The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
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Title: The Jungle Book
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Release Date: January 16, 2006 [EBook #236] Last Updated: October 6, 2016
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUNGLE BOOK
Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
<br /> <br />
THE JUNGLE BOOK<br />
By Rudyard Kipling<br /> <br />
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Contents
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[ Mowgli’s Brothers ](#link2H_4_0001)<br />[ Hunting-Song of the Seeonee Pack ](#link2H_4_0002)<br />[ Kaa’s Hunting ](#link2H_4_0003)<br />[ Road-Song of the Bandar-Log ](#link2H_4_0004)<br />[ “Tiger! Tiger!” ](#link2H_4_0005)<br />[ Mowgli’s Song ](#link2H_4_0006)<br />[ The White Seal ](#link2H_4_0007)<br />[ Lukannon ](#link2H_4_0008)<br />[ “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” ](#link2H_4_0009)<br />[ Darzee’s Chant ](#link2H_4_0010)<br />[ Toomai of the Elephants ](#link2H_4_0011)<br />[ Shiv and the Grasshopper ](#link2H_4_0012)<br />[ Her Majesty’s Servants ](#link2H_4_0013)<br />[ Parade Song of the Camp Animals ](#link2H_4_0014)|
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Mowgli’s BrothersNow Rann the Kite brings home the nightThat Mang the Bat sets free—The herds are shut in byre and hutFor loosed till dawn are we.This is the hour of pride and power,Talon and tush and claw.Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting allThat keep the Jungle Law!Night-Song in the JungleIt was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills whenFather Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, andspread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feelingin their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across herfour tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of thecave where they all lived. “Augrh!” said Father Wolf. “It is time to huntagain.” He was going to spring down hill when a little shadow with a bushytail crossed the threshold and whined: “Good luck go with you, O Chief ofthe Wolves. And good luck and strong white teeth go with noble childrenthat they may never forget the hungry in this world.”
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It was the jackal—Tabaqui, the Dish-licker—and the wolves ofIndia despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and tellingtales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the villagerubbish-heaps. But they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more thananyone else in the jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that hewas ever afraid of anyone, and runs through the forest biting everythingin his way. Even the tiger runs and hides when little Tabaqui goes mad,for madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wildcreature. We call it hydrophobia, but they call it dewanee—themadness—and run.<br />“Enter, then, and look,” said Father Wolf stiffly, “but there is no foodhere.”<br />“For a wolf, no,” said Tabaqui, “but for so mean a person as myself a drybone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log [the jackal people], topick and choose?” He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he found thebone of a buck with some meat on it, and sat cracking the end merrily.<br />“All thanks for this good meal,” he said, licking his lips. “How beautifulare the noble children! How large are their eyes! And so young too!Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the children of kings are menfrom the beginning.”<br />Now, Tabaqui knew as well as anyone else that there is nothing so unluckyas to compliment children to their faces. It pleased him to see Mother andFather Wolf look uncomfortable.<br />Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made, and then hesaid spitefully:<br />“Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will huntamong these hills for the next moon, so he has told me.”<br />Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River, twenty milesaway.<br />“He has no right!” Father Wolf began angrily—“By the Law of theJungle he has no right to change his quarters without due warning. He willfrighten every head of game within ten miles, and I—I have to killfor two, these days.”<br />“His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for nothing,” saidMother Wolf quietly. “He has been lame in one foot from his birth. That iswhy he has only killed cattle. Now the villagers of the Waingunga areangry with him, and he has come here to make our villagers angry. Theywill scour the jungle for him when he is far away, and we and our childrenmust run when the grass is set alight. Indeed, we are very grateful toShere Khan!”<br />“Shall I tell him of your gratitude?” said Tabaqui.<br />“Out!” snapped Father Wolf. “Out and hunt with thy master. Thou hast doneharm enough for one night.”<br />“I go,” said Tabaqui quietly. “Ye can hear Shere Khan below in thethickets. I might have saved myself the message.”<br />Father Wolf listened, and below in the valley that ran down to a littleriver he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a tiger who hascaught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.<br />“The fool!” said Father Wolf. “To begin a night’s work with that noise!Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga bullocks?”<br />“H’sh. It is neither bullock nor buck he hunts to-night,” said MotherWolf. “It is Man.”<br />The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that seemed to come fromevery quarter of the compass. It was the noise that bewilders woodcuttersand gypsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes into thevery mouth of the tiger.<br />“Man!” said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth. “Faugh! Are therenot enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must eat Man, and on ourground too!”<br />The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason,forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show hischildren how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds ofhis pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means,sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, andhundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybodyin the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is thatMan is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it isunsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too—and it is true—thatman-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth.