THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK

By Rudyard Kipling

CONTENTS

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

HOW FEAR CAME

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

The Law of the Jungle--which is by far the oldest law in the world--hasarranged for almost every kind of accident that may befall the JunglePeople, till now its code is as perfect as time and custom can makeit. You will remember that Mowgli spent a great part of his life in theSeeonee Wolf-Pack, learning the Law from Baloo, the Brown Bear; andit was Baloo who told him, when the boy grew impatient at the constantorders, that the Law was like the Giant Creeper, because it droppedacross every one's back and no one could escape. "When thou hast livedas long as I have, Little Brother, thou wilt see how all the Jungleobeys 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 spendshis life eating and sleeping does not worry about anything till itactually 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, thePorcupine, meeting Mowgli in a bamboo-thicket, told him that the wildyams were drying up. Now everybody knows that Ikki is ridiculouslyfastidious in his choice of food, and will eat nothing but the very bestand ripest. So Mowgli laughed and said, "What is that to me?"

"Not much NOW, " said Ikki, rattling his quills in a stiff, uncomfortableway, "but later we shall see. Is there any more diving into the deeprock-pool below the Bee-Rocks, Little Brother?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the Law of the Jungle it is death to kill at the drinking-placeswhen once the Water Truce has been declared. The reason of this is thatdrinking comes before eating. Every one in the Jungle can scramble alongsomehow when only game is scarce; but water is water, and when there isbut one source of supply, all hunting stops while the Jungle People gothere for their needs. In good seasons, when water was plentiful, thosewho came down to drink at the Waingunga--or anywhere else, for thatmatter--did so at the risk of their lives, and that risk made no smallpart of the fascination of the night's doings. To move down so cunninglythat never a leaf stirred; to wade knee-deep in the roaring shallowsthat drown all noise from behind; to drink, looking backward over oneshoulder, every muscle ready for the first desperate bound of keenterror; to roll on the sandy margin, and return, wet-muzzled and wellplumped out, to the admiring herd, was a thing that all tall-antleredyoung bucks took a delight in, precisely because they knew that at anymoment Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap upon them and bear them down. But now all that life-and-death fun was ended, and the Jungle Peoplecame up, starved and weary, to the shrunken river, --tiger, bear, deer, buffalo, and pig, all together, --drank the fouled waters, and hung abovethem, too exhausted to move off. 

The deer and the pig had tramped all day in search of something betterthan dried bark and withered leaves. The buffaloes had found no wallowsto be cool in, and no green crops to steal. The snakes had left theJungle 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 noseof a rooting pig dislodged them. The river-turtles had long ago beenkilled by Bagheera, cleverest of hunters, and the fish had buriedthemselves deep in the dry mud. Only the Peace Rock lay across theshallows like a long snake, and the little tired ripples hissed as theydried 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 hisfellows. His hair was bleached to tow colour by the sun; his ribs stoodout 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 thelook of knotted grass-stems. But his eye, under his matted forelock, wascool and quiet, for Bagheera was his adviser in this time of trouble, and told him to go quietly, hunt slowly, and never, on any account, tolose 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 allfat with new grass. Come down to the Peace Rock and hear the news. On myback, Little Brother. "

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

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

Mowgli laughed. "Yes, we be great hunters now, " said he. "I am verybold--to eat grubs, " and the two came down together through thecrackling undergrowth to the river-bank and the lace-work of shoals thatran out from it in every direction. 

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

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

Up-stream, at the bend of the sluggish pool round the Peace Rock, andWarden of the Water Truce, stood Hathi, the wild elephant, with hissons, gaunt and gray in the moonlight, rocking to and fro--alwaysrocking. 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 thetall trees came down to the water's edge, was the place set apart forthe Eaters of Flesh--the tiger, the wolves, the panther, the bear, andthe others. 

"We are under one Law, indeed, " said Bagheera, wading into the water andlooking across at the lines of clicking horns and starting eyes wherethe deer and the pig pushed each other to and fro. "Good hunting, allyou of my blood, " he added, lying own at full length, one flank thrustout of the shallows; and then, between his teeth, "But for that which isthe Law it would be VERY good hunting. "

The quick-spread ears of the deer caught the last sentence, and afrightened whisper ran along the ranks. "The Truce! Remember the Truce!"

"Peace there, peace!" gurgled Hathi, the wild elephant. "The Truceholds, Bagheera. This is no time to talk of hunting. "

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

"WE wish so, very greatly, " bleated a young fawn, who had only been bornthat spring, and did not at all like it. Wretched as the Jungle Peoplewere, even Hathi could not help chuckling; while Mowgli, lying on hiselbows in the warm water, laughed aloud, and beat up the scum with hisfeet. 

"Well spoken, little bud-horn, " Bagheera purred. "When the Truce endsthat shall be remembered in thy favour, " and he looked keenly throughthe darkness to make sure of recognising the fawn again. 

Gradually the talking spread up and down the drinking-places. One couldhear the scuffling, snorting pig asking for more room; the buffaloesgrunting among themselves as they lurched out across the sand-bars, andthe deer telling pitiful stories of their long foot-sore wanderings inquest of food. Now and again they asked some question of the Eaters ofFlesh across the river, but all the news was bad, and the roaring hotwind of the Jungle came and went between the rocks and the rattlingbranches, and scattered twigs, and dust on the water. 

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

"The river has fallen since last night, " said Baloo. "O Hathi, hast thouever seen the like of this drought?"

"It will pass, it will pass, " said Hathi, squirting water along his backand sides. 

"We have one here that cannot endure long, " said Baloo; and he lookedtoward the boy he loved. 

"I?" said Mowgli indignantly, sitting up in the water. "I have no longfur 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 Ibeen seen without my hide. "

"Nay, I meant no harm, Baloo; but only that thou art, as it were, likethe cocoanut in the husk, and I am the same cocoanut all naked. Now thatbrown husk of thine----" Mowgli was sitting cross-legged, and explainingthings with his forefinger in his usual way, when Bagheera put out apaddy 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 thathe does not do what the ripe cocoanuts do. "

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

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

"It is not good to make a jest of thy teacher, " said the bear, whenMowgli had been ducked for the third time. 

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

Mowgli looked--stared, rather--as insolently as he knew how, and ina minute Shere Khan turned away uneasily. "Man-cub this, and Man-cubthat, " he rumbled, going on with his drink, "the cub is neither man norcub, or he would have been afraid. Next season I shall have to beg hisleave for a drink. Augrh!"

"That may come, too, " said Bagheera, looking him steadily between theeyes. "That may come, too--Faugh, Shere Khan!--what new shame hast thoubrought here?"

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

"Man!" said Shere Khan coolly, "I killed an hour since. " He went onpurring and growling to himself. 

The line of beasts shook and wavered to and fro, and a whisper wentup that grew to a cry. "Man! Man! He has killed Man!" Then all lookedtowards Hathi, the wild elephant, but he seemed not to hear. Hathi neverdoes anything till the time comes, and that is one of the reasons why helives so long. 

"At such a season as this to kill Man! Was no other game afoot?" saidBagheera scornfully, drawing himself out of the tainted water, andshaking each paw, cat-fashion, as he did so. 

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

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

"Thy kill was from choice?" he asked; and when Hathi asks a question itis best to answer. 

"Even so. It was my right and my Night. Thou knowest, O Hathi. " ShereKhan spoke almost courteously. 

"Yes, I know, " Hathi answered; and, after a little silence, "Hast thoudrunk thy fill?"

"For to-night, yes. "

"Go, then. The river is to drink, and not to defile. None but the LameTiger would so have boasted of his right at this season when--when wesuffer together--Man and Jungle People alike. Clean or unclean, get tothy lair, Shere Khan!"

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

"What is this right Shere Khan speaks of?" Mowgli whispered inBagheera's ear. "To kill Man is always, shameful. The Law says so. Andyet Hathi says----"

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

Mowgli waited for a minute to pick up his courage, because no one caredto address Hathi directly, and then he cried: "What is Shere Khan'sright, O Hathi?" Both banks echoed his words, for all the People of theJungle are intensely curious, and they had just seen something that noneexcept Baloo, who looked very thoughtful, seemed to understand. 

"It is an old tale, " said Hathi; "a tale older than the Jungle. Keepsilence along the banks and I will tell that tale. "

There was a minute or two of pushing a shouldering among the pigsand the buffalo, and then the leaders of the herds grunted, one afteranother, "We wait, " and Hathi strode forward, till he was nearlyknee-deep in the pool by the Peace Rock. Lean and wrinkled andyellow-tusked though he was, he looked what the Jungle knew him tobe--their master. 

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

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

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

"And ye do not know why ye fear Man?" Hathi went on. "This is thereason. In the beginning of the Jungle, and none know when that was, weof the Jungle walked together, having no fear of one another. In thosedays there was no drought, and leaves and flowers and fruit grew on thesame tree, and we ate nothing at all except leaves and flowers and grassand fruit and bark. "

"I am glad I was not born in those days, " said Bagheera. "Bark is onlygood to sharpen claws. "

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

"It has not lost fat in the telling, " Bagheera whispered, and Mowglilaughed 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 JunglePeople knew nothing of Man, but lived in the Jungle together, makingone people. But presently they began to dispute over their food, thoughthere was grazing enough for all. They were lazy. Each wished to eatwhere he lay, as sometimes we can do now when the spring rains are good. Tha, the First of the Elephants, was busy making new jungles and leadingthe rivers in their beds. He could not walk in all places; therefore hemade the First of the Tigers the master and the judge of the Jungle, towhom the Jungle People should bring their disputes. In those days theFirst of the Tigers ate fruit and grass with the others. He was as largeas I am, and he was very beautiful, in colour all over like the blossomof the yellow creeper. There was never stripe nor bar upon his hide inthose good days when this the Jungle was new. All the Jungle People camebefore him without fear, and his word was the Law of all the Jungle. Wewere then, remember ye, one people. 

"Yet upon a night there was a dispute between two bucks--agrazing-quarrel such as ye now settle with the horns and thefore-feet--and it is said that as the two spoke together before theFirst of the First of the Tigers lying among the flowers, a buck pushedhim with his horns, and the First of the Tigers forgot that he was themaster and judge of the Jungle, and, leaping upon that buck, broke hisneck. 

"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 theblood, ran away into the marshes of the North, and we of the Jungle, left without a judge, fell to fighting among ourselves; and Tha heardthe noise of it and came back. Then some of us said this and some of ussaid that, but he saw the dead buck among the flowers, and asked whohad killed, and we of the Jungle would not tell because the smell of theblood made us foolish. We ran to and fro in circles, capering and cryingout and shaking our heads. Then Tha gave an order to the trees that hanglow, and to the trailing creepers of the Jungle, that they should markthe 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 GrayApe who lives in the branches, and said, 'I will now be master of theJungle. '"

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 firsthe made a wise face for himself, but in a little while he began toscratch and to leap up and down, and when Tha came back he found theGray Ape hanging, head down, from a bough, mocking those who stoodbelow; and they mocked him again. And so there was no Law in theJungle--only foolish talk and senseless words. 

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

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

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

"Only the First of the Tigers was not with us, for he was still hiddenin the marshes of the North, and when word was brought to him of theThing we had seen in the cave, he said. 'I will go to this Thing andbreak his neck. ' So he ran all the night till he came to the cave; butthe trees and the creepers on his path, remembering the order that Thahad given, let down their branches and marked him as he ran, drawingtheir fingers across his back, his flank, his forehead, and his jowl. Wherever they touched him there was a mark and a stripe upon his yellowhide. AND THOSE STRIPES DO THIS CHILDREN WEAR TO THIS DAY! When he cameto 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 wasafraid 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 madeashamed 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 Iam 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 washaway, ' said Tha; and the First of the Tigers swam, and rolled and rolledupon the grass, till the Jungle ran round and round before his eyes, butnot one little bar upon all his hide was changed, and Tha, watching him, laughed. Then the First of the Tigers said: 'What have I done that thiscomes to me?' Tha said, 'Thou hast killed the buck, and thou hast letDeath loose in the Jungle, and with Death has come Fear, so that thepeople of the Jungle are afraid one of the other, as thou art afraid ofthe Hairless One. ' The First of the Tigers said, 'They will never fearme, for I knew them since the beginning. ' Tha said, 'Go and see. ' Andthe First of the Tigers ran to and fro, calling aloud to the deer andthe 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 theywere afraid. 

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

"Then the First of the Tigers answered, 'I am content'; but when nexthe drank he saw the black stripes upon his flank and his side, and heremembered the name that the Hairless One had given him, and he wasangry. For a year he lived in the marshes waiting till Tha should keephis promise. And upon a night when the jackal of the Moon [the EveningStar] stood clear of the Jungle, he felt that his Night was upon him, and he went to that cave to meet the Hairless One. Then it happened asTha promised, for the Hairless One fell down before him and lay alongthe 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 thathe had killed Fear. Then, nosing above the kill, he heard Tha comingdown from the woods of the North, and presently the voice of the Firstof the Elephants, which is the voice that we hear now----"

The thunder was rolling up and down the dry, scarred hills, butit brought no rain--only heat--lightning that flickered along theridges--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 tillthou diest. Thou hast taught Man to kill!'

"The First of the Tigers, standing stiffly to his kill, said. 'He is asthe buck was. There is no Fear. Now I will judge the Jungle Peoples oncemore. '

"And Tha said: 'Never again shall the Jungle Peoples come to thee. Theyshall 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 blowthat thou canst not see he shall bid thee wait his pleasure. He shallmake the ground to open under thy feet, and the creeper to twist aboutthy neck, and the tree-trunks to grow together about thee higher thanthou canst leap, and at the last he shall take thy hide to wrap his cubswhen they are cold. Thou hast shown him no mercy, and none will he showthee. '

"The First of the Tigers was very bold, for his Night was still on him, and he said: 'The Promise of Tha is the Promise of Tha. He will not takeaway 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 noslow learner. '

"The First of the Tigers said: 'He is here under my foot, and his backis broken. Let the Jungle know I have killed Fear. '

"Then Tha laughed, and said: 'Thou hast killed one of many, but thouthyself shalt tell the Jungle--for thy Night is ended. '

"So the day came; and from the mouth of the cave went out anotherHairless One, and he saw the kill in the path, and the First of theTigers 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 calledhim Ho-Igoo--and he knew something of the wicked little Gondee axe thatwhirls 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 inthe flank. Thus it happened as Tha said, for the First of the Tigers ranhowling up and down the Jungle till he tore out the stick, and all theJungle knew that the Hairless One could strike from far off, and theyfeared more than before. So it came about that the First of the Tigerstaught the Hairless One to kill--and ye know what harm that has sincedone to all our peoples--through the noose, and the pitfall, and thehidden trap, and the flying stick and the stinging fly that comes out ofwhite smoke [Hathi meant the rifle], and the Red Flower that drives usinto the open. Yet for one night in the year the Hairless One fears theTiger, as Tha promised, and never has the Tiger given him cause to beless afraid. Where he finds him, there he kills him, remembering how theFirst of the Tigers was made ashamed. For the rest, Fear walks up anddown the Jungle by day and by night. "

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

"And only when there is one great Fear over all, as there is now, can weof the Jungle lay aside our little fears, and meet together in one placeas 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 twiceand thrice in a moon. "

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

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

"Umm!" said Bagheera deep in his furry throat. "Does the Tiger know hisNight?"

"Never till the Jackal of the Moon stands clear of the eveningmist. Sometimes it falls in the dry summer and sometimes in the wetrains--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 wickedsmile. "Do men know this--tale?" said he. 

"None know it except the tigers, and we, the elephants--the children ofTha. 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 totalk. 

"But--but--but, " said Mowgli, turning to Baloo, "why did not the Firstof the Tigers continue to eat grass and leaves and trees? He did butbreak the buck's neck. He did not EAT. What led him to the hot meat?"

"The trees and the creepers marked him, Little Brother, and made himthe 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, theEaters of Grass, " said Baloo. 

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

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

THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT

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

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

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

 Dirge of the Langurs. 

There was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of thesemi-independent native States in the north-western part of the country. He was a Brahmin, so high-caste that caste ceased to have any particularmeaning for him; and his father had been an important official in thegay-coloured tag-rag and bobtail of an old-fashioned Hindu Court. Butas 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 wellwith the English, and imitate all that the English believed to be good. At the same time a native official must keep his own master's favour. This was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed young Brahmin, helped by a good English education at a Bombay University, played itcoolly, 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 andtelegraphs--died, Purun Dass stood high with his young successor, whohad been tutored by an Englishman; and between them, though he alwaystook care that his master should have the credit, they establishedschools for little girls, made roads, and started State dispensaries andshows of agricultural implements, and published a yearly blue-book onthe "Moral and Material Progress of the State, " and the Foreign Officeand the Government of India were delighted. Very few native States takeup English progress altogether, for they will not believe, as Purun Dassshowed he did, that what was good for the Englishman must be twice asgood for the Asiatic. The Prime Minister became the honoured friendof Viceroys, and Governors, and Lieutenant-Governors, and medicalmissionaries, and common missionaries, and hard-riding English officerswho came to shoot in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts oftourists who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showinghow things ought to be managed. In his spare time he would endowscholarships for the study of medicine and manufactures on strictlyEnglish lines, and write letters to the "Pioneer", the greatest Indiandaily paper, explaining his master's aims and objects. 

At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous sums tothe priests when he came back; for even so high-caste a Brahmin as PurunDass lost caste by crossing the black sea. In London he met and talkedwith every one worth knowing--men whose names go all over the world--andsaw a great deal more than he said. He was given honorary degrees bylearned universities, and he made speeches and talked of Hindu socialreform to English ladies in evening dress, till all London cried, "Thisis the most fascinating man we have ever met at dinner since cloths werefirst laid. "

When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for the Viceroyhimself made a special visit to confer upon the Maharajah the GrandCross of the Star of India--all diamonds and ribbons and enamel; and atthe same ceremony, while the cannon boomed, Purun Dass was made a KnightCommander of the Order of the Indian Empire; so that his name stood SirPurun Dass, K. C. I. E. 

That evening, at dinner in the big Viceregal tent, he stood up with thebadge and the collar of the Order on his breast, and replying to thetoast of his master's health, made a speech few Englishmen could havebettered. 

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

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin andbrass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polishedbrown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on theground--behind him they were firing salutes from the bastions in honourof 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 acolourless dream of the night. He was a Sunnyasi--a houseless, wanderingmendicant, depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and solong as there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggarstarves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom eateneven fish. A five-pound note would have covered his personal expensesfor food through any one of the many years in which he had been absolutemaster of millions of money. Even when he was being lionised in Londonhe had held before him his dream of peace and quiet--the long, white, dusty Indian road, printed all over with bare feet, the incessant, slow-moving traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up underthe fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their eveningmeal. 

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

At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness overtookhim--sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside; sometimes by amud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis, who are another mistydivision of holy men, would receive him as they do those who know whatcastes and divisions are worth; sometimes on the outskirts of a littleHindu village, where the children would steal up with the foodtheir parents had prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the baregrazing-grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsycamels. It was all one to Purun Dass--or Purun Bhagat, as he calledhimself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But unconsciouslyhis feet drew him away northward and eastward; from the south toRohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool to ruined Samanah, and thenup-stream along the dried bed of the Gugger river that fills only whenthe rain falls in the hills, till one day he saw the far line of thegreat Himalayas. 

Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was ofRajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way--a Hill-woman, always home-sick forthe snows--and that the least touch of Hill blood draws a man in the endback 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 Ishall sit down and get knowledge"; and the cool wind of the Himalayaswhistled 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 aclattering cavalry escort, to visit the gentlest and most affable ofViceroys; and the two had talked for an hour together about mutualfriends in London, and what the Indian common folk really thought ofthings. This time Purun Bhagat paid no calls, but leaned on the railof the Mall, watching that glorious view of the Plains spread outforty miles below, till a native Mohammedan policeman told him he wasobstructing traffic; and Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law, because he knew the value of it, and was seeking for a Law of his own. Then he moved on, and slept that night in an empty hut at Chota Simla, which looks like the very last end of the earth, but it was only thebeginning of his journey. He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road, thelittle ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock, or strutted outon timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep; that dips into warm, wet, shut-in valleys, and climbs out across bare, grassy hill-shoulders wherethe sun strikes like a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, darkforests where the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and thepheasant calls to his mate. And he met Thibetan herdsmen with their dogsand flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of borax on his back, and wandering wood-cutters, and cloaked and blanketed Lamas fromThibet, coming into India on pilgrimage, and envoys of little solitaryHill-states, posting furiously on ring-streaked and piebald ponies, orthe cavalcade of a Rajah paying a visit; or else for a long, clear dayhe would see nothing more than a black bear grunting and rooting belowin the valley. When he first started, the roar of the world he had leftstill rang in his ears, as the roar of a tunnel rings long after thetrain has passed through; but when he had put the Mutteeanee Pass behindhim that was all done, and Purun Bhagat was alone with himself, walking, wondering, and thinking, his eyes on the ground, and his thoughts withthe clouds. 

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

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

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

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

When he met Purun Bhagat's eyes--the eyes of a man used to controlthousands--he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl without a word, and returned to the village, saying, "We have at last a holy man. Never have I seen such a man. He is of the Plains--but pale-coloured--aBrahmin 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 themost savoury meal for the Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but withbuckwheat and Indian corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish outof the stream in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built inthe stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger, andbannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and it was afull bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was he going to stay?asked the priest. Would he need a chela--a disciple--to beg for him? Hadhe a blanket against the cold weather? Was the food good?

Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to stay. That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl be placedoutside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two twisted roots, anddaily should the Bhagat be fed; for the village felt honoured that sucha man--he looked timidly into the Bhagat's face--should tarry amongthem. 

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

Every morning the filled begging-bowl was laid silently in the crutch ofthe roots outside the shrine. Sometimes the priest brought it; sometimesa Ladakhi trader, lodging in the village, and anxious to get merit, trudged up the path; but, more often, it was the woman who had cookedthe meal overnight; and she would murmur, hardly above her breath. "Speak for me before the gods, Bhagat. Speak for such a one, the wifeof so-and-so!" Now and then some bold child would be allowed the honour, and Purun Bhagat would hear him drop the bowl and run as fast as hislittle legs could carry him, but the Bhagat never came down to thevillage. It was laid out like a map at his feet. He could see theevening gatherings, held on the circle of the threshing-floors, becausethat was the only level ground; could see the wonderful unnamed greenof the young rice, the indigo blues of the Indian corn, the dock-likepatches 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 belawfully eaten by Hindus in time of fasts. 

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

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

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

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

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

So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stoneslab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into a little holeby the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between thetree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and woreinto a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beastknew his exact place at the fire. The fields changed their colours withthe seasons; the threshing-floors filled and emptied, and filled againand again; and again and again, when winter came, the langurs friskedamong the branches feathered with light snow, till the mother-monkeysbrought their sad-eyed little babies up from the warmer valleys with thespring. There were few changes in the village. The priest was older, andmany of the little children who used to come with the begging-dish senttheir own children now; and when you asked of the villagers how longtheir holy man had lived in Kali's Shrine at the head of the pass, theyanswered, "Always. "

Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the Hills for manyseasons. Through three good months the valley was wrapped in cloudand soaking mist--steady, unrelenting downfall, breaking off intothunder-shower after thunder-shower. Kali's Shrine stood above theclouds, for the most part, and there was a whole month in which theBhagat never caught a glimpse of his village. It was packed away undera white floor of cloud that swayed and shifted and rolled on itself andbulged upward, but never broke from its piers--the streaming flanks ofthe 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 throughthe pine-needles, dripping from the tongues of draggled fern, andspouting in newly-torn muddy channels down the slopes. Then the suncame out, and drew forth the good incense of the deodars and therhododendrons, and that far-off, clean smell which the Hill people call"the smell of the snows. " The hot sunshine lasted for a week, and thenthe rains gathered together for their last downpour, and the water fellin sheets that flayed off the skin of the ground and leaped back inmud. Purun Bhagat heaped his fire high that night, for he was sure hisbrothers would need warmth; but never a beast came to the shrine, thoughhe called and called till he dropped asleep, wondering what had happenedin the woods. 

