The
Second Jungle Book
5S-<,<
LIBRARY
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA
PRESENTED BY
MRS. ALFRED W. I NGALLS
_ ^-:^
THE
SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
THE
SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
\^
BY
RUDYARD KIPLING
//
DECORATED BY
JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING, C. I. E.
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1906
' ' iy
Copyright, 1895, by The Century Co.
How Fear Came, The Law of the Jungle ;
The Miracle of Purun Bhagat, A Sonjr of Kahir;
The Undertakers, A Ripple-song.
Copyright, 1894, by Bacheller, Johnson &■ Bacheller.
Quiquern, "Angutivun tina.*'
Copyright, 1895, by Iri'ing Bacheller.
The Spring Running, The Outsonf.
Copyright, 1895, by John Brisben Walker.
Lettiig in the Jungle, Mowgli's Song Against People.
Copyright, 1894, by Rudyard KipliuL,'.
Red Dog, Chil's Song.
Copyright, 1895, by Rudyard Kipling.
Copyright, 1895, by The Century Co.
THE DE VINNE PREB6.
*' 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 /"
CONTENTS
PAGE
How Fear Came i
The Law of the Jungle 29
The Miracle of Purun Bhagat ;^^
A Song of Kabir 61
Letting in the Jungle 63
MowGLi's Song Against People 112
The Undertakers 115
A Ripple-song ' 155
The King's Ankus 157
The Song of the Little Hunter 191
QuiQUERN 193
" AnGUTIVUN TINA " 234
Red Dog 237
Chil's Song 281
The Spring Running 283
The Outsong 321
THE
SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
The stream is shrunk — the pool is dry,
And we be comrades, thou and I ;
With fevered jowl and sunken flank
Each jostling each along the bank;
And, by one drouthy fear made still,
Foregoing 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 arc shrunk — the strcajns are dry.
And we be playmates, thou and I,
Till yonder cloud — Good Huntini^ ! — loose
The rain that breaks the Water Truce.
,m i.i .ij.ru.u-u UM. u.» i.m
t^
HOW FEAR CAME
HE Law of the Jungle —
which is by far the old-
est law in the world —
has arranged for almost
every kind of accident
that may befall the Jun-
gle People, till now its
code is as perfect as time
and custom can make it.
If you have read the other book about Mowgli,
you will remember that he 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
2 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Creeper, becaruse it dropped across every one's
back and no on^ could escape. " When thou
hast Hved 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
HOW FEAR CAME 3
he knew as much as any five of the Jungle Peo-
ple put together.
"That is thy loss. A small crack might let in
some wisdom." Ikki clucked quickly to prevent
Mowgli from pulling his nose-bristles, and Mow-
gli 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 mokwa blooms."
That spring the mohwa tree, that Baloo was
so fond of, never flowered. The greeny, cream-
colored, 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
4 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
withered, clanking- vvlien 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 com-
ing ; 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 orreat deal of carrion, and even-
incr after evenincr he brouQfht the news to the
beasts, too weak to force their way to fresh hunt-
ing-grounds, that the sun was killing the Jungle
for three days' flight in every direction.
Mowgli, who had never known what real hun-
ger 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 l^one, and Bagheera could
kill thrice in a night, and hardly get a full meal.
But the want of water was the worst, for though
th(^ Jungle People drink seldom they must drink
deep.
HOW FEAR CAME • 5
And the heat went on and on, and sucked up
all the moisture, till at last the main channel of
the Waing-unga 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 center 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 be-
fore 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 shriekino- the warnine-
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
6 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 Jun-
gle 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 wal-
lows 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.
HOW FEAR CAME 7
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 color 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 Basfheera 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."
8 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" This is no time to carry weig^ht. I can still
stand alone, but — indeed we be no tatted bul-
locks, we too."
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. PFou ! "
Mowgli laughed. " Yes, we be great hunters
now," said he. " I am very bold — to eat grubs,"
and the two came down too^ether throueh 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, join-
inof them. " Look across. Yonder are trails like
the roads of Man."
On the level plain of the furtlicr 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
colorless 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 cough-
ing- in the snuff-like dust.
Up-stream, at the bend of the sluggish pool
HOW FEAR CAME 9
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, and the
bear, and the others.
"We are under one Law, indeed," said Ba-
gheera, 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 down 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
lo THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
am an eater of turtles — a fisher of frogs. Ngaa-
yaJi ! 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 chuck-
ling ; 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 favor," and he looked keenly
through the darkness to make sure of recognizing
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 ques-
tion 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.
HOW FEAR CAME II
" The men-folk, too, they die beside their
plows," 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, squirt-
ing 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 fore-
12 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
finc^er in his usual way, when Bagbeera out 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, pull-
ing 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 whisker 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 bank; then he dropped his square, frilled
head and began 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
HOW FEAR CAME 13
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. Aurgh/"
"That may come, too," said Bagheera, looking
him steadily between the eyes. " That may
come, too — ^ P'augh, 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 clown-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 toward 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 scorn-
fully, drawing himself out of the tainted water,
and shaking each paw, cat- fashion, as he did so.
14 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" I killed for choice — not for food." The horri-
fied 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 ? "
Baofheera's back beoj'an 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,
thouorh there was no need. Shere Khan slunk
away, not daring to growl, for he knew — what
HOW FEAR CAME 15
every one else knows — that when the last comes
to the last, llathi 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 in-
tensely curious, and they had just seen some-
thing 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 and
shouldering among the pigs and the buffalo, and
then the leaders of the herds grunted, one after
another, " We wait," and Hathi strode forward
l6 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 mut-
ter 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, hav-
ing no fear of one another. In those days there
was no drought, and leaves and flowers and fruit
gfrew 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
HOW FEAR CAME 17
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 pres-
ently they began to dispute over their food,
though there was grazing enough for all. They
were lazy. Each wished to eat where he lay down,
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 dis-
putes. 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 color all over
like the blossom of the yellow creeper. There was
i8 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 Tigers lying among the flowers, a
buck pushed him with his horns, and the First of
the Timers forgfot 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
HOW FEAR CAME 19
the trees that hang- low, and to the traihng- creep-
ers of the Jung-le, 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 beean 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
20 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
down the Jungle seeking for Fear, and presently
the bulialoes — "
" Ugh ! " said M)sa, 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 buf-
faloes 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 custon^i, but each tribe drew off by
itself — tlie 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 tlu; North,
and when word was brought to him of the Thing
we had seen in the cave, he said : ' 1 will go to
this Thing and break his neck.' So he ran all the
nieht till he came to the cave; but the trees and
HOW FEAR CAME 21
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 tlank, his forehead, and his
jowl. Wherever they touched him there was a
mark and a stripe upon his yellow hide. And
those sii'ipes do his children lucar 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
22 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
round and round before his eyes, but not one little
bar upon all his hide was changed, and Tha, watch-
ing him, laughed. Then the First of the Tigers
said, ' What hav^e 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 Titrers ran to and fro. callinof
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 with-
out 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
HOW FEAR CAME 23
meet the Hairless One — and his name is Man —
ye shaU not be afraid of him. but he shall be
afraid of )ou, 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 Pear 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 Hair-
less 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, nos-
ing 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,
24 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
scarred hills, l)ut it brought no rain — only heat-
liLi'htnin''" that thckcred alongf 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 tofrcther 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
HOW FEAR CAME .25
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
26 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 Hair-
less 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, remem-
bering how the First of the Tigers was made
ashamed. For the rest, Fear walks up and down
the Jungle by day and by night."
''Aid! Aoof 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."
HOW FEAR CAME 27
" Kven so. T/ieu 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 vil-
lacre. 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 Tio^er know his Nig-ht?"
" 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
28
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 con-
tinue to eat erass and leaves and trees? He did
but break the buck's neck. He did not cat. What
led him to the hot meat ? "
" The trees and the creepers marked him. Lit-
tle 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 1
made a beginning there would never be an end
to them. Let go my ear, Little Brother."
THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE
UST to give you an idea of the im-
mense 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 speci-
mens of the simpler rulings.
Nozv this is the Laiu of the Jzingie — as old ami as true
as the sky ;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the
Wolf tJiat shall break it must die.
As the erecper that girdles the tree -trunk the Lazv run-
neth forward and baek —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength
of the Wolf is tlie Pack.
30 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink dccpl}-, 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 LAW OF TUK JUNGLE 31
The Council shall send him a message, and so he shall
change it again.
If yc kill before midnight, be silent, and wake not the
woods with your bay,
Lest yc frighten the deer from the crops, and the
brother^ go empty away.
Ve 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 yc 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
cat 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.
32 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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, ajid many and
mighty are they ;
But the head and the hoof of the Lazu and the Jiaimch
and the hump is — Obey !
THE MIRACLE OE PURUN BHAGAT
The night wc felt the eartli 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 hiin, we the Little Folk ,
But lo ! he docs not come again !
Mourn now, wc 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.
H*
.H!
V,
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT
HERE was once a man in
India who was Prime Min-
ister of one of the semi-in
dependent native States in
the northwestern part of the
country. He was a Brah-
min, so high-caste that caste
ceased to have any particu-
lar meaning for him ; and
his father had been an im-
portant official in the gay-colored 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
35
36 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
well with the Knglisli, and imitatt; all that the
English believed to be good. At the same time
a native oflicial must keep his own master's
favor. This was a difficult game, but the quiet,
close-mouthed young Brahmin, helped by a
good English education at a Bombay Univer-
sity, played it cooll)', 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 im-
plements, and published a yearly blue-book on
the " Moral and Material Procuress 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 orood for the Asiatic. The Prime
Minister became the honored friend of Viceroys
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 37
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 traveled up and down India
in the cold weather, showing how things ought
to be managed. In his spare time he would en-
dow 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 Encrland 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 knowinof — men whose names o-q 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
38 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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
sunbaked quiet, he did a thing no Englishman
would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the
world's affairs went, he died. The jeweled order
of his knighthood went back to the Indian Gov-
ernment, and a new Prime Minister was appointed
to the charge of affairs, and a great game of Gen-
eral Post began in all the subordinate appoint-
ments. 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 ocher-colored dress of a Sun-
nyasi or holy man, was considered nothing extra-
TME MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 39
ordinary. He had been, as the Old Law recom-
mends, twenty )ears a )'outh, twcaity years a
hghter," — though he had never carried a weapon
in liis hfe, — and twenty years head of a house-
hold. He had used his wealth and his power for
what he knew both to be worth ; he had taken
honor when it came his way ; he had seen men
and cities far and near, and men and cities had
stood up and honored him. Now he would let
these things go, as a man drops the cloak he no
lonsfer 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\\\ his hand, barefoot, alone, with
eyes cast on the ground — behind him they were
firinof salutes from the bastions in honor 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 colorless dream
of the night. He was a Sunnyasi — a houseless
wandering mendicant, depending on his neigh-
bors 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
40 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
for food through any one of the many years in
which he had been absohite master of milHons
of money. Even when he was beino- honized
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-movintr traffic, and the sharp-smelling" wood
smoke curling up under the fig-trees in the twi-
light, 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 trouoh of the lonii" Atlantic seas than
Purun Dass among the roving, gathering, sepa-
rating millions of India.
At night his antelope skin was spread where
the darkness overtook hini — sometimes in a Sun-
nyasi monastery by the roadside ; sometimes by
a mud pillar shrine of Kala Pir, wdiere 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 out-
skirts of a little Hindu village, wdiere the children
would steal up with the food tlunr parents had
prepared ; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare
grazing-grounds, where the flame of his stick fire
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 41
waked the drowsy camels. It was all one to Pu-
run Dass — or Purun Bhagat, as he called him-
self now. Earth, people, and food were all one.
But unconsciously his feet drew him away north-
ward 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 remem-
bered 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 at 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 In-
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
dian common folk
really thouoht of
things. This lime
Piinm I)hao-at paid
no calls, but leaned
on the rail of the
Mall, watch in ^l;- that
Li'lorious view of the
Plains spread out
forty miles below, till
a native Mohamme-
dan policeman told
liim he was obstruct-
in_o- traffic ; and \\\-
run Rhao-at sahicUiied
re\ erently to the Law,
because he knew the
\alue of it, and was
seeking for a Law of
his own. 'IhcMi he
moved on, and slept
thatnig'ht in an empty
hut at Chota Simla,
which looks like the very last end of the earth,
but it was only the be^^-innino- of his journey.
He followed the IIimala)a- Fhibet road, the
little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 43
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 burn-
ing-glass ; or turns through dripping, dark for-
ests 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-cut-
ters, and cloaked and blanketed Lamas from
Thibet, coming into India on pilgrimage, and en-
voys of little solitary Hill-states, posting furiously
on ring-streaked and piebald ponies, or the caval-
cade 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 rano;" 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, wonder-
ing, 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 days' climb
44 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
— 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 deo-
dar, 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 worshiped 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 an-
telope 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. Look-
ing across the valley, the eye was deceived by the
size of thimrs, and could not at first realize that
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 45
what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite
mountain -flank, was in truth a forest of hundred-
foot pines. Purun l^hagat 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 hun-
dred 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-colored
— 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 savory meal for the Bhagat. Hill -food
is very simple, but with buckwheat and Indian
corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out
46 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 ban-
nocks of flour, a devout woman can make good
things, and it was a full bowl that the priest car-
ried 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
a":ainst the cold weather ? Was the food ":ood ?
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 honored that such a
man — he looked timidly into the Bhagat's face
— should tarry among them.
That day saw the end of Purun IMiagat's wan-
derings. 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 rejjeat a Name softly to
himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each re-
petition, he seemed to move more and more out
of his body, sweeping up to the doors of some
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BIIAGAT 47
tremendous discovtn-)- ; Init, just as the door was
openin<^, his bod\' 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 fdled begging-bowl was
laid silently in the crutch of the roots outside the
shrine. Sometimes the priest brought it ; some-
times a Ladakhi trader, lociofinor in the villaee,
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 honor, and Purun
Bhagat would hear him drop the bowl and run as
fast as his little legs could carry him, but the Bha-
gat never caine down to the village. It was laid
out like a map at his feet. He could see the even-
ing gatherings, held on the circle of the threshing-
floors because that was the only level ground ;
could see the wonderful unnamed ereen 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.
48
THE SFXOND JUNGLE BOOK
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. Hiv-
ing 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
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 49
things, who knew Kah's Shrine- well, came back
to look at the intruder. The laugiLvs, the big
gray- whiskered monkeys of the Himalayas, were,
naturally, the first, for they are alive with cu-
riosity ; 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 harm-
less. At evening, they would leap down from the
{nnes, and beg with their hands for things to eat,
and then swing off in graceful curves. They
liked tlie 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 morn-
ing, 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
bior deer which is like our red deer, but strono;er.
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 nuz-
50 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
zlcd his shoulder. Punin Bhagat shd 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 raveled off the
velvet. Afterward, the barasiiigh 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 niusJiick-nabJia must needs
find out what the light in the shrine meant, and
drop her moose-like nose into Purun Bhagat's
lap, coming and going with the shadows of the
fire. Purun Bhagat called them all " my bro-
thers," and his low call of " BJiai I BJiai! " would
draw them from the forest at noon if they were
within earshot. 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 1 Mi agat showed
no fear, Sona showed no anger, Init watched him,
and came closer, and begged a share of the ca-
resses, and a dole of bread or wild berries. Often,
in the still dawns, when the Bhagat would climb
to the \er)' crest of the pass to watch the red
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 51
day walking aloni;' the peaks of the snows, he
would hnd Sona shuffling" and grunting at his
heels, thrusting a curious fore-paw under fallen
trunks, and bringing it away with a W^6><?/of im-
patience ; or his early steps would wake Sona
where he lay curled up, and the great brute, ris-
intr erect, would think to fi^"ht, till he heard the
Bhaofat'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 mak-
ing 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 stalk-
inof like a shadow throuoh the dark forest behind
the shrine; saw the ininaul, the Himalayan phea-
sant, blazing in her best colors before Kali's sta-
tue ; and the langitrs on their haunches, inside,
playing with the walnut shells. Some of the chil-
dren, 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 further 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
52 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
certainty that there was notliiiiL^ great and noth-
ing" little in this world ; and da)' 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 an-
telope skin was dented into a little hole by the
foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place be-
tween 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 chanored their colors with the seasons ; the
threshing-floors filled and emptied, and filled
again and again ; anci again and again, when
winter came, the langiu^s 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 chil-
dren now ; and wlien 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
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 53
known in the Hills tor many seasons. Through
three good months the \alU;)' was wrapped in
cloud and soaking mist — steady, unrelenting
downfall, breaking' oft 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 saw 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 o-athered too-ether 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,
54 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 langttr.
" 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 /au-
gui'' 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 langiirs eyes were
full of thins^s 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 P)hagat's direc-
tion and stamped uneasily, hissing through his
half-shut nostrils.
" Hai ! Hai ! Hai ! " said the Bhagat, snapping
his fingers. " Is tJiis payment for a night's lodg-
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 55
ing?" But the deer pushed him toward the
door, and as he did so Purun Bhagfat heard tlie
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,
tw^irling 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 bara-
singh 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
56 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
haunches. As soon as they were clear of the
forest more of the Hliagat's Ijrothers joined them.
He heard, though he could not see, the langiirs
pressing about him, and behind them the 2ihh !
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 barasi7igJi. 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
Bhaofat and his brothers, down and down till
the deer's feet clicked and stumbled on the wall of
a threshin"--floor, and he snorted because he smelt
Man. Now they were at the head of the one
crooked village street, and the l)hagat beat with his
crutch on tlie 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 sj)oken 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 eive the call."
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 57
It ran from house to house, while the beasts,
cramped in the narrow way, surged and huddled
round the Hhagat, 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 hold-
ing back the terrified barasingh, while the mon-
keys 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 bot-
tom, 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
barasingk, weighted by the failing strength of
Purun Bhagat. At last the deer stopped in the
shadow of a deep pine-wood, five hundred feet up
the hillside. His instinct, that had warned him
of the coming slide, told him he would be safe
here.
58 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Purun Bhagat dropped fainting" by his side, for
the chill of the rain and that fierce climb were kill-
ing 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 hill-
side 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 min-
utes, 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
muftled 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 Hung head-down
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT 59
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-colored lake.
Of the village, of the road to the shrine, of the
shrine itself, and the forest behind, there was not
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 bai^asingh standing over him, who fled when
they came near, and they heard the langtirs wail-
ing 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 northeast.
The priest said : " Behold a miracle after a
miracle, for in this very attitude must all Sun-
nyasis 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
6o
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
progressive and enlightened State of Mohini-
ivala, and honorary or corresponding member of
more learned and scientific societies than ^vill ever
do any good in this world or the next.
^<i>if^
t% m
A SONG OF KABIR
H, 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 giiddee 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 !
6t
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 !
■lb ■
'Wif'.
tei*^'i
wmtsm&ma
ly, ;lt
'-'IP
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE
'^ y^^^U will remember, if you
have read the tales in the
first Jungle Book, that, after
Mowgli had pinned Shere
Khan's hide to the Coun-
cil Rock, he told as many
as were left of the Seeonee
^*' V j\ Pack that henceforward he
i.-;:> J 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
6s
66 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
for a da)' and a nig-ht. Then he told Mother
Wolf and P^ather Wolf as much as they could un-
derstand 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 Bro-
ther had to explain their share of the great buf-
falo-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," Mow-
gli said, at the en^l, " 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 orlad I did not see that last," said Mo-
ther Wolf, stiffly. " It is not my custom to suffer
my cubs to be driven to and fro like jackals. /
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE bj
would have taken a price from the Man-Pack;
but I woukl have spared the woman who gave
thee the milk. Yes, I woukl have spared her
alone."
" Peace, peace, Raksha ! " said Father Wolf,
lazily. "Our Prog 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 Bro-
ther?"
"Webeyfz'^," said Gray Brother, looking round
at the company, and snapping his jaws on the
last word.
"We also miofht attend to that huntinof," said
Bagheera, with a little switcJi-sivitch of his tail,
looking at Baloo. " But why think of men now,
Akela?"
" For this reason," the Lone Wolf answered:
" when that yellow thief's hide was hung up on
the rock, I went back along our trail to the vil-
lage, stepping in my tracks, turning aside, and
68 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
lying" down, to miikc ii mixed trail in case one
should follow us. Hut whcni I had fouled the trail
so that I myself hardly knew it again, Mang, the
Bat, came hawkino^ between the trees, and huncf
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 w^as a big stone that I threw," chuckled
Mowgli, who had often amused himself by throw-
ing 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
the Red Flower blossomed at the o-ate of the vil-
lage, and men sat about it carrying guns. Now
/know, for I have good cause," — i\kela looked
down at the old dry scars on his flank and side, —
" that men do not carry guns for pleasure. Pres-
ently, 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," Akc^la re-
turned. " 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-isinife cut deep into the ground below.
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 69
Mowgli Struck quicker than an average human
eye coukl follow, hut 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, return-
ing the knife to its sheath, " speak of the Man-
Pack and of Mowgli in tzvo breaths — not one."
" Phff ! That is a sharp tooth," said Akela,
snuffing at the blade's cut in the earth, " but liv-
ing 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
70 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
to catch the upper scent, which, though it is the
faintest, is the truest.
" Man ! " Akela growled, ch'opping on his
haunches.
" Bulcleo ! " said Mowgh, 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, trium-
phantly. " 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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 71
knife at me for thinking- he mi^-ht be Man ? "
o o
said Akela, as the four wolves turned back sul-
lenly and dropped to heel.
" Am I to o^ive a reason for all I choose to do ?"
said Mowgli, furiously.
"That is Man! There speaks Man!" Ba-
ofheera muttered under his whiskers. " Even so
did men talk round the King's cages at Oodey-
pore. 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 hunt-
ing. 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. That 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,
72 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
till their hair stood up all over their bodies, and
they trembled in every liml), 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 fol-
lowed at his heels with their tails between their
leors.
" 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 nothings but he thouo-ht
many things.
Mowgli cut across noiselessly through the Jun-
gle, 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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 73
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 un-
trained 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 betterthan 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
74 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 necessp^y.
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 un-
doubtedly the father and mother of this Devil-
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 75
child, and had barricaded them in dieir 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 dis-
pose 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, Bul-
deo 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 hap-
pen 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?
76 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 per-
fectly safe.
" What says he ? What says he ? What says
he ? " the wolves repeated every few minutes ;
and Mowofli 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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE T]
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 char-
coal-burners went off very valiantly in single
file.
" I am going hot- foot back to the Man- Pack,"
Mowgli said at last.
" And those ? " said Gray Brother, looking hun-
grily 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 villasfe gfates 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 Bro-
ther, the song need not be of the sweetest. Go
with them, Bagheera, and help make that song.
When the night is shut down, meet me by the
village — Gray Brother knows the place."
" It is no liofht huntincr to work for a Maii-cub.
