cannot say. I am sorrowful to my tail’s tail that he felt not thy
knife. There is always evil at Cold Lairs--above ground or below. But
now I am hungry. Dost thou hunt with me this dawn?” said Kaa.

“No; Bagheera must see this thing. Good hunting!” Mowgli danced off,
flourishing the great ankus, and stopping from time to time to admire
it, till he came to that part of the Jungle Bagheera chiefly used,
and found him drinking after a heavy kill. Mowgli told him all his
adventures from beginning to end, and Bagheera sniffed at the ankus
between whiles. When Mowgli came to the White Cobra’s last words, the
Panther purred approvingly.

“Then the White Hood spoke the thing which is?” Mowgli asked quickly.

“I was born in the King’s cages at Oodeypore, and it is in my stomach
that I know some little of Man. Very many men would kill thrice in a
night for the sake of that one big red stone alone.”

“But the stone makes it heavy to the hand. My little bright knife is
better; and--see! the red stone is not good to eat. Then WHY would they
kill?”

“Mowgli, go thou and sleep. Thou hast lived among men, and----”

“I remember. Men kill because they are not hunting;--for idleness and
pleasure. Wake again, Bagheera. For what use was this thorn-pointed
thing made?”

Bagheera half opened his eyes--he was very sleepy--with a malicious
twinkle.

“It was made by men to thrust into the head of the sons of Hathi, so
that the blood should pour out. I have seen the like in the street of
Oodeypore, before our cages. That thing has tasted the blood of many
such as Hathi.”

“But why do they thrust into the heads of elephants?”

“To teach them Man’s Law. Having neither claws nor teeth, men make these
things--and worse.”

“Always more blood when I come near, even to the things the Man-Pack
have made,” said Mowgli disgustedly. He was getting a little tired of
the weight of the ankus. “If I had known this, I would not have taken
it. First it was Messua’s blood on the thongs, and now it is Hathi’s. I
will use it no more. Look!”

The ankus flew sparkling, and buried itself point down thirty yards
away, between the trees. “So my hands are clean of Death,” said Mowgli,
rubbing his palms on the fresh, moist earth. “The Thuu said Death would
follow me. He is old and white and mad.”

“White or black, or death or life, _I_ am going to sleep, Little
Brother. I cannot hunt all night and howl all day, as do some folk.”

Bagheera went off to a hunting-lair that he knew, about two miles off.
Mowgli made an easy way for himself up a convenient tree, knotted three
or four creepers together, and in less time than it takes to tell was
swinging in a hammock fifty feet above ground. Though he had no positive
objection to strong daylight, Mowgli followed the custom of his
friends, and used it as little as he could. When he waked among the very
loud-voiced peoples that live in the trees, it was twilight once more,
and he had been dreaming of the beautiful pebbles he had thrown away.

“At least I will look at the thing again,” he said, and slid down a
creeper to the earth; but Bagheera was before him. Mowgli could hear him
snuffing in the half light.

“Where is the thorn-pointed thing?” cried Mowgli.

“A man has taken it. Here is the trail.”

“Now we shall see whether the Thuu spoke truth. If the pointed thing is
Death, that man will die. Let us follow.”

“Kill first,” said Bagheera. “An empty stomach makes a careless eye. Men
go very slowly, and the Jungle is wet enough to hold the lightest mark.”

They killed as soon as they could, but it was nearly three hours before
they finished their meat and drink and buckled down to the trail. The
Jungle People know that nothing makes up for being hurried over your
meals.

“Think you the pointed thing will turn in the man’s hand and kill him?”
 Mowgli asked. “The Thuu said it was Death.”

“We shall see when we find,” said Bagheera, trotting with his head low.
“It is single-foot” (he meant that there was only one man), “and the
weight of the thing has pressed his heel far into the ground.”

“Hai! This is as clear as summer lightning,” Mowgli answered; and they
fell into the quick, choppy trail-trot in and out through the checkers
of the moonlight, following the marks of those two bare feet.

“Now he runs swiftly,” said Mowgli. “The toes are spread apart.” They
went on over some wet ground. “Now why does he turn aside here?”

“Wait!” said Bagheera, and flung himself forward with one superb bound
as far as ever he could. The first thing to do when a trail ceases to
explain itself is to cast forward without leaving, your own confusing
foot-marks on the ground. Bagheera turned as he landed, and faced
Mowgli, crying, “Here comes another trail to meet him. It is a smaller
foot, this second trail, and the toes turn inward.”