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

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

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

"Hai! Hai! Hai!" said the Bhagat, snapping his fingers, "Is THIS paymentfor a night's lodging?" But the deer pushed him toward the door, and ashe did so Purun Bhagat heard the sound of something opening with a sigh, and saw two slabs of the floor draw away from each other, while thesticky earth below smacked its lips. 

"Now I see, " said Purun Bhagat. "No blame to my brothers that they didnot sit by the fire to-night. The mountain is falling. And yet--whyshould I go?" His eye fell on the empty begging-bowl, and his facechanged. "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 getto the fire. "

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

He clutched the bristling withers of the barasingh with his right hand, held the torch away with his left, and stepped out of the shrine intothe desperate night. There was no breath of wind, but the rain nearlydrowned the flare as the great deer hurried down the slope, slidingon his haunches. As soon as they were clear of the forest more of theBhagat's brothers joined them. He heard, though he could not see, thelangurs pressing about him, and behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. Therain matted his long white hair into ropes; the water splashed beneathhis bare feet, and his yellow robe clung to his frail old body, but hestepped down steadily, leaning against the barasingh. He was no longera holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K. C. I. E. , Prime Minister of no smallState, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life. Downthe steep, plashy path they poured all together, the Bhagat and hisbrothers, down and down till the deer's feet clicked and stumbled on thewall of a threshing-floor, and he snorted because he smelt Man. Now theywere at the head of the one crooked village street, and the Bhagat beatwith his crutch on the barred windows of the blacksmith's house, as historch blazed up in the shelter of the eaves. "Up and out!" cried PurunBhagat; and he did not know his own voice, for it was years since he hadspoken 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 hisbeasts. Gather the little ones and give the call. "

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

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

"Across the valley and up the next hill!" shouted Purun Bhagat. "Leavenone behind! We follow!"

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

Purun Bhagat dropped fainting by his side, for the chill of the rain andthat fierce climb were killing him; but first he called to the scatteredtorches ahead, "Stay and count your numbers"; then, whispering to thedeer 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 thatgrew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and thehillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, androcked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep, and true as the deep Cof the organ drowned everything for perhaps five minutes, while the veryroots of the pines quivered to it. It died away, and the sound of therain falling on miles of hard ground and grass changed to the muffleddrum of water on soft earth. That told its own tale. 

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

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

The priest said: "Behold a miracle after a miracle, for in this veryattitude must all Sunnyasis be buried! Therefore where he now is we willbuild the temple to our holy man. "

They built the temple before a year was ended--a little stone-and-earthshrine--and they called the hill the Bhagat's hill, and they worshipthere with lights and flowers and offerings to this day. But they donot 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 progressiveand enlightened State of Mohiniwala, and honorary or correspondingmember of more learned and scientific societies than will ever do anygood in this world or the next. 

A SONG OF KABIR

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

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

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

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

LETTING IN THE JUNGLE

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

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

You will remember that after Mowgli had pinned Shere Khan's hide tothe Council Rock, he told as many as were left of the Seeonee Pack thathenceforward he would hunt in the Jungle alone; and the four children ofMother and Father Wolf said that they would hunt with him. But it is noteasy 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, wasto go to the home-cave, and sleep for a day and a night. Then he toldMother Wolf and Father Wolf as much as they could understand of hisadventures among men; and when he made the morning sun flicker up anddown the blade of his skinning-knife, --the same he had skinned ShereKhan with, --they said he had learned something. Then Akela and GrayBrother had to explain their share of the great buffalo-drive in theravine, and Baloo toiled up the hill to hear all about it, and Bagheerascratched himself all over with pure delight at the way in which Mowglihad managed his war. 

It was long after sunrise, but no one dreamed of going to sleep, andfrom 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 smellof the tiger-skin on the Council Rock. 

"But for Akela and Gray Brother here, " Mowgli said, at the end, "I couldhave done nothing. Oh, mother, mother! if thou hadst seen the blackherd-bulls pour down the ravine, or hurry through the gates when theMan-Pack flung stones at me!"

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

"Peace, peace, Raksha!" said Father Wolf, lazily. "Our Frog has comeback again--so wise that his own father must lick his feet; and what isa cut, more or less, on the head? Leave Men alone. " Baloo and Bagheeraboth echoed: "Leave Men alone. "

Mowgli, his head on Mother Wolf's side, smiled contentedly, and saidthat, for his own part, he never wished to see, or hear, or smell Managain. 

"But what, " said Akela, cocking one ear--"but what if men do not leavethee alone, Little Brother?"

"We be FIVE, " said Gray Brother, looking round at the company, andsnapping his jaws on the last word. 

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

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

"It was a big stone that I threw, " chuckled Mowgli, who had often amusedhimself by throwing ripe paw-paws into a hornet's nest, and racing offto the nearest pool before the hornets caught him. 

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

"But why should he? Men have cast me out. What more do they need?" saidMowgli angrily. 

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

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

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

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

Bagheera sprang to his feet, thrust up his head as far as he could, sniffed, and stiffened through every curve in his body. Gray Brotherfollowed his example quickly, keeping a little to his left to get thewind that was blowing from the right, while Akela bounded fifty yards upwind, and, half-crouching, stiffened too. Mowgli looked on enviously. He could smell things as very few human beings could, but he had neverreached the hair-trigger-like sensitiveness of a Jungle nose; and histhree months in the smoky village had set him back sadly. However, hedampened his finger, rubbed it on his nose, and stood erect to catch theupper scent, which, though it is the faintest, is the truest. 

"Man!" Akela growled, dropping on his haunches. 

"Buldeo!" said Mowgli, sitting down. "He follows our trail, and yonderis 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 Junglewinks 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 leafwill flash like a heliograph. But that day was cloudless and still. 

"I knew men would follow, " said Akela triumphantly. "Not for nothinghave I led the Pack. "

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

"Where go ye, and without word?" Mowgli called. 

"H'sh! We roll his skull here before mid-day!" Gray Brother answered. 

"Back! Back and wait! Man does not eat Man!" Mowgli shrieked. 

"Who was a wolf but now? Who drove the knife at me for thinking he mightbe Man?" said Akela, as the four wolves turned back sullenly and droppedto heel. 

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

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

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

Mowgli had been looking from one to the other of his friends, his chestheaving 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 backagain and again, till their hair stood up all over their bodies, andthey trembled in every limb, while Mowgli stared and stared. 

"Now, " said he, "of us five, which is leader?"

"Thou art leader, Little Brother, " said Gray Brother, and he lickedMowgli's foot. 

"Follow, then, " said Mowgli, and the four followed at his heels withtheir tails between their legs. 

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

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

Mowgli cut across noiselessly through the Jungle, at right angles toBuldeo's path, till, parting the undergrowth, he saw the old man, hismusket 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 weightof Shere Khan's raw hide on his shoulders, while Akela and Gray Brothertrotted behind, so that the triple trail was very clearly marked. Presently Buldeo came to where Akela, as you know, had gone back andmixed it all up. Then he sat down, and coughed and grunted, and madelittle casts round and about into the Jungle to pick it up again, and, all the time he could have thrown a stone over those who were watchinghim. No one can be so silent as a wolf when he does not care to beheard; and Mowgli, though the wolves thought he moved very clumsily, could come and go like a shadow. They ringed the old man as a schoolof porpoises ring a steamer at full speed, and as they ringed him theytalked unconcernedly, for their speech began below the lowest end of thescale that untrained human beings can hear. [The other end is bounded bythe high squeak of Mang, the Bat, which very many people cannot catch atall. From that note all the bird and bat and insect talk takes on. ]

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

Mowgli translated. "He says that packs of wolves must have danced roundme. He says that he never saw such a trail in his life. He says he istired. "

"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 thatthey 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 lightand puff at a water-pipe, and they took good note of the smell of thetobacco, so as to be sure of Buldeo in the darkest night, if necessary. 

Then a little knot of charcoal-burners came down the path, and naturallyhalted to speak to Buldeo, whose fame as a hunter reached for at leasttwenty miles round. They all sat down and smoked, and Bagheera andthe others came up and watched while Buldeo began to tell the story ofMowgli, the Devil-child, from one end to another, with additions andinventions. How he himself had really killed Shere Khan; and how Mowglihad 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 thebullet turned the corner, when he pointed it at Mowgli, and killed oneof Buldeo's own buffaloes; and how the village, knowing him to be thebravest hunter in Seeonee, had sent him out to kill this Devil-child. But meantime the village had got hold of Messua and her husband, whowere undoubtedly the father and mother of this Devil-child, and hadbarricaded them in their own hut, and presently would torture them tomake them confess they were witch and wizard, and then they would beburned to death. 

"When?" said the charcoal-burners, because they would very much like tobe present at the ceremony. 

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

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

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

The charcoal-burners looked round cautiously, and thanked their starsthey had not; but they had no doubt that so brave a man as Buldeo wouldfind him if any one could. The sun was getting rather low, and they hadan idea that they would push on to Buldeo's village and see that wickedwitch. 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 theJungle, which might produce the Wolf-demon at any minute, without hisescort. He, therefore, would accompany them, and if the sorcerer's childappeared--well, he would show them how the best hunter in Seeonee dealtwith such things. The Brahmin, he said, had given him a charm againstthe creature that made everything perfectly safe. 

"What says he? What says he? What says he?" the wolves repeated everyfew minutes; and Mowgli translated until he came to the witch part ofthe story, which was a little beyond him, and then he said that the manand woman who had been so kind to him were trapped. 

"Does Man trap Man?" said Bagheera. 

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

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

"And those?" said Gray Brother, looking hungrily after the brown backsof the charcoal-burners. 

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

Gray Brother bared his white teeth in contempt. "We can head them roundand 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 theroad, and, Gray Brother, the song need not be of the sweetest. Go withthem, Bagheera, and help make that song. When night is shut down, meetme by the village--Gray Brother knows the place. "

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

He lowered his head so that the sound would travel, and cried a long, long, "Good hunting"--a midnight call in the afternoon, which was quiteawful enough to begin with. Mowgli heard it rumble, and rise, and fall, and die off in a creepy sort of whine behind him, and laughed to himselfas he ran through the Jungle. He could see the charcoal-burners huddledin a knot; old Buldeo's gun-barrel waving, like a banana-leaf, to everypoint of the compass at once. Then Gray Brother gave the Ya-la-hi!Yalaha! call for the buck-driving, when the Pack drives the nilghai, thebig blue cow, before them, and it seemed to come from the very ends ofthe earth, nearer, and nearer, and nearer, till it ended in a shrieksnapped off short. The other three answered, till even Mowgli could havevowed that the full Pack was in full cry, and then they all brokeinto the magnificent Morning-song in the Jungle, with every turn, andflourish, 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 itsounds like when it breaks the afternoon hush of the Jungle:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was at twilight when he saw the well-remembered grazing-grounds, andthe dhak-tree where Gray Brother had waited for him on the morning thathe killed Shere Khan. Angry as he was at the whole breed and communityof Man, something jumped up in his throat and made him catch his breathwhen he looked at the village roofs. He noticed that every one had comein from the fields unusually early, and that, instead of getting totheir 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, " saidMowgli. "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 nightsafter, it will be Mowgli's turn again. "

He crept along outside the wall till he came to Messua's hut, and lookedthrough the window into the room. There lay Messua, gagged, and boundhand and foot, breathing hard, and groaning: her husband was tied to thegaily-painted bedstead. The door of the hut that opened into the streetwas shut fast, and three or four people were sitting with their backs toit. 

Mowgli knew the manners and customs of the villagers very fairly. Heargued that so long as they could eat, and talk, and smoke, they wouldnot do anything else; but as soon as they had fed they would begin to bedangerous. Buldeo would be coming in before long, and if his escort haddone its duty, Buldeo would have a very interesting tale to tell. So hewent in through the window, and, stooping over the man and the woman, cut their thongs, pulling out the gags, and looked round the hut forsome milk. 

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

"I knew--I knew he would come, " Messua sobbed at last. "Now do I KNOWthat he is my son!" and she hugged Mowgli to her heart. Up to that timeMowgli 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 apause. 

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

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

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

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

"I do not understand. Let Messua tell the tale. "

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

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

The man looked up gloomily, but Messua laughed. "See!" she said to herhusband, "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 beas dead already. "

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

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

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

"H'm!" said Mowgli, and he tickled the palm of his hand with the tipof his skinning-knife; "I have no wish to do harm to any one of thisvillage--YET. But I do not think they will stay thee. In a little whilethey will have much else to think upon. Ah!" he lifted his head andlistened to shouting and trampling outside. "So they have let Buldeocome home at last?"

"He was sent out this morning to kill thee, " Messua cried. "Didst thoumeet him?"

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

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

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

He shook himself and glided back to the hut. Just as he was at thewindow 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 Iloved best. Little Frog, I have a desire to see that woman who gave theemilk, " said Mother Wolf, all wet with the dew. 

"They have bound and mean to kill her. I have cut those ties, and shegoes with her man through the Jungle. "

"I also will follow. I am old, but not yet toothless. " Mother Wolfreared herself up on end, and looked through the window into the dark ofthe hut. 

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

"Maybe, " said Mowgli, with a very unpleasant look on his face; "butto-night I am very far from that trail. Wait here, but do not let hersee. "

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

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

"I have spoken to my man, " said Messua. "Khanhiwara is thirty miles fromhere, but at Khanhiwara we may find the English--"

"And what Pack are they?" said Mowgli. 

"I do not know. They be white, and it is said that they govern allthe land, and do not suffer people to burn or beat each other withoutwitnesses. If we can get thither to-night, we live. Otherwise we die. "

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

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

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

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

"I say they will NOT follow till I choose; but a horse is well thoughtof, for Messua is tired. " Her husband stood up and knotted the lastof the rupees into his waist-cloth. Mowgli helped Messua through thewindow, and the cool night air revived her, but the Jungle in thestarlight looked very dark and terrible. 

"Ye know the trail to Khanhiwara?" Mowgli whispered. 

They nodded. 

"Good. Remember, now, not to be afraid. And there is no need to goquickly. Only--only there may be some small singing in the Jungle behindyou and before. "

"Think you we would have risked a night in the Jungle through anythingless than the fear of burning? It is better to be killed by beasts thanby 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 oldJungle Law for the hundredth time to a foolish cub--"I say that not atooth in the Jungle is bared against you; not a foot in the Jungle islifted against you. Neither man nor beast shall stay you till you comewithin eye-shot of Khanhiwara. There will be a watch about you. " Heturned quickly to Messua, saying, "HE does not believe, but thou wiltbelieve?"

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

"HE will be afraid when he hears my people singing. Thou wilt know andunderstand. Go now, and slowly, for there is no need of any haste. Thegates are shut. "

Messua flung herself sobbing at Mowgli's feet, but he lifted her veryquickly with a shiver. Then she hung about his neck and called him everyname of blessing she could think of, but her husband looked enviouslyacross his fields, and said: "IF we reach Khanhiwara, and I get the earof the English, I will bring such a lawsuit against the Brahmin and oldBuldeo and the others as shall eat the village to the bone. They shallpay me twice over for my crops untilled and my buffaloes unfed. I willhave 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 placeof hiding. 

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

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

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

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

"I am ashamed of thy brethren, " he said, purring. "What? Did they notsing sweetly to Buldeo?" said Mowgli. 

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

"I had other game afoot. Ask Buldeo if he liked the song. But whereare the Four? I do not wish one of the Man-Pack to leave the gatesto-night. "

"What need of the Four, then?" said Bagheera, shifting from foot tofoot, his eyes ablaze, and purring louder than ever. "I can hold them, Little Brother. Is it killing at last? The singing and the sight of themen climbing up the trees have made me very ready. Who is Man that weshould 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 whitesunlight. 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 whirlingoverhead, struck left and right into the empty air, that sang under thestrokes, landed noiselessly, and leaped again and again, while thehalf purr, half growl gathered head as steam rumbles in a boiler. "Iam Bagheera--in the jungle--in the night, and my strength is in me. Whoshall stay my stroke? Man-cub, with one blow of my paw I could beat thyhead flat as a dead frog in the summer!"

"Strike, then!" said Mowgli, in the dialect of the village, NOT thetalk 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 thelevel of Mowgli's. Once more Mowgli stared, as he had stared at therebellious cubs, full into the beryl-green eyes till the red glarebehind their green went out like the light of a lighthouse shut offtwenty miles across the sea; till the eyes dropped, and the big headwith them--dropped lower and lower, and the red rasp of a tongue gratedon Mowgli's instep. 

"Brother--Brother--Brother!" the boy whispered, stroking steadily andlightly from the neck along the heaving back. "Be still, be still! It isthe fault of the night, and no fault of thine. "

"It was the smells of the night, " said Bagheera penitently. "This aircries aloud to me. But how dost THOU know?"

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

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

"They are very long at their talk under the tree, " Mowgli said, withoutnoticing the last sentence. "Buldeo must have told many tales. Theyshould come soon to drag the woman and her man out of the trap and putthem into the Red Flower. They will find that trap sprung. Ho! ho!"

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

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

"Pah!" Bagheera grunted. "This place is rank with Man, but here is justsuch 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 thegreat brute's weight. "By the Broken Lock that freed me, they will thinkthey have caught big game! Come and sit beside me, Little Brother; wewill give them 'good hunting' together!"

"No; I have another thought in my stomach. The Man-Pack shall not knowwhat share I have in the sport. Make thine own hunt. I do not wish tosee them. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The man and the woman are come safe within eye-shot of Khanhiwara, "Bagheera said. "Thy lair mother sent the word back by Chil, the Kite. They found a horse before midnight of the night they were freed, andwent 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 thismorning. Then they ate their food and ran back quickly to their houses. "

"Did they, by chance, see thee?"

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

"They shall be forgotten in a little while. Where does Hathi feedto-night?"

"Where he chooses. Who can answer for the Silent One? But why? What isthere Hathi can do which we cannot?"

"Bid him and his three sons come here to me. "

"But, indeed, and truly, Little Brother, it is not--it is not seemlyto say 'Come, ' and 'Go, ' to Hathi. Remember, he is the Master of theJungle, and before the Man-Pack changed the look on thy face, he taughtthee the Master-words of the Jungle. "

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

"The Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore, " Bagheera repeated two or threetimes to make sure. "I go. Hathi can but be angry at the worst, andI would give a moon's hunting to hear a Master-word that compels theSilent One. "

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

"It WAS a Master-word, " Bagheera whispered in his ear. "They werefeeding by the river, and they obeyed as though they were bullocks. Lookwhere they come now!"

Hathi and his three sons had arrived, in their usual way, without asound. The mud of the river was still fresh on their flanks, and Hathiwas thoughtfully chewing the green stem of a young plantain-tree that hehad gouged up with his tusks. But every line in his vast body showed toBagheera, who could see things when he came across them, that it was notthe Master of the Jungle speaking to a Man-cub, but one who was afraidcoming 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 kepthim swinging and rocking, and shifting from one foot to another, fora long time before he spoke; and when he opened his mouth it was toBagheera, not to the elephants. 

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

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

"And to the ploughing that follows the reaping?" said Mowgli. 

"There was no ploughing, " said Hathi. 

"And to the men that live by the green crops on the ground?" saidMowgli. 

"They went away. "

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

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

"And what more?" said Mowgli. 

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

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

"Kill, then, " said the youngest of Hathi's three sons, picking up a tuftof grass, dusting it against his fore-legs, and throwing it away, whilehis little red eyes glanced furtively from side to side. 

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

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

"Let them run as the men ran from the fields of Bhurtpore, till we havethe rain-water for the only plough, and the noise of the rain on thethick leaves for the pattering of their spindles--till Bagheera and Ilair in the house of the Brahmin, and the buck drink at the tank behindthe temple! Let in the Jungle, Hathi!"

"But I--but we have no quarrel with them, and it needs the red rageof great pain ere we tear down the places where men sleep, " said Hathidoubtfully. 

"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 showa 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 Fieldsof Bhurtpore, and I would not wake that smell again. "

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

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

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

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

The idea of Bagheera being a stray fawn upset Mowgli altogether, and helaughed and caught his breath, and sobbed and laughed again, till he hadto 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, hisnamesake. 

By this time Hathi and his three sons had turned, each to one point ofthe 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 sixtymiles--through the Jungle; and every step they took, and every wave oftheir trunks, was known and noted and talked over by Mang and Chil andthe Monkey People and all the birds. Then they began to feed, and fedquietly for a week or so. Hathi and his sons are like Kaa, the RockPython. They never hurry till they have to. 

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

It was a dark night when Hathi and his three sons slipped down from theJungle, and broke off the poles of the machans with their trunks; theyfell as a snapped stalk of hemlock in bloom falls, and the men thattumbled from them heard the deep gurgling of the elephants in theirears. Then the vanguard of the bewildered armies of the deer broke downand flooded into the village grazing-grounds and the ploughed fields;and the sharp-hoofed, rooting wild pig came with them, and what the deerleft the pig spoiled, and from time to time an alarm of wolves wouldshake the herds, and they would rush to and fro desperately, treadingdown the young barley, and cutting flat the banks of the irrigatingchannels. Before the dawn broke the pressure on the outside of thecircle gave way at one point. The Eaters of Flesh had fallen back andleft an open path to the south, and drove upon drove of buck fled alongit. Others, who were bolder, lay up in the thickets to finish their mealnext night. 

But the work was practically done. When the villagers looked in themorning they saw their crops were lost. And that meant death if they didnot get away, for they lived year in and year out as near to starvationas the Jungle was near to them. When the buffaloes were sent to grazethe 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 thevillage lay in their stables with their heads beaten in. Only Bagheeracould have given those strokes, and only Bagheera would have thought ofinsolently dragging the last carcass to the open street. 

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

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

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

But it is hard to tear a village from its moorings. They stayed on aslong as any summer food was left to them, and they tried to gather nutsin the Jungle, but shadows with glaring eyes watched them, and rolledbefore them even at mid-day; and when they ran back afraid to theirwalls, on the tree-trunks they had passed not five minutes before thebark would be stripped and chiselled with the stroke of some greattaloned paw. The more they kept to their village, the bolder grew thewild things that gambolled and bellowed on the grazing-grounds by theWaingunga. They had no time to patch and plaster the rear walls of theempty byres that backed on to the Jungle; the wild pig trampled themdown, and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbowsover the new-won ground, and the coarse grass bristled behind the vineslike the lances of a goblin army following a retreat. The unmarried menran away first, and carried the news far and near that the village wasdoomed. Who could fight, they said, against the Jungle, or the Godsof the Jungle, when the very village cobra had left his hole in theplatform under the peepul-tree? So their little commerce with theoutside world shrunk as the trodden paths across the open grew fewerand fainter. At last the nightly trumpetings of Hathi and his three sonsceased to trouble them; for they had no more to be robbed of. The cropon the ground and the seed in the ground had been taken. The outlyingfields were already losing their shape, and it was time to throwthemselves on the charity of the English at Khanhiwara. 

Native fashion, they delayed their departure from one day to anothertill 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 arush after the heat of the summer. Then they waded out--men, women, and children--through the blinding hot rain of the morning, but turnednaturally for one farewell look at their homes. 