When shall I sleep ? " said Bagheera, yawning,
78 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
though his eyes showed that he was deHghted
with the amusement. " Me to singr 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 enouoh to beo^in with. MowQfli 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 Bro-
ther 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 mag-
nificent 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 :
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 79
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 gHde.
Now, stark and plain, Man's oxen strain.
That draw the new-yoked plow ;
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 creaking 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 Majif "
The dew is dried that drenched our hide,
Or washed about our way ;
And where we drank, the puddled bank
Is crisping into clay.
8o THI-: SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 I "
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 w^hen 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 be-
hind him, nine to the hour, swinging on, delighted
to tind 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
j)ay his debts to the village at large.
It was at twilight when he saw the well-re-
membered grazing-grounds, and the d/m/c-trQQ
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,
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 8i
something" jumped uj) in his throat and made him
catch his breath when he looked at the villatre
roofs. Me 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 groan-
ing : 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
82 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
had done its dut)-, Buldco 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 be-
wildered 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 k}iow 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 he}' 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."
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 83
" 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 remem-
ber? " 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 Mowgfli. " 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.
84 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" H'm ! " said Mowgli, and he tickled the palm
of his hand with tlie tip of his skinning-knife ; " I
have no wish to do harm to any one of this vil-
lage — ye^. 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 lis-
tened 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
alontr acfain outside the wall of the villag-e 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 ask-
ing 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.
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 85
" Bah ! " said Moworli. " Chatter — chatter !
Talk, talk ! Men are blood-brothers of the Ba7i-
dar-loi^. 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. Lit-
tle 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
86 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
she said was: "I gave thee th)- first milk; but
Bagheera speaks truth: Man goes to Man at
the last."
" Maybe," said Mowgli, with a very unpleas-
ant look on his face; "but to-night I am very
fir from that trail. Wait here, but do not let
her see."
''Thou wast never afraid of 7ne, 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.
" Kanhiwara is thirty miles from here, but at
Kanhiwara 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 suf-
fer 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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 87
on his hands and knees digging up the earth in
one corner ot the hut.
"It is his httle 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 the
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 Mes-
sua 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 Kanhiwara?" 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 Jun-
gle behind you and before."
"Think you we would have risked a night in
the Jungle through anything less than the fear of
88 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
burning? It is better to l)e 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 ye come within
eye- shot of Kanhiwara. There will be a watch
about you." He turned quickly to Messua, say-
ing, " 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
sinofino". 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 Hfted 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 hus-
band looked enviously across his fields, and said :
"//"we reach Kanhiwara, 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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 89
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
toncfue a little. I would call Baeheera."
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, The call will follow up
to Kanhiwara. It is Favor of the Jungle."
Messua uro-ed her husband forward, and the
darkness of the Jungle 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, pur-
ring.
" 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
90 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
though I were out wooing in the spring ! Didst
thou not hear us ? "
" I had other game afoot. Ask Buldeo if he
hked the song. But where are the Four ? I do
not wish one of the Man- Pack to leave the cfates
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 killinor at last ? The sinor-
ing and the sight of the men climbing up the
trees have made me very ready. What 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 sung 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 all my strength is in
me. Who shall stay my stroke ? Man -cub, with
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 91
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 whis-
pered, 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 tli07i 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 pan-
92 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
ther 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 pan-
ther. But I love thee. Little Brother."
"They are very long at their talk under the
tree," Mowgli s.aid, 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 tliink they will tie me with cords."
"Be wise, then," said Mowgli, laughing; for
he was beginning to feel as reckless as the pan-
ther, 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,
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 93
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 bam-
boos and sickles and knives. Buldeo and the
Brahmin were at the head of it, but the mob was
4
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 ! Bul-
deo, heat the cfun-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,
94 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 — elabo-
rately, 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 un-
der, 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 Ba-
gheera 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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 95
Still, and thought, and his face grew darker and
darker.
"What have I done? " said Bagheera, at last,
coming t-o his feet, fawning,
" Nothing but great good. Watch them now
till the day. I sleep." Mowgli ran off into the Jun-
gle, 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. Ba-
gheera 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 Kanhiwara," 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
g6 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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
hiintinof 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 trul)-. Little l)rother, it is
not — it is not seemly to say ' Come,' and ' Go,' to
Hathi. Remember, he is the Master of the Jun-
gle, 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 be-
cause of the Sack of the Fields of Bh-urtpore."
"The Sack of the Melds of Bhurtpore," Ba-
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 97
gheera repeated two or three times to make sure.
" I go. I lathi can but he angry at the worst, and
I would give a moon's hunting to hear a Mas-
ter-word that compels the Silent One."
He w^ent away, leaving Mowgli stabbing fu-
riously with his skinning-knile 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 pee-
pul-tree in the evening that had put the idea into
his head.
" It was a Master-word," Bagheera wdiispered
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
98 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
usual way, without a sound. 1 he 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 ele-
phants.
" 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
I
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 99
Strong", and went away till his wound was healed.
Then came he, angry, by night to the helds 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 helds 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 plowing that follows the reap-
ing ? " said Mowgli.
"There was no plowing," 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 niorhts 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
loo THE SFXOND JUNGLE BOOK
who takes his food from the trround. 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 awa)^ 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.
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE loi
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 plowed 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 Mow-
gli 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 plow, and the noise of the rain on the thick
leaves for the pattering of their spindles — till
Bap^heera and I lair in the house of the Brahmin,
and the buck drink at the tank behind the tem-
ple ! 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
I02 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 0^0 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 — be-
fore 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,
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 103
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 rumor 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
I04 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
meal — moved first by companies, scuffling over
the rocks, and the deer foHowed, 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 thino^
would have turned the scattered, straggling droves
that trrazed and sauntered and drank and o^razed
again ; but whenever there was an alarm some
one would rise up and soothe them. At one time
it would be Sahi the Porcupine, full of news of
good feed just a little further 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 P'lesh skirmished round its edge.
And the center 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
' LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 105
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 wac/iajis 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 plowed
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 gav^e 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 practicalh^ done. When the
villagers looked in the morning they saw their
lo6 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
crops were lost. And that meant death if they
did not get away, for they Hved 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
o-leaninof among- what was left ; and where Hathi
gleans there is no need to follow. The men de-
cided to live on their stored seed-corn until the
rains had fallen, and then to take work as ser-
vants 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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 107
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 old-
est 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 Kanhiwara, 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
io8 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
wild gourd would grow where they had wor-
shiped their God, and the sooner they saved
themselves the better.
But it is hard to tear a villao^e from its moor-
ings. 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
midday ; 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 chiseled with the stroke of some great taloned
paw. The more they kept to their village, the
bolder grew the wild things that gamboled and
bellowed on the grazing-grounds by the Wain-
gunga. 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 doonied.
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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE lo^j
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 out-
lying fields were already losing their shape, and
it was time to throw themselves on the charity
of the English at Kanhiwara.
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 (jate, a crash of fallinof 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
no THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 eaves ; 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
ray tusks were red at r3hurtpore ! 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
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE iii
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 plow
not six months before.
4A 7/ k,.
MOWGLI'S SONG AGAINST PEOPLE
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 Karcla, the bitter Karcla,
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 Karcla, 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 Karcla, the bitter Karcla,
Shall seed where ye loved !
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE 113
I will reap your fields before j'oii at tiic hands of a host;
Ye shall fjlean 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.
THE UNDERTAKERS
ESPECT the a^ed!"
It was a thick voice — a
muddy voice that would have
made you shudder — a voice
Hke somethine soft breaking
in tw^o. There was a quaver
in it, a croak and a whine.
" Respect the aged ! O
Companions of the River — respect the aged ! "
Nothing coukl be seen on the broad reach of
the river except a Httle 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*
Il8 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 gun-
wale, 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.
Nieht 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
THE UNDERTAKERS 119
low 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 battahons of the flying-foxes; and cloud
upon cloud of water-birds came whistling and
" honkincr " 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 pickaxe beak
might steal. His legs were long and thin and
120 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
skinii)-, but he moved them cleHcately, and looked
at theiiA with pride as he preened down liis ashy-
gray tail-leathers, 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, cc:)cked 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
doofs of this villaee ! 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 Jicard
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
THE UNDERTAKERS 121
of proverbs, picked up by listening to men round
the village fires of an evening.
" Quite true. So, to make surje, I took care of
that puppy while the dogs were busy elsewhere."
"They were vciy 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 Qgg,'' 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 re-
peated, 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 w^ould by no means say this to his
122 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
noble face, he is so wise and so virtuous — as I,
alas ! 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 conse-
quence — "
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, keep-
ing 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 could carry the
Mugger up the bank with the rush of a steam-
engine.
" Auspiciously met, Protector of the Poor ! " he
THE UNDERTAKERS 123
fawned, backini^ 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 get-
ting 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 to-
gether.
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
124 THK SFXOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 philosophize 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 rail-
way 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 remem-
ber, child, he who rebukes the World is rebuked
by the World."
" Mattery is worse than an empty tin can in
the belly. Rut that which we have just heard is
wisdom," said the Adjutant, bringing down one
foot.
THE UNDERTAKERS 125
" Consider, though, their in<j;-ratitude to this ex-
cellent one," began the Jackal tenderly.
" Nay, nav, not inLrratitude ! " the MuLrcfer said.
"They do not think for others; that is all. Ikit
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
honored ao^ain."
" 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 differ-
126 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
ence. Yet she meant well, and we must con-
sider the spirit of the offering."
" What ofood are mariq-old wreaths when one
is on the rubbish-heap? " said the Jackal, hunting
for fleas, but keeping one wary eye on his Pro-
tector 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.' "
"/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 ! * "
THE UNDERTAKERS 127
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
128 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 g-rowth — be-
fore the last famine but three (by the Rig-ht 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
THE UNDERTAKERS 129
ford.' * Not SO,' saitl the Brahmin. ' Look, he is
driving- the flood before him ! He is the LTodhnc;
of the villag"e.' 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 m the
water more than likely to hide a cross-shaped
hook. But tliat goat I accepted, and went down
to the Ghaut in great honor. 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 Adju-
tant. "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 up-
per 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
I30 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 dras" 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
further, but that gave me three in one day — well-
fed 7nanjis (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 wisdoni ; 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 con-
stantly rise to the surface of the water, and turn
over on their sides, like Mohoo and little Chapta ;
THE UNDERTAKERS 131
nor do they gather in shoals after flood, hkc
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 mov-
ing about in their beds, and will shift, sometimes,
as much as two or three miles in a season, drown-
132 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
ino- the fields on one bank, and spreading good
silt on the other.
•' There is no knowledge so useful," said the
Mugger, "lor new land means new quarrels.
The Mugger knows. Oho ! the Mugger knows.
As soon as the water has drained oft, 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
eiven him. He feels the ofood 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 Muoro-er 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
THE UNDERTAKERS 133
* 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 >('//6«r-scrub yon-
der. 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 too-ether forward in a rinp", or side-
ways 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
haofSfle over the blood- money, for the dead was a
strong man, leaving many sons. Yet before am-
ratvela (sunrise) they put the fire to him a little,
134 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 — ":lean — than'' said the Mucrorer.
" 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 were dainty seasons. But to-day they
keep their streets as clean as the outside of an
^^%, 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 thousfht of it.
" Ah, but the white-faces are there — the Eng-
lish, and they bring dogs from somewhere down
the river, in boats — big fat dogs — to keep those
same jackals lean," said the Adjutant.
THE UNDERTAKERS 135
" They are, then, as hard-hearted as these peo-
ple ? 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 pro-
per way. It made me very sick."
"That was better than my case," said the Ad-
jutant. " When I was in my third season, a
young and a bold bird, I went down to the river
where the bio- 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,
136 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 swal-
lowed as is our custom. Immediately I was af-
flicted 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 boat-
men 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, settinof aside that
marvelous colciness, was that there was nothing
at all in my crop when I had finished my lament-
ings ! "
The Adjutant had done his very best to de-
scribe 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 — " anytJiing is possible that comes out
of a boat thrice the size of Mugger-Ghaut. My
village is not a small one."
THE UNDERTAKERS 137
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 w/ie/i 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
Muo-orer.
" 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
138 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 frf)m
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 agrain itmio^ht be — " beo-an the Musfo-er
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 ? / 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."
I "You do not know the I'lnglish as I do," said
THE UNDERTAKERS 139
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 bot-
tom-boards, and whisper : ' Is he here ? Is he
there? Bring^ne my gun.' I could hear him be-
fore I could sec 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, anci thus saved great ex-
pense 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 Muo^oer of Mu or 2:er- Ghaut ! Me ! Chil-
dren, 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, ex-
cept 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
HO THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
being builded for the third time, as I remember,
when my cousin, the Gavial, brought me word of
rich waters above Benares. At first 1 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 Gunea-
ward. I was a month's journey from my own
people and the river that I knew. That was very
marvelous ! "
"What food on the way ?" said the Jackal,
who kept his soul in his little stomach, ami was
not a bit im])r(;ssed b\' 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
THE UNDERTAKERS 141
unless you think you can establish some kind of
blood-relationship, and as it is only in old fairy-
tales that the Mugg-er ever marries a jackal, the
Jackal knew for what reason he had been sud-
denly 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 kin-
ship. 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.
142 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
•'That food was eaten thirty seasons ago,"
said the Adjutant quietly. "If we talk for thirty
seasons more it will nev^er 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 Eng-
lish 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 ! "
THE UNDERTAKERS I43
He went off into his horrible dance again,
while the Jackal looked on enviously. He natu-
rally 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
jewelry and nose-rings and anklets as my women
are nowadays. To delight in ornaments is to
end with a rope for necklace, as the saying is.
All the muCTo-ers of all the rivers o^rew 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
144 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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, com-
ing 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 crosswise 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 an-
other in the boat, and presently I rose again to
watch them. fheir 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 ! "
THE UNDERTAKERS 145
" 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 long 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 neckplate
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 bit-
146 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
ten off b)- 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 de-
sire 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 miser-
ably 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 com-
pletely everything was wiped out of his memory,
and sat down with an ^ir.
" Indeed, very man)' 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
THE UNDERTAKERS 147
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 Eng-
lish. 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
log's 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
dragge(f 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 thinor
happen to men how shall the Mugger of Mugger-
Ghaut escape?' There were boats, too, that
came up behind me without sails, burning con-
tinually, as the cotton-boats sometimes burn, but
never sinking."
"Ah ! " said the Adjutant. " Boats like those
come to Calcutta of the South. Thev are tall
148 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 plowing and sowing and reaping,
and going to and fro in their fields, as quietly as
their own cattle."
"Was there still crood 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 curr(Mit were not English, as my people saw.
Then my people said that it was best to say noth-
ing at all, but to pay the tax and plow the land.
After a long time the river cleared, and those
that came down it had been clearly drowned by
THE UNDERTAKERS 149
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."
" Marvelous ! Most truly marvelous ! " said
the Jackal. " I am become fat through merely
hearing about so much good eating. And after-
ward what, if it be permitted to ask, did the Pro-
tector 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
I50 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
new thing. It is true they are a heavy-footed,
noisy, and foohsli pc^ople, and the s[)ort 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 be-
tween the teeth of the Mugger of Mugger- (ihaut,
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
hi77t 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 !
A rrh ! "
THE UNDERTAKERS 151
"How can a Jackal luint with a Mugger?"
said the Atljutanl coolh . " Big thief and
Httle thief; it is easy to say who gets the pick-
ingrs."
The Jackal turned, whining impatiently, and
was going; to curl himself up under the tree-trunk,
when suddenl)- 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 In-
dia 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 an)thing greater
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 Muofcrer."
" Warn him, then. He was called Protector
152 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
of the Poor l^y some one not unlike <i 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 ly-
ing 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 deo^a (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."
THE UNDERTAKERS 153
" That 's for him to decide. Here goes ! "
There was a roar hke the sound of a small can-
non (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 Mar-
tini, whose long bullet makes nothing of a croco-
dile's plates. But the explosive bullets did the
work. One of them struck just behind the Mug-
ger's neck, a hand's breadth to the left of the back-
bone, 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 thun-
der ! " 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
154
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Stood admiring" die length of the Mugger. Then
a native with an axe cut olf the big head, and
four men dragged it across the spit.
"The last time that I had my hand in a Mug-
ger's mouth," said one of the Englishmen, stoop-
ing 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 boatman ! Haul that
head up the bank, and we '11 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, was n't it ? "
• 9 • • •
Curiously enough, the Jackal and the Adjutant
made the very same remark not three minutes
after the men had left.
A RIPPLE SONG
NCE 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 azuhile, for I am
Death!''
"Where my lover calls I go —
Shame it were to treat him coldly-
'T was 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 ! "
155
156 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" When my lover calls I haste —
Dame Disdain was never wedded ! "
Ripple-ripple round her waist,
Clear the current eddied.
Foolish heart a7id faithful hand,
Little feet that touched no land.
Far aiuay 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.
'/^^^4 '■'
THE KING'S ANKUS
|AA, the big- Rock Python,
had changed his skin for
perhaps the two hundredth
time since his birth ; and
Mowgh, who never forgot
that he owed his Hfe to
Kaa for a night's work at
Cold Lairs, which you may
perhaps remember, went to
coneratLilate him. Skin-
changing always makes a snake moody and de-
pressed 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
»59
l6o THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 cir-
cle 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 Mow-
gli'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 ! "
"Aye, 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 <rreat heats I have wished I could slouch
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 check-
THE KING'S ANKUS i6i
erings of the immense back. " The Turtle is hard-
er-backed, but not so ga)'." he said judgmatically.
" The PVog, ni)- 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 color 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
nothinor ^Ise could. Sometimes Mowgrli would
stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa's shift-
ing coils, striving to get one arm free and catch
i62 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
him 1))' the tliroat. 'I'licn Kaa would give way
limply, and Mowoli. wiili hodi ([uick-moxiiiL;' 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 Mow-
gli'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 ofuard for that liohtnino- lumre, 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 inter-
esting by sunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped
in. Jungle-fashion, without a sound, and dived
across ; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on
THE KING'S ANKUS 163
his back, his arms behind his head, watching' the
moon rising abov^e the rocks, and breaking up
her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa's
diamond-shaped head cut the pool hke a razor,
and came out to rest on Mowgh'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 re-
member, 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 Bro-
ther?"
" Not all," said Mowgli, laughing; "else there
would be a new anj^ 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
i64 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
of summer ; and also I have ne\er gone empty
but I wished that I had kilk^d a goat ; and also I
have never killed a goat but 1 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 favor of the Jungle ! Is there more any-
where 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
THE KING'S ANKUS 165
burrows." Mowgli knew that Kaa was talking
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 fol-
lowed, 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 orame ? Was it orood huntinof ? " Mow-
gli 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 Mowg^li. "I now re-
member 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
i66 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
shall see all these things, for the least of which
very many men would die.' "
"That intLst 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 otq."
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, how-
ever, were raiding in the Jungle, and so Cold
Lairs stood empty and silent in the moonlight.
Kaa led up to the ruins of the queen's pavilion
that stood on the terrace, slipped over the rub-
bish, and dived down the half-choked staircase
that went underground from the center of the
pavilion. Mowgli gave the snake-call — "We
THE KING'S ANKUS 167
be of one l)lood, ye and I," — and followed on his
hands and knees. They crawled a long' distance
down a sloping passage diat turned and twisted
several times, and at last came to where the root
of some great tree, growing thirty feet over-
head, had forced out a solid stone in the wall.
They crept through the gap, and found them-
selves in a large vault, whose domed roof had
been also broken away by tree-roots so that a
few streaks of light dropped dowMi 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 Mow^gli 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 dark-
ness 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 al-
toofether he was most wonderful.
" Good huntinof ' " said MowQfli, who carried
his manners with his knife, and that never left
him.
" What of my city ? " said the White Cobra,
i68 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
without answering the greeting. " What of the
great, the walled city — the city of a hundred ele-
phants 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 ele-
phants. 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 Yega-
suri, 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. hathcr of Cobras,
there is only the Jungle here, as it has been since
the ]:)eginning."
" Then who is he,'' said the White Cobra, "sit-
THE KING'S ANKUS 169
tin</ down before me, unafraid, knowincf not the
name of the Kin"- tallcinir our talk through a
man's Hps ? Who is he with the knife and the
snake's tongue ? "
" MowgH 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 ni)- 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 kines.
But it is lono- and Ion or since the stone was last
moved, and I think tliat niy 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.
I/O THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" 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 / 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 — /, 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 clown, 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 at, the lesser Kings
will be thy servants ! "
"Again the trail is lost," said Mowgli, coolly.
" Can any jackal have burrowed so deep and bit-
ten 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 Co-
bra. " Before thine eyes close I will allow thee
this favor. Look thou, and see what man has
never seen before ! "
THE KING'S ANKUS 171
'* They do not well in the Jungle who speak to
Mowgli of favors," 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 moved 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 risintr throuo^h it, as wrecks lift throufjh
the sand, were jeweled elephant-howdahs of em-
bossed 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 higfh, of forofotten
gods, silver with jeweled eyes ; there were coats
172 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
of mail, gold inlaid on steel, and fringed wiUi
rotted and blackened seed-pearls ; there were hel-
mets, crested and beaded with pigeoii'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-hiltcd swords,
daggers, and hunting-knives ; there were golden
sacrificial bowls and ladles, and portable altars
of a shape that never see 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-ring-s, 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, show-
ing 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 |)recious stones ; and
the dead weitrht of the i/old and silver alone mii'ht
THE KING'S ANKUS
173
be two or three hundred tons. I'^very native ruler
in India to-da)-, 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 ex-
chanofed for Government securi-
ties, 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 fascinat-
ing laid on the front of a how-
dah half buried in the coins. It
was a three-foot ankus, or ele-
phant-goad — something like a
small boat-hook. The top was
one round shining ruby, and
twelve inches of the handle
below it were studded with rough turquoises close
together, giving a most satisfactor)- grip. Below
174 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
them was a rim of jade with a flower-pattern run-
ning- 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 ele-
phant-catching ; and the pictures attracted Mow-
gli, 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 favor ? "
"I do not understand," said Mowoli, "The
things are hard and cold, and by no means good
to eat. But this " — he lifted the ankus — " I de-
sire 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 gocst 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.
THE KING'S ANKUS 175
" 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 trea-
sure? If thou wilt orive me the ankus to take
away, it is good hunting. If not, it is good hunt-
ing 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
mme !
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
176 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 a while, Kaa of the Rocks, and see
the boy run. There is room for great sport here.
Life is good. Run to and fro a while, and make
sport, boy ! "
Mowgli put his hand on Kaa's head quietly,
"The white thinij 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, paralyzing 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,
THE KING'S ANKUS 177
forced the mouth open with the blade of the knife,
and showed the terrible poison-fangs of the up-
per jaw lying black and withered in the gum.