<br />The purr grew louder, and ended in the full-throated “Aaarh!” of thetiger’s charge.<br />Then there was a howl—an untigerish howl—from Shere Khan. “Hehas missed,” said Mother Wolf. “What is it?”<br />Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan muttering andmumbling savagely as he tumbled about in the scrub.<br />“The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a woodcutter’s campfire,and has burned his feet,” said Father Wolf with a grunt. “Tabaqui is withhim.”<br />“Something is coming uphill,” said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear. “Getready.”<br />The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped withhis haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had beenwatching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world—thewolf checked in mid-spring. He made his bound before he saw what it was hewas jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that heshot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost wherehe left ground.<br />“Man!” he snapped. “A man’s cub. Look!”<br />Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brownbaby who could just walk—as soft and as dimpled a little atom asever came to a wolf’s cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolf’s face,and laughed.<br />“Is that a man’s cub?” said Mother Wolf. “I have never seen one. Bring ithere.”<br />A Wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary, mouth an eggwithout breaking it, and though Father Wolf’s jaws closed right on thechild’s back not a tooth even scratched the skin as he laid it down amongthe cubs.<br />“How little! How naked, and—how bold!” said Mother Wolf softly. Thebaby was pushing his way between the cubs to get close to the warm hide.“Ahai! He is taking his meal with the others. And so this is a man’s cub.Now, was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man’s cub among herchildren?”<br />“I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our Pack or inmy time,” said Father Wolf. “He is altogether without hair, and I couldkill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he looks up and is not afraid.”<br />The moonlight was blocked out of the mouth of the cave, for Shere Khan’sgreat square head and shoulders were thrust into the entrance. Tabaqui,behind him, was squeaking: “My lord, my lord, it went in here!”<br />“Shere Khan does us great honor,” said Father Wolf, but his eyes were veryangry. “What does Shere Khan need?”<br />“My quarry. A man’s cub went this way,” said Shere Khan. “Its parents haverun off. Give it to me.”<br />Shere Khan had jumped at a woodcutter’s campfire, as Father Wolf had said,and was furious from the pain of his burned feet. But Father Wolf knewthat the mouth of the cave was too narrow for a tiger to come in by. Evenwhere he was, Shere Khan’s shoulders and forepaws were cramped for want ofroom, as a man’s would be if he tried to fight in a barrel.<br />“The Wolves are a free people,” said Father Wolf. “They take orders fromthe Head of the Pack, and not from any striped cattle-killer. The man’scub is ours—to kill if we choose.”<br />“Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By thebull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fairdues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!”
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The tiger’s roar filled the cave with thunder. Mother Wolf shook herselfclear of the cubs and sprang forward, her eyes, like two green moons inthe darkness, facing the blazing eyes of Shere Khan.<br />“And it is I, Raksha [The Demon], who answers. The man’s cub is mine,Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run withthe Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter oflittle naked cubs—frog-eater—fish-killer—he shall huntthee! Now get hence, or by the Sambhur that I killed (I eat no starvedcattle), back thou goest to thy mother, burned beast of the jungle, lamerthan ever thou camest into the world! Go!”<br />Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he wonMother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Packand was not called The Demon for compliment’s sake. Shere Khan might havefaced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for heknew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and wouldfight to the death. So he backed out of the cave mouth growling, and whenhe was clear he shouted:<br />“Each dog barks in his own yard! We will see what the Pack will say tothis fostering of man-cubs. The cub is mine, and to my teeth he will comein the end, O bush-tailed thieves!”<br />Mother Wolf threw herself down panting among the cubs, and Father Wolfsaid to her gravely:<br />“Shere Khan speaks this much truth. The cub must be shown to the Pack.Wilt thou still keep him, Mother?”<br />“Keep him!” she gasped. “He came naked, by night, alone and very hungry;yet he was not afraid! Look, he has pushed one of my babes to one sidealready. And that lame butcher would have killed him and would have runoff to the Waingunga while the villagers here hunted through all our lairsin revenge! Keep him? Assuredly I will keep him. Lie still, little frog. Othou Mowgli—for Mowgli the Frog I will call thee—the time willcome when thou wilt hunt Shere Khan as he has hunted thee.”<br />“But what will our Pack say?” said Father Wolf.<br />The Law of the Jungle lays down very clearly that any wolf may, when hemarries, withdraw from the Pack he belongs to. But as soon as his cubs areold enough to stand on their feet he must bring them to the Pack Council,which is generally held once a month at full moon, in order that the otherwolves may identify them. After that inspection the cubs are free to runwhere they please, and until they have killed their first buck no excuseis accepted if a grown wolf of the Pack kills one of them. The punishmentis death where the murderer can be found; and if you think for a minuteyou will see that this must be so.