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

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

"All in good time, " panted Hathi. "Oh, but my tusks were red atBhurtpore; 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-streakedheads of the wreckers in the ragged gap. Then they fled, houseless andfoodless, down the valley, as their village, shredded and tossed andtrampled, melted behind them. 

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

MOWGLI'S SONG AGAINST PEOPLE

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

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

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

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

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

THE UNDERTAKERS

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

"Respect the aged!"

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

"Respect the aged! O Companions of the River--respect the aged!"

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

"O Brahmins of the River--respect the aged and infirm!"

A boatman turned where he sat on the gunwale, lifted up his hand, saidsomething that was not a blessing, and the boats creaked on throughthe twilight. The broad Indian river, that looked more like a chainof little lakes than a stream, was as smooth as glass, reflecting thesandy-red sky in mid-channel, but splashed with patches of yellow anddusky purple near and under the low banks. Little creeks ran into theriver in the wet season, but now their dry mouths hung clear abovewater-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, andended in a sort of rude brick pier-head, where people who wanted towash could wade in step by step. That was the Ghaut of the village ofMugger-Ghaut. 

Night was falling fast over the fields of lentils and rice and cottonin the low-lying ground yearly flooded by the river; over the reedsthat fringed the elbow of the bend, and the tangled jungle of thegrazing-grounds behind the still reeds. The parrots and crows, who hadbeen chattering and shouting over their evening drink, had flown inlandto roost, crossing the out-going battalions of the flying-foxes; andcloud upon cloud of water-birds came whistling and "honking" tothe cover of the reed-beds. There were geese, barrel-headed andblack-backed, teal, widgeon, mallard, and sheldrake, with curlews, andhere and there a flamingo. 

A lumbering Adjutant-crane brought up the rear, flying as though eachslow 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 ofthe voice, and landed stiffly on the sand-bar below the bridge. Then yousaw what a ruffianly brute he really was. His back view was immenselyrespectable, for he stood nearly six feet high, and looked rather like avery proper bald-headed parson. In front it was different, for his AllySloper-like head and neck had not a feather to them, and there was ahorrible raw-skin pouch on his neck under his chin--a hold-all for thethings his pick-axe beak might steal. His legs were long and thin andskinny, but he moved them delicately, and looked at them with pride ashe preened down his ashy-gray tail-feathers, glanced over the smooth ofhis shoulder, and stiffened into "Stand at attention. "

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

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

"Ugh!" he said, shaking himself dolefully as he landed. "May the redmange destroy the dogs of this village! I have three bites for each fleaupon me, and all because I looked--only looked, mark you--at an old shoein 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 througha thick board--"I HEARD there was a new-born puppy in that same shoe. "

"To hear is one thing; to know is another, " said the Jackal, who had avery fair knowledge of proverbs, picked up by listening to men round thevillage fires of an evening. 

"Quite true. So, to make sure, I took care of that puppy while the dogswere busy elsewhere. "

"They were VERY busy, " said the Jackal. "Well, I must not go to thevillage hunting for scraps yet awhile. And so there truly was a blindpuppy in that shoe?"

"It is here, " said the Adjutant, squinting over his beak at his fullpouch. "A small thing, but acceptable now that charity is dead in theworld. "

"Ahai! The world is iron in these days, " wailed the Jackal. Then hisrestless eye caught the least possible ripple on the water, and he wenton quickly: "Life is hard for us all, and I doubt not that even ourexcellent 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 sameegg, " said the Adjutant to nobody in particular; for he was rather afine sort of a liar on his own account when he took the trouble. 

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

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

"That his food never fails, and in consequence----"

There was a soft grating sound, as though a boat had just touched inshoal water. The Jackal spun round quickly and faced (it is alwaysbest to face) the creature he had been talking about. It was atwenty-four-foot crocodile, cased in what looked like treble-rivetedboiler-plate, studded and keeled and crested; the yellow points of hisupper teeth just overhanging his beautifully fluted lower jaw. Itwas the blunt-nosed Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, older than any man in thevillage, who had given his name to the village; the demon of the fordbefore the railway bridge, came--murderer, man-eater, and local fetishin one. He lay with his chin in the shallows, keeping his place by analmost invisible rippling of his tail, and well the Jackal knew that onestroke of that same tail in the water would carry the Mugger up the bankwith the rush of a steam-engine. 

"Auspiciously met, Protector of the Poor!" he fawned, backing at everyword. "A delectable voice was heard, and we came in the hopes of sweetconversation. 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 flatterywas the best way of getting things to eat, and the Mugger knew thatthe Jackal had spoken for this end, and the Jackal knew that the Muggerknew, and the Mugger knew that the Jackal knew that the Mugger knew, andso they were all very contented together. 

The old brute pushed and panted and grunted up the bank, mumbling, "Respect the aged and infirm!" and all the time his little eyes burnedlike coals under the heavy, horny eyelids on the top of his triangularhead, as he shoved his bloated barrel-body along between his crutchedlegs. Then he settled down, and, accustomed as the Jackal was to hisways, he could not help starting, for the hundredth time, when he sawhow exactly the Mugger imitated a log adrift on the bar. He had eventaken pains to lie at the exact angle a naturally stranded log wouldmake with the water, having regard to the current of the season at thetime and place. All this was only a matter of habit, of course, becausethe Mugger had come ashore for pleasure; but a crocodile is never quitefull, and if the Jackal had been deceived by the likeness he would nothave lived to philosophise over it. 

"My child, I heard nothing, " said the Mugger, shutting one eye. "Thewater was in my ears, and also I was faint with hunger. Since therailway 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 allalike, to my mind. "

"Nay, there are very great differences indeed, " the Mugger answeredgently. "Some are as lean as boat-poles. Others again are fat asyoung ja--dogs. Never would I causelessly revile men. They are of allfashions, but the long years have shown me that, one with another, theyare very good. Men, women, and children--I have no fault to find withthem. And remember, child, he who rebukes the World is rebuked by theWorld. "

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

"Consider, though, their ingratitude to this excellent one, " began theJackal tenderly. 

"Nay, nay, not ingratitude!" the Mugger said. "They do not think forothers; that is all. But I have noticed, lying at my station below theford, that the stairs of the new bridge are cruelly hard to climb, bothfor old people and young children. The old, indeed, are not so worthy ofconsideration, but I am grieved--I am truly grieved--on account of thefat children. Still, I think, in a little while, when the newness of thebridge has worn away, we shall see my people's bare brown legs bravelysplashing through the ford as before. Then the old Mugger will behonoured again. "

"But surely I saw Marigold wreaths floating off the edge of the Ghautonly 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 losesher eyesight year by year, and cannot tell a log from me--the Mugger ofthe Ghaut. I saw the mistake when she threw the garland, for I was lyingat the very foot of the Ghaut, and had she taken another step I mighthave shown her some little difference. Yet she meant well, and we mustconsider the spirit of the offering. "

"What good are marigold wreaths when one is on the rubbish-heap?" saidthe Jackal, hunting for fleas, but keeping one wary eye on his Protectorof the Poor. 

"True, but they have not yet begun to make the rubbish-heap that shallcarry ME. Five times have I seen the river draw back from the villageand make new land at the foot of the street. Five times have I seen thevillage rebuilt on the banks, and I shall see it built yet five timesmore. I am no faithless, fish-hunting Gavial, I, at Kasi to-day andPrayag to-morrow, as the saying is, but the true and constant watcher ofthe 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 hisreward. '"

"_I_ have watched long--very long--nearly all my life, and my reward hasbeen bites and blows, " said the Jackal. 

"Ho! ho! ho!" roared the Adjutant. 

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

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

The Jackal winced, though he was full three seasons old, but you cannotresent an insult from a person with a beak a yard long, and the power ofdriving it like a javelin. The Adjutant was a most notorious coward, butthe Jackal was worse. 

"We must live before we can learn, " said the Mugger, "and there is thisto say: Little jackals are very common, child, but such a mugger as I amis 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 orwalks 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 acreek or a backwater has an outlet to it ere you ascend, much may bedone. "

"Once I heard that even the Protector of the Poor made a mistake, " saidthe Jackal viciously. 

"True; but there my Fate helped me. It was before I had come to myfull growth--before the last famine but three (by the Right and Left ofGunga, how full used the streams to be in those days!). Yes, I was youngand unthinking, and when the flood came, who so pleased as I? A littlemade me very happy then. The village was deep in flood, and I swam abovethe Ghaut and went far inland, up to the rice-fields, and they were deepin good mud. I remember also a pair of bracelets (glass they were, and troubled me not a little) that I found that evening. Yes, glassbracelets; and, if my memory serves me well, a shoe. I should haveshaken 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 riveragain the flood had fallen, and I walked through the mud of the mainstreet. Who but I? Came out all my people, priests and women andchildren, and I looked upon them with benevolence. The mud is not a goodplace to fight in. Said a boatman, 'Get axes and kill him, for he is theMugger of the ford. ' 'Not so, ' said the Brahmin. 'Look, he is drivingthe flood before him! He is the godling of the village. ' Then theythrew many flowers at me, and by happy thought one led a goat across theroad. "

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

"Hairy--too hairy, and when found in the water more than likely to hidea cross-shaped hook. But that goat I accepted, and went down to theGhaut in great honour. Later, my Fate sent me the boatman who haddesired to cut off my tail with an axe. His boat grounded upon an oldshoal which you would not remember. "

"We are not ALL jackals here, " said the Adjutant. "Was it the shoal madewhere the stone-boats sank in the year of the great drouth--a long shoalthat lasted three floods?"

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

"Ay, I forgot. A channel divided them, and later dried up again, " saidthe Adjutant, who prided himself on his memory. 

"On the lower shoal my well-wisher's craft grounded. He was sleeping inthe bows, and, half awake, leaped over to his waist--no, it was no morethan to his knees--to push off. His empty boat went on and touched againbelow the next reach, as the river ran then. I followed, because I knewmen would come out to drag it ashore. "

"And did they do so?" said the Jackal, a little awe-stricken. This washunting on a scale that impressed him. 

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

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

"Not cleverness, child, but only thought. A little thought in lifeis like salt upon rice, as the boatmen say, and I have thought deeplyalways. The Gavial, my cousin, the fish-eater, has told me how hard itis 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 iswisdom; but, on the other hand, my cousin, the Gavial, lives among hispeople. MY people do not swim in companies, with their mouths out of thewater, as Rewa does; nor do they constantly rise to the surface of thewater, and turn over on their sides, like Mohoo and little Chapta; nordo they gather in shoals after flood, like Batchua and Chilwa. "

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

"So my cousin says, and makes a great to-do over hunting them, butthey do not climb the banks to escape his sharp nose. MY people areotherwise. 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 thetail to the trunk, as the saying is, I make up the whole elephant. Isthere a green branch and an iron ring hanging over a doorway? The oldMugger knows that a boy has been born in that house, and must someday come down to the Ghaut to play. Is a maiden to be married? The oldMugger 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 isthere. Has the river changed its channel, and made new land where therewas only sand before? The Mugger knows. "

"Now, of what use is that knowledge?" said the Jackal. "The river hasshifted even in my little life. " Indian rivers are nearly always movingabout in their beds, and will shift, sometimes, as much as two or threemiles in a season, drowning the fields on one bank, and spreading goodsilt on the other. 

"There is no knowledge so useful, " said the Mugger, "for new land meansnew quarrels. The Mugger knows. Oho! the Mugger knows. As soon as thewater has drained off, he creeps up the little creeks that men thinkwould not hide a dog, and there he waits. Presently comes a farmersaying he will plant cucumbers here, and melons there, in the new landthat the river has given him. He feels the good mud with his baretoes. Anon comes another, saying he will put onions, and carrots, andsugar-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 oldMugger sees and hears. Each calls the other 'Brother, ' and they go tomark out the boundaries of the new land. The Mugger hurries with themfrom point to point, shuffling very low through the mud. Now they beginto quarrel! Now they say hot words! Now they pull turbans! Now they liftup 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, asthe iron-bound bamboo of the loser witnesses. Yet they are not gratefulto the Mugger. No, they cry 'Murder!' and their families fight withsticks, twenty a-side. My people are good people--upland Jats--Malwaisof the Bet. They do not give blows for sport, and, when the fight isdone, the old Mugger waits far down the river, out of sight of thevillage, behind the kikar-scrub yonder. Then come they down, mybroad-shouldered Jats--eight or nine together under the stars, bearingthe dead man upon a bed. They are old men with gray beards, and voicesas deep as mine. They light a little fire--ah! how well I know thatfire!--and they drink tobacco, and they nod their heads together forwardin a ring, or sideways toward the dead man upon the bank. They say theEnglish Law will come with a rope for this matter, and that such a man'sfamily will be ashamed, because such a man must be hanged in the greatsquare 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 thelong night. Then says one, at last, 'The fight was a fair fight. Let ustake blood-money, a little more than is offered by the slayer, and wewill say no more about it. ' Then do they haggle over the blood-money, for the dead was a strong man, leaving many sons. Yet before amratvela(sunrise) they put the fire to him a little, as the custom is, and thedead 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 goodpeople!"

"They are too close--too narrow in the hand for my crop, " croaked theAdjutant. "They waste not the polish on the cow's horn, as the sayingis; and, again, who can glean after a Malwai?"

"Ah, I--glean--THEM, " said the Mugger. 

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

"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 inthe Rains, " said the Jackal, his mouth watering at the bare thought ofit. 

"Ah, but the white-faces are there--the English, and they bring dogsfrom somewhere down the river in boats--big fat dogs--to keep those samejackals lean, " said the Adjutant. 

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

"That was better than my case, " said the Adjutant. "When I was in mythird season, a young and a bold bird, I went down to the river wherethe big boats come in. The boats of the English are thrice as big asthis village. "

"He has been as far as Delhi, and says all the people there walk ontheir heads, " muttered the Jackal. The Mugger opened his left eye, andlooked keenly at the Adjutant. 

"It is true, " the big bird insisted. "A liar only lies when he hopesto be believed. No one who had not seen those boats COULD believe thistruth. "

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

"From the insides of this boat they were taking out great pieces ofwhite 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 housewith thick walls. But a boatman, who laughed, took a piece no largerthan a small dog, and threw it to me. I--all my people--swallow withoutreflection, and that piece I swallowed as is our custom. Immediately Iwas afflicted with an excessive cold which, beginning in my crop, randown to the extreme end of my toes, and deprived me even of speech, while the boatmen laughed at me. Never have I felt such cold. I dancedin my grief and amazement till I could recover my breath and thenI danced and cried out against the falseness of this world; and theboatmen derided me till they fell down. The chief wonder of the matter, setting aside that marvellous coldness, was that there was nothing atall in my crop when I had finished my lamentings!"

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

"Anything, " said the Mugger, shutting his left eye again--"ANYTHING ispossible that comes out of a boat thrice the size of Mugger-Ghaut. Myvillage is not a small one. "

There was a whistle overhead on the bridge, and the Delhi Mailslid across, all the carriages gleaming with light, and the shadowsfaithfully following along the river. It clanked away into the darkagain; but the Mugger and the Jackal were so well used to it that theynever turned their heads. 

"Is that anything less wonderful than a boat thrice the size ofMugger-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 mostpart--but WHEN they fell) I was ready. After the first pier was madethey never thought to look down the stream for the body to burn. There, again, I saved much trouble. There was nothing strange in the buildingof the bridge, " said the Mugger. 

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

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

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

"And again it might be----" began the Mugger pettishly. 

"Certainly--most certainly, " said the Jackal, without waiting for theother to finish. 

"What?" said the Mugger angrily, for he could feel that the others knewmore than he did. "What might it be? _I_ never finished my words. Yousaid it was a bullock. "

"It is anything the Protector of the Poor pleases. I am HIS servant--notthe servant of the thing that crosses the river. "

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

"You do not know the English as I do, " said the Mugger. "There was awhite-face here when the bridge was built, and he would take a boatin the evenings and shuffle with his feet on the bottom-boards, andwhisper: 'Is he here? Is he there? Bring me my gun. ' I could hear himbefore I could see him--each sound that he made--creaking and puffingand rattling his gun, up and down the river. As surely as I had pickedup one of his workmen, and thus saved great expense in wood for theburning, so surely would he come down to the Ghaut, and shout in a loudvoice that he would hunt me, and rid the river of me--the Mugger ofMugger-Ghaut! ME! Children, I have swum under the bottom of his boat forhour after hour, and heard him fire his gun at logs; and when I was wellsure he was wearied, I have risen by his side and snapped my jaws in hisface. When the bridge was finished he went away. All the English hunt inthat fashion, except when they are hunted. "

"Who hunts the white-faces?" yapped the Jackal excitedly. 

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

"I remember a little of that Hunting. I was young then, " said theAdjutant, clattering his beak significantly. 

"I was well established here. My village was being builded for the thirdtime, as I remember, when my cousin, the Gavial, brought me word of richwaters above Benares. At first I would not go, for my cousin, who is afish-eater, does not always know the good from the bad; but I heard mypeople 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 waterand take to my feet. I went by night, using the littlest streams as theyserved me; but it was the beginning of the hot weather, and all streamswere low. I crossed dusty roads; I went through tall grass; I climbedhills in the moonlight. Even rocks did I climb, children--consider thiswell. I crossed the tail of Sirhind, the waterless, before I couldfind the set of the little rivers that flow Gungaward. I was a month'sjourney from my own people and the river that I knew. That was verymarvellous!"

"What food on the way?" said the Jackal, who kept his soul in his littlestomach, and was not a bit impressed by the Mugger's land travels. 

"That which I could find--COUSIN, " said the Mugger slowly, dragging eachword. 

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

"Assuredly, Father, I might have known, " said the Jackal. A muggerdoes not care to be called a father of jackals, and the Mugger ofMugger-Ghaut said as much--and a great deal more which there is no usein repeating here. 

"The Protector of the Poor has claimed kinship. How can I remember theprecise degree? Moreover, we eat the same food. He has said it, " was theJackal's reply. 

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

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

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

"By the Right and Left of Gunga! when I came there never did I see suchwaters!"

"Were they better, then, than the big flood of last season?" said theJackal. 

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

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

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

"Yes, by Allahabad one lay still in the slack-water and let twenty goby to pick one; and, above all, the English were not cumbered withjewellery and nose-rings and anklets as my women are nowadays. Todelight in ornaments is to end with a rope for a necklace, as the sayingis. All the muggers of all the rivers grew fat then, but it was my Fateto be fatter than them all. The news was that the English were beinghunted into the rivers, and by the Right and Left of Gunga! we believedit was true. So far as I went south I believed it to be true; and I wentdown-stream beyond Monghyr and the tombs that look over the river. "

"I know that place, " said the Adjutant. "Since those days Monghyr is alost city. Very few live there now. "

"Thereafter I worked up-stream very slowly and lazily, and a littleabove Monghyr there came down a boatful of white-faces--alive! Theywere, as I remember, women, lying under a cloth spread over sticks, andcrying aloud. There was never a gun fired at us, the watchers of thefords in those days. All the guns were busy elsewhere. We could hearthem day and night inland, coming and going as the wind shifted. I roseup full before the boat, because I had never seen white-faces alive, though I knew them well--otherwise. A naked white child kneeled by theside of the boat, and, stooping over, must needs try to trail his handsin the river. It is a pretty thing to see how a child loves runningwater. I had fed that day, but there was yet a little unfilled spacewithin me. Still, it was for sport and not for food that I rose at thechild's hands. They were so clear a mark that I did not even look when Iclosed; but they were so small that though my jaws rang true--I am sureof that--the child drew them up swiftly, unhurt. They must have passedbetween tooth and tooth--those small white hands. I should have caughthim cross-wise at the elbows; but, as I said, it was only for sport anddesire to see new things that I rose at all. They cried out one afteranother in the boat, and presently I rose again to watch them. The boatwas too heavy to push over. They were only women, but he who trustsa woman will walk on duckweed in a pool, as the saying is: and by theRight and Left of Gunga, that is truth!"

"Once a woman gave me some dried skin from a fish, " said the Jackal. "Ihad hoped to get her baby, but horse-food is better than the kick of ahorse, 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 orsince. Five times, one after another" (the Mugger must have met with anold-fashioned revolver); "and I stayed open-mouthed and gaping, my headin the smoke. Never did I see such a thing. Five times, as swiftly as Iwave my tail--thus!"

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

"Not before the fifth shot, " said the Mugger, as though he had neverdreamed of stunning one of his listeners--"not before the fifth shotdid I sink, and I rose in time to hear a boatman telling all thosewhite women that I was most certainly dead. One bullet had gone undera neck-plate of mine. I know not if it is there still, for the reason Icannot turn my head. Look and see, child. It will show that my tale istrue. "

"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 bebitten off by blind puppies if the shadow of such a thought has crossedmy 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 issufficient, and I will tell the tale to all my children, asking for noproof. "

"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 desirethat any children of thine should know that the Mugger of Mugger-Ghauttook his only wound from a woman. They will have much else to think ofif they get their meat as miserably as does their father. "

"It is forgotten long ago! It was never said! There never was a whitewoman! There was no boat! Nothing whatever happened at all. "

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

"Indeed, very many things happened, " said the Mugger, beaten in hissecond attempt that night to get the better of his friend. (Neither boremalice, however. Eat and be eaten was fair law along the river, and theJackal came in for his share of plunder when the Mugger had finisheda meal. ) "I left that boat and went up-stream, and, when I had reachedArrah and the back-waters behind it, there were no more dead English. The river was empty for a while. Then came one or two dead, in redcoats, not English, but of one kind all--Hindus and Purbeeahs--then fiveand six abreast, and at last, from Arrah to the North beyond Agra, itwas as though whole villages had walked into the water. They came outof little creeks one after another, as the logs come down in the Rains. When the river rose they rose also in companies from the shoals theyhad rested upon; and the falling flood dragged them with it across thefields and through the Jungle by the long hair. All night, too, goingNorth, 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; andevery ripple brought more dead. At last even I was afraid, for I said:'If this thing happen to men, how shall the Mugger of Mugger-Ghautescape?' There were boats, too, that came up behind me without sails, burning continually, as the cotton-boats sometimes burn, but neversinking. "

"Ah!" said the Adjutant. "Boats like those come to Calcutta of theSouth. They are tall and black, they beat up the water behind them witha tail, and they----"

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

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

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

"Marvellous! Most truly marvellous!" said the Jackal. "I am become fatthrough merely hearing about so much good eating. And afterward what, ifit be permitted to ask, did the Protector of the Poor do?"

"I said to myself--and by the Right and Left of Gunga! I locked my jawson that vow--I said I would never go roving any more. So I lived by theGhaut, very close to my own people, and I watched over them year afteryear; and they loved me so much that they threw marigold wreaths at myhead whenever they saw it lift. Yes, and my Fate has been very kind tome, 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 Adjutantsympathetically. "What does the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut need more?"

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

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

"That was a pleasant and profitable life, " he grinned, looking upinquiringly 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 alongthe banks. Yet I have told HIM a hundred times of good things wallowingdown-stream. How true is the saying, 'All the world forgets the Jackaland the Barber when the news has been told!' Now he is going to sleep!Arrh!"

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

The Jackal turned, whining impatiently, and was going to curl himselfup under the tree-trunk, when suddenly he cowered, and looked up throughthe 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 notlooking for us--those two men. "

"Men, is it? My office protects me. All India knows I am holy. " TheAdjutant, being a first-class scavenger, is allowed to go where hepleases, and so this one never flinched. 

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

"Warn him, then. He was called Protector of the Poor by some one notunlike a starving Jackal but a little time ago. "

"Let my cousin protect his own hide. He has told me again and againthere 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 saidit was a gun! Now, with good luck, we shall feed before daylight. Hecannot hear well out of water, and--this time it is not a woman!"