The White Cobra had outlived his poison, as a
snake will.
" Thuu " (" It is dried up "),^ said Mowgli ; and
motioning Kaa away, he picked up the ankus,
settingf the White Cobra free.
"The Kine'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 ha^ 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
1 Literally, a rotted out tree-stump.
178 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
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 eval
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 ad-
ventures from beginning to end, and Bagheera
sniffed at the ankus between whiles. When Mow-
THE KING'S ANKUS 179
gli 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 Oodey-
pore, and it is in my stomach that I know some
little of Man. Very many men would kill thrice in
a nio^ht for the sake of that one bigr 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 Oodey-
pore, before our cages. That thing has tasted
the blood of many such as Hathi."
"But why do they thrust into the heads of
elephants ? "
i8o THE SECOND JUiNGLE BOOK
" To teach them Man's Law. Havin^^ neither
claws nor teeth, men make these things — and
worse."
" Always more blood when I come near, even
to the thinors the Man- Pack have made," said
Mowgli, disgustedly. He was getting a little
tired of the weight of the ankiis. "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, / 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 swincrinof in a hammock
fifty feet above ground. Though he had no posi-
tive objection to strong daylight, Mowgli fol-
lowed the custom of his friends, and used it as
THE KING'S ANKUS l8l
little as he could. When he waked among the
very loud-voiced peoples that li\e 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 things acjain," he
said, and slid down a creeper to the earth ; but
Batrheera was before him. Mowofli could hear
him snuffingr in the half lisfht.
"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 stom-
ach 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."
182 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" 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 liohtninof,"
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."
THE KING'S ANKUS 183
"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, leav-
ing 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 Mowgfli, 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
i84 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
from the rock pace by pace among the trees, his
voice rising in the distance as he approached a
httle cascade. " I — go — far — away — to —
where — the — noise — of — falhno- — water —
covers — my — noise ; and — here — I — wait.
Cry thy trail, Bagheera, Big Foot ! "
The panther had been casting in every cHrec-
tion 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 keep-
ing 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 ! "
THE KING'S ANKUS 185
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 Bro-
ther?" said Bagheera gently. "Here is one
death, at least."
" Follow on. But where is the drinker of ele-
phant's blood — the red-eyed thorn?"
"Little Foot has it — perhaps. It is single-
foot acrain 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 orlance. " I have used such a thine
among the buffaloes when I served in the Man-
Pack. The Father of Cobras — I am sorrowful
i86 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
that I made a jest of hini — 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 now, and Bagheera
said, " I smell smoke."
" Men are always more ready to eat than to
run," Mowgli answered, trotting in and out be-
tween the low scrub bushes of the new Jungle they
were exploring. Bagheera, a little to his left,
made an indescribable noise in his throat.
THE KING'S ANKUS 187
" Here is one that has done with feeding," said
he. A tumbled bundle of gay-colored clothes
lay under a bush, and round it was some spilt
flour.
" That was done by the bamboo again," said
Mowgli. " See ! that white dust is what men
eat. They have taken the kill from this one, —
he carried their food, — and given him for a kill to
Chil, the Kite."
" It is the third," said Bagheera.
" I will go with new, big frogs to the Father
of Cobras, and feed him fat," said Mowgli to him-
self "The drinker of elephant's blood is Death
himself — but still I do not understand ! "
" Follow ! " said Bagheera.
They had not gone half a mile further when
they heard Ko, the Crow, singing the death-song
in the top of a tamarisk under whose shade three
men were lying. A half-dead fire smoked in the
center of the circle, under an iron plate which
held a blackened and burned cake of unleavened
bread. Close to the fire, and blazing in the sun-
shine, lay the ruby-and-turquoise ankus.
"The thing works quickly; all ends here,"
said Bagheera. "How did these die, Mowgli?
There is no mark on any."
A Jungle-dweller gets to learn by experience
as much as many doctors know of poisonous
i88 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
plants and berries. Mowgli sniffed the smoke
that came up from the hre, broke off a morsel of
the blackened bread, tasted it, and spat it out
again.
"Apple of Death," he coughed. "The first
must have made it ready in the food for these,
who killed him, having first killed the Gond."
" Good hunting, indeed ! The kills follow
close," said Bagheera.
"Apple of Death" is what the Jungle call
thorn-apple or dhatura, the readiest poison in all
India.
"What now?" said the panther. " Must thou
and I kill each other for yonder red-eyed slayer? "
"Can it speak?" said Mowgli, in a whisper.
"Did I do it a wrong when I threw it away?
Between us two it can do no wrong, for we do
not desire what men desire. If it be left here, it
will assuredly continue to kill men one after an-
other as fast as nuts fall in a high wind. I have
no love to men, but even I would not have them
die six in a nio"ht."
"What matter? They are only men. They
killed one another and were well pleased," said
Bagheera. " That first litde woodman hunted
well."
"They are cubs none the less; and a cub will
THE KING'S ANKUS 189
drown himself to bite the moon's light on the
water. The fault was mine," said Mowgli, who
spoke as though he knew all about everything.
" I will never again bring into the Jungle strange
things — not though they be as beautiful as flow-
ers. This" — he handled the ankus gingerly —
" goes back to the Father of Cobras. But first
we must sleep, and we cannot sleep near these
sleepers. Also we must bury him, lest he run
away and kill another six. Dig me a hole under
that tree."
" But, Little Brother," said Bagheera, moving
off to the spot, " I tell thee it is no fault of the
blood-drinker. The trouble is with men."
" All one," said Mowgli. "Dig the hole deep.
When we wake I will take him up and carry him
back."
Two nights later, as the White Cobra sat
mourning in the darkness of the vault, ashamed,
and robbed, and alone, the turquoise ankus
whirled through the hole in the wall, and clashed
on the floor of golden coins.
" Father of Cobras," said Mowgli (he was care-
ful to keep the other side of the wall), "get thee
a young and ripe one of thine own people to help
190
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
thee guard the King's Treasure so that no man
may come away alive any more."
" Ah-ha ! It returns, then. I said the thing
was Death. How comes it that thou art still
alive ? " the old Cobra mumbled, twining lovingly
round the ankus-haft.
" By the Bull that bought me, I do not know !
That thing has killed six times in a night. Let
him ofo out no more."
THE SONG OF THE LITTLE HUNTER
RE Mor the Peacock flutters, eie
the Monkey People cry,
Ere Chil the Kite swoops down
a furlong sheer,
Through the Jungle very softly
flits a shadow and a sigh —
He is Fear, O Little Hunter,
he is Fear !
Very softly down the glade runs
a waiting, watching shade,
And the whisper spreads and widens far and near ;
And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even
now —
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear !
Ere the moon has climbed the mountain, ere the rocks
are ribbed with light,
When the downward-dipping trails are dank and
drear.
Comes a breathing hard behind thee — stiuffle-smcffle
through the night —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear !
On thy knees and draw the bow ; bid the shrilling
arrow go ;
In the empty, mocking thicket plunge the spear;
191
192
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
But thy hands are loosed and weak, and the blood has
left thy cheek —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
When the heat-cloud sucks the tempest, when the sliv-
ered pine-trees fall.
When the blinding, blaring rain-squalls lash and veer;
Through the war-gongs of the thunder rings a voice
more loud than all —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear !
Now the spates are banked and deep ; now the footless
boulders leap —
Now the lightning shows each littlest leaf-rib clear-
But thy throat is shut and dried, and thy heart against
thy side
Hammers: Fear, O Little Hunter — this is Fear!
QUIOUERN
The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow —
They beg for coffee and sugar ; they go where the white men go.
The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight;
They sell their furs to the trading-post ; they sell their souls to the
white.
The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler's
crew;
Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few.
But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man's ken —
Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the last
of the Men!
— Translation.
QUIOUERN
E has opened his eyes.
Look ! "
" Put him in the skin
ac;-ain. He will be a stronpf
dog. On the fourth month
we will name him."
" For whom ? " said Amo-
raq.
Kadlu's eye rolled round
the skin-lined snow-house
till it fell on fourteen-year-
old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench, making
a button out of walrus ivory. " Name him for
me," said Kotuko, with a grin. " I shall need
him one day."
Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were almost
195
196 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
buried in the fat of his flat cheeks, and nodded to
Anioraq, while the puppy's fierce mother whined
to see her baby wriggling far out of reach in the
little sealskin pouch hung above the warmth of
the blubber-lamp. Kotuko went on with his
carvang, and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of lea-
ther dog-harnesses into a tiny little room that
opened from one side of the house, slipped off
his heav^y deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a
whalebone-net that hung above another lamp, and
dropped down on the sleeping-bench to whittle
at a piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq, his
wife, should bring the regular dinner of boiled
meat and blood-soup. He had been out since
early dawn at the seal-holes, eight miles away,
and had come home with three big seal. Half-
way down the long, low snow passage or tunnel
that led to the inner door of the house you could
hear snappings and yelpings, as the dogs of his
sleigh-team, released from the day's work, scuffled
for warm places.
When the yelpings grew too loud Kotuko lazily
rolled off the sleeping-bench, and picked up a
whip with an eighteen-inch handle of springy
whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy, plaited
thong. He dived into the passage, where it
sounded as though all the dogs were eating him
QUIQUERN 197
alive ; but that was no more than their regular
ofrace before meals. When he crawled out at the
far end half a dozen furry heads followed him
with their eyes as he went to a sort of gallows
of whale-jawbones, from which the dog's meat
was hung ; split off the frozen stuff in big lumps
with a broad-headed spear ; and stood, his whip
in one hand and the meat in the other. Each
beast was called by name, the weakest first,
and woe betide any dog that moved out of his
turn ; for the tapering lash would shoot out like
thonged lightning, and flick away an inch or so
of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped,
choked once over his portion, and hurried
back to the protection of the passage, while the
boy stood upon the snow under the blazing
Northern Lights and dealt out justice. The
last to be served was the big black leader of
the team, who kept order when the dogs were
harnessed ; and to him Kotuko gave a double
allowance of meat as well as an extra crack of the
whip.
"Ah!" said Kotuko, coiling up the lash, "I
have a little one over the lamp that will make a
great many bowlings. Sarpok ! Get in !"
He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted
the dry snow from his furs with the whalebone
198 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
*
beater that Amoraq kept by the door, tapped
the skin-Hned roof of the house to shake off any
icicles that might have fallen from the dome of
snow above, and curled up on the bench. The
dogs in the passage snored and whined in their
sleep, the boy-baby in Amoraq's deep fur hood
kicked and choked and sTurofled, and the mother
of the newly named puppy lay at Kotuko's side,
her eyes fixed on the bundle of sealskin, warm
and safe above the broad yellow flame of the
lamp.
And all this happened far away to the north,
beyond Labrador, beyond Hudson's Strait, where
the great tides heave the ice about, north of Mel-
ville Peninsula — north even of the narrow Fury
and Hecla Straits — on the north shore of Baffin
Land, where Bylot's Island stands above the ice
of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong
side up. North of Lancaster Sound there is lit-
tle we know anything about, except North, Devon
and Ellesmere Land ; but even there live a few
scattered people, next door, as it were, to the
very Pole.
Kadlu was an Inuit, — what you call an Es-
quimau, — and his tribe, some thirty persons all
told, belonged to the Tununirmiut — "the coun-
try lying at the back of something." In the
QUIQUERN 199
maps that desolate coast is written Navy Board
Inlet, hut the Inuit name is best, because the
country lies at the very back of everything in the
world. For nine months of the year there is only
ice, snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that
no one can realize who has never seen the ther-
mometer even at zero. For six months of those
nine it is dark ; and that is what makes it so hor-
rible. In the three months of the summer it
only freezes every other day and every night,
and then the snow begins to weep off on the
southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put
out their woolly buds, a tiny stonecrop or so
makes believe to blossom, beaches of fine gravel
and rounded stones run down to the open sea,
and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up
above the granulated snow. But all that is gone
in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down
again on the land ; while at sea the ice tears
up and down the offing, jamming and ramming,
and splitting and hitting, and pounding and
grounding, till it all freezes together, ten feet
thick, from the land outward to deep water.
In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to
the edge of this land-ice, and spear them as they
came up to breathe at their blow-holes. The
seal must have open water to live and catch
200 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
tish in, and in the deep of winter the ice would
sonietiiiics run eighty miles without a break from
the nearest shore. In the spring- he and his peo-
ple retreated from the floes to the rocky main-
land, where they put up tents of skins, and
snared the sea-birds, or speared the young seal
basking on the beaches. Later, they would go
south into Baffin Land after the reindeer, and to
get their year's store of salmon from the hun-
dreds of streams and lakes of the interior; coming
back north in September or October for the
musk-ox hunting and the regular winter sealery.
This traveling was done with dog-sleighs, twenty
and thirty miles a day, or sometimes down the
coast in big skin "woman-boats," when the dogs
and the babies lay among the feet of the rowers,
and the women sang songs as they glided from
cape to cape over the glassy, cold waters. All
the luxuries that the Tununirmiut knew came
from the south — driftwood for sleigh-runners,
rod-iron for harpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles
that cooked food much better than the old soap-
stone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches,
as well as colored ribbons for the women's hair,
little cheap mirrors, and red cloth for the edging
of deerskin dress-jackets. Kadlu traded the rich,
creamy, twisted narwhal -horn and musk-ox teeth
QUIQUERN 20I
(these are just as valuable as pearls) to the
Southern Inuit, and they, in turn, traded with the
whalers and the missionary-posts of Exeter and
Cumberland Sounds ; and so the chain went on,
till a kettle picked up by a ship's cook in the
Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-
lamp somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic
Circle,
Kadlu, being a good hunter, was rich in iron
harpoons, snow-knives, bird-darts, and all the
other things that make life easy up there in the
great cold ; and he was the head of this tribe, or,
as they say, " the man who knows all about it by
practice." This did not give him any authority,
except now and then he could advise his friends
to change their hunting-grounds ; but Kotuko
used it to domineer a little, in the lazy, fat Inuit
fashion, over the other boys, when they came out
at night to play ball in the moonlight, or to sing
the Child's Song to the Aurora Borealis.
But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man,
and Kotuko was tired of making snares for wild
fowl and kit-foxes, and most tired of all of help-
ing the women to chew seal - and deerskins (that
supples them as nothing else can) the long day
through, while the men were out hunting. He
wanted to go into the quaggi, the Singing- House,
202 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
when the hunters gathered there for their mys-
teries, and the a?igekok, the sorcerer, frightened
them into the most dehghtful fits after the lamps
were put out, and you could hear the Spirit of
the Reindeer stamping on the roof; and when a
spear was thrust out into the open black night it
came back covered with hot blood. He wanted
to throw his big boots into the net with the tired
air of a head of a family, and to gamble with
the hunters when they dropped in of an evening
and played a sort of home-made roulette with
a tin pot and a nail. There were hundreds of
things that he wanted to do, but the grown men
laughed at him and said, "Wait till you have
been in the buckle, Kotuko. Hunting is not all
catching."
Now that his father had named a puppy for
him, things looked brighter. An Inuit does not
waste a good dog on his son till the boy knows
something of do^'-drivine ; and Kotuko was more
than sure that he knew more than everything.
If the puppy had not had an iron constitution
he would have died from over- stuffing and over-
handling. Kotuko made him a tiny harness with
a trace to it, and hauled him all over the house
floor, shouting: " Aua ! Ja aua ! " (Go to the
right.) " Choiachoi ! Ja choiachoi ! " (Go to the
QUIQUERN 203
left.) " Ohaha ! " (Stop.) The puppy did not
like it at all, but being fished for in this way
was pure happiness beside being put to the
sleigh for the first time. He just sat down on the
snow, and played with the seal-hide trace that
ran from his harness to the pitii, the big thong
in the bows of the sleigh. Then the team
started, and the puppy found the heavy ten-foot
sleigh running up his back, and dragging him
along the snow, while Kotuko laughed till the
tears ran down his face. There followed days
and days of the cruel whip that hisses like
the wind over ice, and his companions all bit him
because he did not know his work, and the har-
ness chafed him, and he was not allowed to sleep
with Kotuko any more, but had to take the cold-
est place in the passage. It was a sad time for
the puppy.
The boy learned, too, as fast as the dog ;
though a dog-sleigh is a heartbreaking thing to
manage. Each beast is harnessed, the weakest
nearest to the driver, by his own separate trace,
which runs under his left fore -leg to the main
thong, where it is fastened by a sort of button
and loop which can be slipped by a turn of the
wrist, thus freeing one dog at a time. This is
very necessary, because young dogs often get the
204 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
trace between their hind legs, where it cuts to
the bone. And they one and all will go visiting
their friends as they run, jumping in and out
among the traces. Then they fight, and the
result is more mixed than a wet fishing-line next
morning. A great deal of trouble can be avoided
by scientific use of the whip. Every Inuit boy
prides himself as being a master of the long lash ;
but it is easy to flick at a mark on the ground,
and difficult to lean forward and catch a shirkine
dog just behind the shoulders when the sleigh is
going at full speed. If you call one dog's name
for "visiting," and accidentally lash another, the
two will fight it out at once, and stop all the
others. Again, if you travel with a companion
and begin to talk, or by yourself and sing, the
dogs will halt, turn round, and sit down to hear
what you have to say. Kotuko was run away
from once or twice through forgetting to block
the sleigh when he stopped ; and he broke many
lashings, and ruined a few thongs, before he
could be trusted with a full team of eig"ht and the
light sleigh. Then he felt himself a person of
consequence, and on smooth, black ice, with a
bold heart and a quick elbow, he smoked along
over the levels as fast as a pack in full cry. He
would go ten miles to the seal-holes, and when
QUIQUERN 205
he was on the hunting-grounds he would twitch
a trace loose from the pitu, and free the big black
leader, who was the cleverest dog in the team.
As soon as the dog had scented a breathing-hole
Kotuko would reverse the sleigh, driving a
couple of sawed-off antlers, that stuck up like
perambulator-handles from the back-rest, deep
into the snow, so that the team could not get
away. Then he would crawl forward inch by
inch, and wait till the seal came up to breathe.
Then he would stab down swiftly with his spear
and running-line, and presently would haul his
seal up to the lip of the ice, while the black leader
came up and helped to pull the carcass across
the ice to the sleigh. That was the time when
the harnessed dogs yelled and foamed with ex-
citement, and Kotuko laid the long lash like a
red-hot bar across all their faces, till the carcass
froze stiff Going home was the heavy work.
The loaded sleigh had to be humored among the
rough ice, and the dogs sat down and looked
hungrily at the seal instead of pulling. At last
they would strike the well-worn sleigh-road to
the village, and toodle-kiyi along the ringing
ice, heads down and tails up, while Kotuko struck
up the "Angutivaun tai-na tau-na-ne taina " (The
Song of the Returning Hunter), and voices hailed
2o6 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
him from house to house under all that dim, star-
litten sky.
When Kotuko the dog came to his full growth
he enjoyed himself too. He fought his way up
the team steadily, fight after fight, till one fine
evening, over their food, he tackled the big, black
leader (Kotuko the boy saw fair play), and
made second dog of him, as they say. So he
was promoted to the long thong of the leading
dog, running five feet in advance of all the
others: it was his bounden duty to stop all fight-
ing, in harness or out of it, and he wore a collar
of copper wire, very thick and heavy. On special
occasions he was fed with cooked food inside
the house, and sometimes was allowed to sleep
on the bench with Kotuko. He was a good
seal-dog, and would keep a musk-ox at bay by
running round him and snapping at his heels.
He would even — and this for a sleigh-dog is
the last proof of braver}/ — he would even stand
up to the gaunt Arctic wolf, whom all dogs of the
North, as a rule, fear beyond anything that walks
the snow. He and his master — they did not
count the team of ordinary dogs as company —
hunted together, day after day and night after
night, fur- wrapped boy and savage, long-
haired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged, yellow brute.
QUIQUERN 207
All an Inuit has to do is to get food and skins
tor himself and his family. The women-folk
make the skins into clothing, and occasionally
help in trapping small game ; but the bulk of the
food — and they eat enormously — must be found
by the men. If the supply fails there is no one
up there to buy or beg or borrow from. The
people must die.
An Inuit does not think of these chances till
he is forced to. Kadlu, Kotuko, Amoraq, and
the boy-baby who kicked about in Amoraq's fur
hood and chewed pieces of blubber all day, were
as happy together as any family in the world.
They came of a very gentle race — an Inuit
seldom loses his temper, and almost never strikes
a child — who did not know exactly what telling
a real lie meant, still less how to steal. They
were content to spear their living out of the
heart of the bitter, hopeless cold ; to smile oily
smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairy tales of
evenings, and eat till they could eat no more,
and sing the endless woman's song, " Amna aya,
aya amna, ah ! ah ! " through the long, lamp-
lighted days as they mended their clothes and
their hunting-gear.
But one terrible winter everything betrayed
them. The Tununirmiut returned from the
2o8 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
yearly salmon -fishing, and made their houses on
the early ice to the north of Bylot's Island, ready
to go after the seal as soon as the sea froze.
But it was an early and savage autumn. All
through September there were continuous gales
that broke up the smooth seal-ice when it was
only four or five feet thick, and forced it inland,
and piled a great barrier, some twenty miles
broad, of lumped and ragged and needly ice, over
which it was impossible to draw the dog-sleighs.
The edge of the floe off which the seal were used
to fish in winter lay, perhaps, twenty miles beyond
this barrier, and out of reach of the Tununirmiut.
Even so, they might have managed to scrape
through the winter on their stock of frozen
salmon and stored blubber, and what the traps
gave them, but in December one of their hunters
came across a tiipik (a skin-tent) of three women
and a girl nearly dead, whose men had come
down from the far North and been crushed in
their little skin hunting-boats while they were out
after the long-horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course,
could only distribute the women among the huts
of the winter village, for no Inuit dare refuse
a meal to a strangfer. He never knows when his
own turn may come to beg. Amoraq took the
girl, who was about fourteen, into her own house
QUIQUERN 209
as a sort of servant. From the cut of her sharp-
pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of
her white deerskin leggings, they supposed she
came from Ellesmere Land. She had never seen
tin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs before;
but Kotuko the boy and Kotuko the dog were
rather fond of her.
Then all the foxes went south, and even the
wolverine, that growling, blunt-headed little thief
of the snow, did not take the trouble to follow
the line of empty traps that Kotuko set. The
tribe lost a couple of their best hunters, who
were badly crippled in a fight with a musk-ox,
and this threw more work on the others. Ko-
tuko went out, day after day, with a light hunt-
ing-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest dogs,
looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear
ice where a seal might perhaps have scratched a
breathing-hole. Kotuko the dog ranged far and
wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice-fields
Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine
of excitement, above a seal-hole three miles
away, as plainly as though he were at his elbow.