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Father Wolf waited till his cubs could run a little, and then on the nightof the Pack Meeting took them and Mowgli and Mother Wolf to the CouncilRock—a hilltop covered with stones and boulders where a hundredwolves could hide. Akela, the great gray Lone Wolf, who led all the Packby strength and cunning, lay out at full length on his rock, and below himsat forty or more wolves of every size and color, from badger-coloredveterans who could handle a buck alone to young black three-year-olds whothought they could. The Lone Wolf had led them for a year now. He hadfallen twice into a wolf trap in his youth, and once he had been beatenand left for dead; so he knew the manners and customs of men. There wasvery little talking at the Rock. The cubs tumbled over each other in thecenter of the circle where their mothers and fathers sat, and now andagain a senior wolf would go quietly up to a cub, look at him carefully,and return to his place on noiseless feet. Sometimes a mother would pushher cub far out into the moonlight to be sure that he had not beenoverlooked. Akela from his rock would cry: “Ye know the Law—ye knowthe Law. Look well, O Wolves!” And the anxious mothers would take up thecall: “Look—look well, O Wolves!”<br />At last—and Mother Wolf’s neck bristles lifted as the time came—FatherWolf pushed “Mowgli the Frog,” as they called him, into the center, wherehe sat laughing and playing with some pebbles that glistened in themoonlight.<br />Akela never raised his head from his paws, but went on with the monotonouscry: “Look well!” A muffled roar came up from behind the rocks—thevoice of Shere Khan crying: “The cub is mine. Give him to me. What havethe Free People to do with a man’s cub?” Akela never even twitched hisears. All he said was: “Look well, O Wolves! What have the Free People todo with the orders of any save the Free People? Look well!”
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There was a chorus of deep growls, and a young wolf in his fourth yearflung back Shere Khan’s question to Akela: “What have the Free People todo with a man’s cub?” Now, the Law of the Jungle lays down that if thereis any dispute as to the right of a cub to be accepted by the Pack, hemust be spoken for by at least two members of the Pack who are not hisfather and mother.<br />“Who speaks for this cub?” said Akela. “Among the Free People who speaks?”There was no answer and Mother Wolf got ready for what she knew would beher last fight, if things came to fighting.<br />Then the only other creature who is allowed at the Pack Council—Baloo,the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle: oldBaloo, who can come and go where he pleases because he eats only nuts androots and honey—rose upon his hind quarters and grunted.<br />“The man’s cub—the man’s cub?” he said. “I speak for the man’s cub.There is no harm in a man’s cub. I have no gift of words, but I speak thetruth. Let him run with the Pack, and be entered with the others. I myselfwill teach him.”<br />“We need yet another,” said Akela. “Baloo has spoken, and he is ourteacher for the young cubs. Who speaks besides Baloo?”<br />A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the BlackPanther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up incertain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera,and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, asbold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But hehad a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softerthan down.<br />“O Akela, and ye the Free People,” he purred, “I have no right in yourassembly, but the Law of the Jungle says that if there is a doubt which isnot a killing matter in regard to a new cub, the life of that cub may bebought at a price. And the Law does not say who may or may not pay thatprice. Am I right?”<br />“Good! Good!” said the young wolves, who are always hungry. “Listen toBagheera. The cub can be bought for a price. It is the Law.”<br />“Knowing that I have no right to speak here, I ask your leave.”<br />“Speak then,” cried twenty voices.<br />“To kill a naked cub is shame. Besides, he may make better sport for youwhen he is grown. Baloo has spoken in his behalf. Now to Baloo’s word Iwill add one bull, and a fat one, newly killed, not half a mile from here,if ye will accept the man’s cub according to the Law. Is it difficult?”