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

A voice on the bridge whispered: "It's an odd shot--straight downalmost--but as safe as houses. Better try behind the neck. Golly! whata brute! The villagers will be wild if he's shot, though. He's the deota[godling] of these parts. "

"Don't care a rap, " another voice answered; "he took about fifteen of mybest coolies while the bridge was building, and it's time he was puta stop to. I've been after him in a boat for weeks. Stand by with theMartini as soon as I've given him both barrels of this. "

"Mind the kick, then. A double four-bore's no joke. "

"That's for him to decide. Here goes!"

There was a roar like the sound of a small cannon (the biggest sort ofelephant-rifle is not very different from some artillery), and a doublestreak of flame, followed by the stinging crack of a Martini, whose longbullet makes nothing of a crocodile's plates. But the explosive bulletsdid the work. One of them struck just behind the Mugger's neck, ahand's-breadth to the left of the backbone, while the other burst alittle lower down, at the beginning of the tail. In ninety-nine casesout of a hundred a mortally-wounded crocodile can scramble to deep waterand get away; but the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut was literally broken intothree pieces. He hardly moved his head before the life went out of him, and he lay as flat as the Jackal. 

"Thunder and lightning! Lightning and thunder!" said that miserablelittle beast. "Has the thing that pulls the covered carts over thebridge tumbled at last?"

"It is no more than a gun, " said the Adjutant, though his verytail-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 thesand-bar, where they stood admiring the length of the Mugger. Then anative with an axe cut off the big head, and four men dragged it acrossthe spit. 

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

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

*****

Curiously enough, the Jackal and the Adjutant made the very same remarknot three minutes after the men had left. 

A RIPPLE SONG

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE KING'S ANKUS

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

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

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

"Even to the scales of the eyes it is perfect, " said Mowgli, under hisbreath, playing with the old skin. "Strange to see the covering of one'sown head at one's own feet!"

"Ay, but I lack feet, " said Kaa; "and since this is the custom of allmy people, I do not find it strange. Does thy skin never feel old andharsh?"

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

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

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

"It needs water. A new skin never comes to full colour before the firstbath. Let us go bathe. "

"I will carry thee, " said Mowgli; and he stooped down, laughing, tolift the middle section of Kaa's great body, just where the barrel wasthickest. A man might just, as well have tried to heave up a two-footwater-main; and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amusement. Then theregular evening game began--the Boy in the flush of his great strength, and the Python in his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against theother 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 heplayed carefully, and never loosed one-tenth of his power. Ever sinceMowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling, Kaa hadtaught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing else could. Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa'sshifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him bythe throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with bothquick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail asit flung backward feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock toand fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful, statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils andstruggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. "Now! now! now!"said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli's quick handcould 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 thehead that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn theguard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not theleast use in trying. 

"Good hunting!" Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot awayhalf a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers fullof grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake's pet bathing-place--adeep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting bysunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle-fashion, without a sound, and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back, his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks, and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa'sdiamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to reston Mowgli's shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the coolwater. 

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

A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them "Goodhunting!" and went away. 

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

"Not all, " said Mowgli, laughing; "else there would be a new and strongShere 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 inthe middle of the Rains, and the Rains to cover the sun in the deep ofsummer; and also I have never gone empty but I wished that I had killeda goat; and also I have never killed a goat but I wished it had beenbuck; nor buck but I wished it had been nilghai. But thus do we feel, all of us. "

"Thou hast no other desire?" the big snake demanded. 

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

"Now, the Cobra said----" Kaa began. "What cobra? He that went away justnow said nothing. He was hunting. "

"It was another. "

"Hast thou many dealings with the Poison People? I give them their ownpath. They carry death in the fore-tooth, and that is not good--for theyare 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 orfour moons since, " said he, "I hunted in Cold Lairs, which place thouhast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled shrieking past the tanksand to that house whose side I once broke for thy sake, and ran into theground. "

"But the people of Cold Lairs do not live in burrows. " Mowgli knew thatKaa was telling of the Monkey People. 

"This thing was not living, but seeking to live, " Kaa replied, witha quiver of his tongue. "He ran into a burrow that led very far. Ifollowed, 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 ofthings beyond my knowledge, and showed me many things I had never beforeseen. "

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

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

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

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

"That MUST be new game. And yet the Poison People do not tell us whengame 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 theother 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 usgo. "

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

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

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

"Good hunting!" said Mowgli, who carried his manners with his knife, andthat never left him. 

"What of the city?" said the White Cobra, without answering thegreeting. "What of the great, the walled city--the city of a hundredelephants and twenty thousand horses, and cattle past counting--the cityof the King of Twenty Kings? I grow deaf here, and it is long since Iheard their war-gongs. "

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

"I told thee, " said Kaa softly to the Cobra, --"I told thee, four moonsago, that thy city was not. "

"The city--the great city of the forest whose gates are guarded by theKing's towers--can never pass. They builded it before my father's fathercame from the egg, and it shall endure when my son's sons are as whiteas I! Salomdhi, son of Chandrabija, son of Viyeja, son of Yegasuri, madeit in the days of Bappa Rawal. Whose cattle are YE?"

"It is a lost trail, " said Mowgli, turning to Kaa. "I know not histalk. "

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

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

"Mowgli they call me, " was the answer. "I am of the Jungle. The wolvesare my people, and Kaa here is my brother. Father of Cobras, who artthou?"

"I am the Warden of the King's Treasure. Kurrun Raja builded the stoneabove me, in the days when my skin was dark, that I might teach deathto those who came to steal. Then they let down the treasure through thestone, 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 tolet down more, and never to take away. There are no riches like theseriches--the treasures of a hundred kings. But it is long and long sincethe stone was last moved, and I think that my city has forgotten. "

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

"Twice and thrice have men found their way here, " the White Cobraanswered savagely; "but they never spoke till I came upon them gropingin the dark, and then they cried only a little time. But ye come withlies, Man and Snake both, and would have me believe the city is not, andthat my wardship ends. Little do men change in the years. But I changenever! Till the stone is lifted, and the Brahmins come down singing thesongs that I know, and feed me with warm milk, and take me to the lightagain, I--I--_I_, and no other, am the Warden of the King's Treasure!The city is dead, ye say, and here are the roots of the trees? Stoopdown, 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 thouhast entered it, the lesser Kings will be thy servants!"

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

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

"They do not well in the Jungle who speak to Mowgli of favours, " saidthe boy, between his teeth; "but the dark changes all, as I know. I willlook, if that please thee. "

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

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

He let the gold pieces fall, and move forward. The floor of the vaultwas buried some five or six feet deep in coined gold and silver that hadburst from the sacks it had been originally stored in, and, in the longyears, the metal had packed and settled as sand packs at low tide. On itand in it and rising through it, as wrecks lift through the sand, werejewelled elephant-howdahs of embossed silver, studded with plates ofhammered gold, and adorned with carbuncles and turquoises. There werepalanquins and litters for carrying queens, framed and braced withsilver and enamel, with jade-handled poles and amber curtain-rings;there were golden candlesticks hung with pierced emeralds that quiveredon the branches; there were studded images, five feet high, of forgottengods, silver with jewelled eyes; there were coats of mail, gold inlaidon steel, and fringed with rotted and blackened seed-pearls; therewere helmets, crested and beaded with pigeon's-blood rubies; there wereshields of lacquer, of tortoise-shell and rhinoceros-hide, strappedand bossed with red gold and set with emeralds at the edge; there weresheaves of diamond-hilted swords, daggers, and hunting-knives; therewere golden sacrificial bowls and ladles, and portable altars of a shapethat never sees the light of day; there were jade cups and bracelets;there were incense-burners, combs, and pots for perfume, henna, andeye-powder, all in embossed gold; there were nose-rings, armlets, head-bands, finger-rings, and girdles past any counting; there werebelts, seven fingers broad, of square-cut diamonds and rubies, andwooden boxes, trebly clamped with iron, from which the wood had fallenaway in powder, showing the pile of uncut star-sapphires, opals, cat's-eyes, sapphires, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and garnets within. 

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

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

"I do not understand, " said Mowgli. "The things are hard and cold, andby no means good to eat. But this"--he lifted the ankus--"I desire totake 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 giveit, " he said. "All that is here I will give thee--till thou goest away. "

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

"Look by thy foot! What is that there?" Mowgli picked up something whiteand smooth. "It is the bone of a man's head, " he said quietly. "And hereare two more. "

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

"But what do I need of this that is called treasure? If thou wiltgive me the ankus to take away, it is good hunting. If not, it is goodhunting none the less. I do not fight with the Poison People, and I wasalso taught the Master-word of thy tribe. "

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

Kaa flung himself forward with blazing eyes. "Who bade me bring theMan?" he hissed. 

"I surely, " the old Cobra lisped. "It is long since I have seen Man, andthis Man speaks our tongue. "

"But there was no talk of killing. How can I go to the Jungle and saythat 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! Ihave 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 amthe Warden of the Treasure of the King's City!"

"But, thou white worm of the dark, I tell thee there is neither king norcity! The Jungle is all about us!" cried Kaa. 

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

Mowgli put his hand on Kaa's head quietly. 

"The white thing has dealt with men of the Man-Pack until now. He doesnot know me, " he whispered. "He has asked for this hunting. Let him haveit. " Mowgli had been standing with the ankus held point down. He flungit from him quickly and it dropped crossways just behind the greatsnake's hood, pinning him to the floor. In a flash, Kaa's weight wasupon the writhing body, paralysing it from hood to tail. The red eyesburned, and the six spare inches of the head struck furiously right andleft. 

"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 forfood. But look you, Kaa!" He caught the snake behind the hood, forcedthe mouth open with the blade of the knife, and showed the terriblepoison-fangs of the upper jaw lying black and withered in the gum. TheWhite Cobra had outlived his poison, as a snake will. 

"THUU" ("It is dried up"--Literally, a rotted out tree-stump), saidMowgli; and motioning Kaa away, he picked up the ankus, setting theWhite Cobra free. 

"The King's Treasure needs a new Warden, " he said gravely. "Thuu, thouhast not done well. Run to and fro and make sport, Thuu!"

"I am ashamed. Kill me!" hissed the White Cobra. 

"There has been too much talk of killing. We will go now. I take thethorn-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 ofall my city. Not long wilt thou hold it, Jungle Man, nor he who takes itfrom thee. They will kill, and kill, and kill for its sake! My strengthis dried up, but the ankus will do my work. It is Death! It is Death! Itis Death!"

Mowgli crawled out through the hole into the passage again, and the lastthat he saw was the White Cobra striking furiously with his harmlessfangs at the stolid golden faces of the gods that lay on the floor, andhissing, "It is Death!"

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

"This is brighter than Bagheera's eyes, " he said delightedly, as hetwirled the ruby. "I will show it to him; but what did the Thuu meanwhen he talked of death?"

"I cannot say. I am sorrowful to my tail's tail that he felt not thyknife. There is always evil at Cold Lairs--above ground or below. Butnow 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 admireit, till he came to that part of the Jungle Bagheera chiefly used, and found him drinking after a heavy kill. Mowgli told him all hisadventures from beginning to end, and Bagheera sniffed at the ankusbetween whiles. When Mowgli came to the White Cobra's last words, thePanther purred approvingly. 

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

"I was born in the King's cages at Oodeypore, and it is in my stomachthat I know some little of Man. Very many men would kill thrice in anight for the sake of that one big red stone alone. "

"But the stone makes it heavy to the hand. My little bright knife isbetter; and--see! the red stone is not good to eat. Then WHY would theykill?"

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

"I remember. Men kill because they are not hunting;--for idleness andpleasure. Wake again, Bagheera. For what use was this thorn-pointedthing made?"

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

"It was made by men to thrust into the head of the sons of Hathi, sothat the blood should pour out. I have seen the like in the street ofOodeypore, before our cages. That thing has tasted the blood of manysuch as Hathi. "

"But why do they thrust into the heads of elephants?"

"To teach them Man's Law. Having neither claws nor teeth, men make thesethings--and worse. "

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

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

"White or black, or death or life, _I_ am going to sleep, LittleBrother. 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 threeor four creepers together, and in less time than it takes to tell wasswinging in a hammock fifty feet above ground. Though he had no positiveobjection to strong daylight, Mowgli followed the custom of hisfriends, and used it as little as he could. When he waked among the veryloud-voiced peoples that live in the trees, it was twilight once more, and he had been dreaming of the beautiful pebbles he had thrown away. 

"At least I will look at the thing again, " he said, and slid down acreeper to the earth; but Bagheera was before him. Mowgli could hear himsnuffing in the half light. 

"Where is the thorn-pointed thing?" cried Mowgli. 

"A man has taken it. Here is the trail. "

"Now we shall see whether the Thuu spoke truth. If the pointed thing isDeath, that man will die. Let us follow. "

"Kill first, " said Bagheera. "An empty stomach makes a careless eye. Mengo 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 beforethey finished their meat and drink and buckled down to the trail. TheJungle People know that nothing makes up for being hurried over yourmeals. 

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

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

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

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

"Wait!" said Bagheera, and flung himself forward with one superb boundas far as ever he could. The first thing to do when a trail ceases toexplain itself is to cast forward without leaving, your own confusingfoot-marks on the ground. Bagheera turned as he landed, and facedMowgli, crying, "Here comes another trail to meet him. It is a smallerfoot, this second trail, and the toes turn inward. "

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

"That is true, " said Bagheera. "Now, lest by crossing each other'stracks we foul the signs, let each take one trail. I am Big Foot, LittleBrother, and thou art Little Foot, the Gond. "

Bagheera leaped back to the original trail, leaving Mowgli stoopingabove 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 standstill, not daring to shift my feet. Cry thy trail, Little Brother. "

"Now, I, Little Foot, come to the rock, " said Mowgli, running up histrail. "Now, I sit down under the rock, leaning upon my right hand, andresting my bow between my toes. I wait long, for the mark of my feet isdeep here. "

"I also, " said Bagheera, hidden behind the rock. "I wait, resting the endof the thorn-pointed thing upon a stone. It slips, for here is a scratchupon the stone. Cry thy trail, Little Brother. "

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

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

"I come from behind the rock upon my knees, dragging the thorn-pointedthing. Seeing no one, I run. I, Big Foot, run swiftly. The trail isclear. Let each follow his own. I run!"

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

"Where art thou, Little Foot?" cried Bagheera. Mowgli's voice answeredhim not fifty yards to the right. 

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

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

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

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

"Follow on. But where is the drinker of elephant's blood--the red-eyedthorn?"

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

The single trail of a light man who had been running quickly and bearinga burden on his left shoulder held on round a long, low spur of driedgrass, 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 hiddenin a ravine. 

"Again!" said Bagheera, checking as though he had been turned intostone. 

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

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

"Indeed, they killed for the sake of the red and blue stones, " Bagheeraanswered. "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 talkedtogether, all five, standing up, before they killed him. Bagheera, letus go back. My stomach is heavy in me, and yet it heaves up and downlike 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 ofthe 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, trottingin and out between the low scrub bushes of the new Jungle they wereexploring. Bagheera, a little to his left, made an indescribable noisein his throat. 

"Here is one that has done with feeding, " said he. A tumbled bundleof gay-coloured clothes lay under a bush, and round it was some spiltflour. 

"That was done by the bamboo again, " said Mowgli. "See! that white dustis what men eat. They have taken the kill from this one, --he carriedtheir 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 himfat, " said Mowgli to himself. "The drinker of elephant's blood is Deathhimself--but still I do not understand!"

"Follow!" said Bagheera. 

They had not gone half a mile farther when they heard Ko, the Crow, singing the death-song in the top of a tamarisk under whose shade threemen were lying. A half-dead fire smoked in the centre of the circle, under an iron plate which held a blackened and burned cake of unleavenedbread. Close to the fire, and blazing in the sunshine, lay theruby-and-turquoise ankus. 

"The thing works quickly; all ends here, " said Bagheera. "How did THESEdie, Mowgli? There is no mark on any. "

A Jungle-dweller gets to learn by experience as much as many doctorsknow of poisonous plants and berries. Mowgli sniffed the smoke that cameup from the fire, 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 thefood 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, thereadiest poison in all India. 

"What now?" said the panther. "Must thou and I kill each other foryonder red-eyed slayer?"

"Can it speak?" said Mowgli in a whisper. "Did I do it a wrong when Ithrew it away? Between us two it can do no wrong, for we do not desirewhat men desire. If it be left here, it will assuredly continue to killmen one after another as fast as nuts fall in a high wind. I have nolove to men, but even I would not have them die six in a night. "

"What matter? They are only men. They killed one another, and were wellpleased, " said Bagheera. "That first little woodman hunted well. "

"They are cubs none the less; and a cub will drown himself to bite themoon's light on the water. The fault was mine, " said Mowgli, who spokeas though he knew all about everything. "I will never again bring intothe Jungle strange things--not though they be as beautiful as flowers. This"--he handled the ankus gingerly--"goes back to the Father ofCobras. But first we must sleep, and we cannot sleep near thesesleepers. 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 tellthee it is no fault of the blood-drinker. The trouble is with the men. "

"All one, " said Mowgli. "Dig the hole deep. When we wake I will take himup and carry him back. "

*****

Two nights later, as the White Cobra sat mourning in the darkness ofthe vault, ashamed, and robbed, and alone, the turquoise ankus whirledthrough the hole in the wall, and clashed on the floor of golden coins. 

"Father of Cobras, " said Mowgli (he was careful to keep the other sideof the wall), "get thee a young and ripe one of thine own people to helpthee guard the King's Treasure, so that no man may come away alive anymore. "

"Ah-ha! It returns, then. I said the thing was Death. How comes it thatthou art still alive?" the old Cobra mumbled, twining lovingly round theankus-haft. 

"By the Bull that bought me, I do not know! That thing has killed sixtimes in a night. Let him go out no more. "

THE SONG OF THE LITTLE HUNTER

 Ere Mor the Peacock flutters, ere 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--snuffle-snuffle 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; 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 slivered 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!

QUIQUERN

 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. 

"He has opened his eyes. Look!"

"Put him in the skin again. He will be a strong dog. On the fourth monthwe will name him. "

"For whom?" said Amoraq. 

Kadlu's eye rolled round the skin-lined snow-house till it fell onfourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench, making a buttonout of walrus ivory. "Name him for me, " said Kotuko, with a grin. "Ishall need him one day. "

Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were almost buried in the fat of hisflat cheeks, and nodded to Amoraq, while the puppy's fierce motherwhined to see her baby wriggling far out of reach in the little sealskinpouch hung above the warmth of the blubber-lamp. Kotuko went on with hiscarving, and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of leather dog-harnesses into atiny little room that opened from one side of the house, slipped off hisheavy deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a whalebone-net that hung aboveanother lamp, and dropped down on the sleeping-bench to whittle ata piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq, his wife, should bring theregular dinner of boiled meat and blood-soup. He had been out sinceearly dawn at the seal-holes, eight miles away, and had come home withthree big seal. Half-way down the long, low snow passage or tunnelthat led to the inner door of the house you could hear snappings andyelpings, 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 thesleeping-bench, and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch handle ofspringy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy, plaited thong. Hedived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs wereeating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace beforemeals. When he crawled out at the far end, half a dozen furry headsfollowed him with their eyes as he went to a sort of gallows ofwhale-jawbones, from which the dog's meat was hung; split off the frozenstuff in big lumps with a broad-headed spear; and stood, his whip inone hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name, theweakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn; forthe tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning, and flick awayan inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped, choked onceover his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the passage, while the boy stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights anddealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader ofthe team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed; and to him Kotukogave 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 thelamp that will make a great many howlings. SARPOK! Get in!"

He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from hisfurs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door, tapped theskin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might havefallen from the dome of snow above, and curled up on the bench. Thedogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep, the boy-baby inAmoraq's deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled, and the mother ofthe newly-named puppy lay at Kotuko's side, her eyes fixed on the bundleof sealskin, warm and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp. 

And all this happened far away to the north, beyond Labrador, beyondHudson's Strait, where the great tides heave the ice about, north ofMelville Peninsula--north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla Straits--onthe north shore of Baffin Land, where Bylot's Island stands above theice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong side up. North ofLancaster Sound there is little we know anything about, except NorthDevon 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 Esquimau, --and his tribe, somethirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut--"the country lyingat the back of something. " In the maps that desolate coast is writtenNavy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name is best, because the country liesat the very back of everything in the world. For nine months of the yearthere is only ice and snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that noone can realise who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For sixmonths of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible. In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other day andevery night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the southerlyslopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly buds, a tinystonecrop or so makes believe to blossom, beaches of fine gravel androunded stones run down to the open sea, and polished boulders andstreaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow. But all that is gonein a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down again on the land; whileat sea the ice tears up and down the offing, jamming and ramming, andsplitting and hitting, and pounding and grounding, till it all freezestogether, 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. Theseal must have open water to live and catch fish in, and in the deep ofwinter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from thenearest shore. In the spring he and his people retreated from the floesto the rocky mainland, where they put up tents of skins, and snared thesea-birds, or speared the young seal basking on the beaches. Later, theywould go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer, and to get theiryear's store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of theinterior; coming back north in September or October for the musk-oxhunting and the regular winter sealery. This travelling was done withdog-sleighs, twenty and thirty miles a day, or sometimes down the coastin big skin "woman-boats, " when the dogs and the babies lay among thefeet of the rowers, and the women sang songs as they glided from cape tocape over the glassy, cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiutknew came from the south--driftwood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron forharpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked food much betterthan the old soap-stone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches, aswell as coloured ribbons for the women's hair, little cheap mirrors, and red cloth for the edging of deerskin dress-jackets. Kadlu traded therich, creamy, twisted narwhal horn and musk-ox teeth (these are justas valuable as pearls) to the Southern Inuit, and they, in turn, tradedwith the whalers and the missionary-posts of Exeter and CumberlandSounds; and so the chain went on, till a kettle picked up by a ship'scook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-lampsomewhere 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 thegreat cold; and he was the head of his tribe, or, as they say, "theman who knows all about it by practice. " This did not give him anyauthority, except now and then he could advise his friends to changetheir hunting-grounds; but Kotuko used it to domineer a little, in thelazy, fat Inuit fashion, over the other boys, when they came out atnight to play ball in the moonlight, or to sing the Child's Song to theAurora Borealis. 

But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired ofmaking snares for wild-fowl and kit-foxes, and most tired of all ofhelping the women to chew seal-and deer-skins (that supples them asnothing else can) the long day through, while the men were out hunting. He wanted to go into the quaggi, the Singing-House, when the huntersgathered there for their mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer, frightened them into the most delightful fits after the lamps were putout, 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 backcovered with hot blood. He wanted to throw his big boots into the netwith the tired air of the head of a family, and to gamble with thehunters when they dropped in of an evening and played a sort ofhome-made roulette with a tin pot and a nail. There were hundreds ofthings 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 ALLcatching. "

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 knowssomething of dog-driving; and Kotuko was more than sure that he knewmore than everything. 

If the puppy had not had an iron constitution he would have died fromover-stuffing and over-handling. Kotuko made him a tiny harness with atrace to it, and hauled him all over the house-floor, shouting: "Aua!Ja aua!" (Go to the right). "Choiachoi! Ja choiachoi!" (Go to the left). "Ohaha!" (Stop). The puppy did not like it at all, but being fished forin this way was pure happiness beside being put to the sleigh for thefirst time. He just sat down on the snow, and played with the seal-hidetrace that ran from his harness to the pitu, the big thong in the bowsof the sleigh. Then the team started, and the puppy found the heavyten-foot sleigh running up his back, and dragging him along the snow, while Kotuko laughed till the tears ran down his face. There followeddays and days of the cruel whip that hisses like the wind over ice, andhis companions all bit him because he did not know his work, and theharness chafed him, and he was dot allowed to sleep with Kotuko anymore, but had to take the coldest place in the passage. It was a sadtime for the puppy. 