When the dog found a hole the boy would build
himself a little, low snow wall to keep off the
worst of the bitter wind, and there he would wait
ten, twelve, twenty hours for the seal to come up
2IO THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
to breathe, his eyes glued to the tiny mark he
had made above the hole to guide the downward
thrust of his harpoon, a little sealskin mat under
his feet, and his legs tied together in the tic-
tareang (the buckle that the old hunters had
talked about). This helps to keep a man's legs
from twitching as he waits and waits and waits
for the quick-eared seal to rise. Though there
is no excitement in it, you can easily believe that
the sittinor still in the buckle with the thermome-
ter perhaps forty degrees below zero is the hard-
est w^ork an Inuit knows. When a seal was
caught Kotuko the dog would bound forward,
his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull
the body to the sleigh, w^here the tired and hun-
gry dogs lay sullenly under the lee of the broken
ice.
A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in
the little village had a right to be filled, and
neither bone, hide, nor sinew was wasted. The
dogs' meat was taken for human use, and Amoraq
fed the team with pieces of old summer skin-
tents raked out from under the sleeping-bench,
and they howled and howled again, and waked
to howl hungrily. One could tell by the soap-
stone lamps in the huts that famine was near.
In good seasons, when blubber was plentiful, the
QUIQUERN 211
light in the boat-shaped lamps would be two
feet high — cheerful, oily, and yellow. Now it
was a bare six inches : Amoracj carefully pricked
down the moss wick when an unwatched flame
brightened for a moment, and the eyes of all the
family followed her hand. The horror of famine
up there in the great cold is not so much dying,
as dying in the dark. All the Inuit dread the
dark that presses on them without a break for
six months in each year ; and when the lamps
are low in the houses the minds of people begin
to be shaken and confused.
But worse was to come.
The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the
passages, glaring at the cold stars, and snuffing
into the bitter wind, night after night. When
they stopped howling the silence fell down again
as solid and as heavy as a snowdrift against
a door, and men could hear the beating of their
blood in the thin passages of the ear, and the
thumping of their own hearts, that sounded as
loud as the noise of sorcerers' drums beaten
across the snow. One night Kotuko the dog,
who had been unusually sullen in harness, leaped
up and pushed his head against Kotuko's knee.
Kotuko patted him, but the dog still pushed
blindly forward, fawning. Then Kadlu waked.
212 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
and gripped the heavy wolf-like head, and stared
into the glassy eyes. The dog whimpered and
shivered between Kadlu's knees. The hair rose
about his neck, and he growled as though a
stranger were at the door ; then he barked joy-
ously, and rolled on the ground, and bit at Ko-
tuko's boot like a puppy.
" What is it ? " said Kotuko ; for he was be-
ofinnino^ to be afraid.
"The sickness," Kadlu answered. "It is the
dog-sickness." Kotuko the dog lifted his nose,
and howled and howled again.
" I have not seen this before. What will he
do ? " said Kotuko.
Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little, and
crossed the hut for his short stabbing-harpoon.
The big dog looked at him, howled again, and
slunk away down the passage, while the other
dogs drew aside right and left to give him ample
room. When he was out on the snow he barked
furiously, as though on the trail of a musk-ox,
and, barking and leaping and frisking, passed
out of sight. This was not hydrophobia, but
simple, plain madness. The cold and the hunger,
and, above all, the dark, had turned his head ;
and when the terrible dog-sickness once shows
itself in a team, it spreads like wildfire. Next
QUIQUERN 213
hunting-day another dog sickened, and was killed
rtien and there by Kotuko as he bit and struggled
among the traces. Then the black second dog,
who had been the leader in the old days, sud-
denly gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-
track, and when they slipped him from the pitu
he flew at the throat of an ice-cliff, and ran away
as his leader had done, his harness on his back.
After that no one \vould take the dogs out again.
They needed them for something else, and the
dogs knew it ; and though they were tied down
and fed by hand, their eyes were full of despair
and fear. To make things worse, the old women
began to tell ghost-tales, and to say that they had
met the spirits of the dead hunters lost that
autumn, who prophesied all sorts of horrible
things,
Kotuko orrieved more for the loss of his doof
than anything else ; for, though an Inuit eats
enormously, he also knows how to starve. But
the hunger, the darkness, the cold, and the ex-
posure told on his strength, and he began to
hear voices inside his head, and to see people
who w^ere not there, out of the tail of his eye.
One night — he had unbuckled himself after ten
hours' waiting above a "blind" seal-hole, and
was staggering back to the village faint and dizzy
214 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
— he halted to lean his back against a boulder
which happened to be supported like a rocking-
stone on a single jutting point of ice. His weight
disturbed the balance of the thing, it rolled over
ponderously, and as Kotuko sprang aside to
avoid it, slid after him, squeaking and hissing on
the ice slope.
That was enough for Kotuko. He had been
brought up to believe that every rock and boulder
had its owner (its iiiud), who was generally a
one-eyed kind of a Woman-Thing called a tornaq^
and that when a tornaq meant to help a man she
rolled after him inside her stone house, and asked
him whether he would take her for a guardian
spirit, (In summer thaws the ice-propped rocks
and boulders roll and slip all over the face of the
land, so you can easily see how the idea of live
stones arose.) Kotuko heard the blood beating
in his ears as he had heard it all day, and he
thought that was the tornaq of the stone speak-
ing to him. Before he reached home he was
quite certain that he had held a long conversation
with her, and as all his people believed that this
was quite possible, no one contradicted him.
" She said to me, ' I jump down, I jump down
from my place on the snow,'" cried Kotuko, with
hollow eyes, leaning forward in the half-lighted
QUIQUERN 215
hut. " She said, ' I will be a guide.' She says,
' I will guide you to the good seal-holes,' To-
morrow I go out, and the tornaq will guide me."
Then the aiigekok, the village sorcerer, came in,
and Kotuko told him the tale a second time. It
lost nothincr in the tellinfj.
"Follow the tornait [the spirits of the stones],
and they will bring us food again," said the
angekok.
Now the girl from the North had been lying
near the lamp, eating very little and saying less
for days past ; but when Amoraq and Kadlu next
morning packed and lashed a little hand-sleigh
for Kotuko, and loaded it with his hunting-gear
and as much blubber and frozen seal-meat as
they could spare, she took the pulling-rope, and
stepped out boldly at the boy's side.
"Your house is my house," she said, as the
little bone-shod sleigh squeaked and bumped
behind them in the awful Arctic night.
"My house is your house," said Kotuko;
"but / think that we shall both go to Sedna
together."
Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Under-world,
and the Inuit believe that every one who dies
must spend a year in her horrible country before
going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where
2i6 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up when
you call.
Through the villag-e people were shouting:
"The toniait have spoken to Kotuko. They will
show him open ice. He will bring us the seal
again ! " Their voices were soon swallowed up by
the cold, empty dark, and Kotuko and the girl
shouldered close together as they strained on
the pulling-rope or humored the sleigh through
the broken ice in the direction of the Polar Sea.
Kotuko insisted that the to7'naq of the stone had
told him to go north, and north they went under
Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer — those stars that we
call the Great Bear.
No European could have made five miles a day
over the ice-rubbish and the sharp-edged drifts ;
but those two knew exactly the turn of the wrist
that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock, the jerk
that neatly lifts it out of an ice-crack, and the ex-
act strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of
the spear-head that make a path possible when
everything looks hopeless.
The girl said nothing, but bowed her head, and
the long wolverine-fur fringe of her ermine hood
blew across her broad, dark face. The sky above
them was an intense velvety-black, changing to
bands of Indian red on the horizon, where the
QUIQUERN 217
great stars burned like street lamps. From time
to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights
would roll across the hollow of the high heavens,
flick like a flag, and disappear ; or a meteor
would crackle trom darkness to darkness, trailing
a shower of sparks behind. Then they could see
the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe tipped
and laced with strange colors — red, copper, and
bluish ; but in the ordinary starlight everything
turned to one frost-bitten gray. The floe, as
you will remember, had been battered and tor-
mented by the autumn gales till it was one frozen
earthquake. There were gullies and ravines,
and holes like gravel-pits, cut in ice; lumps and
scattered pieces frozen down to the original floor
of the floe ; blotches of old black ice that had
been thrust under the floe in some gale and
heaved up again ; roundish boulders of ice ; saw-
like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies
before the wind; and sunken pits where thirty or
forty acres lay below the level of the rest of the
field. From a little distance you might have
taken the lumps for seal or walrus, overturned
sleighs or men on a hunting expedition, or even
the great Ten-legged White Spirit- Bear himself;
but in spite of these fantastic shapes, all on the
very edge of starting into life, there was neither
2l8 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
sound nor the least faint echo of sound. And
through this silence and through this waste, where
the sudden lights flapped and went out again,
the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled
like thinofs in a nisfhtmare — a nio^htmare of the
end of the world at the end of the world.
When they were tired Kotuko would make what
the hunters call a " half-house," a very small snow
hut, into which they would huddle with the travel-
ing-lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen seal-
meat. When they had slept the march began
again — thirty miles a day to get ten miles north-
ward. The girl was always very silent, but
Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into
songs he had learned in the Singing- House —
summer songs, and reindeer and salmon songs
— all horribly out of place at that season. He
would declare that he heard the tornaq growling
to him, and would run wildly up a hummock, toss-
ing his arms and speaking in loud, threatening
tones. To tell the truth, Kotuko was very nearly
crazy for the time being ; but the girl was sure
that he was being guided by his guardian spirit,
and that everything would come right. She was
not surprised, therefore, when at the end of the
fourth march Kotuko, whose eyes were burning
like fire-balls in his head, told her that his tornaq
QUIQUERN 219
was following them across the snow in the shape
of a two-headed dog. The girl looked where
Kotuko pointed, and something seemed to slip
into a ravine. It was certainly not human, but
everybody knew that the tornait preferred to
appear in the shape of bear and seal, and such
like.
It might have been the Ten-legged White
Spirit-Bear himself, or it might have been any-
thing, for Kotuko and the girl were so starved
that their eyes were untrustworthy. They had
trapped nothing, and seen no trace of game since
they had left the village ; their food would not
hold out for another week, and there was a gale
coming. A Polar storm can blow for ten days
without a break, and all that while it is certain
death to be abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-
house large enough to take in the hand-sleigh
(never be separated from your meat), and while
he was shaping the last irregular block of ice
that makes the key-stone of the roof, he saw
a Thine looking at him from a little cliff of ice
half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the
Thing seemed to be forty feet long and ten feet
high, with twenty feet of tail and a shape that
quivered all along the outlines. The girl saw
it too, but instead of crying aloud with terror,
220 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
said quietly, "That is Quiquern. Wliat comes
after?"
" He will speak to me," said Kotuko; but the
snow-knife trembled in his hand as he spoke, be-
cause however much a man may believe that he
is a friend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom
likes to be taken quite at his word. Quiquern,
too, is the phantom of a gigantic toothless dog
without any hair, who is supposed to live in
the far North, and to wander about the country
just before things are going to happen. They
may be pleasant or unpleasant things, but not
even the sorcerers care to speak about Quiquern.
He makes the dogs go mad. Like the Spirit-
Bear he has several extra pairs of legs, — six or
eight, — and this Thing jumping up and down in
the haze had more legs than any real dog needed.
Kotuko and the girl huddled into their hut
quickly. Of course if Quiquern had wanted them,
he could have torn it to pieces above their heads,
but the sense of a foot-thick snow wall between
themselves and the wicked dark was great com-
fort. The eale broke with a shriek of wind like
the shriek of a train, and for three days and three
nights it held, never varying one point, and never
lulling even for a minute. They fed the stone
lamp between their knees, and nibbled at the half-
QUIQUERN 221
warm seal-meat, and watched the black soot
gather on the roof for seventy -two long hours.
The girl counted up the food in the sleigh ; there
was not more than two days' supply, and Kotuko
looked over the iron heads and the deer- sinew
fastenings of his harpoon and his seal-lance and
his bird-dart. There was nothing: else to do.
"We shall go to Sedna soon — very soon,"
the girl whispered. "In three days we shall lie
down and go. Will your tornaq do nothing?
Sing her an angekoks song to make her come
here."
He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of
the magic songs, and the gale went down slowly.
In the middle of his song the girl started, laid her
mittened hand and then her head to the ice floor
of the hut. Kotuko followed her example, and
the two kneeled, staring into each other's eyes,
and listening with every nerve. He ripped a
thin sliver of whalebone from the rim of a bird-
snare that lay on the sleigh, and, after straighten-
ing, set it upright in a little' hole in the ice,
firming it down with his mitten. It was almost
as delicately adjusted as a compass-needle, and
now instead of listening they watched. The thin
rod quivered a little — the least little jar in the
world ; then it vibrated steadily for a few seconds,
222 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
came to rest, and vibrated again, this time nod-
ding to another point of the compass.
"Too soon !" said Kotuko. "Some big floe
has broken far away outside."
The girl pointed at the rod, and shook her head.
" It is the big breaking," she said. " Listen to the
ground-ice. It knocks."
When they kneeled this time they heard the
most curious muffled grunts and knockings, ap-
parently under their feet. Sometimes it sounded
as though a blind puppy were squeaking above
the lamp ; then as if a stone were being ground
on hard ice ; and again, like muffled blows on a
drum : but all dragged out and made small, as
though they traveled through a little horn a weary
distance away.
"We shall not go to Sedna lying down," said
Kotuko. "It is the breaking. The tornaq has
cheated us. We shall die."
All this may sound absurd enough, but the two
were face to face with a very real danger. The
three days' gale had driven the deep water of
Baffin's Ray southerly, and piled it on to the
edge of the far-reaching land-ice that stretches
from Bylot's Island to the west. Also, the strong
current which sets east out of Lancaster Sound car-
ried with it mile upon mile of what they call pack-
QUIQUERN 223
ice — rough ice that lias not frozen into fields;
and this pack was bombarding the floe at the
same time that the swell and heave of the storm-
worked sea was weakeninof and undermining it.
What Kotuko and the girl had been listening to
were the faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty
miles away, and the little telltale rod quivered to
the shock of it.
Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once
wakes after its long winter sleep, there is no
knowing what may happen, for solid floe-ice
changes shape almost as quickly as a cloud. The
gale was evidently a spring gale sent out of time,
and anything was possible.
Yet the two were happier in their minds than
before. If the floe broke up there would be no
more waiting and suffering. Spirits, goblins,
and witch-people were moving about on the
racking ice, and they might find themselves step-
ping into Sedna's country side by side with all
sorts of wild Things, the flush of excitement still
on them. When they left the hut after the gale,
the noise on the horizon was steadily growing,
and the tough ice moaned and buzzed all round
them.
" It is still waiting," said Kotuko.
On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the
224 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
eight-legged Thing that they had seen three days
before — and it howled horribly.
" Let us follow," said the girl. "It may know
some way that does not lead to Sedna " ; but she
reeled from weakness as she took the pulling-
rope. The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily
across the ridges, heading always toward the
westward and the land, and they followed, while
the growling thunder at the edge of the floe
rolled nearer and nearer. The floe's lip was split
and cracked in every direction for three or four
miles inland, and great pans of ten-foot-thick
ice, from a few yards to twenty acres square, were
jolting and ducking and surging into one an-
other, and into the yet unbroken floe, as the
heavy swell took and shook and spouted between
them. This battering-ram ice was, so to speak,
the first army that the sea was flinging against
the floe. The incessant crash and jar of these
cakes almost drowned the ripping sound of sheets
of pack-ice driven bodily under the floe as
cards are hastily pushed under a table-cloth.
Where the water was shallow these sheets would
be piled one atop of the other till the bottom-
most touched mud fifty feet down, and the dis-
colored sea banked behind the muddy ice till the
increasing pressure drove all forward again. In
QUIQUERN 225
addition to the floe and the pack-ice, the gale
and the currents were bringing down true bergs,
saihng mountains of ice, snapped off from the
Greenland side of the water or the north shore
of Melville Bay. They pounded in solemnly,
the waves breaking white round them, and ad-
vanced on the floe like an old-time fleet under
full sail. A berg that seemed ready to carry
the world before it would ground helplessly in
deep water, reel over, and wallow in a lather of
foam and mud and flying frozen spray, while a
much smaller and lower one would rip and ride
into the flat floe, flinging tons of ice on either
side, and cutting a track half a mile long before it
was stopped. Some fell like swords, shearing
a raw-edged canal ; and others splintered into a
shower of blocks, weighing scores of tons apiece,
that whirled and skirled among the hummocks.
Others, again, rose up bodily out of the water
when they shoaled, twisted as though in pain, and
fell solidly on their sides, while the sea threshed
over their shoulders. This trampling and crowd-
ing" and bendinof and bucklinof and archincr of the
ice into every possible shape was going on as
far as the eye could reach all along the north line
of the floe. From where Kotuko and the girl
were th^ confusion looked no more than an un-
226 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
easy, rippling-, crawling movement under the hori-
zon ; but it came toward them each moment, and
they could hear, far away to landward, a heavy
booming, as it might have been the boom of ar-
tillery through a fog. That showed that the floe
was being jammed home against the iron cliffs
of Bylot's Island, the land to the southward be-
hind them.
"This has never been before," said Kotuko,
staring stupidly. " This is not the time. How
can the floe break now ? "
"Follow tJiat r^ the girl cried, pointing to the
Thing, half limping, half running distractedly be-
fore them. They followed, tugging at the hand-
sleigh, while nearer and nearer came the roaring
march of the ice. At last the fields round them
cracked and starred in every direction, and the
cracks opened and snapped like the teeth of
wolves. But where the Thing rested, on a mound
of old and scattered ice-blocks some fifty feet
high, there was no motion. Kotuko leaped for-
ward wildly, dragging the girl after him, and
crawled to the bottom of the mound. The talk-
inp- of the ice crrew louder and louder round
them, but the mound stayed fast, and, as the girl
looked at him, he threw his right elbow upward
and outward, making the Inuit sign for land in
QUIQUERN 227
the shape of an island. And land it was that ihc
eight-legged, limping Thing had" led them to —
some granite-tipped, sand-beached islet off the
coast, shod and sheathed and masked with ice so
that no man could have told it from the floe, but
at the bottom solid earth, and not shifting ice!
The smashing and rebound of the floes as they
grounded and splintered marked the borders of
it, and a friendly shoal ran out to the northward,
and turned aside the rush of the heaviest ice, ex-
actly as a ploughshare turns over loam. There
was danger, of course, that some heavily squeezed
ice-field might shoot up the beach, and plane off
the top of the islet bodily ; but that did not
trouble Kotuko and the girl when they made their
snow-house and began to eat, and heard the
ice hammer and skid along the beach. The
Thing had disappeared, and Kotuko was talking
excitedly about his power over spirits as he
crouched round the lamp. In the middle of his
wild sayings the girl began to laugh, and rock
herself backward and forward.
Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut
crawl by crawl, there were two heads, one yel-
low and one black, that belonged to two of the
most sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you
saw. Kotuko the dog was one, and the black
228 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
leader was the other. Both were now fat, well-
looking, and ([uite restored to their proper
minds, but coupled to each other in an extra-
ordinary fashion. When the black leader ran
off, you remember, his harness was still on him.
He must have met Kotuko the dog, and played
or fought with him, for his shoulder-loop had
caught in the plaited copper wire of Kotuko's
collar, and had drawn tight, so that neither could
get at the trace to gnaw it apart, but each was
fastened sidelonof to his neisfhbor's neck. That,
with the freedom of hunting on their own ac-
count, must have helped to cure their madness.
They were very sober.
The girl pushed the two shamefaced creatures
toward Kotuko, and, sobbing with laughter, cried,
" That is Quiquern, who led us to safe ground.
Look at his eight legs and double head ! "
Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his
arms, yellow and black together, trying to ex-
plain how they had got their senses back again.
Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were
round and well clothed. " They have found
food," he said, with a grin. " I do not think we
shall go to Sedna so soon. My tornaq sent
these. The sickness has left them."
As soon as they had greeted Kotuko, these
QUIQUERN 229
two, who had been forced to sleep and eat and
hunt together for the past few weeks, flew at
each other's throat, and there was a beautiful
battle in the snow-house. " Empty dogs do not
fight," Kotuko said. "They have found the seal.
Let us sleep. We shall find food."
When they waked there was open water on
the north beach of the island, and all the loos-
ened ice had been driven landward. The first
sound of the surf is one of the most delightful
that the Inuit can hear, for it means that spring
is on the road. Kotuko and the girl took hold
of hands and smiled, for the clear, full roar of
the suro^e amonof the ice reminded them of sal-
mon and reindeer time and the smell of blossom-
ing ground-willows. Even as they looked, the
sea began to skim over between the floating
cakes of ice, so intense was the cold ; but on
the horizon there was a vast red glare, and
that was the light of the sunken sun. It was
more like hearing him yawn in his sleep than
seeing him rise, and the glare only lasted for
a few minutes, but it marked the turn of the
year. Nothing, they felt, could alter that.
Kotuko found the does fio-htinor over a fresh-
killed seal who was following the fish that a
gale always disturbs. He was the first of some
230 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island
in the course of the day, and till the sea froze
hard there were hundreds of keen black heads
rejoicing in the shallow free water and floating
about with the floating ice.
It was good to eat seal-liver again ; to fill the
lamps recklessly wuth blubber, and watch the
flame blaze three feet in the air ; but as soon as
the new sea- ice bore, Kotuko and the irirl loaded
the hand-sleigh, and made the two dogs pull as
they had never pulled in their lives, for they feared
what might have happened in their village. The
weather was as pitiless as usual; but it is easier
to draw a sleigh loaded with good food than
to hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal
carcasses buried in the ice of the beach, all ready
for use, and hurried back to their people. The
dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko
told them what was expected, and though there
was no sign of a landmark, in two days they were
eivinof tongue outside Kadlu's house. Only three
dogs answered them ; the others had been eaten,
and the houses were all dark. But when Kotuko
shouted, " Ojo ! " (boiled meat), weak voices re-
plied, and when he called the muster of the vil-
lage name by name, very distinctly, there were
no gaps in it.
An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu's
QUIQUERN 231
house; snow-water was heating; the pots were
beginning to simmer, and the snow was dripping
from the roof, as Amoraq made ready a meal for
all the village, and the boy-baby in the hood
chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber, and
the hunters slowly and methodically filled them-
selves to the very brim with seal-meat. Kotuko
and the sfirl told their tale. The two does sat
between them, and whenever their names came
in, they cocked an ear apiece and looked most
thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who
has once gone mad and recovered, the Inuit say,
is safe against all further attacks.
" So the tornaq did not forget us," said Kotuko.
"The storm blew, the ice broke, and the seal
swam in behind the fish that were frightened by
the storm. Now the new seal-holes are not two
days' distant. Let the good hunters go to-mor-
row and bring back the seal I have speared —
twenty-five seal buried in the ice. When we have
eaten those we will all follow the seal on the floe."