Then Mowgli ran up and looked. “It is the foot of a Gond hunter,” he
said. “Look! Here he dragged his bow on the grass. That is why the first
trail turned aside so quickly. Big Foot hid from Little Foot.”

“That is true,” said Bagheera. “Now, lest by crossing each other’s
tracks we foul the signs, let each take one trail. I am Big Foot, Little
Brother, and thou art Little Foot, the Gond.”

Bagheera leaped back to the original trail, leaving Mowgli stooping
above the curious narrow track of the wild little man of the woods.

“Now,” said Bagheera, moving step by step along the chain of footprints,
“I, Big Foot, turn aside here. Now I hide me behind a rock and stand
still, not daring to shift my feet. Cry thy trail, Little Brother.”

“Now, I, Little Foot, come to the rock,” said Mowgli, running up his
trail. “Now, I sit down under the rock, leaning upon my right hand, and
resting my bow between my toes. I wait long, for the mark of my feet is
deep here.”

“I also,” said Bagheera, hidden behind the rock. “I wait, resting the end
of the thorn-pointed thing upon a stone. It slips, for here is a scratch
upon the stone. Cry thy trail, Little Brother.”

“One, two twigs and a big branch are broken here,” said Mowgli, in an
undertone. “Now, how shall I cry THAT? Ah! It is plain now. I, Little
Foot, go away making noises and tramplings so that Big Foot may hear
me.” He moved away from the rock pace by pace among the trees, his
voice rising in the distance as he approached a little cascade. “I--go,
far--away--to--where--the--noise--of--falling-water--covers--my--noise;
and--here--I--wait. Cry thy trail, Bagheera, Big Foot!”

The panther had been casting in every direction to see how Big Foot’s
trail led away from behind the rock. Then he gave tongue:

“I come from behind the rock upon my knees, dragging the thorn-pointed
thing. Seeing no one, I run. I, Big Foot, run swiftly. The trail is
clear. Let each follow his own. I run!”

Bagheera swept on along the clearly-marked trail, and Mowgli followed
the steps of the Gond. For some time there was silence in the Jungle.

“Where art thou, Little Foot?” cried Bagheera. Mowgli’s voice answered
him not fifty yards to the right.

“Um!” said the Panther, with a deep cough. “The two run side by side,
drawing nearer!”

They raced on another half-mile, always keeping about the same distance,
till Mowgli, whose head was not so close to the ground as Bagheera’s,
cried: “They have met. Good hunting--look! Here stood Little Foot, with
his knee on a rock--and yonder is Big Foot indeed!”

Not ten yards in front of them, stretched across a pile of broken rocks,
lay the body of a villager of the district, a long, small-feathered Gond
arrow through his back and breast.

“Was the Thuu so old and so mad, Little Brother?” said Bagheera gently.
“Here is one death, at least.”

“Follow on. But where is the drinker of elephant’s blood--the red-eyed
thorn?”

“Little Foot has it--perhaps. It is single-foot again now.”

The single trail of a light man who had been running quickly and bearing
a burden on his left shoulder held on round a long, low spur of dried
grass, where each footfall seemed, to the sharp eyes of the trackers,
marked in hot iron.

Neither spoke till the trail ran up to the ashes of a camp-fire hidden
in a ravine.

“Again!” said Bagheera, checking as though he had been turned into
stone.

The body of a little wizened Gond lay with its feet in the ashes, and
Bagheera looked inquiringly at Mowgli.

“That was done with a bamboo,” said the boy, after one glance. “I have
used such a thing among the buffaloes when I served in the Man-Pack.
The Father of Cobras--I am sorrowful that I made a jest of him--knew
the breed well, as I might have known. Said I not that men kill for
idleness?”

“Indeed, they killed for the sake of the red and blue stones,” Bagheera
answered. “Remember, I was in the King’s cages at Oodeypore.”

“One, two, three, four tracks,” said Mowgli, stooping over the ashes.
“Four tracks of men with shod feet. They do not go so quickly as Gonds.
Now, what evil had the little woodman done to them? See, they talked
together, all five, standing up, before they killed him. Bagheera, let
us go back. My stomach is heavy in me, and yet it heaves up and down
like an oriole’s nest at the end of a branch.”

“It is not good hunting to leave game afoot. Follow!” said the panther.
“Those eight shod feet have not gone far.”

No more was said for fully an hour, as they worked up the broad trail of
the four men with shod feet.

It was clear, hot daylight

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