The boy learned, too, as fast as the dog; though a dog-sleigh is aheart-breaking thing to manage. Each beast is harnessed, the weakestnearest to the driver, by his own separate trace, which runs underhis left fore-leg to the main thong, where it is fastened by a sortof button and loop which can be slipped by a turn of the wrist, thusfreeing one dog at a time. This is very necessary, because young dogsoften get the trace between their hind legs, where it cuts to the bone. And they one and all WILL go visiting their friends as they run, jumpingin and out among the traces. Then they fight, and the result is moremixed than a wet fishing-line next morning. A great deal of trouble canbe avoided by scientific use of the whip. Every Inuit boy prides himselfas being a master of the long lash; but it is easy to flick at a mark onthe ground, and difficult to lean forward and catch a shirking dog justbehind the shoulders when the sleigh is going at full speed. If you callone dog's name for "visiting, " and accidentally lash another, the twowill fight it out at once, and stop all the others. Again, if you travelwith a companion and begin to talk, or by yourself and sing, the dogswill halt, turn round, and sit down to hear what you have to say. Kotukowas run away from once or twice through forgetting to block the sleighwhen he stopped; and he broke many lashings, and ruined a few thongsbefore he could be trusted with a full team of eight and the lightsleigh. Then he felt himself a person of consequence, and on smooth, black ice, with a bold heart and a quick elbow, he smoked along overthe levels as fast as a pack in full cry. He would go ten miles to theseal-holes, and when he was on the hunting-grounds he would twitch atrace loose from the pitu, and free the big black leader, who wasthe cleverest dog in the team. As soon as the dog had scented abreathing-hole, Kotuko would reverse the sleigh, driving a couple ofsawed-off antlers, that stuck up like perambulator-handles from theback-rest, deep into the snow, so that the team could not get away. Thenhe would crawl forward inch by inch, and wait till the seal came upto breathe. Then he would stab down swiftly with his spear andrunning-line, and presently would haul his seal up to the lip of theice, while the black leader came up and helped to pull the carcassacross the ice to the sleigh. That was the time when the harnessed dogsyelled and foamed with excitement, and Kotuko laid the long lash like ared-hot bar across all their faces, till the carcass froze stiff. Goinghome was the heavy work. The loaded sleigh had to be humoured among therough ice, and the dogs sat down and looked hungrily at the seal insteadof pulling. At last they would strike the well-worn sleigh-road to thevillage, and toodle-kiyi along the ringing ice, heads down and tailsup, while Kotuko struck up the "An-gutivaun tai-na tau-na-ne taina" (TheSong of the Returning Hunter), and voices hailed him from house to houseunder all that dim, star-littern sky. 

When Kotuko the dog came to his full growth he enjoyed himself too. Hefought his way up the team steadily, fight after fight, till one fineevening, over their food, he tackled the big, black leader (Kotuko theboy saw fair play), and made second dog of him, as they say. So he waspromoted to the long thong of the leading dog, running five feet inadvance of all the others: it was his bounden duty to stop all fighting, in harness or out of it, and he wore a collar of copper wire, very thickand heavy. On special occasions he was fed with cooked food inside thehouse, and sometimes was allowed to sleep on the bench with Kotuko. Hewas a good seal-dog, and would keep a musk-ox at bay by running roundhim and snapping at his heels. He would even--and this for a sleigh-dogis the last proof of bravery--he would even stand up to the gaunt Arcticwolf, whom all dogs of the North, as a rule, fear beyond anythingthat walks the snow. He and his master--they did not count the team ofordinary dogs as company--hunted together, day after day and nightafter night, fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged, yellow brute. All an Inuit has to do is to get food andskins for himself and his family. The women-folk make the skins intoclothing, and occasionally help in trapping small game; but the bulkof the food--and they eat enormously--must be found by the men. If thesupply fails there is no one up there to buy or beg or borrow from. Thepeople 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 hoodand chewed pieces of blubber all day, were as happy together as anyfamily in the world. They came of a very gentle race--an Inuit seldomloses his temper, and almost never strikes a child--who did not knowexactly what telling a real lie meant, still less how to steal. Theywere content to spear their living out of the heart of the bitter, hopeless cold; to smile oily smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairytales of evenings, and eat till they could eat no more, and sing theendless woman's song: "Amna aya, aya amna, ah! ah!" through the longlamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and their hunting-gear. 

But one terrible winter everything betrayed them. The Tununirmiutreturned from the yearly salmon-fishing, and made their houses on theearly ice to the north of Bylot's Island, ready to go after the sealas soon as the sea froze. But it was an early and savage autumn. Allthrough September there were continuous gales that broke up the smoothseal-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 raggedand 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 winterlay perhaps twenty miles beyond this barrier, and out of reach of theTununirmiut. Even so, they might have managed to scrape through thewinter on their stock of frozen salmon and stored blubber, and whatthe traps gave them, but in December one of their hunters came across atupik (a skin-tent) of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose menhad come down from the far North and been crushed in their little skinhunting-boats while they were out after the long-horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course, could only distribute the women among the huts of the wintervillage, for no Inuit dare refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knowswhen his own turn may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was aboutfourteen, into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of hersharp-pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of her white deer-skinleggings, they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land. She had never seentin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs before; but Kotuko the boy andKotuko 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 tofollow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set. The tribe lost acouple of their best hunters, who were badly crippled in a fight witha musk-ox, and this threw more work on the others. Kotuko went out, dayafter day, with a light hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the strongestdogs, looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice wherea seal might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole. Kotuko the dogranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice-fieldsKotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of excitement, above aseal-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 snowwall to keep off the worst of the bitter wind, and there he would waitten, twelve, twenty hours for the seal to come up to breathe, his eyesglued to the tiny mark he had made above the hole to guide the downwardthrust of his harpoon, a little seal-skin mat under his feet, and hislegs tied together in the tutareang (the buckle that the old huntershad talked about). This helps to keep a man's legs from twitching as hewaits and waits and waits for the quick-eared seal to rise. Though thereis no excitement in it, you can easily believe that the sitting still inthe buckle with the thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero isthe hardest work an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught, Kotuko the dogwould bound forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull thebody to the sleigh, where the tired and hungry dogs lay sullenly underthe lee of the broken ice. 

A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in the little village had aright to be filled, and neither bone, hide, nor sinew was wasted. Thedogs' meat was taken for human use, and Amoraq fed the team with piecesof old summer skin-tents raked out from under the sleeping-bench, andthey howled and howled again, and waked to howl hungrily. One couldtell by the soap-stone lamps in the huts that famine was near. In goodseasons, when blubber was plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped lampswould be two feet high--cheerful, oily, and yellow. Now it was abare six inches: Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick, when anunwatched flame brightened for a moment, and the eyes of all the familyfollowed her hand. The horror of famine up there in the great cold isnot so much dying, as dying in the dark. All the Inuit dread the darkthat presses on them without a break for six months in each year; andwhen the lamps are low in the houses the minds of people begin to beshaken and confused. 

But worse was to come. 

The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages, glaring at thecold stars, and snuffing into the bitter wind, night after night. Whenthey stopped howling the silence fell down again as solid and heavy as asnowdrift against a door, and men could hear the beating of their bloodin the thin passages of the ear, and the thumping of their own hearts, that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers' drums beaten acrossthe snow. One night Kotuko the dog, who had been unusually sullen inharness, leaped up and pushed his head against Kotuko's knee. Kotukopatted him, but the dog still pushed blindly forward, fawning. ThenKadlu waked, and gripped the heavy wolf-like head, and stared into theglassy eyes. The dog whimpered and shivered between Kadlu's knees. Thehair rose about his neck, and he growled as though a stranger were atthe door; then he barked joyously, and rolled on the ground, and bit atKotuko's boot like a puppy. 

"What is it?" said Kotuko; for he was beginning to be afraid. 

"The sickness, " Kadlu answered. "It is the dog sickness. " Kotuko the doglifted 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 shortstabbing-harpoon. The big dog looked at him, howled again, and slunkaway down the passage, while the other dogs drew aside right and left togive him ample room. When he was out on the snow he barked furiously, asthough on the trail of a musk-ox, and, barking and leaping and frisking, passed out of sight. His trouble was not hydrophobia, but simple, plainmadness. The cold and the hunger, and, above all, the dark, had turnedhis head; and when the terrible dog-sickness once shows itself in ateam, it spreads like wild-fire. Next hunting-day another dog sickened, and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he bit and struggled amongthe traces. Then the black second dog, who had been the leader in theold days, suddenly gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-track, and whenthey 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 thatno one would take the dogs out again. They needed them for somethingelse, and the dogs knew it; and though they were tied down and fed byhand, 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 metthe spirits of the dead hunters lost that autumn, who prophesied allsorts of horrible things. 

Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else; forthough an Inuit eats enormously he also knows how to starve. But thehunger, the darkness, the cold, and the exposure told on his strength, and he began to hear voices inside his head, and to see people whowere not there, out of the tail of his eye. One night--he had unbuckledhimself after ten hours' waiting above a "blind" seal-hole, and wasstaggering back to the village faint and dizzy--he halted to leanhis back against a boulder which happened to be supported like arocking-stone on a single jutting point of ice. His weight disturbed thebalance of the thing, it rolled over ponderously, and as Kotukosprang aside to avoid it, slid after him, squeaking and hissing on theice-slope. 

That was enough for Kotuko. He had been brought up to believe that everyrock and boulder had its owner (its inua), who was generally a one-eyedkind of a Woman-Thing called a tornaq, and that when a tornaq meant tohelp a man she rolled after him inside her stone house, and asked himwhether he would take her for a guardian spirit. (In summer thaws theice-propped rocks and boulders roll and slip all over the face of theland, so you can easily see how the idea of live stones arose. ) Kotukoheard the blood beating in his ears as he had heard it all day, andhe thought that was the tornaq of the stone speaking to him. Before hereached home he was quite certain that he had held a long conversationwith 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 hut. "She said, 'I will be a guide. ' She said, 'I will guide you to the goodseal-holes. ' To-morrow I go out, and the tornaq will guide me. "

Then the angekok, the village sorcerer, came in, and Kotuko told him thetale a second time. It lost nothing in the telling. 

"Follow the tornait [the spirits of the stones], and they will bring usfood again, " said the angekok. 

Now the girl from the North had been lying near the lamp, eating verylittle and saying less for days past; but when Amoraq and Kadlu nextmorning packed and lashed a little hand-sleigh for Kotuko, and loaded itwith his hunting-gear and as much blubber and frozen seal-meat as theycould spare, she took the pulling-rope, and stepped out boldly at theboy's side. 

"Your house is my house, " she said, as the little bone-shod sleighsqueaked and bumped behind them in the awful Arctic night. 

"My house is your house, " said Kotuko; "but I think that we shall bothgo to Sedna together. "

Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld, and the Inuit believe thatevery one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country beforegoing to Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where it never freezes and thefat reindeer trot up when you call. 

Through the village people were shouting: "The tornait have spoken toKotuko. They will show him open ice. He will bring us the seal again!"Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold, empty dark, andKotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on thepulling-rope or humoured the sleigh through the ice in the direction ofthe Polar Sea. Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told himto go north, and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer--thosestars that we call the Great Bear. 

No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-rubbish andthe sharp-edged drifts; but those two knew exactly the turn of the wristthat coaxes a sleigh round a hummock, the jerk that nearly lifts itout of an ice-crack, and the exact strength that goes to the few quietstrokes of the spear-head that make a path possible when everythinglooks hopeless. 

The girl said nothing, but bowed her head, and the long wolverine-furfringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad, dark face. The skyabove them was an intense velvety black, changing to bands of Indianred on the horizon, where the great stars burned like street-lamps. Fromtime to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll acrossthe hollow of the high heavens, flick like a flag, and disappear; ora meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness, trailing a shower ofsparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface ofthe floe tipped and laced with strange colours--red, copper, and bluish;but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bittengray. The floe, as you will remember, had been battered and tormented bythe autumn gales till it was one frozen earthquake. There were gulliesand ravines, and holes like gravel-pits, cut in ice; lumps and scatteredpieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe; blotches of oldblack ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heavedup again; roundish boulders of ice; saw-like edges of ice carved by thesnow that flies before the wind; and sunken pits where thirty or fortyacres lay below the level of the rest of the field. From a littledistance you might have taken the lumps for seal or walrus, overturnedsleighs or men on a hunting expedition, or even the great Ten-leggedWhite Spirit-Bear himself; but in spite of these fantastic shapes, allon the very edge of starting into life, there was neither sound nor theleast faint echo of sound. And through this silence and through thiswaste, where the sudden lights flapped and went out again, the sleighand the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare--anightmare 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 withthe travelling-lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat. When theyhad slept, the march began again--thirty miles a day to get ten milesnorthward. The girl was always very silent, but Kotuko mutteredto himself and broke out into songs he had learned in theSinging-House--summer songs, and reindeer and salmon songs--all horriblyout of place at that season. He would declare that he heard the tornaqgrowling to him, and would run wildly up a hummock, tossing his arms andspeaking in loud, threatening tones. To tell the truth, Kotuko was verynearly crazy for the time being; but the girl was sure that he was beingguided by his guardian spirit, and that everything would come right. She was not surprised, therefore, when at the end of the fourth marchKotuko, whose eyes were burning like fire-balls in his head, told herthat his tornaq was following them across the snow in the shape of atwo-headed dog. The girl looked where Kotuko pointed, and somethingseemed to slip into a ravine. It was certainly not human, but everybodyknew 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 mighthave been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that theireyes were untrustworthy. They had trapped nothing, and seen no trace ofgame since they had left the village; their food would not hold out foranother week, and there was a gale coming. A Polar storm can blow forten days without a break, and all that while it is certain death tobe abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough to take in thehand-sleigh (never be separated from your meat), and while he wasshaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the key-stone of theroof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice half amile away. The air was hazy, and the Thing seemed to be forty feet longand ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and a shape that quiveredall along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloudwith terror, said quietly, "That is Quiquern. What comes after?"

"He will speak to me, " said Kotuko; but the snow-knife trembled in hishand as he spoke, because however much a man may believe that he is afriend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom likes to be taken quiteat his word. Quiquern, too, is the phantom of a gigantic toothlessdog without any hair, who is supposed to live in the far North, and towander about the country just before things are going to happen. Theymay be pleasant or unpleasant things, but not even the sorcerers care tospeak about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like the Spirit-Bear, hehas several extra pairs of legs, --six or eight, --and this Thing jumpingup and down in the haze had more legs than any real dog needed. Kotukoand the girl huddled into their hut quickly. Of course if Quiquern hadwanted them, he could have torn it to pieces above their heads, but thesense of a foot-thick snow-wall between themselves and the wicked darkwas great comfort. The gale broke with a shriek of wind like the shriekof a train, and for three days and three nights it held, never varyingone point, and never lulling even for a minute. They fed the stone lampbetween their knees, and nibbled at the half-warm seal-meat, and watchedthe black soot gather on the roof for seventy-two long hours. The girlcounted up the food in the sleigh; there was not more than two days'supply, and Kotuko looked over the iron heads and the deer-sinewfastenings of his harpoon and his seal-lance and his bird-dart. Therewas nothing else to do. 

"We shall go to Sedna soon--very soon, " the girl whispered. "In threedays we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do nothing? Sing her anangekok's song to make her come here. "

He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of the magic songs, and thegale went down slowly. In the middle of his song the girl started, laidher mittened hand and then her head to the ice floor of the hut. Kotukofollowed her example, and the two kneeled, staring into each other'seyes, and listening with every nerve. He ripped a thin sliver ofwhalebone from the rim of a bird-snare that lay on the sleigh, and, after straightening, set it upright in a little hole in the ice, firmingit down with his mitten. It was almost as delicately adjusted as acompass-needle, and now instead of listening they watched. The thin rodquivered a little--the least little jar in the world; then it vibratedsteadily for a few seconds, came to rest, and vibrated again, this timenodding 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 bigbreaking, " she said. "Listen to the ground-ice. It knocks. "

When they kneeled this time they heard the most curious muffled gruntsand knockings, apparently under their feet. Sometimes it sounded asthough a blind puppy were squeaking above the lamp; then as if a stonewere being ground on hard ice; and again, like muffled blows on a drum;but all dragged out and made small, as though they travelled through alittle 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 witha very real danger. The three days' gale had driven the deep water ofBaffin's Bay southerly, and piled it on to the edge of the far-reachingland-ice that stretches from Bylot's Island to the west. Also, thestrong current which sets east out of Lancaster Sound carried with itmile upon mile of what they call pack-ice--rough ice that has not frozeninto fields; and this pack was bombarding the floe at the same timethat the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening andundermining it. What Kotuko and the girl had been listening to were thefaint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away, and the littletell-tale rod quivered to the shock of it. 

Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after its long wintersleep, there is no knowing what may happen, for solid floe-ice changesshape almost as quickly as a cloud. The gale was evidently a spring galesent out of time, and anything was possible. 

Yet the two were happier in their minds than before. If the floe brokeup there would be no more waiting and suffering. Spirits, goblins, andwitch-people were moving about on the racking ice, and they might findthemselves stepping into Sedna's country side by side with all sorts ofwild Things, the flush of excitement still on them. When they left thehut after the gale, the noise on the horizon was steadily growing, andthe tough ice moaned and buzzed all round them. 

"It is still waiting, " said Kotuko. 

On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the eight-legged Thing that theyhad seen three days before--and it howled horribly. 

"Let us follow, " said the girl. "It may know some way that does not leadto Sedna"; but she reeled from weakness as she took the pulling-rope. The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the ridges, headingalways toward the westward and the land, and they followed, while thegrowling thunder at the edge of the floe rolled nearer and nearer. Thefloe's lip was split and cracked in every direction for three or fourmiles inland, and great pans of ten-foot-thick ice, from a few yardsto twenty acres square, were jolting and ducking and surging into oneanother, and into the yet unbroken floe, as the heavy swell took andshook and spouted between them. This battering-ram ice was, so to speak, the first army that the sea was flinging against the floe. The incessantcrash and jar of these cakes almost drowned the ripping sound of sheetsof pack-ice driven bodily under the floe as cards are hastily pushedunder a tablecloth. Where the water was shallow these sheets would bepiled one atop of the other till the bottommost touched mud fifty feetdown, and the discoloured sea banked behind the muddy ice till theincreasing pressure drove all forward again. In addition to the floe andthe pack-ice, the gale and the currents were bringing down true bergs, sailing mountains of ice, snapped off from the Greenland side of thewater or the north shore of Melville Bay. They pounded in solemnly, the waves breaking white round them, and advanced on the floe like anold-time fleet under full sail. A berg that seemed ready to carry theworld before it would ground helplessly in deep water, reel over, andwallow in a lather of foam and mud and flying frozen spray, while a muchsmaller and lower one would rip and ride into the flat floe, flingingtons of ice on either side, and cutting a track half a mile long beforeit was stopped. Some fell like swords, shearing a raw-edged canal;and others splintered into a shower of blocks, weighing scores of tonsapiece, that whirled and skirted among the hummocks. Others, again, roseup bodily out of the water when they shoaled, twisted as though inpain, and fell solidly on their sides, while the sea threshed over theirshoulders. This trampling and crowding and bending and buckling andarching of the ice into every possible shape was going on as far as theeye could reach all along the north line of the floe. From whereKotuko and the girl were, the confusion looked no more than an uneasy, rippling, crawling movement under the horizon; but it came toward themeach moment, and they could hear, far away to landward a heavy booming, as it might have been the boom of artillery through a fog. That showedthat the floe was being jammed home against the iron cliffs of Bylot'sIsland, the land to the southward behind them. 

"This has never been before, " said Kotuko, staring stupidly. "This isnot the time. How can the floe break NOW?"

"Follow THAT!" the girl cried, pointing to the Thing half limping, half running distractedly before them. They followed, tugging at thehand-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 wherethe Thing rested, on a mound of old and scattered ice-blocks some fiftyfeet high, there was no motion. Kotuko leaped forward wildly, draggingthe girl after him, and crawled to the bottom of the mound. The talkingof the ice grew louder and louder round them, but the mound stayed fast, and, as the girl looked at him, he threw his right elbow upward andoutward, making the Inuit sign for land in the shape of an island. Andland it was that the eight-legged, limping Thing had led them to--somegranite-tipped, sand-beached islet off the coast, shod and sheathed andmasked with ice so that no man could have told it from the floe, but atthe bottom solid earth, and not shifting ice! The smashing and reboundof 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 rushof the heaviest ice, exactly as a ploughshare turns over loam. There wasdanger, of course, that some heavily squeezed ice-field might shoot upthe beach, and plane off the top of the islet bodily; but that did nottrouble Kotuko and the girl when they made their snow-house and beganto eat, and heard the ice hammer and skid along the beach. The Thinghad disappeared, and Kotuko was talking excitedly about his power overspirits as he crouched round the lamp. In the middle of his wild sayingsthe girl began to laugh, and rock herself backward and forward. 

Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut crawl by crawl, there weretwo heads, one yellow and one black, that belonged to two of the mostsorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw. Kotuko the dog was one, and the black leader was the other. Both were now fat, well-looking, andquite restored to their proper minds, but coupled to each other in anextraordinary fashion. When the black leader ran off, you remember, hisharness was still on him. He must have met Kotuko the dog, and played orfought with him, for his shoulder-loop had caught in the plaited copperwire of Kotuko's collar, and had drawn tight, so that neither could getat the trace to gnaw it apart, but each was fastened sidelong tohis neighbour's neck. That, with the freedom of hunting on their ownaccount, must have helped to cure their madness. They were very sober. 

The girl pushed the two shamefaced creatures towards Kotuko, and, sobbing with laughter, cried, "That is Quiquern, who led us to safeground. Look at his eight legs and double head!"

Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and blacktogether, trying to explain 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 shallgo to Sedna so soon. My tornaq sent these. The sickness has left them. "

As soon as they had greeted Kotuko, these two, who had been forced tosleep and eat and hunt together for the past few weeks, flew at eachother's throat, and there was a beautiful battle in the snow-house. "Empty dogs do not fight, " Kotuko said. "They have found the seal. Letus sleep. We shall find food. "

When they waked there was open water on the north beach of the island, and all the loosened ice had been driven landward. The first sound ofthe surf is one of the most delightful that the Inuit can hear, for itmeans that spring is on the road. Kotuko and the girl took hold of handsand smiled, for the clear, full roar of the surge among the icereminded them of salmon and reindeer time and the smell of blossomingground-willows. Even as they looked, the sea began to skim over betweenthe floating cakes of ice, so intense was the cold; but on the horizonthere 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, andthe glare lasted for only a few minutes, but it marked the turn of theyear. Nothing, they felt, could alter that. 

Kotuko found the dogs fighting over a fresh-killed seal who wasfollowing the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first of sometwenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the course of theday, and till the sea froze hard there were hundreds of keen black headsrejoicing in the shallow free water and floating about with the floatingice. 

It was good to eat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps recklessly withblubber, and watch the flame blaze three feet in the air; but as soonas the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the girl loaded the hand-sleigh, andmade the two dogs pull as they had never pulled in their lives, for theyfeared what might have happened in their village. The weather was aspitiless as usual; but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with goodfood than to hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal carcassesburied in the ice of the beach, all ready for use, and hurried back totheir people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko told themwhat was expected, and though there was no sign of a landmark, in twodays they were giving tongue outside Kadlu's house. Only three dogsanswered them; the others had been eaten, and the houses were all dark. But when Kotuko shouted, "Ojo!" (boiled meat), weak voices replied, andwhen he called the muster of the village name by name, very distinctly, there were no gaps in it. 