" What do you do ? " said the sorcerer in the
same sort of voice as he used to Kadlu, richest of
the Tununirmiut.
Kotuko looked at the girl from the North, and said
quietly, " We build a house." He pointed to the
northwest side of Kadlu's house, for that is the side
on which the married son or daughter always lives.
232 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
The girl turned her hands pahii upward, with
a Httle despairing shake of her head. She was a
foreigner, picked up starving, and coukl bring
nothing to the housekeeping.
Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat,
and began to sweep things into the girl's lap —
stone lamps, iron skin-scrapers, tin kettles, deer-
skins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and real
canvas-needles such as sailors use — the finest
dowry that has ever been given on the far edge
of the Arctic Circle, and the girl from the North
bowed her head down to the very floor.
" Also these ! " said Kotuko, laughing and sign-
ing to the dogs, who thrust their cold muzzles
into the twirl's face.
"Ah," said the angekok, with an important
couo^h as thouo^h he had been thinkimj it all over.
"As soon as Kotuko left the village I went to
the Sinirinuf-House and sanir ma^ic. I sano^ all
the long nights, and called upon the Spirit of the
Reindeer. My singing made the gale blow that
broke the ice and drew the two dogs toward
Kotuko when the ice would have crushed his
bones. My song drew the seal in behind the
broken ice. My body lay still in the quaggi, but
my spirit ran about on the ice, and guided Kotuko
and the dogs in all the things they did. I did it."
QUIQUERN 233
Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one con-
tradicted ; and the angckok, by virtue of his
office, helped himself to yet another lump of boiled
meat, and lay down to sleep with the others in
the warm, well- lighted, oil-smelling home.
Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit
fashion, scratched pictures of all these adven-
tures on a long, flat piece of ivory with a hole at
one end. When he and the girl went north to
Ellesmere Land in the year of the Wonderful Open
Winter, he left the picture-story with Kadlu, who
lost it in the shingle when his dog-sleigh broke
down one summer on the beach of Lake Netil-
ling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Liuit found
it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who
was interpreter on a Cumberland Sound whaler,
and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was afterward
a quartermaster on board a big steamer that took
tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When
the tourist season was over, the steamer ran be-
tween London and Australia, stopping at Cey-
lon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to a Cingalese
jeweler for tw.o imitation sapphires. I found
it under some rubbish in a house at Colombo,
and have translated it from one end to the other.
"ANGUTIVUN TINA"
[This is a very free translation of the Song of the Re-
turning Hunter, as the men used to sing it after seal-
spearing. The Inuit always repeat things over and
over again.]
UR gloves are stiff with the frozen
blood,
Our furs with the drifted
snow,
As we come in with the
seal — the seal !
In from the edge of the
floe.
All jana ! Ana ! OJia ! Haq !
And the yelping dog-teams go.
And the long whips crack, and the men come back,
Back from the edge of the floe !
We tracked our seal to his secret place,
We heard him scratch below.
We made our mark, and we watched beside,
Out on the edge of the floe.
234
ANGUTIVUN TINA 235
We raised our lance when he rose to breathe,
We drove it downward — so !
And we played him thus, and wc killed him thus
Out on the edge of the floe.
Our gloves are glued with the frozen blood.
Our eyes with the drifting snow ;
But we come back to our wives again, »
Back from the edge of the floe !
All jana ! Ana/ OJia ! Ilaq !
And the loaded dog- teams go.
And the ivives ean hear their tnen eonic back.
Back from the edge of the floe I
RED DOG
For our white and our excellent nights — for the nights of swift
running,
Fair ranging, far-seeing, good hunting, sure cunning!
For the smells of the dawning, untainted, ere dew has departed !
For the rush through the mist, and the quarry blind-started !
For the cry of our mates when the sambhur has wheeled and is
standing at bay,
For the risk and the riot of night !
For the sleep at the lair-mouth by day.
It is met, and we go to the fight
Bay ! O bay !
RED DOG
T was after the letting in of the
Jungle that the pleasantest part of
Mowg-li's life begran. He had the
good conscience that comes from
paying debts; all the Jungle was his
friend, and just a little afraid of him.
The things that he did and saw
and heard when he was wandering
from one people to another, with
or without his four companions,
would make many stories, each as
long as this one. So you will never be told how
he met the Mad Elephant of Mandla, who killed
339
240 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
two-and-twenty bullocks drawing eleven carts of
coined silver to the Government Treasury, and
scattered the shiny rupees in the dust ; how he
fought Jacala, the Crocodile, all one long night
in the Marshes of the North, and broke his skin-
ning-knife on the brute's back-plates ; how he
found a new and longer knife round the neck
of a man who had been killed by a wild boar,
and how he tracked that boar and killed him as a
fair price for the knife ; how he was caught up
once in the Great Famine, by the moving of the
deer, and nearly crushed to death in the swaying
hot herds ; how he saved Hathi the Silent from
being once more trapped in a pit with a stake at
the bottom, and how, next day, he himself fell
into a very cunning leopard-trap, and how Hathi
broke the thick wooden bars to pieces above him;
how he milked the wild buffaloes in the swamp,
and how —
But we must tell one tale at a time. Father
and Mother Wolf died, and Mowgli rolled a big-
boulder against the mouth of their cave, and
cried the Death Song over them ; Baloo grew
very old and stiff, and even Bagheera, whose
nerves were steel, and whose muscles were iron,
was a shade slower on the kill than he had been.
Akela turned from gray to milky white with pure
RED DOG 241
age ; his ribs stuck out, and he walked as though
he had been made of wood, and Mowgli killed
for him. But the young wolves, the children of the
disbanded Seeonee Pack, throve and increased,
and when there were about forty of them, mas-
terless, full-voiced, clean-footed five-year-olds,
Akela told them that they ought to gather them-
selves together and follow the Law, and run un-
der one head, as befitted the Free People.
This was not a question in which Mowgli con-
cerned himself, for, as he said, he had eaten sour
fruit, and he knew the tree it hung from ; but
when Phao, son of Phaona (his father was the
Gray Tracker in the days of Akela's headship),
fought his way to the leadership of the Pack, ac-
cording to Jungle Law, and the old calls and
songs began to ring under the stars once more,
Mowgli came to the Council Rock for memory's
sake. When he chose to speak the Pack waited
till he had finished, and he sat at Akela's side on
the rock above Phao. Those were days of good
hunting and good sleeping. No stranger cared
to break into the jungles that belonged to
Mowgli's people, as they called the Pack, and
the young wolves grew fat and strong, and there
were many cubs to bring to the Looking-over.
Mowgli always attended a Looking-over, re-
242 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
membering the night when a black panther
bought a naked brown baby into the Pack, and
the long call, " Look, look well, O Wolves,"
made his heart flutter. Otherwise, he would be
far away in the Jungle with his four brothers,
tasting, touching, seeing, and feeling new things.
One twilight when he was trotting leisurely
across the ranges to give Akela the half of a
buck that he had killed, while the Four jog-
ged behind him, sparring a little, and tumbling
one another over for joy of being alive, he heard
a cry that had never been heard since the bad
days of Shere Khan. It was what they call in
the Jungle the phccal, a hideous kind of shriek
that the jackal gives when he is hunting behind
a tiger, or when there is a big killing afoot. If
you can imagine a mixture of hate, triumph, fear,
and despair, with a kind of leer running through
it, you will get some notion of the pheeal that
rose and sank and wavered and quavered far away
across the Waingunga. The Four stopped at
once, bristling and growling. Mowgli's hand
went to his knife, and he checked, the blood in
his face, his eyebrows knotted.
" There is no Striped One dare kill here," he
said.
"That is not the cry of the Forerunner," an-
RED DOG 243
swered Gray Brother, "It is some great killing.
Listen ! "
It broke out again, half sobbing and half chuck-
ling, just as though the jackal had soft human
lips. Then Mowgli drew deep breath, and ran
to the Council Rock, overtaking on his way hur-
rying wolves of the Pack. Phao and Akela were
on the Rock together, and below them, every
nerve strained, sat the others. The mothers and
the cubs were cantering off to their lairs ; for
when the plieeal cries it is no time for weak
things to be abroad.
They could hear nothing except the Wain-
gunga rushing and gurgling in the dark, and the
light evening winds among the tree-tops, till
suddenly across the river a wolf called. It was
no wolf of the Pack, for they were all at the Rock.
The note changed to a long, despairing bay ;
and "Dhole!" it said, "Dhole! dhole! dhole!"
They heard tired feet on the rocks, and a gaunt,
wolf, streaked with red on his flanks, his right
fore-paw useless, and his jaws white with foam,
flung himself into the circle and lay gasping at
Mowgli's feet.
"Good hunting! Under whose Headship?"
said Phao gravely.
" Good hunting ! Won-tolla am I," was the an-
244 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
swer. He meant that he was a soHtary wolf,
fending for himself, his mate, and his cubs in
some lonely lair, as do many wolves in the south.
Won-tolla means an Outlier — one who lies out
from any Pack. Then he panted, and they could
see his heart-beats shake him backward and
forward.
*' What moves ? " said Phao, for that is the
question all the Jungle asks after ih.^ pkeea I cries.
" The dhole, the dhole of the Dekkan — Red
Dog, the Killer ! They came north from the
south saying the Dekkan was empty and killing
out by the way. When this moon was new there
were four to me — my mate and three cubs. She
would teach them to kill on the grass plains, hid-
ing to drive the buck, as we do who are of the
open. At midnight I heard them together, full
tonpfue on the trail. At the dawn-wind I found
them stiff in the grass — four, P>ee People, four
when this moon was new. Then sought I my
Blood- Right and found the dhole."
" How many ? " said Mowgli quickly ; the
Pack growled deep in their throats.
" I do not know. Three of them will kill no
more, but at the last they drove me like the buck ;
on my three legs they drove me. Look, Free
People ! "
RED DOG 245
He thrust out his mangled fore- foot, all dark
with dried blood. There were cruel bites low
down on his side, and his throat was torn and
worried.
"Eat," said Akela, rising up from the meat
Mowgli had brought him, and the Outlier flung
himself on it.
"This shall be no loss," he said humbly, when
he had taken off the first edge of his hunger.
" Give me a little strength, Free People, and I
also will kill. My lair is empty that was full when
this moon was new, and the Blood Debt is not all
paid."
Phao heard his teeth crack on a haunch-bone
and grunted approvingly.
"We shall need those jaws," said he. "Were
their cubs with the dhole ? "
" Nay, nay. Red Hunters all : grown dogs of
their Pack, heavy and strong, for all that they eat
lizards in the Dekkan."
What Won-tolla had said meant that the dhole,
the red hunting-dog of the Dekkan, was moving
to kill, and the Pack knew well that even the
tiger will surrender a new kill to the dhole. They
drive straight through the Jungle, and what they
meet they pull down and tear to pieces. Though
they are not as big nor half as cunning as the
246 THE SECONM) JUNGLE BOOK
wolf, tliey are vcr)- strong and very numerous.
The dhole, for instance, do not begin to call them-
selves a pack till they are a hundred strong ;
whereas forty wolves make a very fair pack in-
deed. Mowgli's wanderings had taken him to
the edge of the high grassy downs of the Dek-
kan, and he had seen the fearless dholes sleep-
ing and playing and scratching themselves in
the little hollows and tussocks that they use
for lairs. He despised and hated them because
they did not smell like the Free People, be-
cause they did not live in caves, and, above all,
because they had hair between their toes while
he and his friends were clean -footed. But he
knew, for Hathi had told him, what a terrible
thing a dhole hunting-pack was. Even Hathi
moves aside from their line, and until they are
killed, or till game is scarce, they will go forward,
Akela knew something of the dholes, too, for
he said to Mowgli quietly. " It is better to die in
a Full Pack than leaderless and alone. This is
good hunting, and — my last. But, as men live,
thou hast very many more nights and days.
Little Brother. Go north and lie down, and if
any live after the dhole has gone by he shall
bring thee word of the fight."
"Ah," said Mowgli, quite gravely, "must I go
RED DOG 247
to the marshes and catch Httle fish and sleep in a
tree, or must I ask help of the Bandar-log and
crack nuts, while the Pack fight below ? "
"It is to the death," said Akela. "Thou hast
never met the dhole — the Red Killer. Even the
Striped One — "
'' Aowa ! Aowa / " said Mowgli pettingly. " I
have killed one striped ape, and sure am I in my
stomach that Shere Khan would have left his own
mate for meat to the dhole if he had winded a
pack across three ranges. Listen now : There
was a wolf, my father, and there was a wolf, my
mother, and there was an old gray wolf (not too
wise : he is white now) was my father and my
mother. Therefore I — "he raised his voice, "I
say that when the dhole come, and if the dhole
come, Mowgli and the Free People are of one
skin for that hunting ; and I say, by the Bull that
bought me — by the Bull Bagheera paid for me
in the old days which ye of the Pack do not re-
member — / say, that the Trees and the River
may hear and hold fast if I forget ; / say that this
my knife shall be as a tooth to the Pack — and I
do not think it is so blunt. This is my Word
which has gone from me."
"Thou dost not know the dhole, man with a
wolfs tongue," said Won-tolla. " I look only to
248 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
clear the Blood Debt against them ere they have
me in many pieces. They move slowly, killing
out as they go, but in two days a little strength
will come back to me and I turn again for the
Blood Debt. But for jr, Free People, my word
is that ye go north and eat but little for a while
till the dhole are gone. There is no meat in this
hunting."
" Hear the Outlier ! " said Mowgli with a laugh.
" Free People, we must go north and dig lizards
and rats from the bank, lest by any chance we
meet the dhole. He must kill out our hunting-
grounds, while we lie hid in the north till it please
him to ofive us our own agfain. He is a doof —
and the pup of a dog — red, yellow-bellied, lair-
less, and haired between every toe ! He counts
his cubs six and eight at the litter, as though he
were Chikai, the little leaping rat. Surely we
must run away. Free People, and beg leave of the
peoples of the north for the offal of dead cattle !
Ye know the saying : ' North are the vermin ;
south are the lice. We are the Jungle.' Choose
ye, O choose. It is good hunting! For the Pack —
for the Full Pack — for the lair and the litter ;
for the in-kill and the out-kill ; for the mate that
drives the doe and the little, little cub wnthin the
cave ; it is met ! — it is met ! — it is met ! "
RED DOG 249
The Pack answered with one deep, crashing
bark that sounded in the night like a big tree
falhng. ''It is met ! " they cried.
"Stay with these," said Mowgli to the Four.
" We shall need every tooth. Phao and Akela
must make ready the battle. I go to count the
dogs."
" It is death ! " Won-tolla cried, half rising.
" What can such a hairless one do against
the Red Dog? Even the Striped One, remem-
ber — "
"Thou art indeed an Outlier," Mowgli called
back; " but we will speak when the dholes are
dead. Good hunting all ! "
He hurried off into the darkness, wild with ex-
citement, hardly looking where he set foot, and
the natural consequence was that he tripped full
length over Kaa's great coils where the python
lay watching a deer-path near the river.
''Ksska/ " said Kaa angrily. " Is this jungle-
work, to stamp and tramp and undo a night's
hunting — when the game are moving so well,
too ? "
" The fault was mine," said Mowgli, picking
himself up. " Indeed I was seeking thee, Flat-
head, but each time we meet thou art longer and
broader by the length of my arm. There is none
250 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
like thee in the Jungle, wise, old, strong, and
most beautiful Kaa."
" Now, whither does this trail lead ? " Kaa's
voice was gentler. " Not a moon since there was
a Mauling with a knife threw stones at my head,
and called me bad little tree-cat names, because I
lay asleep in the open."
"Ay, and turned every driven deer to all the
winds, and Mowgli was hunting, and this same
Flathead was too deaf to hear his whistle, and
leave the deer- roads free," Mowgli answered
composedly, sitting down among the painted coils.
" Now this same Manling comes with soft,
tickling words to this same Flathead, telling him
that he is wise and strong and beautiful, and
this same old Flathead believes and makes a
place, thus, for this same stone-throwing Manling,
and — . Art thou at ease now ? Could Ba-
gheera give thee so good a resting-place ? "
Kaa had, as usual, made a sort of soft, half-ham ■
mock of himself under Mowgli's weight. 1 he boy
reached out in the darkness, and gathered in the
supple cable-like neck till Kaa's head rested on
his shoulder, and then he told him all that had
happened in the Jungle that night.
"Wise I may be," said Kaa at the end; "but
deaf I surely am. Else I should have heard the
RED DOG 251
pheeal. Small wonder the Eaters of Grass are
uneasy. How many be the dhole?"
" I have not yet seen. 1 came hot-foot to thee.
Thou art older than Hathi. But oh, Kaa," —
here Mowgli wriggled with sheer joy, — "it will
be eood huntinsf. Few of us will see another
moon."
"Dost thoiL strike in this? Remember thou
art a Man ; and remember what Pack cast thee
out. Let the Wolf look to the Dog. I'hou art
a Man."
" Last year's nuts are this year's black earth,"
said Mowgli. "It is true that I am a Man, but
it is in my stomach that this night I have said
that I am a Wolf I called the River and the
Trees to remember. I am of the Free People,
Kaa, till the dhole has gone by."
" Free People," Kaa grunted. " Free thieves !
And thou hast tied thyself into the death-knot
for the sake of the memory of the dead wolves ?
This is no good hunting."
" It is my Word which I have spoken. The
Trees know, the River knows. Till the dhole
have gone by my Word comes not back to me."
" N'gssJi ! This changes all trails. I had
thought to take thee awa)- with me to the north-
ern marshes, but the Word — even the Word of
252 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
a little, naked, hairless manling — is the Word.
Now 1, Kaa, say — "
•' Think well, Flathead, lest thou tie thyself
into the death-knot also. I need no Word from
thee, for well I know — "
" Be it so, then," said Kaa. " I will give no
Word ; but what is in thy stomach to do when
the dhole come ? "
" They must swim the Waingunga. I thought
to meet them with my knife in the shallows, the
Pack behind me ; and so stabbing and thrusting
we a little might turn them down-stream, or cool
their throats."
" The dhole do not turn and their throats are
hot," said Kaa. "There will be neither Manling
nor Wolf-cub when that hunting is done, but only
dry bones."
" A/a/a / If we die, we die. It will be most
good hunting. But my stomach is young, and I
have not seen many Rains. I am not wise nor
strong. Hast thou a better plan, Kaa ? "
" I have seen a hundred and a hundred Rains.
Ere Hathi cast his milk-tushes my trail was big
in the dust. By the First Egg I am older than
many trees, and I have seen all that the Jungle
has done."
" But //lis is new hunting," said Mowgli,
RED DOG 253
" Never before have the dhole crossed our
trail."
" What is has been. What will be is no more
than a forgotten year striking backward. Be
still while I count those my years,"
For a long hour Mowgli lay back among the
coils, while Kaa, his head motionless on the
ground, thought of all that he had seen and
known since the day he came from the egg. The
light seemed to go out of his eyes and leave them
like stale opals, and now and again he made little
stiff passes with his head, right and left, as though
he were hunting in his sleep. Mowgli dozed
quietly, for he knew that there is nothing like
sleep before hunting, and he was trained to take
it at any hour of the day or night.
Then he felt Kaa's back grow bigger and
broader below him as the huge python puffed him-
self out, hissing with the noise of a sword drawn
from a steel scabbard.
" I have seen all the dead seasons," Kaa said at
last, "and the great trees and the old elephants,
and the rocks that were bare and sharp-pointed
ere the moss grew. Art ///oii still alive. Mauling? "
" It is only a little after moonset," said Mowgli.
"I do not understand — "
'' Hssh! I am acjain Kaa. I knew it was but
254 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
a little time. Now we will go to the river, and I
will show thee what is to be done against the
dhole."
He turned, straight as an arrow, for the main
stream of the Waingunga, plunging in a little
above the pool that hid the Peace Rock, Mowgli
at his side.
" Nay, do not swim. I go swiftly. My back.
Little Brother ! "
Mowgli tucked his left arm round Kaa's neck,
dropped his right close to his body, and straight-
ened his feet. Then Kaa breasted the current as
he alone could, and the ripple of the checked
water stood up in a frill round Mowgli's neck, and
his feet were waved to and fro in the eddy under
the python's lashing sides. A mile or two above
the Peace Rock the Waingunga narrows between
a gorge of marble rocks from eighty to a hundred
feet high, and the current runs like a mill-race
between and over all manner of ugly stones.
But Mowgli did not trouble his head about the
water; little water in the world could have given
him a moment's fear. He was looking at the
gorge on either side and sniffing uneasily, for
there was a sweetish-sourish smell in the air, very
like the smell of a big ant-hill on a hot day. In-
stinctively he lowered himself in the water, only
RED DOG 255
raising his head to breathe from time to time,
and Kaa came to anchor with a double twist of
his tail round a sunken rock, holding Mowgli in
the hollow of a coil, while the water raced on.
"This is the Place of Death," said the boy.
" Why do we come here ? "
" They sleep," said Kaa. " Hathi will not turn
aside for the Striped One. Yet Hathi and the
Striped One together turn aside for the dhole,
and the dhole they say turn aside for nothing.
And yet for whom do the Little People of the
Rocks turn aside ? Tell me, Master of the Jungle,
who is the Master of the Jungle ?"
" These," Mowgli whispered. " It is the Place
of Death. Let us go."
" Nay, look well, for they are asleep. It is as
it was when I was not the length of thy arm."
The split and weatherworn rocks of the gorge
of the WainQ^unofa had been used since the besfin-
ning of the Jungle by the Little People of the
Rocks — the busy, furious, black wild bees of
India ; and, as Mowgli knew well, all trails turned
off lialf a mile before they reached the gorge.
For centuries the Little People had hived and
swarmed from cleft to cleft, and swarmed again,
staining the white marble with stale honey, and
made their combs tall and deep in the dark
256 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
of the inner caves, where neither man nor beast
nor fire nor water had ever touched them. The
length of the gorge on both sides was hung as it
were with black shimmery velvet curtains, and
Mowgli sank as he looked, for those were the
clotted millions of the sleeping bees. There were
other lumps and festoons and things like decayed
tree-trunks studded on the face of the rock, the
old combs of past years, or new cities built in the
shadow of the windless ijorcre, and huo-e masses
of spongy, rotten trash had rolled dowm and stuck
among the trees and creepers that clung to the
rock-face. As he listened he heard more than
once the rustle and slide of a honey-loaded comb
turning over or falling away somewhere in the
dark galleries ; then a booming of angry wings
and the sullen drip, drip, drip, of the wasted honey,
guttering along till it lipped over some ledge in
the open air and sluggishly trickled down on the
twigs. There was a tiny little beach, not five
feet broad, on one side of the river, and that was
piled high with the rubbish of uncounted years.