<br />There was a clamor of scores of voices, saying: “What matter? He will diein the winter rains. He will scorch in the sun. What harm can a naked frogdo us? Let him run with the Pack. Where is the bull, Bagheera? Let him beaccepted.” And then came Akela’s deep bay, crying: “Look well—lookwell, O Wolves!”<br />Mowgli was still deeply interested in the pebbles, and he did not noticewhen the wolves came and looked at him one by one. At last they all wentdown the hill for the dead bull, and only Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, andMowgli’s own wolves were left. Shere Khan roared still in the night, forhe was very angry that Mowgli had not been handed over to him.<br />“Ay, roar well,” said Bagheera, under his whiskers, “for the time willcome when this naked thing will make thee roar to another tune, or I knownothing of man.”<br />“It was well done,” said Akela. “Men and their cubs are very wise. He maybe a help in time.”
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“Truly, a help in time of need; for none can hope to lead the Packforever,” said Bagheera.<br />Akela said nothing. He was thinking of the time that comes to every leaderof every pack when his strength goes from him and he gets feebler andfeebler, till at last he is killed by the wolves and a new leader comes up—tobe killed in his turn.<br />“Take him away,” he said to Father Wolf, “and train him as befits one ofthe Free People.”<br />And that is how Mowgli was entered into the Seeonee Wolf Pack for theprice of a bull and on Baloo’s good word.<br />Now you must be content to skip ten or eleven whole years, and only guessat all the wonderful life that Mowgli led among the wolves, because if itwere written out it would fill ever so many books. He grew up with thecubs, though they, of course, were grown wolves almost before he was achild. And Father Wolf taught him his business, and the meaning of thingsin the jungle, till every rustle in the grass, every breath of the warmnight air, every note of the owls above his head, every scratch of a bat’sclaws as it roosted for a while in a tree, and every splash of everylittle fish jumping in a pool meant just as much to him as the work of hisoffice means to a business man. When he was not learning he sat out in thesun and slept, and ate and went to sleep again. When he felt dirty or hothe swam in the forest pools; and when he wanted honey (Baloo told him thathoney and nuts were just as pleasant to eat as raw meat) he climbed up forit, and that Bagheera showed him how to do.
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Bagheera would lie out on a
branch and call, “Come along, Little Brother,” and at first Mowgli would
cling like the sloth, but afterward he would fling himself through the
branches almost as boldly as the gray ape. He took his place at the
Council Rock, too, when the Pack met, and there he discovered that if he
stared hard at any wolf, the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes, and so
he used to stare for fun. At other times he would pick the long thorns out
of the pads of his friends, for wolves suffer terribly from thorns and
burs in their coats. He would go down the hillside into the cultivated
lands by night, and look very curiously at the villagers in their huts,
but he had a mistrust of men because Bagheera showed him a square box with
a drop gate so cunningly hidden in the jungle that he nearly walked into
it, and told him that it was a trap. He loved better than anything else to
go with Bagheera into the dark warm heart of the forest, to sleep all
through the drowsy day, and at night see how Bagheera did his killing.
Bagheera killed right and left as he felt hungry, and so did Mowgli—with
one exception. As soon as he was old enough to understand things, Bagheera
told him that he must never touch cattle because he had been bought into
the Pack at the price of a bull’s life. “All the jungle is thine,” said
Bagheera, “and thou canst kill everything that thou art strong enough to
kill; but for the sake of the bull that bought thee thou must never kill
or eat any cattle young or old. That is the Law of the Jungle.” Mowgli
obeyed faithfully.
And he grew and grew strong as a boy must grow who does not know that he
is learning any lessons, and who has nothing in the world to think of
except things to eat.