An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu's house; snow-water was heating;the pots were beginning to simmer, and the snow was dripping from theroof, as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the village, and the boy-babyin the hood chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber, and the huntersslowly and methodically filled themselves to the very brim withseal-meat. Kotuko and the girl told their tale. The two dogs sat betweenthem, and whenever their names came in, they cocked an ear apiece andlooked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has once gonemad and recovered, the Inuit say, is safe against all further attacks. 

"So the tornaq did not forget us, " said Kotuko. "The storm blew, the icebroke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were frightened by thestorm. Now the new seal-holes are not two days distant. Let the goodhunters go to-morrow and bring back the seal I have speared--twenty-fiveseal buried in the ice. When we have eaten those we will all follow theseal on the floe. "

"What do YOU do?" said the sorcerer in the same sort of voice as he usedto Kadlu, richest of the Tununirmiut. 

Kadlu looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly, "WE build ahouse. " He pointed to the north-west side of Kadlu's house, for that isthe side on which the married son or daughter always lives. 

The girl turned her hands palm upward, with a little despairing shakeof her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving, and could bringnothing to the housekeeping. 

Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat, and began to sweep thingsinto the girl's lap--stone lamps, iron skin-scrapers, tin kettles, deer-skins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and real canvas-needles suchas sailors use--the finest dowry that has ever been given on the faredge of the Arctic Circle, and the girl from the North bowed her headdown to the very floor. 

"Also these!" said Kotuko, laughing and signing to the dogs, who thrusttheir cold muzzles into the girl's face. 

"Ah, " said the angekok, with an important cough, as though he had beenthinking it all over. "As soon as Kotuko left the village I went to theSinging-House and sang magic. I sang all the long nights, and calledupon the Spirit of the Reindeer. MY singing made the gale blow thatbroke the ice and drew the two dogs toward Kotuko when the ice wouldhave 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, andguided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things they did. I did it. "

Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one contradicted; and the angekok, by virtue of his office, helped himself to yet another lump of boiledmeat, 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 picturesof all these adventures on a long, flat piece of ivory with a hole atone end. When he and the girl went north to Ellesmere Land in the yearof the Wonderful Open Winter, he left the picture-story with Kadlu, wholost it in the shingle when his dog-sleigh broke down one summer on thebeach of Lake Netilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Inuit foundit next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was interpreter on aCumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was afterwarda quartermaster on board a big steamer that took tourists to the NorthCape in Norway. When the tourist season was over, the steamer ranbetween London and Australia, stopping at Ceylon, and there Olsen soldthe ivory to a Cingalese jeweller for two imitation sapphires. I foundit under some rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it fromone end to the other. 

'ANGUTIVAUN TAINA'

[This is a very free translation of the Song of the Returning Hunter, as the men used to sing it after seal-spearing. The Inuit always repeatthings over and over again. ]

 Our 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. 

 Au jana! Aua! Oha! 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. 

 We raised our lance when he rose to breathe, We drove it downward--so! And we played him thus, and we 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!

 Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq! And the loaded dog-teams go, And the wives can hear their men come back. Back from the edge of the floe!

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!

It was after the letting in of the Jungle that the pleasantest part ofMowgli's life began. He had the good conscience that comes from payingdebts; 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 onepeople to another, with or without his four companions, would make manymany stories, each as long as this one. So you will never be told howhe met the Mad Elephant of Mandla, who killed two-and-twenty bullocksdrawing eleven carts of coined silver to the Government Treasury, and scattered the shiny rupees in the dust; how he fought Jacala, theCrocodile, all one long night in the Marshes of the North, and broke hisskinning-knife on the brute's back-plates; how he found a new and longerknife round the neck of a man who had been killed by a wild boar, andhow 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 thedeer, and nearly crushed to death in the swaying hot herds; how he savedHathi the Silent from being once more trapped in a pit with a stakeat the bottom, and how, next day, he himself fell into a very cunningleopard-trap, and how Hathi broke the thick wooden bars to pieces abovehim; 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, andMowgli rolled a big boulder against the mouth of their cave, and criedthe Death Song over them; Baloo grew very old and stiff, and evenBagheera, whose nerves were steel and whose muscles were iron, was ashade slower on the kill than he had been. Akela turned from gray tomilky white with pure age; his ribs stuck out, and he walked as thoughhe had been made of wood, and Mowgli killed for him. But the youngwolves, the children of the disbanded Seeonee Pack, throve andincreased, and when there were about forty of them, masterless, full-voiced, clean-footed five-year-olds, Akela told them that theyought to gather themselves together and follow the Law, and run underone head, as befitted the Free People. 

This was not a question in which Mowgli concerned himself, for, as hesaid, he had eaten sour fruit, and he knew the tree it hung from; butwhen Phao, son of Phaona (his father was the Gray Tracker in the daysof Akela's headship), fought his way to the leadership of the Pack, according to the Jungle Law, and the old calls and songs began to ringunder the stars once more, Mowgli came to the Council Rock for memory'ssake. When he chose to speak the Pack waited till he had finished, andhe sat at Akela's side on the rock above Phao. Those were days of goodhunting and good sleeping. No stranger cared to break into the junglesthat belonged to Mowgli's people, as they called the Pack, and the youngwolves grew fat and strong, and there were many cubs to bring to theLooking-over. Mowgli always attended a Looking-over, remembering thenight 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 giveAkela the half of a buck that he had killed, while the Four joggedbehind him, sparring a little, and tumbling one another over for joy ofbeing alive, he heard a cry that had never been heard since the bad daysof Shere Khan. It was what they call in the Jungle the pheeal, a hideouskind 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 ofhate, triumph, fear, and despair, with a kind of leer running throughit, you will get some notion of the pheeal that rose and sank andwavered and quavered far away across the Waingunga. The Four stopped atonce, bristling and growling. Mowgli's hand went to his knife, and hechecked, 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, " answered Gray Brother. "It issome great killing. Listen!"

It broke out again, half sobbing and half chuckling, just as though thejackal had soft human lips. Then Mowgli drew deep breath, and ran to theCouncil Rock, overtaking on his way hurrying wolves of the Pack. Phao and Akela were on the Rock together, and below them, every nervestrained, sat the others. The mothers and the cubs were cantering off totheir lairs; for when the pheeal cries it is no time for weak things tobe abroad. 

They could hear nothing except the Waingunga rushing and gurgling inthe dark, and the light evening winds among the tree-tops, till suddenlyacross the river a wolf called. It was no wolf of the Pack, for theywere all at the Rock. The note changed to a long, despairing bay; and"Dhole!" it said, "Dhole! dhole! dhole!" They heard tired feet on therocks, and a gaunt wolf, streaked with red on his flanks, his rightfore-paw useless, and his jaws white with foam, flung himself into thecircle and lay gasping at Mowgli's feet. 

"Good hunting! Under whose Headship?" said Phao gravely. 

"Good hunting! Won-tolla am I, " was the answer. He meant that he wasa solitary wolf, fending for himself, his mate, and his cubs insome lonely lair, as do many wolves in the south. Won-tolla means anOutlier--one who lies out from any Pack. Then he panted, and they couldsee his heart-beats shake him backward and forward. 

"What moves?" said Phao, for that is the question all the Jungle asksafter the pheeal cries. 

"The dhole, the dhole of the Dekkan--Red Dog, the Killer! They camenorth from the south saying the Dekkan was empty and killing out by theway. When this moon was new there were four to me--my mate and threecubs. She would teach them to kill on the grass plains, hiding todrive the buck, as we do who are of the open. At midnight I heard themtogether, full tongue on the trail. At the dawn-wind I found them stiffin the grass--four, Free People, four when this moon was new. Thensought 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 theydrove me like the buck; on my three legs they drove me. Look, FreePeople!"

He thrust out his mangled fore-foot, all dark with dried blood. Therewere cruel bites low down on his side, and his throat was torn andworried. 

"Eat, " said Akela, rising up from the meat Mowgli had brought him, andthe Outlier flung himself on it. 

"This shall be no loss, " he said humbly, when he had taken off the firstedge of his hunger. "Give me a little strength, Free People, and I alsowill kill. My lair is empty that was full when this moon was new, andthe 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 there cubs with the dhole?"

"Nay, nay. Red Hunters all: grown dogs of their Pack, heavy and strongfor all that they eat lizards in the Dekkan. "

What Won-tolla had said meant that the dhole, the red hunting-dog of theDekkan, was moving to kill, and the Pack knew well that even the tigerwill surrender a new kill to the dhole. They drive straight through theJungle, and what they meet they pull down and tear to pieces. Thoughthey are not as big nor half as cunning as the wolf, they are verystrong and very numerous. The dhole, for instance, do not begin to callthemselves a pack till they are a hundred strong; whereas forty wolvesmake a very fair pack indeed. Mowgli's wanderings had taken him tothe edge of the high grassy downs of the Dekkan, and he had seen thefearless dholes sleeping and playing and scratching themselves in thelittle hollows and tussocks that they use for lairs. He despised andhated them because they did not smell like the Free People, because theydid not live in caves, and, above all, because they had hair betweentheir toes while he and his friends were clean-footed. But he knew, forHathi had told him, what a terrible thing a dhole hunting-pack was. EvenHathi moves aside from their line, and until they are killed, or tillgame 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 isgood hunting, and--my last. But, as men live, thou hast very many morenights and days, Little Brother. Go north and lie down, and if any liveafter the dhole has gone by he shall bring thee word of the fight. "

"Ah, " said Mowgli, quite gravely, "must I go to the marshes and catchlittle fish and sleep in a tree, or must I ask help of the Bandar-logand crack nuts, while the Pack fight below?"

"It is to the death, " said Akela. "Thou hast never met the dhole--theRed Killer. Even the Striped One----"

"Aowa! Aowa!" said Mowgli pettingly. "I have killed one striped ape, andsure am I in my stomach that Shere Khan would have left his own mate formeat to the dhole if he had winded a pack across three ranges. Listennow: There was a wolf, my father, and there was a wolf, my mother, andthere was an old gray wolf (not too wise: he is white now) was my fatherand my mother. Therefore I--" he raised his voice, "I say that when thedhole come, and if the dhole come, Mowgli and the Free People are ofone skin for that hunting; and I say, by the Bull that bought me--by theBull Bagheera paid for me in the old days which ye of the Pack do notremember--_I_ say, that the Trees and the River may hear and hold fastif I forget; _I_ say that this my knife shall be as a tooth to thePack--and I do not think it is so blunt. This is my Word which has gonefrom me. "

"Thou dost not know the dhole, man with a wolf's tongue, " saidWon-tolla. "I look only to clear the Blood Debt against them ere theyhave me in many pieces. They move slowly, killing out as they go, but intwo days a little strength will come back to me and I turn again for theBlood Debt. But for YE, Free People, my word is that ye go north and eatbut little for a while till the dhole are gone. There is no meat in thishunting. "

"Hear the Outlier!" said Mowgli with a laugh. "Free People, we must gonorth and dig lizards and rats from the bank, lest by any chance we meetthe dhole. He must kill out our hunting-grounds, while we lie hid in thenorth till it please him to give us our own again. He is a dog--and thepup of a dog--red, yellow-bellied, lairless, and haired between everytoe! He counts his cubs six and eight at the litter, as though he wereChikai, 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 arethe Jungle. ' Choose ye, O choose. It is good hunting! For the Pack--forthe Full Pack--for the lair and the litter; for the in-kill and theout-kill; for the mate that drives the doe and the little, little cubwithin the cave; it is met!--it is met!--it is met!"

The Pack answered with one deep, crashing bark that sounded in the nightlike a big tree falling. "It is met!" they cried. "Stay with these, "said Mowgli to the Four. "We shall need every tooth. Phao and Akela mustmake ready the battle. I go to count the dogs. "

"It is death!" Won-tolla cried, half rising. "What can such a hairlessone do against the Red Dog? Even the Striped One, remember----"

"Thou art indeed an Outlier, " Mowgli called back; "but we will speakwhen the dholes are dead. Good hunting all!"

He hurried off into the darkness, wild with excitement, hardly lookingwhere he set foot, and the natural consequence was that he tripped fulllength over Kaa's great coils where the python lay watching a deer-pathnear the river. 

"Kssha!" said Kaa angrily. "Is this jungle-work, to stamp and tramp andundo a night's hunting--when the game are moving so well, too?"

"The fault was mine, " said Mowgli, picking himself up. "Indeed I wasseeking thee, Flathead, but each time we meet thou art longer andbroader by the length of my arm. There is none like thee in the Jungle, wise, old, strong, and most beautiful Kaa. "

"Now whither does THIS trail lead?" Kaa's voice was gentler. "Not amoon since there was a Manling with a knife threw stones at my head andcalled 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 washunting, and this same Flathead was too deaf to hear his whistle, andleave the deer-roads free, " Mowgli answered composedly, sitting downamong the painted coils. 

"Now this same Manling comes with soft, tickling words to this sameFlathead, telling him that he is wise and strong and beautiful, andthis same old Flathead believes and makes a place, thus, for this samestone-throwing Manling, and--Art thou at ease now? Could Bagheera givethee so good a resting-place?"

Kaa had, as usual, made a sort of soft half-hammock of himself underMowgli's weight. The boy reached out in the darkness, and gathered inthe supple cable-like neck till Kaa's head rested on his shoulder, andthen 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 Ishould have heard the pheeal. Small wonder the Eaters of Grass areuneasy. How many be the dhole?"

"I have not yet seen. I came hot-foot to thee. Thou art older thanHathi. But oh, Kaa, "--here Mowgli wriggled with sheerjoy, --"it will begood hunting. Few of us will see another moon. "

"Dost THOU strike in this? Remember thou art a Man; and remember whatPack cast thee out. Let the Wolf look to the Dog. THOU art a Man. "

"Last year's nuts are this year's black earth, " said Mowgli. "It is truethat I am a Man, but it is in my stomach that this night I have saidthat I am a Wolf. I called the River and the Trees to remember. I am ofthe Free People, Kaa, till the dhole has gone by. "

"Free People, " Kaa grunted. "Free thieves! And thou hast tied thyselfinto the death-knot for the sake of the memory of the dead wolves? Thisis 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. "

"Ngssh! This changes all trails. I had thought to take thee away with meto the northern marshes, but the Word--even the Word of a little, naked, hairless Manling--is the Word. Now I, Kaa, say----"

"Think well, Flathead, lest thou tie thyself into the death-knot also. Ineed no Word from thee, for well I know----"

"Be it so, then, " said Kaa. "I will give no Word; but what is in thystomach to do when the dhole come?"

"They must swim the Waingunga. I thought to meet them with my knife inthe shallows, the Pack behind me; and so stabbing and thrusting, we alittle might turn them down-stream, or cool their throats. "

"The dhole do not turn and their throats are hot, " said Kaa. "There willbe neither Manling nor Wolf-cub when that hunting is done, but only drybones. "

"Alala! If we die, we die. It will be most good hunting. But my stomachis young, and I have not seen many Rains. I am not wise nor strong. Hastthou a better plan, Kaa?"

"I have seen a hundred and a hundred Rains. Ere Hathi cast hismilk-tushes my trail was big in the dust. By the First Egg, I am olderthan many trees, and I have seen all that the Jungle has done. "

"But THIS is new hunting, " said Mowgli. "Never before have the dholecrossed our trail. "

"What is has been. What will be is no more than a forgotten yearstriking backward. Be still while I count those my years. "

For a long hour Mowgli lay back among the coils, while Kaa, his headmotionless on the ground, thought of all that he had seen and knownsince the day he came from the egg. The light seemed to go out of hiseyes and leave them like stale opals, and now and again he made littlestiff passes with his head, right and left, as though he were hunting inhis sleep. Mowgli dozed quietly, for he knew that there is nothing likesleep before hunting, and he was trained to take it at any hour of theday or night. 

Then he felt Kaa's back grow bigger and broader below him as the hugepython puffed himself out, hissing with the noise of a sword drawn froma steel scabbard. 

"I have seen all the dead seasons, " Kaa said at last, "and thegreat trees and the old elephants, and the rocks that were bare andsharp-pointed ere the moss grew. Art THOU still alive, Manling?"

"It is only a little after moonset, " said Mowgli. "I do notunderstand----"

"Hssh! I am again Kaa. I knew it was but a little time. Now we willgo to the river, and I will show thee what is to be done against thedhole. "

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 athis 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 tohis body, and straightened his feet. Then Kaa breasted the current ashe alone could, and the ripple of the checked water stood up in a frillround Mowgli's neck, and his feet were waved to and fro in the eddyunder the python's lashing sides. A mile or two above the Peace Rockthe Waingunga narrows between a gorge of marble rocks from eighty toa hundred feet high, and the current runs like a mill-race between andover all manner of ugly stones. But Mowgli did not trouble his headabout the water; little water in the world could have given him amoment's fear. He was looking at the gorge on either side and sniffinguneasily, for there was a sweetish-sourish smell in the air, very likethe smell of a big ant-hill on a hot day. Instinctively he loweredhimself in the water, only raising his head to breathe from time totime, and Kaa came to anchor with a double twist of his tail round asunken rock, holding Mowgli in the hollow of a coil, while the waterraced 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 thedhole they say turn aside for nothing. And yet for whom do the LittlePeople of the Rocks turn aside? Tell me, Master of the Jungle, who isthe 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 thelength of thy arm. "

The split and weatherworn rocks of the gorge of the Waingunga had beenused since the beginning of the Jungle by the Little People of theRocks--the busy, furious, black wild bees of India; and, as Mowgli knewwell, all trails turned off half a mile before they reached the gorge. For centuries the Little People had hived and swarmed from cleft tocleft, and swarmed again, staining the white marble with stale honey, and made their combs tall and deep in the dark of the inner caves, whereneither man nor beast nor fire nor water had ever touched them. Thelength of the gorge on both siaes was hung as it were with blackshimmery velvet curtains, and Mowgli sank as he looked, for those werethe clotted millions of the sleeping bees. There were other lumps andfestoons and things like decayed tree-trunks studded on the face of therock, the old combs of past years, or new cities built in the shadow ofthe windless gorge, and huge masses of spongy, rotten trash had rolleddown 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 ahoney-loaded comb turning over or failing away somewhere in the darkgalleries; then a booming of angry wings, and the sullen drip, drip, drip, of the wasted honey, guttering along till it lipped over someledge in the open air and sluggishly trickled down on the twigs. Therewas 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 weredead bees, drones, sweepings, and stale combs, and wings of maraudingmoths that had strayed in after honey, all tumbled in smooth piles ofthe finest black dust. The mere sharp smell of it was enough to frightenanything that 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 thegorge. 

"Here is this season's kill, " said he. "Look!" On the bank lay theskeletons of a couple of young deer and a buffalo. Mowgli could seethat neither wolf nor jackal had touched the hones, which were laid outnaturally. 

"They came beyond the line; they did not know the Law, " murmuredMowgli, "and the Little People killed them. Let us go ere they wake. "

"They do not wake till the dawn, " said Kaa. "Now I will tell thee. Ahunted buck from the south, many, many Rains ago, came hither from thesouth, not knowing the Jungle, a Pack on his trail. Being made blind byfear, he leaped from above, the Pack running by sight, for they werehot and blind on the trail. The sun was high, and the Little People weremany and very angry. Many, too, were those of the Pack who leaped intothe Waingunga, but they were dead ere they took water. Those who did notleap died also in the rocks above. But the buck lived. "

"How?"

"Because he came first, running for his life, leaping ere the LittlePeople were aware, and was in the river when they gathered to kill. The Pack, following, was altogether lost under the weight of the LittlePeople. "

"The buck lived?" Mowgli repeated slowly. 

"At least he did not die THEN, though none waited his coming down witha strong body to hold him safe against the water, as a certain old fat, deaf, yellow Flathead would wait for a Manling--yea, though there wereall 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 beforethe 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 mytongue to prick into their hides. "

"If they follow thee hot and blind, looking only at thy shoulders, thosewho do not die up above will take water either here or lower down, forthe Little People will rise up and cover them. Now the Waingunga ishungry water, and they will have no Kaa to hold them, but will go down, such as live, to the shallows by the Seeonee Lairs, and there thy Packmay meet them by the throat. "

"Ahai! Eowawa! Better could not be till the Rains fall in the dryseason. 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 veryclosely. "

"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 thyclumsy feet set down without seeing would end the hunt. See, I leavethee here, and for thy sake only I will carry word to the Pack that theymay know where to look for the dhole. For myself, I am not of one skinwith ANY wolf. "

When Kaa disliked an acquaintance he could be more unpleasant than anyof the Jungle People, except perhaps Bagheera. He swam down-stream, and opposite the Rock he came on Phao and Akela listening to the nightnoises. 

"Hssh! Dogs, " he said cheerfully. "The dholes will come down-stream. Ifye be not afraid ye can kill them in the shallows. "

"When come they?" said Phao. "And where is my Man-cub?" said Akela. 

"They come when they come, " said Kaa. "Wait and see. As for THY Man-cub, from whom thou hast taken a Word and so laid him open to Death, THYMan-cub is with ME, and if he be not already dead the fault is noneof thine, bleached dog! Wait here for the dhole, and be glad that theMan-cub and I strike on thy side. "

Kaa flashed up-stream again, and moored himself in the middle ofthe gorge, looking upward at the line of the cliff. Presently he sawMowgli's head move against the stars, and then there was a whizz inthe air, the keen, clean schloop of a body falling feet first, and nextminute the boy was at rest again in the loop of Kaa's body. 

"It is no leap by night, " said Mowgli quietly. "I have jumped twice asfar for sport; but that is an evil place above--low bushes and gulliesthat go down very deep, all full of the Little People. I have put bigstones one above the other by the side of three gullies. These I shallthrow down with my feet in running, and the Little People will rise upbehind me, very angry. "

"That is Man's talk and Man's cunning, " said Kaa. "Thou art wise, butthe Little People are always angry. "

"Nay, at twilight all wings near and far rest for a while. I will playwith the dhole at twilight, for the dhole hunts best by day. He followsnow Won-tolla's blood-trail. "

"Chil does not leave a dead ox, nor the dhole the blood-trail, " saidKaa. 

"Then I will make him a new blood-trail, of his own blood, if I can, andgive him dirt to eat. Thou wilt stay here, Kaa, till I come again withmy dholes?"

"Ay, but what if they kill thee in the Jungle, or the Little People killthee before thou canst leap down to the river?"

"When to-morrow comes we will kill for to-morrow, " said Mowgli, quotinga Jungle saying; and again, "When I am dead it is time to sing the DeathSong. Good hunting, Kaa!"

He loosed his arm from the python's neck and went down the gorge likea log in a freshet, paddling toward the far bank, where he foundslack-water, and laughing aloud from sheer happiness. There was nothingMowgli liked better than, as he himself said, "to pull the whiskersof Death, " and make the Jungle know that he was their overlord. He hadoften, with Baloo's help, robbed bees' nests in single trees, andhe knew that the Little People hated the smell of wild garlic. So hegathered a small bundle of it, tied it up with a bark string, and thenfollowed Won-tolla's blood-trail, as it ran southerly from the Lairs, for some five miles, looking at the trees with his head on one side, andchuckling as he looked. 

"Mowgli the Frog have I been, " said he to himself; "Mowgli the Wolf haveI said that I am. Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before I am Mowgli theBuck. At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man. Ho!" and he slid his thumbalong the eighteen-inch blade of his knife. 