There were dead bees, drones, sweepings, and
stale combs, and wings of marauding. moths that
liad strayed in after honey, all tumbled in smooth
piles of the finest black dust. The mere sharp
smell of it was enough to frighten anything that
RED DOG 257
had no wings, and knew what the Little People
were.
Kaa moved up-stream again till he came to a
sandy bar at the head of the gorge.
*' Here is this season's kill," said he. " Look! "
On the bank lay the skeletons of a couple of
young deer and a buffalo. Mowgli could see that
neither wolf nor jackal had touched the bones,
which were laid out naturally.
"They came beyond the line: they did not
know the Law," murmured Mowgli, "and the Lit-
tle People killed them. Let us go ere they wake."
"They do not wake till the dawn," said Kaa.
" Now I will tell thee. A hunted buck from the
south, many, many Rains ago, came hither from
the south, not knowing the Jungle, a Pack on his
trail. Being made blind by fear, he leaped from
above, the Pack running by sight, for they were
hot and blind on the trail. The sun was high,
and the Little People were many and very angry.
Many too were those of the Pack who leaped
into the Waingunga, but they were dead ere they
took water. Those who did not leap died also in
the rocks above. But the buck lived."
"How?"
"Because he came first, running for his life,
leaping ere the Little People were aware, and
258 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
was in the river when they gathered to kill. The
Pack, following-, was altogether lost under the
weight of the Little People."
" The buck lived?" Mowgli repeated slowly.
"At least he did not die then, though none
waited his coming down with a strong body to
hold him safe against the water, as a certain old
fat, deaf, yellow Flathead would wait for a Man-
ling — yea, though there were all the dholes of
the Dekkan on his trail. What is in thy stomach ? "
Kaa's head was close to Mowgli's ear ; and it was
a little time before the boy answered.
" It is to pull the very whiskers of Death,
but — Kaa, thou art, indeed, the wisest of all the
Jungle."
" So many have said. Look now, if the dhole
follow thee — "
" As surely they will follow. Ho ! ho ! I have
many little thorns under my tongue to prick into
their hides."
" If they follow thee hot and blind, looking
only at thy shoulders, those who do not die up
above will take water either here or lower down,
for the Little People will rise up and cover them.
Now the Waingunga is hungry water, and they will
have no Kaa to hold them, but will go down,
such as live, to the shallows by the Seeonee
ri-:d doCx 259
lairs, and there thy Pack may meet them by the
throat,"
'' Ahai/ Eowaiva! Better could not be till the
Rains fall in the dry season. There is now only
the little matter of the run and the leap. I will
make me known to the dholes, so that they shall
follow me very closely."
" Hast thou seen the rocks above thee? From
the landward side ? "
" Indeed, no. That I had forgotten."
" Go look. It is all rotten ground, cut and full
of holes. One of thy clumsy feet set down with-
out seeing would end the hunt. See, I leave thee
here, and for thy sake only I will carry word to
the Pack that they may know where to look for
the dhole. For myself, I am not of one skin with
any wolf."
When Kaa disliked an acquaintance he could
be more unpleasant than any of the Jungle Peo-
ple, except perhaps Bagheera. He swam down-
stream and opposite the Rock he came on Phao
and Akela listenine to the nio-ht noises.
" Hssh ! Dogs," he said cheerfully. " The
dholes will come down-stream. If ye be not
afraid ye can kill them in the shallows."
" When come they ? " said Phao. " And where
is my Man -cub? " said Akela.
26o THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
"They come when they come," said Kaa.
" Wait and see. As for thy Man -cub, h"om whom
thou hast taken a Word and so laid him open to
Death, thy Man -cub is with vie, and if he be not
already dead the fault is none of thine, bleached
dog ! Wait here for the dhole, and be glad that
the Man-cub and I strike on thy side."
He flashed up-stream again, and moored him-
self in the middle of the gorge, looking upward
at the line of the cliff. Presently he saw Mowgli's
head move against the stars, and then there was
a whizz in the air, the keen, clean schloop of a body
falling feet first, and next minute the boy was at
rest again in the loop of Kaa's body.
" It is no leap by night," said Mowgli quietly,
" I hav^e jumped twice as far for sport; but that
is an evil place above — low bushes and gullies
that go down very deep, all full of the Little
People. I have put big stones one above the
other by the side of three gullies. These I shall
throw down with my feet in running, and the Lit-
tle People will rise up behind me, very angry."
"That is Man's talk and Man's cunning," said
Kaa. "Thou art wise, but the Little People are
always angry."
" Nay, at twilight all wings near and far rest
for a while. I will play with the dhole at twilight,
RED DOG 261
for the dhole hunts best by day. He follows
now Won-tolla's blood-trail."
" Chil does not leave a dead ox, nor the dhole
the blood-trail," said Kaa.
" Then I will make him'a new blood-trail, of his
own blood, if I can, and give him dirt to eat.
Thou wilt stay here, Kaa, till I come again with
my dholes ? "
** Ay, but what if they kill thee in the Jungle, or
the Little People kill thee before thou canst leap
down to the river ? "
" When to-morrow comes we will kill for to-
morrow," said Mowgli, quoting a Jungle saying;
and again, " When I am dead it is time to sing
the Death Song. Good hunting, Kaa ! "
He loosed his arm from the python's neck and
went down the gorge like a log in a freshet, pad-
dling toward the far bank, where he found slack-
water, and laughing aloud from sheer happiness.
There was nothing Mowgli liked better than, as
he himself said, "to pull the whiskers of Death,"
and make the Jungle know that he was their over-
lord. He had often, with Baloo's help, robbed
bees' nests in single trees, and he knew that the
Little People hated the smell of wild garlic. So
he gathered a small bundle of it, tied it up with a
bark strinor, and then followed Won-tolla's blood-
262 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
trail as it ran southerly from the lairs, for some
five miles, looking at the trees with his head on
one side, and chuckling as he looked.
" Mowoli the Froo" have I been," said he to
himself; " Mowgli the Wolf have I said that I am.
Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before I >am
Mowgli the Buck. At the end I shall be Mowgli
the Man. Ho ! " and he slid his thumb along the
eigfhteen-inch blade of his knife.
Won-tolla's trail, all rank with dark blood-spots,
ran under a forest of thick trees that grew close to-
gether and stretched away northeastward, grad-
ually growing thinner and thinner to within two
miles of the Bee Rocks. From the last tree to
the low scrub of the Bee Rocks was open coun-
try, where there was hardly cover enough to hide
a wolf Mowgli trotted along under the trees,
judging distances between branch and branch,
occasionally climbing up a trunk and taking a
trial leap from one tree to another, till he came
to the open ground, which he studied very care-
fully for an hour. Then he turned, picked up
Won-tolla's trail where he had left it, settled him-
self in a tree with an outrunning branch some
eight feet from the ground, and sat still, sharpen-
ing his knife on the sole of his foot and singing
to himself.
RED DOG 263
A little before midday, when the sun was very
warm, he heard the patter of feet and smelt the
abominable smell of the dhole pack as they trot-
ted pitilessly along Won-tolla's trail. Seen from
above, the red dhole does not look half the size of
a wolf, but Mowgli knew how strong his feet and
jaws were. He watched the sharp bay head of
the leader snuffing along the trail and gave him
" Good hunting ! "
The brute looked up, and his companions halted
behind him, scores and scores of red dogs with
low-hung tails, heavy shoulders, weak quarters,
and bloody mouths. The dholes are a silent
people as a rule, and they have no manners even
in their own Jungle. Fully two hundred must
have gathered below him, but he could see that
the leaders sniffed hungrily on Won-tolla's trail,
and tried to drag the Pack forward. That would
never do, or they would be at the Lairs in broad
daylight, and Mowgli intended to hold them under
his tree till dusk.
"By whose leave do ye come here?" said
Mowgli.
** All Jungles are our Jungle," was the reply,
and the dhole that gave it bared his white teeth.
Mowgli looked down with a smile, and imitated
perfectly the sharp chitter-chatter of Chikai, the
264 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
leaping rat of the Dekkan, meaning the dholes to
understand that he considered them no better
than Chikai. The Pack closed up round the tree-
trunk and the leader bayed savagely, calling
Mowgli a tree-ape. For all answer Mowgli
stretched down one naked lecj and wrigrorled his
bare toes just above the leader's head. That was
enough, and more than enough, to wake the Pack
to stupid rage. Those who have hair between
their toes do not care to be reminded of it. Mowgli
caught his foot away as the leader leaped up, and
said sweetly: " Dog, red dog! Go back to the
Dekkan and eat lizards. Go to Chikai thy bro-
ther — dog, dog — red, red, dog! There is hair
between every toe !" He twiddled his toes a sec-
ond time.
"Come down ere we starve thee out, hairless
ape ! " yelled the Pack, and this was exactly what
Mowgli wanted. He laid himself down along
the branch, his cheek to the bark, his right arm
free, and there he told the Pack what he thought
and knew about them, their manners, their cus-
toms, their mates, and their puppies. There is no
speech in the world so rancorous and so stinging
as the language the Jungle People use to show
scorn and contempt. When you come to think of
it you will see how this must be so. As Mowgli
RED DOG 265
told Kaa, he had many Httle thorns under his
tongue, and slowly and deliberately he drove the
dholes from silence to growls, from growls to
yells, and from yells to hoarse slavery ravings.
They tried to answer his taunts, but a cub might
as well have tried to answer Kaa in a rage ; and
all the while Mowgli's right hand lay crooked at
his side, ready for action, his feet locked round
the branch. The big bay leader had leaped many
times in the air, but Mowgli dared not risk a false
blow. At last, made furious beyond his natural
strength, he bounded up seven or eight feet clear
of the around. Then Mowg-li's hand shot out
like the head of a tree-snake, and gripped him by
the scruff of his neck, and the branch shook with
the jar as his weight fell back, almost wrenching
Mowgli to the ground. But he never loosed his
grasp, and inch by inch he hauled the beast,
hanging like a drowned jackal, up on the branch.
With his left hand he reached for his knife and cut
off the red, bushy tail, flinging the dhole back to
earth again. That was all he needed. The Pack
would not go forward on Won-tolla's trail now
till tliey had killed Mowgli or Mowgli had killed
them. He saw them settle down in circles with a
quiver of the haunches that meant they were
going to stay, and so he climbed to a higher
266 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
crotch, settled his back comfortably, and went to
sleep.
After four or five hours he waked and counted
the Pack. They were all there, silent, husky, and
dry, with eyes of steel. The sun was beginning
to sink. In half an hour the Little People of the
Rocks would be ending their labors, and, as he
knew, the dhole does not fight best in the twi-
light.
" I did not need such faithful watchers," he said
politely, standing up on a branch, "but I will re-
member this. Ye be true dholes, but to my
thinking over much of one kind. For that reason
I do not orive the h'lQ- lizard-eater his tail ao-ain.
Art thou not pleased. Red Dog ? "
" I myself will tear out thy stomach ! " yelled
the leader, scratching at the foot of the tree.
" Nay, but consider, wise rat of the Dekkan.
There will now be many litters of little tailless red
dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that sting when
the sand is hot. Go home. Red Dog, and cry
that an ape has done this. Ye will not go? Come,
then, with me, and I will make you very wise ! "
He moved, Bandar-log fashion, into the next
tree, and so on into the next and the next, the
Pack following with lifted hungry heads. Now
and then he would pretend to fall, and the Pack
RED DOG 267
would tumble one over the other in their haste to
be at the death. It was a curious sight — the
boy with the knife that shone in the low sunlight
as it shifted through the upper branches, and the
silent Pack with their red coats all aflame, hud-
dling and following below. When he came to
the last tree he took the orarlic and rubbed him-
self all over carefully, and the dholes yelled with
scorn. "Ape with a wolf's tongue, dost thou think
to cover thy scent?" they said. "We follow to
the death."
" Take thy tail," said Mowgli, flinging it back
along the course he had taken. The Pack instinc-
tively rushed after it. "And follow now — to
the death."
He had slipped down the tree-trunk, and
headed like the wind in bare feet for the Bee
Rocks, before the dholes saw what he would do.
They gave one deep howl, and settled down to
the long, lobbing canter that can at the last run
down anything that runs. Mowgli knew their
pack-pace to be much slower than that of the
wolves, or he would never have risked a two-mile
run in full sight. They were sure that the boy
was theirs at last, and he was sure that he held
them to play with as he pleased. All his trouble
was to keep them sufficiently hot behind him to
268 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
prevent their turning off too soon. He ran cleanly,
evenly, and springily ; the tailless leader not five
yards behind him ; and the Pack tailing out over
perhaps a quarter of a mile of ground, crazy and
blind with the rage of slaughter. So he kept
his distance by ear, reserving his last effort for
the rush across the Bee Rocks.
The Little People had gone to sleep in the
early twilight, for it was not the season of late-
blossoming flowers; but as Mowgli's first footfalls
rang hollow on the hollow ground he heard a
sound as though all the earth were humming.
Then he ran as he had never run in his life before,
spurned aside one — two — three of the piles of
stones into the dark, sweet-smelling gullies; heard
a roar like the roar of the sea in a cave; saw with
the tail of his eye the air grow dark behind him ;
saw the current of the Waingunga far below and
a flat, diamond-shaped head in the water ; leaped
outward with all his strength, the tailless dhole
snapping at his shoukier in mid-air, and dropped
feet first to the safety of the river, breathless and
triumphant. There was not a sting upon him,
for the smell of the garlic had checked the Little
People for just the few seconds that he was among
them. When he rose Kaa's coils were steadying
him and things were bounding over the edge of
RED DOG 269
the cliff — great lumps, it seemed, of clustered
bees falling- like plummets ; but before any lump
touched water the bees flew upward and the body
of a dhole whirled down-stream. Overhead they
could hear furious short yells that were drowned
in a roar like breakers — the roar of the wings
of the Little People of the Rocks. Some of the
dholes, too, had fallen into the gullies that com-
municated with the underground caves, and there
choked and fought and snapped among the tum-
bled honeycombs, and at last, borne up even when
they were dead on the heaving waves of bees
beneath them, shot out of some hole in the river-
face, to roll over on the black rubbish-heaps.
There were dholes who had leaped short into the
trees on the cliffs, and the bees blotted out their
shapes ; but the greater number of them, mad-
dened by the stings, had flung themselves into
the river ; and, as Kaa said, the Waingunga was
hungry water.
Kaa held Mowgli fast till the boy had recovered
his breath.
" We may not stay here," he said. " The Little
People are roused indeed. Come ! "
Swimminof low and divinij as often as he could,
Mowgli went down the river, knife in hand.
"Slowly, slowly," said Kaa. " One tooth does
270 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
not kill a hundred unless it be a cobra's, and many
of the dholes took water swiftly when they saw
the Little People rise."
"The more work for my knife, then. Phai !
How the Little People follow ! " Mowgli sank
again. The face of the water was blanketed with
wild bees, buzzing sullenly and stinging all they
found.
" Nothing was ever yet lost by silence," said
Kaa — no sting could penetrate his scales —
" and thou hast all the long night for the hunting.
Hear them howl ! "
Nearly half the pack had seen the trap their
fellows rushed into, and turning sharp aside had
flung themselves into the water where the gorge
broke down in steep banks. Their cries of rage
and their threats against the " tree-ape" who had
brought them to their shame mixed with the yells
and growls of those who had been punished by the
Little People. To remain ashore was death, and
every dhole knew it. Their pack was swept along
the current, down to the deep eddies of the Peace
Pool, but even there the angry Little People
followed and forced them to the water again.
Mowgli could hear the voice of tlic tailless leader
bidding his people hold on and kill out every
wolf in Seeonee. But he did not waste his time
in listening.
RED DOG 271
" One kills in the dark behind us !" snapped a
dhole. " Here is tainted water."
Mowgli had dived forward like an otter,
twitched a struggling dhole under water before he
could open his mouth, and dark rings rose as the
body plopped up, turning on its side. The dholes
tried to turn, but the current prevented them, and
the Little People darted at their heads and ears,
and they could hear the challenge of the Seeonee
Pack growing louder and deeper in the gathering
darkness. Again Mowgli dived, and again a
dhole went under, and rose dead, and again the
clamor broke out at the rear of the pack ; some
howling that it was best to go ashore, others call-
ing on their leader to lead them back to the
Dekkan, and others bidding Mowgli show him-
self and be killed.
" They come to the fight with two stomachs
and several voices," said Kaa. " The rest is with
thy brethren below yonder. The Little People
go back to sleep. They have chased us far.
Now I, too, turn back, for I am not of one skin
with any wolf Good hunting, Little Brother, and
remember the dhole bites low."
A wolf came running along the bank on three
legs, leaping up and down, laying his head side-
ways close to the ground, hunching his back, and
272 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
breaking l^igh into the air, as though he were
playing with his cubs. It was Won-tolla, the
Outher, and he said never a word, but continued
his horrible sport beside the dholes. They had
been long in the water now, and were swimming
wearily, their coats drenched and heavy, their
bushy tails dragging like sponges, so tired and
shaken that they, too, were silent, watching the
pair of blazing eyes that moved abreast.
"This is no good hunting," said one, panting.
"Good hunting!" said Mowgli, as he rose
boldly at the brute's side, and sent the long knife
home behind the shoulder, pushing hard to avoid
his dying snap.
"Art thou there, Man-cub?" said Won-tolla
across the water.
"Ask of the dead, Outlier," Mowgli replied.
" Have none come down-stream? I have filled
these dogs' mouths with dirt; I have tricked them
in the broad daylight, and their leader lacks
his tail, but here be some few for thee still.
Whither shall I drive them ? "
"I will wait," said Won-tolla. "The night
is before me."
Nearer and nearer came the bay of the Seeo-
nee wolves. " For the Pack, for the Full Pack
it is met!" and a bend in the river drove the
RED DOG 273
dholes forward amono;^ the sands and shoals op-
posite the Lairs.
Then they saw their mistake. They should
have landed half a mile higher up, and rushed
the wolves on dry ground. Now it was too late.
The bank was lined with burning eyes, and ex-
cept for the horrible//^^^^/ that had never stopped
since sundown, there was no sound in the Jungle.
It seemed as though Won-tolla were fawning on
them to come ashore ; and " Turn and take hold !"
said the leader of the dholes. The entire Pack
flung themselves at the shore, threshing and squat-
tering through the shoal water, till the face of the
Waingunga was all white and torn, and the great
ripples went from side to side, like bow-waves
from a boat. Mowgli followed the rush, stabbing
and slicing as the dholes, huddled together,
rushed up the river-beach in one wave.
Then the long fight began, heaving and strain-
ing and splitting and scattering and narrowing
and broadening along the red, wet sands, and
over and between the tangled tree-roots, and
through and among the brushes, and in and out
of the grass clumps; for even now the dholes were
two to one. But they met wolves fighting for
all that made the Pack, and not only the short,
high, deep-chested, white-tusked hunters of the
274 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Pack, but the anxious-eyed lahinis — the she-
wolves of the lair, as the saying is — fighting for
their htters, with here and there a yearhng wolf,
his first coat still half woolly, tugging and grap-
pling by their sides. A wolf, you must know,
flies at the throat or snaps at the flank, while a
dhole, by preference, bites at the belly ; so when
the dholes were strucjcrlinor out of the water and
had to raise their heads, the odds were with the
wolves. On dry land the wolves suffered ; but
in the water or ashore, Mowgli's knife came and
went without ceasing. The Four had worried
their way to his side. Gray Brother, crouched
between the boy's knees, was protecting his stom-
ach, while the others guarded his back and either
side, or stood over him when the shock of a leap-
ing, yelling dhole who had thrown himself full on
the steady blade, bore him down. For the rest, it
was one tangled confusion — a locked and sway-
ine niob that moved from rioht to left and from
left to right along the bank ; and also ground
round and round slowly on its own center. Here
would be a heaving mound, like a water-blister in
a whirlpool, which would break like a water-blis-
ter, and throw up four or five mangled dogs, each
striving to get back to the center; here would be
a single wolf borne down by two or three dholes,
RED DOG 275
laboriously dragging them forward, and sinking
the while ; here a yearling cub would be held up
by the pressure round him, though he had been
killed early, while his mother, crazed with dumb
rage, rolled over and over, snapping, and passing
on ; and in the middle of the thickest press, per-
haps, one wolf and one dhole, forgetting every-
thing else, would be manoeuvering for first hold
till they were whirled away by a rush of furious
fighters. Once Mowgli passed Akela, a dhole on
either flank, and his all but toothless jaws closed
over the loins of a third ; and once he saw Phao,
his teeth set in the throat of a dhole, tugging the
unwilling beast forward till the yearlings could
finish him. But the bulk of the fiorht was blind
flurry and smother in the dark ; hit, trip, and tum-
ble, yelp, groan, and worry-worry-worry, round
him and behind him and above him. As the
night wore on, the quick, giddy-go-round motion
increased. The dholes were cowed and afraid to
attack the stronger wolves, but did not yet dare
to run away. Mowgli felt that the end was com-
ing soon, and contented himself with striking
merely to cripple. The yearlings were growing
bolder; there was time now and again to breathe,
and pass a word to a friend, and the mere flicker
of the knife would sometimes turn a dog aside.
276 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
"The meat is very near the bone," Gray
Brother yelled. He was bleeding from a score
of flesh-wounds.
" But the bone is yet to be cracked," said
Mowgli. '' Eozuawa / Thus do we do in the
Jungle ! " The red blade ran like a flame along
the side of a dhole whose hind-quarters were hid-
den by the weight of a clinging wolf
" My kill ! " snorted the wolf through his wrin-
kled nostrils. " Leave him to me."
"Is thy stomach still empty, Outlier?" said
Mowgli. Won-tolla was fearfully punished, but
his grip had paralyzed the dhole, who could not
turn round and reach him.
" By the Bull that bought me," said Mowgli,
with a bitter laugh, " it is the tailless one ! " And
indeed it was the big bay-colored leader.
" It is not wise to kill cubs and lahinis,"
Mowgli went on, philosophically, wiping the
blood out of his eves, " unless one has also killed
the Outlier ; and it is in my stomach that this
Won-tolla kills thee."
A dhole leaped to his leader's aid ; but before
his teeth had found Won-tolla's flank, Mowgli's
knife was in his throat, and Gray Brother took
what was left.
" And thus do we do in the Jungle," said
Mowgli.
RED DOG 277
Won-tolla said not a word, only his jaws were
closing and closing' on the backbone as his life
ebbed. The dhole shuddered, his head dropped,
and he lay still, and Won-tolla dropped above
him.
" Huh! The Blood Debt is paid," said Mowgli.
"Sing the song, Won-tolla."
" He hunts no more," said Gray Brother; "and
Akela, too, is silent this long time."
" The bone is cracked ! " thundered Phao, son
of Phaona. "They go! Kill, kill out, O hunters
of the Free People ! "
Dhole after dhole was slinking away from those
dark and bloody sands to the river, to the thick
Jungle, up-stream or down-stream as he saw the
road clear.