Mother Wolf told him once or twice that Shere Khan was not a creature to
be trusted, and that some day he must kill Shere Khan. But though a young
wolf would have remembered that advice every hour, Mowgli forgot it
because he was only a boy—though he would have called himself a wolf
if he had been able to speak in any human tongue.
Shere Khan was always crossing his path in the jungle, for as Akela grew
older and feebler the lame tiger had come to be great friends with the
younger wolves of the Pack, who followed him for scraps, a thing Akela
would never have allowed if he had dared to push his authority to the
proper bounds. Then Shere Khan would flatter them and wonder that such
fine young hunters were content to be led by a dying wolf and a man’s cub.
“They tell me,” Shere Khan would say, “that at Council ye dare not look
him between the eyes.” And the young wolves would growl and bristle.
Bagheera, who had eyes and ears everywhere, knew something of this, and
once or twice he told Mowgli in so many words that Shere Khan would kill
him some day. Mowgli would laugh and answer: “I have the Pack and I have
thee; and Baloo, though he is so lazy, might strike a blow or two for my
sake. Why should I be afraid?”
It was one very warm day that a new notion came to Bagheera—born of
something that he had heard. Perhaps Ikki the Porcupine had told him; but
he said to Mowgli when they were deep in the jungle, as the boy lay with
his head on Bagheera’s beautiful black skin, “Little Brother, how often
have I told thee that Shere Khan is thy enemy?”
“As many times as there are nuts on that palm,” said Mowgli, who,
naturally, could not count. “What of it? I am sleepy, Bagheera, and Shere
Khan is all long tail and loud talk—like Mao, the Peacock.”
“But this is no time for sleeping. Baloo knows it; I know it; the Pack
know it; and even the foolish, foolish deer know. Tabaqui has told thee
too.”
“Ho! ho!” said Mowgli. “Tabaqui came to me not long ago with some rude
talk that I was a naked man’s cub and not fit to dig pig-nuts. But I
caught Tabaqui by the tail and swung him twice against a palm-tree to
teach him better manners.”
“That was foolishness, for though Tabaqui is a mischief-maker, he would
have told thee of something that concerned thee closely. Open those eyes,
Little Brother. Shere Khan dare not kill thee in the jungle. But remember,
Akela is very old, and soon the day comes when he cannot kill his buck,
and then he will be leader no more. Many of the wolves that looked thee
over when thou wast brought to the Council first are old too, and the
young wolves believe, as Shere Khan has taught them, that a man-cub has no
place with the Pack. In a little time thou wilt be a man.”
“And what is a man that he should not run with his brothers?” said Mowgli.
“I was born in the jungle. I have obeyed the Law of the Jungle, and there
is no wolf of ours from whose paws I have not pulled a thorn. Surely they
are my brothers!”
Bagheera stretched himself at full length and half shut his eyes. “Little
Brother,” said he, “feel under my jaw.”
Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera’s silky chin,
where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came
upon a little bald spot.
“There is no one in the jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that
mark—the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born
among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of
the king’s palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the
price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I
too was born among men. I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind
bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera—the
Panther—and no man’s plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one
blow of my paw and came away. And because I had learned the ways of men, I
became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?”
“Yes,” said Mowgli, “all the jungle fear Bagheera—all except
Mowgli.”
“Oh, thou art a man’s cub,” said the Black Panther very tenderly. “And
even as I returned to my jungle, so thou must go back to men at last—to
the men who are thy brothers—if thou art not killed in the Council.”
“But why—but why should any wish to kill me?” said Mowgli.
“Look at me,” said Bagheera. And Mowgli looked at him steadily between the
eyes. The big panther turned his head away in half a minute.
“That is why,” he said, shifting his paw on the leaves. “Not even I can
look thee between the eyes, and I was born among men, and I love thee,
Little Brother. The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet
thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from
their feet—because thou art a man.”
“I did not know these things,” said Mowgli sullenly, and he frowned under
his heavy black eyebrows.
“What is the Law of the Jungle? Strike first and then give tongue. By thy
very carelessness they know that thou art a man. But be wise. It is in my
heart that when Akela misses his next kill—and at each hunt it costs
him more to pin the buck—the Pack will turn against him and against
thee. They will hold a jungle Council at the Rock, and then—and then—I
have it!” said Bagheera, leaping up. “Go thou down quickly to the men’s
huts in the valley, and take some of the Red Flower which they grow there,
so that when the time comes thou mayest have even a stronger friend than I
or Baloo or those of the Pack that love thee. Get the Red Flower.”