Won-tolla's trail, all rank with dark blood-spots, ran under a forest ofthick trees that grew close together and stretched away north-eastward, gradually growing thinner and thinner to within two miles of the BeeRocks. From the last tree to the low scrub of the Bee Rocks was opencountry, where there was hardly cover enough to hide a wolf. Mowglitrotted along under the trees, judging distances between branch andbranch, occasionally climbing up a trunk and taking a trial leap fromone tree to another till he came to the open ground, which he studiedvery carefully for an hour. Then he turned, picked up Won-tolla's trailwhere he had left it, settled himself in a tree with an outrunningbranch some eight feet from the ground, and sat still, sharpening hisknife on the sole of his foot and singing to himself. 

A little before mid-day, when the sun was very warm, he heard the patterof feet and smelt the abominable smell of the dhole-pack as they trottedpitilessly along Won-tolla's trail. Seen from above, the red dhole doesnot look half the size of a wolf, but Mowgli knew how strong his feetand jaws were. He watched the sharp bay head of the leader snuffingalong the trail, and gave him "Good hunting!"

The brute looked up, and his companions halted behind him, scores andscores of red dogs with low-hung tails, heavy shoulders, weak quarters, and bloody mouths. The dholes are a very silent people as a rule, andthey have no manners even in their own Jungle. Fully two hundred musthave gathered below him, but he could see that the leaders sniffedhungrily on Won-tolla's trail, and tried to drag the Pack forward. Thatwould never do, or they would be at the Lairs in broad daylight, andMowgli meant 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 gaveit bared his white teeth. Mowgli looked down with a smile, and imitatedperfectly the sharp chitter-chatter of Chikai, the leaping rat of theDekkan, meaning the dholes to understand that he considered them nobetter than Chikai. The Pack closed up round the tree-trunk and theleader bayed savagely, calling Mowgli a tree-ape. For an answer Mowglistretched down one naked leg and wriggled his bare toes just above theleader's head. That was enough, and more than enough, to wake the Packto stupid rage. Those who have hair between their toes do not care to bereminded of it. Mowgli caught his foot away as the leader leaped up, andsaid sweetly: "Dog, red dog! Go back to the Dekkan and eat lizards. Go toChikai thy brother--dog, dog--red, red dog! There is hair between everytoe!" He twiddled his toes a second time. 

"Come down ere we starve thee out, hairless ape!" yelled the Pack, andthis was exactly what Mowgli wanted. He laid himself down along thebranch, his cheek to the bark, his right arm free, and there he told thePack what he thought and knew about them, their manners, their customs, their mates, and their puppies. There is no speech in the world sorancorous and so stinging as the language the Jungle People use to showscorn and contempt. When you come to think of it you will see how thismust be so. As Mowgli told Kaa, he had many little thorns under histongue, and slowly and deliberately he drove the dholes from silence togrowls, 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 toanswer Kaa in a rage; and all the while Mowgli's right hand lay crookedat his side, ready for action, his feet locked round the branch. The bigbay leader had leaped many times in the air, but Mowgli dared not riska false blow. At last, made furious beyond his natural strength, hebounded up seven or eight feet clear of the ground. Then Mowgli's handshot out like the head of a tree-snake, and gripped him by the scruffof 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 grip, andinch by inch he hauled the beast, hanging like a drowned jackal, up onthe branch. With his left hand he reached for his knife and cut off thered, bushy tail, flinging the dhole back to earth again. That was all heneeded. The Pack would not go forward on Won-tolla's trail now till theyhad killed Mowgli or Mowgli had killed them. He saw them settle downin circles with a quiver of the haunches that meant they were goingto stay, and so he climbed to a higher crotch, settled his backcomfortably, and went to sleep. 

After three or four hours he waked and counted the Pack. They were allthere, silent, husky, and dry, with eyes of steel. The sun was beginningto sink. In half an hour the Little People of the Rocks would be endingtheir labours, and, as you know, the dhole does not fight best in thetwilight. 

"I did not need such faithful watchers, " he said politely, standing upon a branch, "but I will remember this. Ye be true dholes, but to mythinking over much of one kind. For that reason I do not give the biglizard-eater his tail again. Art thou not pleased, Red Dog?"

"I myself will tear out thy stomach!" yelled the leader, scratching atthe foot of the tree. 

"Nay, but consider, wise rat of the Dekkan. There will now be manylitters of little tailless red dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that stingwhen the sand is hot. Go home, Red Dog, and cry that an ape has donethis. Ye will not go? Come, then, with me, and I will make you verywise!"

He moved, Bandar-log fashion, into the next tree, and so on into thenext and the next, the Pack following with lifted hungry heads. Now andthen he would pretend to fall, and the Pack would tumble one over theother in their haste to be at the death. It was a curious sight--the boywith the knife that shone in the low sunlight as it sifted through theupper branches, and the silent Pack with their red coats all aflame, huddling and following below. When he came to the last tree he took thegarlic and rubbed himself all over carefully, and the dholes yelled withscorn. "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 hadtaken. The Pack instinctively rushed after it. "And follow now--to thedeath. "

He had slipped down the tree-trunk, and headed like the wind in barefeet for the Bee Rocks, before the dholes saw what he would do. 

They gave one deep howl, and settled down to the long, lobbing canterthat can at the last run down anything that runs. Mowgli knew theirpack-pace to be much slower than that of the wolves, or he would neverhave risked a two-mile run in full sight. They were sure that the boywas theirs at last, and he was sure that he held them to play with as hepleased. All his trouble was to keep them sufficiently hot behind himto prevent their turning off too soon. He ran cleanly, evenly, andspringily; the tailless leader not five yards behind him; and the Packtailing out over perhaps a quarter of a mile of ground, crazy and blindwith the rage of slaughter. So he kept his distance by ear, reservinghis last effort for the rush across the Bee Rocks. 

The Little People had gone to sleep in the early twilight, for itwas not the season of late blossoming flowers; but as Mowgli's firstfoot-falls rang hollow on the hollow ground he heard a sound as thoughall the earth were humming. Then he ran as he had never run in his lifebefore, spurned aside one--two--three of the piles of stones into thedark, sweet-smelling gullies; heard a roar like the roar of the sea in acave; saw with the tail of his eye the air grow dark behind him; saw thecurrent of the Waingunga far below, and a flat, diamond-shaped headin the water; leaped outward with all his strength, the tailless dholesnapping at his shoulder in mid-air, and dropped feet first to thesafety of the river, breathless and triumphant. There was not a stingupon him, for the smell of the garlic had checked the Little People forjust the few seconds that he was among them. When he rose Kaa's coilswere steadying him and things were bounding over the edge of thecliff--great lumps, it seemed, of clustered bees falling like plummets;but before any lump touched water the bees flew upward and the body of adhole whirled down-stream. Overhead they could hear furious short yellsthat were drowned in a roar like breakers--the roar of the wings of theLittle People of the Rocks. Some of the dholes, too, had fallen into thegullies that communicated with the underground caves, and there chokedand fought and snapped among the tumbled honeycombs, and at last, borneup, even when they were dead, on the heaving waves of bees beneaththem, shot out of some hole in the river-face, to roll over on the blackrubbish-heaps. There were dholes who had leaped short into the treeson the cliffs, and the bees blotted out their shapes; but the greaternumber of them, maddened by the stings, had flung themselves into theriver; 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!"

Swimming low and diving as often as he could, Mowgli went down theriver, knife in hand. 

"Slowly, slowly, " said Kaa. "One tooth does not kill a hundred unlessit be a cobra's, and many of the dholes took water swiftly when they sawthe 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 couldpenetrate 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, andturning sharp aside had flung themselves into the water where the gorgebroke down in steep banks. Their cries of rage and their threats againstthe "tree-ape" who had brought them to their shame mixed with the yellsand growls of those who had been punished by the Little People. Toremain ashore was death, and every dhole knew it. Their pack was sweptalong the current, down to the deep eddies of the Peace Pool, but eventhere the angry Little People followed and forced them to the wateragain. Mowgli could hear the voice of the tailless leader bidding hispeople hold on and kill out every wolf in Seeonee. But he did not wastehis time in listening. 

"One kills in the dark behind us!" snapped a dhole. "Here is taintedwater!"

Mowgli had dived forward like an otter, twitched a struggling dholeunder water before he could open his mouth, and dark rings rose as thebody plopped up, turning on its side. The dholes tried to turn, but thecurrent prevented them, and the Little People darted at the heads andears, and they could hear the challenge of the Seeonee Pack growinglouder and deeper in the gathering darkness. Again Mowgli dived, andagain a dhole went under, and rose dead, and again the clamour brokeout at the rear of the pack; some howling that it was best to go ashore, others calling on their leader to lead them back to the Dekkan, andothers bidding Mowgli show himself 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 backto sleep. They have chased us far. Now I, too, turn back, for I am notof one skin with any wolf. Good hunting, Little Brother, and rememberthe dhole bites low. "

A wolf came running along the bank on three legs, leaping up and down, laying his head sideways close to the ground, hunching his back, andbreaking high into the air, as though he were playing with his cubs. Itwas Won-tolla, the Outlier, and he said never a word, but continued hishorrible sport beside the dholes. They had been long in the water now, and were swimming wearily, their coats drenched and heavy, their bushytails dragging like sponges, so tired and shaken that they, too, weresilent, 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, andsent the long knife home behind the shoulder, pushing hard to avoid hisdying 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 thebroad daylight, and their leader lacks his tail, but here be some fewfor 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 Seeonee wolves. "For the Pack, for the Full Pack it is met!" and a bend in the river drove the dholesforward among the sands and shoals opposite the Lairs. 

Then they saw their mistake. They should have landed half a mile higherup, and rushed the wolves on dry ground. Now it was too late. The bankwas lined with burning eyes, and except for the horrible pheeal that hadnever stopped since sundown, there was no sound in the Jungle. It seemedas though Won-tolla were fawning on them to come ashore; and "Turnand take hold!" said the leader of the dholes. The entire Pack flungthemselves at the shore, threshing and squattering through the shoalwater, till the face of the Waingunga was all white and torn, and thegreat ripples went from side to side, like bow-waves from a boat. Mowglifollowed 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 straining and splitting andscattering and narrowing and broadening along the red, wet sands, andover and between the tangled tree-roots, and through and among thebushes, and in and out of the grass clumps; for even now the dholes weretwo 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 thePack, but the anxious-eyed lahinis--the she-wolves of the lair, as thesaying is--fighting for their litters, with here and there a yearlingwolf, his first coat still half woolly, tugging and grappling by theirsides. 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 dholeswere struggling out of the water and had to raise their heads, the oddswere with the wolves. On dry land the wolves suffered; but in the wateror ashore, Mowgli's knife came and went without ceasing. The Four hadworried their way to his side. Gray Brother, crouched between the boy'sknees, was protecting his stomach, while the others guarded his backand either side, or stood over him when the shock of a leaping, yellingdhole who had thrown himself full on the steady blade bore him down. Forthe rest, it was one tangled confusion--a locked and swaying mob thatmoved from right to left and from left to right along the bank; and alsoground round and round slowly on its own centre. Here would be a heavingmound, like a water-blister in a whirlpool, which would break like awater-blister, and throw up four or five mangled dogs, each striving toget back to the centre; here would be a single wolf borne down by two orthree dholes, laboriously dragging them forward, and sinking the while;here a yearling cub would be held up by the pressure round him, thoughhe had been killed early, while his mother, crazed with dumb rage, rolled over and over, snapping, and passing on; and in the middle of thethickest press, perhaps, one wolf and one dhole, forgetting everythingelse, would be manoeuvring for first hold till they were whirled away bya rush of furious fighters. Once Mowgli passed Akela, a dhole on eitherflank, 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, tuggingthe unwilling beast forward till the yearlings could finish him. But thebulk of the fight was blind flurry and smother in the dark; hit, trip, and tumble, yelp, groan, and worry-worry-worry, round him and behind himand above him. As the night wore on, the quick, giddy-go-round motionincreased. The dholes were cowed and afraid to attack the strongerwolves, but did not yet dare to run away. Mowgli felt that the end wascoming soon, and contented himself with striking merely to cripple. Theyearlings 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 wouldsometimes turn a dog aside. 

"The meat is very near the bone, " Gray Brother yelled. He was bleedingfrom a score of flesh-wounds. 

"But the bone is yet to be cracked, " said Mowgli. "Eowawa! THUS do we doin the Jungle!" The red blade ran like a flame along the side of a dholewhose hind-quarters were hidden by the weight of a clinging wolf. 

"My kill!" snorted the wolf through his wrinkled nostrils. "Leave him tome. "

"Is thy stomach still empty, Outlier?" said Mowgli. Won-tolla wasfearfully punished, but his grip had paralysed the dhole, who could notturn round and reach him. 

"By the Bull that bought me, " said Mowgli, with a bitter laugh, "it isthe tailless one!" And indeed it was the big bay-coloured leader. 

"It is not wise to kill cubs and lahinis, " Mowgli went onphilosophically, wiping the blood out of his eyes, "unless one has alsokilled the Outlier; and it is in my stomach that this Won-tolla killsthee. "

A dhole leaped to his leader's aid; but before his teeth had foundWon-tolla's flank, Mowgli's knife was in his throat, and Gray Brothertook what was left. 

"And thus do we do in the Jungle, " said Mowgli. 

Won-tolla said not a word, only his jaws were closing and closing on thebackbone as his life ebbed. The dhole shuddered, his head dropped, andhe 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 thislong 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 tothe river, to the thick Jungle, up-stream or down-stream as he saw theroad clear. 

"The debt! The debt!" shouted Mowgli. "Pay the debt! They have slain theLone Wolf! Let not a dog go!"

He was flying to the river, knife in hand, to check any dhole who daredto take water, when, from under a mound of nine dead, rose Akela's headand fore-quarters, and Mowgli dropped on his knees beside the Lone Wolf. 

"Said I not it would be my last fight?" Akela gasped. "It is goodhunting. And thou, Little Brother?"

"I live, having killed many. "

"Even so. I die, and I would--I would die by thee, Little Brother. "

Mowgli took the terrible scarred head on his knees, and put his armsround the torn neck. 

"It is long since the old days of Shere Khan, and a Man-cub that rollednaked in the dust. "

"Nay, nay, I am a wolf. I am of one skin with the Free People, " Mowglicried. "It is no will of mine that I am a man. "

"Thou art a man, Little Brother, wolfling of my watching. Thou art aman, 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 thouforgotten? All debts are paid now. Go to thine own people. I tell theeagain, 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, " Mowgli answered. 

"There is no more to say, " said Akela. "Little Brother, canst thou raiseme to my feet? I also was a leader of the Free People. "

Very carefully and gently Mowgli lifted the bodies aside, and raisedAkela to his feet, both arms round him, and the Lone Wolf drew a longbreath, and began the Death Song that a leader of the Pack should singwhen he dies. It gathered strength as he went on, lifting and lifting, and ringing far across the river, till it came to the last "Goodhunting!" and Akela shook himself clear of Mowgli for an instant, and, leaping into the air, fell backward dead upon his last and most terriblekill. 

Mowgli sat with his head on his knees, careless of anything else, whilethe remnant of the flying dholes were being overtaken and run down bythe merciless lahinis. Little by little the cries died away, and thewolves returned limping, as their wounds stiffened, to take stock of thelosses. Fifteen of the Pack, as well as half a dozen lahinis, lay deadby the river, and of the others not one was unmarked. And Mowgli satthrough it all till the cold daybreak, when Phao's wet, red muzzle wasdropped in his hand, and Mowgli drew back to show the gaunt body ofAkela. 

"Good hunting!" said Phao, as though Akela were still alive, and thenover his bitten shoulder to the others: "Howl, dogs! A Wolf has diedto-night!"

But of all the Pack of two hundred fighting dholes, whose boast wasthat all jungles were their Jungle, and that no living thing could standbefore 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 afteranother to the river-bed, when the great fight was finished. Chil isgood friends with everybody, but he is a cold-blooded kind of creatureat heart, because he knows that almost everybody in the Jungle comes tohim in the long-run. ]

 These were my companions going forth by night-- (For Chil! Look you, for Chil!) Now come I to whistle them the ending of the fight. (Chil! Vanguards of Chil!) 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!) They that bade the sambhur wheel, or 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 'twas they died! (For Chil! Look you, for Chil!) Now come I to comfort them that knew them in their pride. (Chil! Vanguards of Chil!) 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 second year after the great fight with Red Dog and the death ofAkela, Mowgli must have been nearly seventeen years old. He lookedolder, for hard exercise, the best of good eating, and baths wheneverhe felt in the least hot or dusty, had given him strength and growth farbeyond his age. He could swing by one hand from a top branch for halfan hour at a time, when he had occasion to look along the tree-roads. He could stop a young buck in mid-gallop and throw him sideways by thehead. He could even jerk over the big, blue wild boars that lived inthe Marshes of the North. The Jungle People who used to fear him for hiswits feared him now for his strength, and when he moved quietly on hisown affairs the mere whisper of his coming cleared the wood-paths. Andyet the look in his eyes was always gentle. Even when he fought, hiseyes never blazed as Bagheera's did. They only grew more and moreinterested and excited; and that was one of the things that Bagheerahimself did not understand. 

He asked Mowgli about it, and the boy laughed and said. "When I miss thekill I am angry. When I must go empty for two days I am very angry. Donot my eyes talk then?"

"The mouth is hungry, " said Bagheera, "but the eyes say nothing. Hunting, eating, or swimming, it is all one--like a stone in wet or dryweather. " Mowgli looked at him lazily from under 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 mists hung below them in bands of white and green. Asthe sun rose it changed into bubbling seas of red gold, churned off, and let the low rays stripe the dried grass on which Mowgli and Bagheerawere resting. It was the end of the cold weather, the leaves andthe trees looked worn and faded, and there was a dry, ticking rustleeverywhere when the wind blew. A little leaf tap-tap-tapped furiouslyagainst a twig, as a single leaf caught in a current will. It rousedBagheera, for he snuffed the morning air with a deep, hollow cough, threw himself on his back, and struck with his fore-paws at the noddingleaf above. 

"The year turns, " he said. "The Jungle goes forward. The Time of NewTalk is near. That leaf knows. It is very good. "

"The grass is dry, " Mowgli answered, pulling up a tuft. "EvenEye-of-the-Spring [that is a little trumpet-shaped, waxy red flowerthat 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 backand 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 howland roll? Remember, we be the Masters of the Jungle, thou and I. "

"Indeed, yes; I hear, Man-cub. " Bagheera rolled over hurriedly and satup, the dust on his ragged black flanks. (He was just casting his wintercoat. ) "We be surely the Masters of the Jungle! Who is so strong asMowgli? Who so wise?" There was a curious drawl in the voice that madeMowgli turn to see whether by any chance the Black Panther were makingfun 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 theJungle, " Bagheera repeated. "Have I done wrong? I did not know that theMan-cub no longer lay upon the ground. Does he fly, then?"

Mowgli sat with his elbows on his knees, looking out across the valleyat the daylight. Somewhere down in the woods below a bird was tryingover 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 bepouring later, but Bagheera heard it. 

"I said the Time of New Talk is near, " growled the panther, switchinghis tail. 

"I hear, " Mowgli answered. "Bagheera, why dost thou shake all over? Thesun is warm. "

"That is Ferao, the scarlet woodpecker, " said Bagheera. "HE has notforgotten. Now I, too, must remember my song, " and he began purring andcrooning to himself, harking back dissatisfied again and again. 

"There is no game afoot, " said Mowgli. 

"Little Brother, are BOTH thine ears stopped? That is no killing-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 DOrun 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 fieldsof a Man-Pack? I sent a runner--I sent thee!--to Hathi, bidding him tocome upon such a night and pluck the sweet grass for me with his trunk. "

"He came only two nights later, " said Bagheera, cowering a little; "andof that long, sweet grass that pleased thee so he gathered more than anyMan-cub could eat in all the nights of the Rains. That was no fault ofmine. "

"He did not come upon the night when I sent him the word. No, he wastrumpeting and running and roaring through the valleys in the moonlight. His trail was like the trail of three elephants, for he would not hideamong the trees. He danced in the moonlight before the houses of theMan-Pack. I saw him, and yet he would not come to me; and _I_ am theMaster of the Jungle!"

"It was the Time of New Talk, " said the panther, always very humble. "Perhaps, Little Brother, thou didst not that time call him by aMaster-word? Listen to Ferao, and be glad!"

Mowgli's bad temper seemed to have boiled itself away. He lay back withhis head on his arms, his eyes shut. "I do not know--nor do I care, " hesaid sleepily. "Let us sleep, Bagheera. My stomach is heavy in me. Makeme a rest for my head. "

The panther lay down again with a sigh, because he could hear Feraopractising and repractising his song against the Springtime of New Talk, as they say. 

In an Indian Jungle the seasons slide one into the other almost withoutdivision. There seem to be only two--the wet and the dry; but if youlook closely below the torrents of rain and the clouds of char and dustyou will find all four going round in their regular ring. Spring is themost wonderful, because she has not to cover a clean, bare field withnew leaves and flowers, but to drive before her and to put away thehanging-on, over-surviving raffle of half-green things which the gentlewinter has suffered to live, and to make the partly-dressed stale earthfeel new and young once more. And this she does so well that there is nospring in the world like the Jungle spring. 

There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells, as theydrift on the heavy air, are old and used. One cannot explain this, butit feels so. Then there is another day--to the eye nothing whatever haschanged--when all the smells are new and delightful, and the whiskers ofthe Jungle People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes awayfrom their sides in long, draggled locks. Then, perhaps, a little rainfalls, and all the trees and the bushes and the bamboos and the mossesand the juicy-leaved plants wake with a noise of growing that you canalmost hear, and under this noise runs, day and night, a deep hum. THATis the noise of the spring--a vibrating boom which is neither bees, norfalling water, nor the wind in tree-tops, but the purring of the warm, happy world. 

Up to this year Mowgli had always delighted in the turn of the seasons. It was he who generally saw the first Eye-of-the-Spring deep down amongthe grasses, and the first bank of spring clouds, which are like nothingelse in the Jungle. His voice could be heard in all sorts of wet, star-lighted, blossoming places, helping the big frogs through theirchoruses, or mocking the little upside-down owls that hoot through thewhite nights. Like all his people, spring was the season he chose forhis flittings--moving, for the mere joy of rushing through the warm air, thirty, forty, or fifty miles between twilight and the morning star, andcoming back panting and laughing and wreathed with strange flowers. TheFour did not follow him on these wild ringings of the Jungle, but wentoff to sing songs with other wolves. The Jungle People are very busyin the spring, and Mowgli could hear them grunting and screaming andwhistling according to their kind. Their voices then are different fromtheir voices at other times of the year, and that is one of the reasonswhy spring in the Jungle is called the Time of New Talk. 

But that spring, as he told Bagheera, his stomach was changed in him. Ever since the bamboo shoots turned spotty-brown he had been lookingforward to the morning when the smells should change. But when themorning 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 tosend on the cry, the words choked between his teeth, and a feeling cameover him that began at his toes and ended in his hair--a feeling of pureunhappiness, so that he looked himself over to be sure that he had nottrod on a thorn. Mor cried the new smells, the other birds took itover, and from the rocks by the Waingunga he heard Bagheera's hoarsescream--something between the scream of an eagle and the neighing ofa horse. There was a yelling and scattering of Bandar-log in thenew-budding branches above, and there stood Mowgli, his chest, filled toanswer Mor, sinking in little gasps as the breath was driven out of itby this unhappiness. 

He stared all round him, but he could see no more than the mockingBandar-log scudding through the trees, and Mor, his tail spread in fullsplendour, dancing on the slopes below. 

"The smells have changed, " screamed Mor. "Good hunting, Little Brother!Where is thy answer?"

"Little Brother, good hunting!" whistled Chil the Kite and his mate, swooping down together. The two baffed under Mowgli's nose so close thata pinch of downy white feathers brushed away. 