"The debt! The debt!" shouted Mowgli.
"Pay the debt ! They have slain the Lone Wolf!
Let not a dog go ! "
He was flying to the river, knife in hand, to
check any dhole who dared to take water, when,
from under a mound of nine dead, rose Akela's
red head and fore-quarters, and Mowgli dropped
on his knees beside the Lone Wolf.
" Said I not it would be my last fight ? " Akela
panted. "It is good hunting. And thou, Little
Brother?"
278 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" I liv^e, having' killed man}."
"Even so. I die, and I would — I would die
by thee, Little Brother."
Moweli took the terrible scarred head on his
knees, and put his arms round the torn neck.
" It is long since the old days of Shere Khan,
and a Man -cub that rolled naked in the dust."
" Nay^ nay, I am a wolf. I am of one skin
with the Free People," Mowgli cried. " It is no
will of mine that I am a man."
" Thou art a man. Little Brother, wolfling of
my watching. Thou art a man, or else the Pack
had fled before the dhole. My life I owe to thee,
and to-day thou hast saved the Pack even as
once I saved thee. Hast thou forgotten ? All
debts are paid now. Go to thine own people. I
tell thee agam, eye of my eye, this hunting is
ended. Go to thine own people."
" I will never go. I will hunt alone in the
Jungle. I have said it."
"After the summer come the Rains, and after
the Rains comes the spring. Go back before
thou art driven."
" Who will drive me ? "
" Mowgli will drive Mowgli. Go back to thy
people. Go to Man."
"When Mowgli drives Mowgli I will go,"
Mowsfli answered
RED DOG 279
"There is no more to say," said Akela. " Lit-
tle Brother, canst thou raise me to my feet ? 1
also was a leader of the Free People."
Very carefully and gently Mowgli lifted the
bodies aside, and raised Akela to his feet, both
arms round him, and the Lone Wolf drew a long
breath, and began the Death Song that a leader
of the Pack should sing when he dies. It gath-
ered strength as he went on, lifting and lifting,
and ringing far across the river, till it came to
the last " Good hunting ! " and Akela shook him-
self clear of Mowgli for an instant, and, leaping
into the air, fell backward dead upon his last and
most terrible kill.
Mowgli sat with the head on his knees, careless
of anything else, while the remnant of the flying
dholes were being overtaken and run down by
the merciless lahinis. Little by little the cries
died away, and the wolves returned limping, as
their wounds stiffened, to take stock of the losses.
Fifteen of the Pack, as well as half a dozen lahi-
nis, lay dead by the river, and of the others not
one was unmarked. And Mowgli sat through
it all till the cold daybreak, when Phao's wet, red
muzzle was dropped in his hand, and Mowgli
drew back to show the gaunt body of Akela.
" Good hunting ! " said Phao, as though Akela
28o THE SFXOND JUNGLE BOOK
were still alive, and then over his bitten shoulder
to the others: "llowl, dogs! A Wolf has died
to-night ! "
But of all the Pack of two hundred fighting
dholes, whose boast was that all Jungles were their
Jungle, and that no living thing could stand be-
fore them, not one returned to the Dekkan to
carry that word.
CHIL'S SONG
[This is the song that Chil sang as the kites dropped
down one after another to the river-bed, when the great
fight was finished. Chil is good friends with everybody,
but he is a cold-blooded kind of creature at heart, be-
cause he knows that almost everybody in the Jungle
comes to him in the long run.]
HESE were my companions going
forth by night —
{For Chill Look you, for Chil/)
Now come I to whistle them the
ending of the fight.
{Chil / Vanguards of Chil I)
Word they gave me overhead of
quarry newly slain,
Word I gave them underfoot of
buck upon the plain.
Here 's an end of every trail — they shall not speak
again !
They that called the hunting-cry — they that followed
fast —
{For Chil ! Look you, for Chil!)
282 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
They that bade the sambhur wheel, and pinned him as
he passed —
( Chil ! Vanguards of Chil !)
They that lagged behind the scent — they that ran before,
They that shunned the level horn — they that overbore.
Here 's an end of every trail — they shall not follow
more.
These were my companions. Pity 't was they died J
{For Chil/ Look yon, for Chill)
Now come I to comfort them that knew them in their
pride.
{Chil ! Vanguards of Chil f)
Tattered flank and sunken eye, open mouth and red,
Locked and lank and lone they lie, the dead upon their
dead.
Here 's an end of every trail — and here my hosts are
fed!
THE SPRING RUNNING
Man goes to Man ! Cry the challenge through the Jungle !
He that was our Brother goes away.
Hear, now, and judge, O ye People of the Jungle, —
Answer, who shall turn him — who shall stay ?
Man goes to Man ! He is weeping in the Jungle:
He that was our Brother sorrows sore !
Man goes to Man! (Oh, we loved him in the Jungle!)
To the Man-Trail where we may not follow more.
THE SPRING RUNNING
"'•^ 1 1 E second year after the
oreat ficrht with Red DoQf
and the death of Akela,
MowcrH must have been
nearly seventeen years
old. He looked older,
for hard exercise, the
best of good eating, and
baths whenever he felt
in the least hot or dusty,
had eiven him strenofth
and growth far beyond his
age. He could swing by
one hand from a top branch for half an hour at
a time, when he had occasion to look aloncr the
tree-roads. He could stop a young buck in mid-
28s
286 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
gallop and throw him sideways by the head.
He could even jerk over the big, blue wild boars
that lived in the Marshes of the North, The
Jungle People who used to fear him for his wits
feared him now for his strength, and when he
moved quietly on his own affairs the mere whis-
per of his coming cleared the wood-paths. And
yet the look in his eyes was always gentle.
Even when he fought, his eyes never blazed as
Bagheera's did. They only grew more and more
interested and excited ; and that was one of the
things that Bagheera himself did not understand.
He asked Mowgli about it, and the boy laughed
and said : " When I miss the kill I am angry.
When I must go empty for two days I am very
angry. Do not my eyes talk then ? "
"The mouth is angry," said Bagheera, "but
the eyes say nothing. Hunting, eating, or swim-
ming, it is all one — like a stone in wet or dry
weather." Mowgli looked at him lazily from un-
der his long eyelashes, and, as usual, the panther's
head dropped. Bagheera knew his master.
They were lying out far up the side of a hill
overlooking the Waingunga, and the morning
mist hung below them in bands of white and
green. As the sun rose it changed into bub-
bling seas of red gold, churned off, and let the
THE SPRING RUNNING 287
low rays stripe the dried grass on which MowgH
and Baeheera were restintr. It was the end of
the cold weather, the leaves and the trees looked
worn and faded, and there was a dry, ticking-
rustle everywhere when the- wind blew. A little
leaf tap-tap-tapped furiously against a twig, as a
sinsfle leaf cauofht in a current will. It roused
Bagheera, for he snuffed the morning air with a
deep, hollow cough, threw himself on his back,
and struck with his fore- paws at the nodding leaf
above.
"The year turns," he said. "The Jungle goes
forward. The Time of New Talk is near. That
leaf knows. It is very good."
"The grass is dry," Mowgli answered, pulling
up a tuft. " Even Eye-of- the- Spring [that is a
little trumpet-shaped, waxy red flower that runs
in and out among the grasses] — even Eye-of- the
Spring is shut, and . . . Bagheera, is it well for
the Black Panther so to lie on his back and beat
with his paws in the air, as though he were the
tree-cat? "
" Aowh ? " said Bagheera. He seemed to be
thinking of other things.
" I say, is it well for the Black Panther so to
mouth and cough, and howl and roll ? Remem-
ber, we be the Masters of the Jungle, thou and I."
288 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
"Indeed, yes: I hear, Man-cub." Bagheera
rolled over hurriedly and sat up, the dust on his
ragged, black flanks, (He was just casting his
winter coat.) "We be surely the Masters of the
Jungle! Who is so;»strong as Mowgli ? Who
so wise ? " There was a curious drawl in the
voice that made Mowgli turn to see whether by
any chance the Black Panther were making fun
of him, for the Jungle is full of words that sound
like one thing, but mean another. " I said we be
beyond question the Masters of the Jungle," Ba-
gheera repeated. " Have I done wrong? I- did
not know that the Man -cub no longer lay upon
the ground. Does he fly, then ? "
Mowgli sat with his elbows on his knees, look-
ing out across the valley at the daylight. Some-
where down in the woods below a bird was try-
ing over in a husky, reedy voice the first few
notes of his spring song. It was no more than
a shadow of the liquid, tumbling call he would
be pouring later, but Bagheera heard it.
" I said the Time of New Talk is near," growled
the panther, switching his tail.
" I hear," Mowgli answered. " Bagheera, why
dost thou shake all over? The sun is warm."
"That is Ferao, the scarlet woodpecker," said
Baofheera. ''He has not forcrotten. Now I, too.
THE SPRING RUNNING 289
must remember my son^," cincl he began purring-
and crooning to himself, harking Ijack dissatis-
fied again and again.
"There is no game afoot," said MowgH.
" Little Brother, are botJi thine ears stopped ?
That is no kilHng-word, but my song that I make
ready against the need."
" I had forgotten. I shall know when the
Time of New Talk is here, because then thou and
the others all run away and leave me alone."
Mowgli spoke rather savagely.
"But, indeed. Little Brother," Bagheera began,
"we do not always — "
" I say ye do," said Mowgli, shooting out his
forefinger angrily. "Ye do run away, and I,
who am the Master of the Jungle, must needs
walk alone. How was it last season, when I
would gather sugar-cane from the fields of a
Man-Pack? I sent a runner— I sent thee ! — to
Hathi, bidding him to come upon such a night
and pluck the sweet grass for me with his trunk."
" He came only two nights later," said Ba-
gheera, cowering a little; "and of that long, sweet
grass that pleased thee so he gathered more
than any Man -cub could eat in all the nights of
the Rains. That was no fault of mine."
" He did not come upon the night when I sent
290 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
him the word. Ko, he was triinipdinL;' and run-
niny^and ro.irin^" through [\\c \alK;ys in the inoon-
hg'lit. I lis trail was hkc tlic trail ot three ele-
l)hants, for he would not hide among the trees.
He danced in the moonlight before the houses of
[lie Man-Pack. I saw him, and yet he \v9uld
not come to me ; and / am the Master of the
Jungle!"
"It was the Time of New Talk," said the pan-
ther, ahvays very humble. " Perhaps, Little
Brother, thou didst not that time call him by a
Master- word ? Listen to Ferao, and be glad ! "
Mowgli's bad temper seemed to have boiled it-
self away. He lay back with his head on his
arms, his eyes shut. "I do not know' — nor do
I care," he said sleepily. " Lc?t us sleep, Ba-
gheera. My stomach is heavy in me. Make mc
a rest for my head."
The panthc'r lay downi again with a sigh, be-
cause he could hear Perao practising and re-
practising his song against the Springtime of
New Talk, as they say.
\n an Indian Jungle the seasons slide; one into
the other almost without division. There seem
to be only two — the wet and the dry; but if
you look closely below the torrents of rain and
the clouds of char and dust you will find all four
THE SPRING RUNNING 291
going" round in their regular ring. Spring is the
most wonderful, because she has not to cover a
clean, bare field with new leaves and flowers, but
to drive before her and to put away the hang-
ing-on, over-surviving raffle of half-green things
which the gentle winter has suffered to live, and
to make the partly dressed stale earth feel new
and young once more. And this she does so
well that there is no spring in the world like the
Jungle spring.
There is one day when all things are tired, and
the very smells, as they drift on the heavy air, are
old and used. One cannot explain this, but it
feels so. Then there is another day — to the
eye nothing whatever has changed — when all
the smells are new and delightful, and the whis-
kers of the Jungle People quiver to their roots,
and the winter hair comes away from their sides
in long, draggled locks. Then, perhaps, a little
rain falls, and all the trees and the bushes and the
bamboos and the mosses and the juicy-leaved
plants wake with a noise of growing that you can
almost hear, and under this noise runs, day and
night, a- deep hum. That is the noise of the
spring — a vibrating boom which is neither bees,
nor falling water, nor the wind in tree-tops, but
the purring of the warm, happy world.
292 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Up to this year Mow^li had always delighted
in the turn of the seasons. It was he who gen-
erally saw the first Eye-of-the-Spring deep down
among the grasses, and the first bank of spring
clouds which are like nothing else in the Jungle.
His voice could be heard in all sorts of wet, star-
lighted, blossoming places, helping the big frogs
through their choruses, or mocking the little up-
side-down owls that hoot through the white
nights. Like all his people, spring was the sea-
son he chose for his flittings — moving, for the
mere joy of rushing through the warm air, thirty,
forty, or fifty miles between twilight and the
morning star, and coming back panting and
lauofhinir ^nd wreathed with stranofe flowers.
The Four did not follow him on these wild rinof-
ings of the Jungle, but went off to sing songs
with other wolves. The Jungle People are ver}^
busy in the spring, and Mowgli could hear them
grunting and screaming and whistling according
to their kind. Their voices then are different
from their voices at other times of the year, and
that is one of the reasons why spring in the Jun-
gle is called the Time of New Talk.
But that spring, as he told Bagheera, his stom-
ach was changed in him. Ever since the bamboo
shoots turned spotty-brown he had been looking
THE SPRING RUNNING 293
forward to the morning when the smells should
chanefe. But when the mornino" came, and Mor
the Peacock, blazing in bronze and blue and
gold, cried it aloud all along the misty woods,
and Mowgli opened his mouth to send on the
cry, the words choked between his teeth, and a
feelinof came over him that beofan at his toes and
ended in his hair — a feeling of pure unhappiness,
so that he looked himself over to be sure that he
e
had not trod on a thorn. Mor cried the new
smells, the other birds took it over, and from the
rocks by the Waingunga he heard Bagheera's
hoarse scream — something between the scream
of an eagle and the neighing of a horse. There
was a yelling and scattering of bandar-log in the
new-budding branches above, and there stood
Mowgli, his chest, filled to answer Mor, sinking
in little gasps as the breath was driven out of it
by this unhappiness.
He stared all round him, but he could see no
more than the mocking bandar-log scudding
through the trees, and Mor, his tail spread in full
splendor, dancing on the slopes below.
" The smells have changed," screamed Mor.
"Good hunting, Little Brother! Where is thy
answer? "
" Little Brother, good hunting 1 " whistled Chil
294 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
the Kite and his nuitc, swoophig" clown together.
The two baffed under Mowgh's nose so close that
a pinch of downy white feathers brushed away.
A Hght spring rain — elephant-rain they call
it — drove across the Jungle in a belt half a mile
wide, left the new leaves wet and nodding be-
hind, and died out in a double rainbow and a
light roll of thunder. The spring hum broke out
for a minute, and was silent, but all the Jungle
Folk seemed to be giving tongue at once. All
except Mowgli.
"I have eaten good food," he said to himself.
" I have drunk good water. Nor does my throat
burn and grow small, as it did when I bit the
blue-spotted root that Oo the Turtle said was
clean food. But my stomach is heavy, and I
have given very bad talk to Bagheera and others,
people of the Jungle and my people. Now, too,
I am hot and now I am cold, and now I am neither
hot nor cold, but angry with that which I cannot
see. Huhu! It is time to make a runnino! To-
night I will cross the ranges ; yes, I will make a
spring running to the Marshes of the North, and
back again. I have hunted too easily too long.
The Four shall come with me, for they grow as
fat as white grubs."
He called, but never one of the Four answered.
THE SPRING RUNNING 295
They were far beyond earshot, singinir over the
spring songs — the Moon and Sambhur Songs
— with the wolves of the Pack ; for in the spring-
time the Jungle People make very little differ-
ence between the day and the night. He gave the
sharp, barking note, but his only answer was the
mocking 7naiou of the little spotted tree-cat wind-
ing in and out among the branches for early
birds' nests. At this he shook all over with raee,
and half drew his knife. Then he became very
haughty, though there was no one to see him,
and stalked severely down the hillside, chin up
and eyebrows down. But never a single one of
his people asked him a question, for they were
all too busy with their own affairs.
" Yes," said Mowgli to himself, though in his
heart he knew that he had no reason. " Let the
Red Dhole come from the Dekkan, or the Red
Flower dance among the bamboos, and all the
Jungle runs whining to Mowgli, calling him great
elephant-names. But now, because Eye-of-the-
Spring is red, and Mor, forsooth, must show his
naked legs in some spring dance, the Jungle goes
mad as Tabaqui. ... By the Bull that bought
me ! am I the Master of the Jungle, or am I not ?
Be silent ! What do ye here ? "
A couple of young wolves of the Pack were
296 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
cantering down a path, looking for open ground
in which to hght. (You will remember that the
Law of the Jungle forbids fighting where the
Pack can see.) Their neck-bristles were as stiff
as wire, and they bayed furiously, crouching for
the first grapple. Mowgli leaped forward, caught
one outstretched throat in either hand, expecting
to fling the creatures backward as he had often
done in games or Pack hunts. But he had never
before interfered with a spring fight. The two
leaped forward and dashed him aside, and with-
out word to waste rolled over and over close
locked.
Mowgli was on his feet almost before he fell, his
knife and his white teeth were bared, and at that
minute he would have killed both for no reason but
that they were fighting when he wished them to
be quiet, although every wolf has full right under
the Law to fight. He danced round them with
lowered shoulders and quivering hand, ready to
send in a double blow when the first flurry of the
scuffle should be over ; but while he waited the
strength seemed to ebb from his body, the knife-
point lowered, and he sheathed the knife and
watched.
" I have surely eaten poison," he sighed at
last. " Since I broke up the Council with the
THE SPRING RUNNING 297
Red Flower — since I killed Shere Khan —
none of the Pack could fling- me aside. And
these be only tail-wolves in the Pack, little hunt-
ers ! My strength is gone from me, and presently
I shall die. Oh, Mowgli, why dost thou not kill
them both ? "
The fight went on till one wolf ran away, and
Mowgli was left alone on the torn and bloody
ground, looking now at his knife, and now at his
legs and arms, while the feeling of unhappiness
he had never known before covered him as wa-^
ter covers a log.
He killed early that evening and eat but little,
so as to be in good fettle for his spring running,
and he eat alone because all the Jungle People
were away singing or fighting. It was a perfect
white night, as they call it. All green things
seemed to have made a month's growth since the
morning. The branch that was yellow-leaved
the day before dripped sap when Mowgli broke
it. The mosses curled deep and warm over his
feet, the young grass had no cutting edges, and
all the voices of the Jungle boomed like one deep
harp-string touched by the moon - — the Moon
of New Talk, who splashed her light full on
rock and pool, slipped it between trunk and
creeper, and sifted it through a million leaves.
298 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Forgetting his unhappiness, Mowgli sang aloud
with pure delight as he settled into his stride. It
was more like flying than anything else, for he
had chosen the long downward slope that leads
to the Northern Marshes through the heart of -the
main Jungle, where the springy ground dead-
ened the fall of his feet. A man-taught man
would have picked his way with many stumbles
through the cheating moonlight, but Mowgli's
muscles, trained by years of experience, bore
him up as though he were a feather. When
a rotten lo2f or a hidden stone turned under his
foot he saved himself, never checking his pace,
without effort and without thought. When he
tired of ground-going he threw up his hands
monkey-fashion to the nearest creeper, and
seemed to float rather than to climb up into the
thin branches, whence he would follow a tree-
road till his mood changed, and he shot down-
ward in a long, leafy curve to the levels again.
There were still, hot hollows surrounded by wet
rocks where he could hardly breathe for the heavy
scents of the night flowers and the bloom along
the creeper-buds ; dark avenues where the moon-
light lay in belts as regular as checkered marbles
in a church aisle ; thickets where the wet young
ofrowth stood breast-hicrh about him and threw
THE SPRING RUNNING 299
its arms round his waist ; and hilltops crowned
with broken rock, where he leaped from stone to
stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes.
He would hear, very faint and far off, the chug-
drug of a boar sharpening his tusks on a bole ;
and would come across the great gray brute all
alone, scribing and rending the bark of a tall tree,
his mouth dripping with foam, and his eyes blaz-
ing like fire. Or he would turn aside to the
sound of clashing horns and hissing grunts, and
dash past a couple of furious sambhur, stagger-
ing to and fro with lowered heads, striped with
blood that showed black in the moonlight. Or at
some rushing ford he would hear Jacala the Croc-
odile bellowing like a bull, or disturb a twined
knot of the Poison People, but before they could
strike he would be away and across the glistening
shingle, deep in the Jungle again.
So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes
singing to himself, the happiest thing in all the
Jungle that night, till the smell of the flowers
warned him that he was near the marshes, and
those lay far beyond his furthest hunting-grounds.
Here, again, a man-trained man would have sunk
overhead in three strides, but Mowgli's feet had
eyes in them, and they passed him from tussock to
tussock and clu'mp to quaking clump without ask-
300 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
ing help from the eyes in his head. He ran out to
the middle of the swamp, disturbing the duck as
he ran, and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk
lapped in the black water. The marsh was
awake all round him, for in the spring the Bird-
People sleep very lightly, and companies of them
were coming or going the night through. But no
one took any notice of Mowgli sitting among the
tall reeds humming songs without words, and look-
ing at the soles of his hard brown feet in case of
neglected thorns. All his unhappiness seemed to
have been left behind in his own jungle, and he
was just beginning a full-throat song when it
came back again — ten times worse than before.
This time Mowofli was frightened. " It is here
also ! " he said half aloud, "It has followed me,"
and he looked over his shoulder to see whether
the It were not standing behind him. " There is
no one here." The night noises of the marsh
went on, but never a bird or beast spoke to him,
and the new feeling of misery grew.
" I have surely eaten poison," he said in an
awe-stricken voice. " It must be that carelessly
I have eaten jjoison, and my strength is going
from me. I was afraid — and yet it was not /
that was afraid — Mowgli was afraid when the
two wolves fought. Akela, or even Phao, would
THE SPRING RUNNING 301
have silenced them ; yet MowgH was afraid.
That is true sign I have eaten poison. . . .
But what do they care in the Jungle? They sing
and howl and fight, and run in companies under
the moon, and I — Hai-mai ! — I am dying in the
marshes, of that poison which I have eaten." He
was so sorry for himself that he nearly wept.
"And after," he went on, "they will find me ly-
ing in the black water. Nay, I will go back to
my own Jungle, and I will die upon the Council
Rock, and Bagheera, whom I love, if he is not
screaming in the valley — Bagheera, perhaps,
may watch by what is left for a little, lest Chil
use me as he used Akela."
A large, warm tear splashed down on his knee,
and, miserable as he was, Mowgli felt happy that
he was so miserable, if you can understand that
upside-down sort of happiness. " As Chil the
Kite used Akela," he repeated, "on the night I
saved the Pack from Red Dog." He was quiet
for a little, thinking of the last words of the
Lone Wolf, which you, of course, remember.
" Now Akela said to me many foolish things
before he died, for when we die our stomachs
change. He said . . . None the less, I ai7i of
the Jungle ! "
In his excitement, as he remembered the fiofht
302 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
on Waineuncra bank, he shouted the last words
aloud, and a wild buffalo-cow among the reeds
sprang- to her knees, snorting, " Man ! "
" Uhh ! " said Mysa the Wild Buffalo (Mowgli
could hear him turn in his wallow), " that is no
man. It is only the hairless wolf of the Seeonee
Pack. On such nights runs he to and fro."
" Uhh ! " said the cow, dropping her head again
to graze, " I thought it was Man."
" I say no. Oh, Mowgli, is it danger ? " lowed
Mysa.
"Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?" the boy called
back mockingly. "That is all Mysa thinks for:
Is it danger? But for Mowgli, who goes to and
fro in the Jungle by night, watching, what do
ye care ? "
" How loud he cries ! " said the cow.
" Thus do they cry," Mysa answered contemp-
tuously, "who, having torn up the grass, know
not how to eat it."
" For less than this," Mowirli ofroaned to him-
self — "for less than this even last Rains I had
pricked Mysa out of his wallow, and ridden him
through the swamp on a rush halter." He
stretched a hand to l^rcak one of the feathery
reeds, but drew it back with a sigh. Mysa went
on steadily chewing the cud, and the long grass
THE SPRING RUNNING 303
ripped where the cow grazed. " I will not die
here,' he said angrily. " Mysa, who is of one
blood with Jacala and the pig, would see me.
Let us go beyond the swamp, and see what
comes. Never have I run such a spring running
— hot and cold together. Up, Mowgli ! "
He could not resist the temptation of stealing
across the reeds to Mysa and pricking him with
the point of his knife. The great dripping bull
broke out of his wallow like a shell exploding,
while Mowgli laughed till he sat down.
" Say now that the hairless wolf of the Seeonee
Pack once herded thee, Mysa," he called.
" Wolf! Thou ? " the bull snorted, stamp-
ing in the mud. " All the Jungle knows thou
wast a herder of tame cattle — such a man's brat
as shouts in the dust by the crops yonder. Thou
of the Jungle ! What hunter would have crawled
like a snake among the leeches, and for a muddy
jest — a jackal's jest — have shamed me before
my cow ? Come to firm ground, and I will — I
will . . . " Mysa frothed at the mouth, for
Mysa has nearly the worst temper of any one in
the Jungle.
Mowgli watched him puff and blow with eyes
that never changed. When he could make hirfi-
self heard through the spattering mud, he said:
304 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
"What Man-Pack lair here by the marsheS;
Mysa? This is new jungle to me."
" Go north, then," roared the angry bull, for
Mowgli had pricked him rather sharply. " It was
a naked cowherd's jest. Go and tell them at the
village at the foot of the marsh."
"The Man-Pack do not love jungle-tales, nor
do I think, Mysa, that a scratch more or less on
thy hide is any matter for a council. Rut I will
go anci look at this village. Yes, I will go.
So^ly now. It is not every night that the Mas-
ter of the Jungle comes to herd thee."
He stepped out to the shivering ground on the
edge of the marsh, well knowing that Mysa
would never charge over it, and laughed, as he
ran, to think of the bull's anger.
" My strength is not altogether gone," he said.
" It may be that the poison is not to the bone.
There is a star sitting low yonder." He looked
at it between his half-shut hands. " By the Bull
that bought me, it is the Red Flower — the Red
Flower that I lay beside before — before I came
even to the first vSeeonee Pack ! Now that I have
seen, I will finish the running."
The marsh ended in abroad plain where a light
t\Vinkled. It was a long time since Mowgli had
concerned himself with the doings of men, but
THE SPRING RUNNING 305
this night the ghminer of the Red Flower drew
him forward.
"I will look," said he, "as I did in the old
days, and I will see how far the Man- Pack has
changed."
Forgetting that he was no longer in his own
jungle, where he could do what he pleased, he
trod carelessly through the dew-loaded grasses
till he came to the hut where the light stood.
Three or four yelping dogs gave tongue, for he
was on the outskirts of a village.
"Hoi" said Mowgli, sitting down noiselessly,
after sending back a deep wolf-growl that silenced
the curs. " What comes will come. Mowgli,
what hast thou to do any more with the lairs of
the Man-Pack? " He rubbed his mouth, remem-
bering where a stone had struck it years ago when
the other Man- Pack had cast him out.
The door of the hut opened, and a woman
stood peering out into the darkness. A child
cried, and the woman said over her shoulder,
" Sleep. It was but a jackal that waked the
dogs. In a little time morning comes."
Mowffli in the orrass beean to shake as thouorh
he had fever. He knew that voice well, but to
make sure he cried softly, surprised to find how
man's talk came back, " Messua ! O Messua ! "
3o6 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" Who calls ? " said the woman, a c^uiver in her
voice.
"Hast thou forirotten ? " said Mowi^li. His
throat was dry as he spoke.
"If it be thou, what name did I give thee ?
Say ! " She had half shut the door, and her hand
was clutching at her breast.
" Nathoo ! Ohe Nathoo 1 " said Mowgli, for,
as you remember, that was the name Messua
orave him when he first came to the Man-Pack.
" Come, my son," she called, and Mowgli
stepped into the light, and looked full at Messua,
the woman who had been good to him, and whose
life he had saved from the Man- Pack so long be-
fore. She was older, and her hair was gray, but
her eyes and her voice had not changed. Wo-
man-like, she expected to find Mowgli where she
had left him, and her eyes traveled upward in a
puzzled way from his chest to his head, that
touched the top of the door.
" My son," she stammered; and then, sinking
to his feet : " Put it is no longer my son. It is a
Godling of the Woods! Ahai ! "
As he stood in the red light of the oil-lamp,
strong, tall, and beautiful, his long black hair
sweeping over his shoulders, the knife swinging
at his neck, and his head crowned with a wreath
THE SPRING RUNNING 307
of white jasmine, he might easily have been mis-
taken for some wild god of a jungle legend. The
child half asleep on a cot sprang up and shrieked
aloud with terror. Messua turned to soothe him,
while Mows^li stood still, looking^ in at the water-
jars and the cooking-pots, the grain -bin, and all
the other human belongings that he found himself
remembering so well.
" What wilt thou eat or drink ? " Messua mur-
mured. " This is all thine. We owe our lives to
thee. But art thou him I called Nathoo, or a
Godling, indeed ? "
" I am Nathoo," said Mowgli, " I am very far
from my own place. I saw this light, and came
hither. I did not know thou wast here."
" After we came to Kanhiwara," Messua said
timidly, " the English would have helped us
against those villagers that sought to burn us,
Rememberest thou ? "
" Indeed, I have not forgotten."
'* But when the English Law was made ready,
we went to the village of those evil people, and
it was no more to be found."
"That also I remember," said Mowgli, with a
quiver of his nostril.
" My man, therefore, took service in the fields,
and at last — for, indeed, he was a strong man —
3o8 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
we held a little land here. It is not so rich as
the old village, but we do not need much — we
two."
" Where is he — the man that dug in the dirt
when he was afraid on that night ? "
" He is dead — a year."
"And he?" Mowgli pointed to the child.
" My son that was born two Rains ago. If
thou art a Godling, give him the Favor of the
Jungle, that he may be safe among thy — thy
people, as we were safe on that night."
She lifted up the child, who, forgetting his
fright, reached out to play with the knife that
hung on Mowgli's chest, and Mowgli put the lit-
tle fingers aside very carefully.
"And if thou art Nathoo whom the tigers car-
ried away," Messua went on, choking, "he is
then thy younger brother. Give him an elder
brother's blessing."
'' Hai-mai I What do I know of the thing
called a blessing? I am neither a Godling nor his
brother, and — O mother, mother, my heart is
heavy in me." He shivered as he set clown the
child.
" Like enough," said Messua, bustling among
the cooking-pots. " This comes of running about
the marshes by night. Beyond question, the
THE SPRING RUNNING 309
fever has soaked thee to the marrow." MowgH
smiled a httle at the idea of anything' in the Jun-
gle hurting him. " I will make a fire, and thou
shalt drink warm milk. Put away the jasmine
wreath : the smell is heavy in so small a place."
Mowgli sat down, muttering, with his face in his
hands. All manner of strano-e feelinors that he
had never felt before were running over him, ex-
actly as though he had been poisoned, and he
felt dizzy and a little sick. He drank the warm
milk in long gulps, Messua patting him on the
shoulder from time to tinie, not quite sure whe-
ther he were her son Nathoo of the lone aeo
days, or some wonderful Jungle being, but glad
to feel that he was at least flesh and blood.
" Son," she said at last, — her eyes were full of
pride, — "have any told thee that thou art beauti-
ful beyond all men ? "
" Hah ? " said Mowgli, for naturally he had
never heard anything of the kind. Messua
laughed softly and happil}-. The look in his
face was enough for her.
" I am the first, then ? It is right, though it
comes seldom, that a mother should tell her son
these good things. Thou art very beautiful.
Never have I looked upon such a man."
Mowgli twisted his head and tried to see over
jio THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
his own hard shoulder, and Messua laughed
again so long that Mowgli, not knowing why,
was forced to laugh with her, and the child ran
from one to the other, laughing too.
'* Nay, thou must not mock thy brother," said
Messua, catching him to her breast. " When
thou art one half as fair we will marry thee to
the youngest daughter of a king, and thou shalt
ride great elephants."
Mowgli could not understand one word in
three of the talk here ; the warm milk was taking
effect on him after his long run, so he curled up
and in a minute was deep asleep, and Messua
put the hair back from his eyes, threw a cloth
over him, and was happy. Jungle-fashion, he
slept out the rest of that night and all the next_^
day ; for his instincts, which never wholly slept,
warned him there was nothino- to fear. He
waked at last with a bound that shook the hut,
for the cloth over his face made him dream of
traps; and there he stood, his hand on his knife,
the sleep all heavy in his rolling eyes, ready for
any fight.
Messua laughed, and set the evening meal be-
fore him. There were only a few coarse cakes
baked over the smoky fire, some rice, and a lump
of sour preserved tamarinds — just enough to go
THE SPRING RUNNING 311
on with till he could get to his evening kill. The
smell of the dew in the marshes made him hungry
and restless. He wanted to finish his spring
running, but the child insisted on sitting in his
arms, and Messua would have it that his long,
blue-black hair must be combed out. So she
sang, as she combed, foolish little baby-songs,
now calling Mowgli her son, and now begging
him to give some of his jungle power to the child.
The hut door was closed, but Mowgli heard a
sound he knew well, and saw Messua's jaw drop
with horror as a great gray paw came under the
bottom of the door, and Gray Brother outside
whined a muffled and penitent whine of anxiety
and fear.
"Out and wait! Ye would not come when I
called," said Mowgli in jungle-talk, without turn-
ing his head, and the great gray paw disappeared.
" Do not — do not bring thy — thy servants
with thee," said Messua. " I — we have always
lived at peace with the Jungle."
"It is peace," said Mowgli, rising. "Think
of that night on the road to Kanhiwara. There
were scores of such folk before thee and behind
thee. But I see that even in springtime the
Jungle People do not always forget. Mother,
go-
312 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Messua drew aside humbly — he was indeed a
wood-god, she thought ; but as his hand was on
the door the mother in her made her throw her
arms round Mowgh's neck again and again.
" Come back ! " she whispered. " Son or no
son, come back, for I love thee — Look, he too
grieves."
The child was crying because the man with
the shiny knife was going away.
"Come back again," Messua repeated. "By
night or by day this door is never shut to thee."
Mowgli's throat worked as though the cords in
it were being pulled, and his voice seemed to be
dragged from it as he answered, " I will surely
come back."
"And now," he said, as he put by the head
of the fawning wolf on the threshold, " I have
a little cry against thee. Gray Brother. Why
came ye not all four when I called so long
ago?
" So long ago ? It was but last night. I —
we — were singing in the Jungle the new songs,
for this is the Time of New Talk. Rememberest
thou ? "
"Truly, truly."
"And as soon as the songs were sung," Gray
Brother went on earnestly, " I followed thy trail.
THE SPRING RUNNING 313
I ran from all the others and followed hot- foot.
But, O Little Brother, what hast tJi02c done,
eating and sleeping with the Man-Pack?"
"If ye had come when I called, this had never
been," said Mowgli, running much faster.
" And now what is to be ? " said Gray Brother.
Mowgli was just going to answer when a girl
in a white cloth came down some path that led
from the outskirts of the village. Gray Brother
dropped out of sight at once, and Mowgli backed
noiselessly into a field of high-springing crops.
He could almost have touched her with his hand
when the warm, green stalks closed before his
face and he disappeared like a ghost. The girl
screamed, for she thought she had seen a spirit,
and then she gave a deep sigh. Mowgli parted
the stalks with his hands and watched her till she
was out of sight.
" And now I do not know," he said, sighing in
his turn. " Why did ye not come when I called?"
"We follow thee — we follow thee," Gray
Brother mumbled, licking at Mowgli's heel.
" We follow thee always, except in the Time of
the New Talk."
"And would ye follow me to the Man-Pack? "
Mowgli whispered.
" Did I not follow thee on the night our old
314 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Pack cast thee out? Who waked thee lying
among the crops ? "
" Ay, but again ? "
** Have I not followed thee to-night? "
'* Ay, but again and again, and it may be
again. Gray Brother ? "
Gray Brother was silent. When he spoke he
growled to himself, " The Black One spoke truth."
" And he said? "
'* Man goes to Man at the last. Raksha, our
mother, said — "
" So also said Akela on the night of Red Dog,"
Moweli muttered.
" So also says Kaa, who is wiser than us all."
"What dost thou say, Gray Brother?"
" They cast thee out once, with bad talk. They
cut thy mouth with stones. They sent Buldeo
to slay thee. They would have thrown thee into
the Red Flower. Thou, and not I, hast said that
they are evil and senseless. Thou, and not I —
I follow my own people — didst let in the Jungle
upon them. Thou, and not I, didst make song
against them more bitter even than our song
against Red Dog."
" I ask thee what thou sayest? "
They were talking as they ran. Gray Brother
cantered on a while without replying, and then
THE SPRING RUNNING 315
he said, — between bound and bound as it were,
— "Man-cub — Master of the Jungle — Son of
Raksha, Lair-brother to me — though I forget
for a Httle while in the spring, thy trail is my
trail, thy lair is my lair, thy kill is my kill, and
thy death-tight is my death-fight. I speak for
the Three. But what wilt thou say to the
Jungle ? "
" That is well thought Between the sight and
the kill it is not good to wait. Go before and
cry them all to the Council Rock, and I will tell
them what is in my stomach. But they may not
come — in the Time of New Talk they may for-
get me."
" Hast thou, then, forgotten nothing ? " snapped
Gray Brother over his shoulder, as he laid him-
self down to gallop, and Mowgli followed, thinking.
At any other season the news would have
called all the Jungle together with bristling necks,
but now they were busy hunting and fighting
and killing and singing. From one to another
Gray Brother ran, crying, " The Master of the
Jungle goes back to Man ! Come to the Council
Rock." And the happy, eager People only
answered, " He will return in the summer heats.
The Rains will drive him to lair. Run and sing
with us, Gray Brother."
3l6 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
" But the Master of the Jungle goes back to
Man," Gray Brother would repeat.
" Eee — Yoawa? Is the Time of New Talk
any less sweet for that ? " they would reply. So
when MowgH, heavy-hearted, came up through
the well-remembered rocks to the place where
he had been broupfht into the Council, he found
only the Four, Baloo, who was nearly blind with
age, and the heavy, cold-blooded Kaa coiled
around Akela's empty seat.
"Thy trail ends here, then, Manling?" said
Kaa, as Mowgli threw himself down, his face in
his hands. *' Cry thy cry." We be of one blood,
thou and I — man and snake toofether."
" Why did I not die under Red Dog ? " the
boy moaned. " My strength is gone from me,
and it is not any poison. By night and by
day I hear a double step upon my trail. When
I turn my head it is as though one had hidden
himself from mc that instant. I go to look be-
hind the trees, and he is not there. I call and
none cry again ; but it is as though one listened
and kept back the answer. I lie down, but I
do not rest. I run the spring running, but I am
not made still. I bathe, but I am not made cool.
The kill sickens me, but I have no heart to fight
except I kill. The Red Flower is in my body,
THE SPRING RUNNING 317
my bones are water — and — I know not what
I know."
" What need of talk ? " said Baloo slowly, turn-
ing his head to where Mowgli lay. " Akela by the
river said it, that Mowgli should drive Mowgli
back to the Man-Pack. I said it. But who listens
now to Baloo? Bagheera — where is Bagheera
this night ? — he knows also. It is the Law."
"When we met at Cold Lairs, Mauling, I
knew it," said Kaa, turning a little in his mighty
coils. " Man goes to Man at the last, though
the Jungle does not cast him out."
The Four looked at one another and at Mow-
gli, puzzled but obedient.
"The Jungle does not cast me out, then?"
Mowcrli stammered.
Gray Brother and the Three growled furi-
ously, beginning, " So long as we live none shall
dare — " But Baloo checked them.
" I tauofht thee the Law. It is for me to
speak," he said; "and, though I cannot now see
the rocks before me, I see far. Little Frog,
take thine own trail ; make thy lair with thine
own blood and pack and people ; but when there
is need of foot or tooth or eye, or a word carried
swiftly by night, remember, Master of the Jungle,
the Jungle is thine at call."
3i8 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
"The Middle Jungle is thine also," said Kaa.
"' I speak for no small people."
" //ai-mai, my brothers," cried Mowgli, throw-
ing up his arms with a sob. " I know not what
I know! I would not go; but I am drawn by
both feet. How shall I leave these nights ? "
" Nay, look up, Little Brother," Baloo repeated.
"There is no shame in this hunting. When the
honey is eaten we leave the empty hive."
"Having cast the skin," said Kaa, "we may
not creep into it afresh. It is the Law."
" Listen, dearest of all to me," said Baloo.
" There is neither word nor will here to hold
thee back. Look up ! Who may question the
Master of the Jungle? I saw thee playing
among the white pebbles yonder when thou wast
a little frog ; and Bagheera, that bought thee for
the price of a young bull newly killed, saw thee
also. Of that Looking Over we two only re-
main ; for Raksha, thy lair-mother, is dead with
thy lair-father; the old Wolf Pack is long since
dead ; thou knowest whither Shere Khan went,
and Akela died among the dholes, where, but for
thy wisdom and strength, the second Seeonee
Pack would also have died. There remains no-
thing but old bones. It is no longer the Man-
THE SPRING RUNNING 319
cub that asks leave of his Pack, but the Master
of the Jungle that changes his trail. Who shall
question Man in his ways?"
" But Bagheera and the Bull that bought me,"
said Mowgli. '* I would not — "
His words were cut short by a roar and a crash
in the thicket below, and Bagheera, light, strong,
and terrible as always, stood before him.
" Therefore,'' he said, stretching out a dripping
right paw, " I did not come. It was a long hunt,
but he lies dead in the bushes now — a bull in his
second year — the Bull that frees thee. Little
Brother. All debts are paid now. For the rest,
my word is Baloo's word." He licked Mowgli's
foot. " Remember, Bagheera loved thee," he
cried and bounded away. At the foot of the hill
he cried again long and loud, " Good hunting on
a new trail. Master of the Jungle ! Remember,
Bagheera loved thee."
"Thou hast heard," said Baloo. "There is no
more. Go now ; but first come to me. O wise
Little Frog, come to me ! "
" It is hard to cast the skin," said Kaa as
Mowgli sobbed and sobbed, with his head on
the blind bear's side and his arms round his neck,
while Baloo tried feebly to lick his feet.
320 THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
"The stars are thin," said Gray Brother, snuff-
inof at tlxe dawn-wind. " Where shall we lair
to-day? for, from now, we follow new trails."
And this is the last of the MowLrli stories.
THE OUTSONG
This is the song that Movvgli heard behind him in the
Jungle till he came to Messua's door again :
Baloo —
OR the sake of him who showed
One wise Frog the Jungle-Road,
Keep the Law the Man- Pack make —
For thy blind old Baloo's sake !
Clean or tainted, hot or stale.
Hold it as it were the Trail,
Through the day and through the night,
Questing neither left nor right.
For the sake of him who loves
Thee beyond all else that moves.
When thy Pack would make thee pain,
Say : " Tabaqui sings again."
When thy Pack would work thee ill,
322 ^THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Say: " Shere Khan is yet to kill."
When the knife is drawn to slay,
Keep the Law and go thy way.
(Root and honey, palm and spathe,
Guard a cub from harm and scathe!)
Wood and Water^ Wind and Tree,
Jnno-lc-Favor zo tvith thee !
Kaa—
Anger is the &^^ of Fear —
Only lidless eyes are clear.
Cobra-poison none may leech ;
Even so with Cobra-speech.
Open talk shall call to thee
Strength, whose mate is Courtesy.
Send no lunge beyond thy length ;
Lend no rotten bough thy strength.
Gauge thy gape with buck or goat,
Lest thine eye should choke thy throat.
After gorging, wouldst thou sleep.
Look the den is hid and deep,
Lest a wrong, by thee forgot,
Draw thy kifter to the spot.
East and West and North and South,
Wash thy hide and close thy mouth.
(Pit and rift and blue pool-brim,
Middle Jungle follow him !)
Wood and Water, Wind and Tree,
Jungle- Favor go with thee!
THE OUTSONG 323
Bagheera —
In the cage my life began ;
Well I know the worth of Man.
By the Broken Lock that freed —
Man-cub, 'ware the Man-cub's breed !
Scenting-dew or starlight pale,
Choose no tangled tree-cat trail.
Pack or council, hunt or den,
Cry no truce with Jackal-Men.
Feed them silence when they say :
" Come with us an easy way."
Feed them silence when they seek
Help of thine to hurt the weak.
Make no bandar s boast of skill ;
Hold thy peace above the kill.
Let nor call nor song nor sign
Turn thee from thy hunting-line.
(Morning mist or twilight clear,
Serve him. Wardens of the Deer !)
Wood and Water, Wind and Tree,
Jungle- Favor go with thee!
The Three —
On the trail that thou must tread
To the thresholds of our dread.
Where the Flozver blossoms red ;
Through the nights xvhen thou shall lie
Prisoned from our Mother -sky,
324
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
Hearing us, thy loves, go by ;
In the dawns, whe?i tJion sJialt zvake
To the toil tJiou canst not break,
Heartsick for the Jungle's sake :
Wood and Water, Wind and Tree^
Wisdom, Strength, and Courtesy^
Juns'le- Favor q-q zvith thee /
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