A light spring rain--elephant-rain they call it--drove across the Junglein a belt half a mile wide, left the new leaves wet and nodding behind, and died out in a double rainbow and a light roll of thunder. The springhum broke out for a minute, and was silent, but all the Jungle Folkseemed to be giving tongue at once. All except Mowgli. 

"I have eaten good food, " he said to himself. "I have drunk goodwater. Nor does my throat burn and grow small, as it did when I bit theblue-spotted root that Oo the Turtle said was clean food. But my stomachis heavy, and I have given very bad talk to Bagheera and others, peopleof the Jungle and my people. Now, too, I am hot and now I am cold, andnow I am neither hot nor cold, but angry with that which I cannot see. Huhu! It is time to make a running! To-night I will cross the ranges;yes, I will make a spring running to the Marshes of the North, and backagain. 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. They were far beyondearshot, singing over the spring songs--the Moon and Sambhur Songs--withthe wolves of the pack; for in the spring-time the Jungle People makevery little difference between the day and the night. He gave the sharp, barking note, but his only answer was the mocking maiou of the littlespotted tree-cat winding in and out among the branches for early birds'nests. At this he shook all over with rage, and half drew his knife. Then he became very haughty, though there was no one to see him, andstalked severely down the hillside, chin up and eyebrows down. But nevera single one of his people asked him a question, for they were all toobusy with their own affairs. 

"Yes, " said Mowgli to himself, though in his heart he knew that he hadno reason. "Let the Red Dhole come from the Dekkan, or the Red Flowerdance among the bamboos, and all the Jungle runs whining to Mowgli, calling him great elephant-names. But now, because Eye-of-the-Spring isred, 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 theMaster of the Jungle, or am I not? Be silent! What do ye here?"

A couple of young wolves of the Pack were cantering down a path, lookingfor open ground in which to fight. (You will remember that the Law ofthe Jungle forbids fighting where the Pack can see. ) Their neck-bristleswere as stiff as wire, and they bayed furiously, crouching for the firstgrapple. Mowgli leaped forward, caught one outstretched throat in eitherhand, expecting to fling the creatures backward as he had often done ingames or Pack hunts. But he had never before interfered with a springfight. The two leaped forward and dashed him aside, and without word towaste rolled over and over close locked. 

Mowgli was on his feet almost before he fell, his knife and his whiteteeth were bared, and at that minute he would have killed both for noreason but that they were fighting when he wished them to be quiet, although every wolf has full right under the Law to fight. He dancedround them with lowered shoulders and quivering hand, ready to send ina double blow when the first flurry of the scuffle should be over;but while he waited the strength seemed to ebb from his body, theknife-point lowered, and he sheathed the knife and watched. 

"I have surely eaten poison, " he sighed at last. "Since I broke up theCouncil with the Red Flower--since I killed Shere Khan--none of the Packcould fling me aside. And these be only tail-wolves in the Pack, littlehunters! 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 onthe torn and bloody ground, looking now at his knife, and now at hislegs and arms, while the feeling of unhappiness he had never knownbefore covered him as water covers a log. 

He killed early that evening and ate but little, so as to be in goodfettle for his spring running, and he ate alone because all the JunglePeople 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 growthsince the morning. The branch that was yellow-leaved the day beforedripped sap when Mowgli broke it. The mosses curled deep and warm overhis feet, the young grass had no cutting edges, and all the voices ofthe Jungle boomed like one deep harp-string touched by the moon--theMoon of New Talk, who splashed her light full on rock and pool, slippedit between trunk and creeper, and sifted it through a million leaves. Forgetting his unhappiness, Mowgli sang aloud with pure delight as hesettled into his stride. It was more like flying than anything else, forhe had chosen the long downward slope that leads to the Northern Marshesthrough the heart of the main Jungle, where the springy ground deadenedthe fall of his feet. A man-taught man would have picked his way withmany 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 log or a hidden stone turned under his foot he savedhimself, never checking his pace, without effort and without thought. When he tired of ground-going he threw up his hands monkey-fashion tothe nearest creeper, and seemed to float rather than to climb up intothe thin branches, whence he would follow a tree-road till his moodchanged, and he shot downward in a long, leafy curve to the levelsagain. There were still, hot hollows surrounded by wet rocks where hecould hardly breathe for the heavy scents of the night flowers and thebloom along the creeper buds; dark avenues where the moonlight lay inbelts as regular as checkered marbles in a church aisle; thickets wherethe wet young growth stood breast-high about him and threw its armsround his waist; and hilltops crowned with broken rock, where he leapedfrom stone to stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes. Hewould hear, very faint and far off, the chug-drug of a boar sharpeninghis tusks on a bole; and would come across the great gray brute allalone, scribing and rending the bark of a tall tree, his mouth drippingwith foam, and his eyes blazing like fire. Or he would turn aside to thesound of clashing horns and hissing grunts, and dash past a couple offurious sambhur, staggering to and fro with lowered heads, striped withblood that showed black in the moonlight. Or at some rushing ford hewould hear Jacala the Crocodile bellowing like a bull, or disturb atwined knot of the Poison People, but before they could strike he wouldbe away and across the glistening shingle, and deep in the Jungle again. 

So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes singing to himself, thehappiest thing in all the Jungle that night, till the smell of theflowers warned him that he was near the marshes, and those lay farbeyond his farthest hunting-grounds. 

Here, again, a man-trained man would have sunk overhead in threestrides, but Mowgli's feet had eyes in them, and they passed him fromtussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without asking help fromthe eyes in his head. He ran out to the middle of the swamp, disturbingthe duck as he ran, and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk lapped inthe black water. The marsh was awake all round him, for in the springthe Bird People sleep very lightly, and companies of them were comingor going the night through. But no one took any notice of Mowgli sittingamong the tall reeds humming songs without words, and looking at thesoles of his hard brown feet in case of neglected thorns. All hisunhappiness seemed to have been left behind in his own Jungle, and hewas just beginning a full-throat song when it came back again--ten timesworse than before. 

This time Mowgli was frightened. "It is here also!" he said half aloud. "It has followed me, " and he looked over his shoulder to see whetherthe It were not standing behind him. "There is no one here. " The nightnoises of the marsh went on, but never a bird or beast spoke to him, andthe new feeling of misery grew. 

"I have surely eaten poison, " he said in an awe-stricken voice. "It mustbe that carelessly I have eaten poison, and my strength is going fromme. I was afraid--and yet it was not _I_ that was afraid--Mowgli wasafraid when the two wolves fought. Akela, or even Phao, would havesilenced them; yet Mowgli was afraid. That is true sign I have eatenpoison. .. . But what do they care in the Jungle? They sing and howl andfight, and run in companies under the moon, and I--Hai-mai!--I am dyingin the marshes, of that poison which I have eaten. " He was so sorry forhimself that he nearly wept. "And after, " he went on, "they will findme lying in the black water. Nay, I will go back to my own Jungle, and Iwill die upon the Council Rock, and Bagheera, whom I love, if he is notscreaming in the valley--Bagheera, perhaps, may watch by what is leftfor 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 understandthat upside-down sort of happiness. "As Chil the Kite used Akela, " herepeated, "on the night I saved the Pack from Red Dog. " He was quietfor 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 hedied, for when we die our stomachs change. He said. .. None the less, IAM of the Jungle!"

In his excitement, as he remembered the fight on Waingunga bank, heshouted the last words aloud, and a wild buffalo-cow among the reedssprang to her knees, snorting, "Man!"

"Uhh!" said Mysa the Wild Buffalo (Mowgli could hear him turn in hiswallow), "THAT is no man. It is only the hairless wolf of the SeeoneePack. On such nights runs he to and fro. "

"Uhh!" said the cow, dropping her head again to graze, "I thought it wasMan. "

"I say no. Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?" lowed Mysa. 

"Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?" the boy called back mockingly. "That is allMysa thinks for: Is it danger? But for Mowgli, who goes to and fro inthe Jungle by night, watching, what do ye care?"

"How loud he cries!" said the cow. "Thus do they cry, " Mysa answeredcontemptuously, "who, having torn up the grass, know not how to eat it. "

"For less than this, " Mowgli groaned to himself, "for less than this evenlast Rains I had pricked Mysa out of his wallow, and ridden him throughthe swamp on a rush halter. " He stretched a hand to break one of thefeathery reeds, but drew it back with a sigh. Mysa went on steadilychewing the cud, and the long grass ripped where the cow grazed. "I willnot die HERE, " he said angrily. "Mysa, who is of one blood with Jacalaand the pig, would see me. Let us go beyond the swamp and see whatcomes. 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 Mysaand pricking him with the point of his knife. The great dripping bullbroke out of his wallow like a shell exploding, while Mowgli laughedtill he sat down. 

"Say now that the hairless wolf of the Seeonee Pack once herded thee, Mysa, " he called. 

"Wolf! THOU?" the bull snorted, stamping in the mud. "All the jungleknows thou wast a herder of tame cattle--such a man's brat as shouts inthe dust by the crops yonder. THOU of the Jungle! What hunter would havecrawled like a snake among the leeches, and for a muddy jest--a jackal'sjest--have shamed me before my cow? Come to firm ground, and I will--Iwill. .. " Mysa frothed at the mouth, for Mysa has nearly the worst temperof any one in the Jungle. 

Mowgli watched him puff and blow with eyes that never changed. Whenhe could make himself heard through the pattering mud, he said: "WhatMan-Pack lair here by the marshes, Mysa? This is new Jungle to me. "

"Go north, then, " roared the angry bull, for Mowgli had pricked himrather sharply. "It was a naked cow-herd's jest. Go and tell them at thevillage at the foot of the marsh. "

"The Man-Pack do not love jungle-tales, nor do I think, Mysa, that ascratch more or less on thy hide is any matter for a council. But I willgo and look at this village. Yes, I will go. Softly now. It is not everynight that the Master of the Jungle comes to herd thee. "

He stepped out to the shivering ground on the edge of the marsh, wellknowing that Mysa would never charge over it and laughed, as he ran, tothink of the bull's anger. 

"My strength is not altogether gone, " he said. "It may be that the poisonis not to the bone. There is a star sitting low yonder. " He looked at itbetween his half-shut hands. "By the Bull that bought me, it is the RedFlower--the Red Flower that I lay beside before--before I came evento the first Seeonee Pack! Now that I have seen, I will finish therunning. "

The marsh ended in a broad plain where a light twinkled. It was a longtime since Mowgli had concerned himself with the doings of men, but thisnight the glimmer of the Red Flower drew him forward. 

"I will look, " said he, "as I did in the old days, and I will see howfar the Man-Pack has changed. "

Forgetting that he was no longer in his own Jungle, where he could dowhat he pleased, he trod carelessly through the dew-loaded grasses tillhe came to the hut where the light stood. Three or four yelping dogsgave tongue, for he was on the outskirts of a village. 

"Ho!" said Mowgli, sitting down noiselessly, after sending back a deepwolf-growl that silenced the curs. "What comes will come. Mowgli, whathast thou to do any more with the lairs of the Man-Pack?" He rubbed hismouth, remembering where a stone had struck it years ago when the otherMan-Pack had cast him out. 

The door of the hut opened, and a woman stood peering out into thedarkness. A child cried, and the woman said over her shoulder, "Sleep. It was but a jackal that waked the dogs. In a little time morningcomes. "

Mowgli in the grass began to shake as though he had fever. He knew thatvoice well, but to make sure he cried softly, surprised to find howman's talk came back, "Messua! O Messua!"

"Who calls?" said the woman, a quiver in her voice. 

"Hast thou forgotten?" said Mowgli. His throat was dry as he spoke. 

"If it be THOU, what name did I give thee? Say!" She had half shut thedoor, and her hand was clutching at her breast. 

"Nathoo! Ohe, Nathoo!" said Mowgli, for, as you remember, that was thename Messua gave him when he first came to the Man-Pack. 

"Come, my son, " she called, and Mowgli stepped into the light, andlooked full at Messua, the woman who had been good to him, and whoselife he had saved from the Man-Pack so long before. She was older, and her hair was gray, but her eyes and her voice had not changed. Woman-like, she expected to find Mowgli where she had left him, and hereyes travelled upward in a puzzled way from his chest to his head, thattouched the top of the door. 

"My son, " she stammered; and then, sinking to his feet: "But it is nolonger my son. It is a Godling of the Woods! Ahai!"

As he stood in the red light of the oil-lamp, strong, tall, andbeautiful, his long black hair sweeping over his shoulders, the knifeswinging at his neck, and his head crowned with a wreath of whitejasmine, he might easily have been mistaken for some wild god of ajungle legend. The child half asleep on a cot sprang up and shriekedaloud with terror. Messua turned to soothe him, while Mowgli stoodstill, looking in at the water-jars and the cooking-pots, the grain-bin, and all the other human belongings that he found himself remembering sowell. 

"What wilt thou eat or drink?" Messua murmured. "This is all thine. Weowe 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 thislight, and came hither. I did not know thou wast here. "

"After we came to Khanhiwara, " Messua said timidly, "the Englishwould 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 ofthose 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--we held a little land here. It is not sorich 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 thatnight?"

"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 theFavour of the Jungle, that he may be safe among thy--thy people, as wewere safe on that night. "

She lifted up the child, who, forgetting his fright, reached out to playwith the knife that hung on Mowgli's chest, and Mowgli put the littlefingers aside very carefully. 

"And if thou art Nathoo whom the tiger carried away, " Messua went on, choking, "he is then thy younger brother. Give him an elder brother'sblessing. "

"Hai-mai! What do I know of the thing called a blessing? I am neithera Godling nor his brother, and--O mother, mother, my heart is heavy inme. " He shivered as he set down the child. 

"Like enough, " said Messua, bustling among the cooking-pots. "This comesof running about the marshes by night. Beyond question, the feverhad soaked thee to the marrow. " Mowgli smiled a little at the idea ofanything in the Jungle hurting him. "I will make a fire, and thou shaltdrink warm milk. Put away the jasmine wreath: the smell is heavy in sosmall a place. "

Mowgli sat down, muttering, with his face in his hands. All manner ofstrange feelings that he had never felt before were running over him, exactly as though he had been poisoned, and he felt dizzy and a littlesick. He drank the warm milk in long gulps, Messua patting him on theshoulder from time to time, not quite sure whether he were her sonNathoo of the long ago days, or some wonderful Jungle being, but glad tofeel that he was at least flesh and blood. 

"Son, " she said at last, --her eyes were full of pride, --"have any toldthee that thou art beautiful beyond all men?"

"Hah?" said Mowgli, for naturally he had never heard anything of thekind. Messua laughed softly and happily. The look in his face was enoughfor her. 

"I am the first, then? It is right, though it comes seldom, that amother 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 his own hard shoulder, andMessua laughed again so long that Mowgli, not knowing why, was forced tolaugh with her, and the child ran from one to the other, laughing too. 

"Nay, thou must not mock thy brother, " said Messua, catching him toher breast. "When thou art one-half as fair we will marry thee to theyoungest daughter of a king, and thou shalt ride great elephants. "

Mowgli could not understand one word in three of the talk here; the warmmilk was taking effect on him after his long run, so he curled up andin 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 therest of that night and all the next day; for his instincts, which neverwholly slept, warned him there was nothing to fear. He waked at lastwith a bound that shook the hut, for the cloth over his face made himdream of traps; and there he stood, his hand on his knife, the sleep allheavy in his rolling eyes, ready for any fight. 

Messua laughed, and set the evening meal before him. There were onlya few coarse cakes baked over the smoky fire, some rice, and a lump ofsour preserved tamarinds--just enough to go on with till he could getto his evening kill. The smell of the dew in the marshes made him hungryand restless. He wanted to finish his spring running, but the childinsisted 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, foolishlittle baby-songs, now calling Mowgli her son, and now begging him togive some of his jungle power to the child. The hut door was closed, butMowgli heard a sound he knew well, and saw Messua's jaw drop with horroras a great gray paw came under the bottom of the door, and Gray Brotheroutside whined a muffled and penitent whine of anxiety and fear. 

"Out and wait! Ye would not come when I called, " said Mowgli inJungle-talk, without turning his head, and the great gray pawdisappeared. 

"Do not--do not bring thy--thy servants with thee, " said Messua. "I--wehave always lived at peace with the Jungle. "

"It is peace, " said Mowgli, rising. "Think of that night on the road toKhanhiwara. There were scores of such folk before thee and behindthee. But I see that even in springtime the Jungle People do not alwaysforget. Mother, I go. "

Messua drew aside humbly--he was indeed a wood-god, she thought; but ashis hand was on the door the mother in her made her throw her arms roundMowgli's neck again and again. 

"Come back!" she whispered. "Son or no son, come back, for I lovethee--Look, he too grieves. "

The child was crying because the man with the shiny knife was goingaway. 

"Come back again, " Messua repeated. "By night or by day this door isnever shut to thee. "

Mowgli's throat worked as though the cords in it were being pulled, andhis voice seemed to be dragged from it as he answered, "I will surelycome back. "

"And now, " he said, as he put by the head of the fawning wolf on thethreshold, "I have a little cry against thee, Gray Brother. Why came yenot all four when I called so long ago?"

"So long ago? It was but last night. I--we--were singing in the Junglethe 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. I ran from all the others and followed hot-foot. But, O Little Brother, what hast THOU done, eating and sleeping with theMan-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 going to answerwhen a girl in a white cloth came down some path that led from theoutskirts of the village. Gray Brother dropped out of sight at once, andMowgli backed noiselessly into a field of high-springing crops. He couldalmost have touched her with his hand when the warm, green stalks closedbefore his face and he disappeared like a ghost. The girl screamed, forshe thought she had seen a spirit, and then she gave a deep sigh. Mowgliparted the stalks with his hands and watched her till she was out ofsight. 

"And now I do not know, " he said, sighing in his turn. "WHY did ye notcome when I called?"

"We follow thee--we follow thee, " Gray Brother mumbled, licking atMowgli's heel. "We follow thee always, except in the Time of the NewTalk. "

"And would ye follow me to the Man-Pack?" Mowgli whispered. 

"Did I not follow thee on the night our old Pack cast thee out? Whowaked 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 BlackOne 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, " Mowgli 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 RedFlower. 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 uponthem. Thou, and not I, didst make song against them more bitter eventhan our song against Red Dog. "

"I ask thee what THOU sayest?"

They were talking as they ran. Gray Brother cantered on a whilewithout replying, and then he said, --between bound and bound as itwere, --"Man-cub--Master of the Jungle--Son of Raksha, Lair-brother tome--though I forget for a little while in the spring, thy trail is mytrail, thy lair is my lair, thy kill is my kill, and thy death-fightis my death-fight. I speak for the Three. But what wilt thou say to theJungle?"

"That is well thought. Between the sight and the kill it is not good towait. Go before and cry them all to the Council Rock, and I will tellthem what is in my stomach. But they may not come--in the Time of NewTalk they may forget me. "

"Hast thou, then, forgotten nothing?" snapped Gray Brother over hisshoulder, as he laid himself down to gallop, and Mowgli followed, thinking. 

At any other season the news would have called all the Jungle togetherwith bristling necks, but now they were busy hunting and fighting andkilling and singing. From one to another Gray Brother ran, crying, "TheMaster of the Jungle goes back to Man! Come to the Council Rock. " Andthe happy, eager People only answered, "He will return in the summerheats. The Rains will drive him to lair. Run and sing with us, GrayBrother. "

"But the Master of the Jungle goes back to Man, " Gray Brother wouldrepeat. 

"Eee--Yoawa? Is the Time of New Talk any less sweet for that?" theywould reply. So when Mowgli, heavy-hearted, came up through thewell-remembered rocks to the place where he had been brought into theCouncil, 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 himselfdown, his face in his hands. "Cry thy cry. We be of one blood, thou andI--man and snake together. "

"Why did I not die under Red Dog?" the boy moaned. "My strength is gonefrom me, and it is not any poison. By night and by day I hear a doublestep upon my trail. When I turn my head it is as though one had hiddenhimself from me that instant. I go to look behind the trees and he isnot there. I call and none cry again; but it is as though one listenedand kept back the answer. I lie down, but I do not rest. I run thespring running, but I am not made still. I bathe, but I am not madecool. The kill sickens me, but I have no heart to fight except I kill. The Red Flower is in my body, my bones are water--and--I know not what Iknow. "

"What need of talk?" said Baloo slowly, turning his head to where Mowglilay. "Akela by the river said it, that Mowgli should drive Mowgliback 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, Manling, I knew it, " said Kaa, turning alittle in his mighty coils. "Man goes to Man at the last, though theJungle does not cast him out. "

The Four looked at one another and at Mowgli, puzzled but obedient. 

"The Jungle does not cast me out, then?" Mowgli stammered. 

Gray Brother and the Three growled furiously, beginning, "So long as welive none shall dare----" But Baloo checked them. 

"I taught thee the Law. It is for me to speak, " he said; "and, though Icannot now see the rocks before me, I see far. Little Frog, take thineown trail; make thy lair with thine own blood and pack and people; butwhen there is need of foot or tooth or eye, or a word carried swiftly bynight, remember, Master of the Jungle, the Jungle is thine at call. "

"The Middle Jungle is thine also, " said Kaa. "I speak for no smallpeople. "

"Hai-mai, my brothers, " cried Mowgli, throwing 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 inthis hunting. When the honey is eaten we leave the empty hive. "

"Having cast the skin, " said Kaa, "we may not creep into it afresh. Itis the Law. "

"Listen, dearest of all to me, " said Baloo. There is neither word norwill here to hold thee back. Look up! Who may question the Master of theJungle? I saw thee playing among the white pebbles yonder when thou wasta little frog; and Bagheera, that bought thee for the price of a youngbull newly killed, saw thee also. Of that Looking Over we two onlyremain; for Raksha, thy lair-mother, is dead with thy lair-father; theold 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 nothing butold bones. It is no longer the Man-cub that asks leave of his Pack, butthe Master of the Jungle that changes his trail. Who shall question Manin his ways?"

"But Bagheera and the Bull that bought me, " said Mowgli. "I wouldnot----"

His words were cut short by a roar and a crash in the thicket below, andBagheera, light, strong, and terrible as always, stood before him. 

"Therefore, " he said, stretching out a dripping right paw, "I did notcome. It was a long hunt, but he lies dead in the bushes now--a bull inhis second year--the Bull that frees thee, Little Brother. All debtsare paid now. For the rest, my word is Baloo's word. " He licked Mowgli'sfoot. "Remember, Bagheera loved thee, " he cried, and bounded away. Atthe foot of the hill he cried again long and loud, "Good hunting on anew trail, Master of the Jungle! Remember, Bagheera loved thee. "

"Thou hast heard, " said Baloo. "There is no more. Go now; but first cometo 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. 

"The stars are thin, " said Gray Brother, snuffing at the dawn wind. "Where shall we lair to-day? for from now, we follow new trails. "

*****

And this is the last of the Mowgli stories. 

THE OUTSONG

[This is the song that Mowgli heard behind him in the Jungle till hecame to Messua's door again. ]

 Baloo

 For 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, 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, Jungle-Favour go with thee!

 Kaa

 Anger is the egg 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 thy den is hid and deep, Lest a wrong, by thee forgot, Draw thy killer 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-Favour go with thee!

 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 banaar'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-Favour go with thee!

 The Three

 On the trail that thou must tread To the thresholds of our dread, Where the Flower blossoms red; Through the nights when thou shalt lie Prisoned from our Mother-sky, Hearing us, thy loves, go by; In the dawns when thou shalt wake To the toil thou canst not break, Heartsick for the Jungle's sake: Wood and Water, Wind and Tree, Wisdom, Strength, and Courtesy, Jungle-Favour go with thee!