By Red Flower Bagheera meant fire, only no creature in the jungle will
call fire by its proper name. Every beast lives in deadly fear of it, and
invents a hundred ways of describing it.
“The Red Flower?” said Mowgli. “That grows outside their huts in the
twilight. I will get some.”
“There speaks the man’s cub,” said Bagheera proudly. “Remember that it
grows in little pots. Get one swiftly, and keep it by thee for time of
need.”
“Good!” said Mowgli. “I go. But art thou sure, O my Bagheera”—he
slipped his arm around the splendid neck and looked deep into the big eyes—“art
thou sure that all this is Shere Khan’s doing?”
“By the Broken Lock that freed me, I am sure, Little Brother.”
“Then, by the Bull that bought me, I will pay Shere Khan full tale for
this, and it may be a little over,” said Mowgli, and he bounded away.
“That is a man. That is all a man,” said Bagheera to himself, lying down
again. “Oh, Shere Khan, never was a blacker hunting than that frog-hunt of
thine ten years ago!”
Mowgli was far and far through the forest, running hard, and his heart was
hot in him. He came to the cave as the evening mist rose, and drew breath,
and looked down the valley. The cubs were out, but Mother Wolf, at the
back of the cave, knew by his breathing that something was troubling her
frog.
“What is it, Son?” she said.
“Some bat’s chatter of Shere Khan,” he called back. “I hunt among the
plowed fields tonight,” and he plunged downward through the bushes, to the
stream at the bottom of the valley. There he checked, for he heard the
yell of the Pack hunting, heard the bellow of a hunted Sambhur, and the
snort as the buck turned at bay. Then there were wicked, bitter howls from
the young wolves: “Akela! Akela! Let the Lone Wolf show his strength. Room
for the leader of the Pack! Spring, Akela!”
The Lone Wolf must have sprung and missed his hold, for Mowgli heard the
snap of his teeth and then a yelp as the Sambhur knocked him over with his
forefoot.
He did not wait for anything more, but dashed on; and the yells grew
fainter behind him as he ran into the croplands where the villagers lived.
“Bagheera spoke truth,” he panted, as he nestled down in some cattle
fodder by the window of a hut. “To-morrow is one day both for Akela and
for me.”
Then he pressed his face close to the window and watched the fire on the
hearth. He saw the husbandman’s wife get up and feed it in the night with
black lumps. And when the morning came and the mists were all white and
cold, he saw the man’s child pick up a wicker pot plastered inside with
earth, fill it with lumps of red-hot charcoal, put it under his blanket,
and go out to tend the cows in the byre.
“Is that all?” said Mowgli. “If a cub can do it, there is nothing to
fear.” So he strode round the corner and met the boy, took the pot from
his hand, and disappeared into the mist while the boy howled with fear.
“They are very like me,” said Mowgli, blowing into the pot as he had seen
the woman do. “This thing will die if I do not give it things to eat”; and
he dropped twigs and dried bark on the red stuff. Halfway up the hill he
met Bagheera with the morning dew shining like moonstones on his coat.
“Akela has missed,” said the Panther. “They would have killed him last
night, but they needed thee also. They were looking for thee on the hill.”
“I was among the plowed lands. I am ready. See!” Mowgli held up the
fire-pot.
“Good! Now, I have seen men thrust a dry branch into that stuff, and
presently the Red Flower blossomed at the end of it. Art thou not afraid?”
“No. Why should I fear? I remember now—if it is not a dream—how,
before I was a Wolf, I lay beside the Red Flower, and it was warm and
pleasant.”
All that day Mowgli sat in the cave tending his fire pot and dipping dry
branches into it to see how they looked. He found a branch that satisfied
him, and in the evening when Tabaqui came to the cave and told him rudely
enough that he was wanted at the Council Rock, he laughed till Tabaqui ran
away. Then Mowgli went to the Council, still laughing.
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Akela the Lone Wolf lay by the side of his rock as a sign that theleadership of the Pack was open, and Shere Khan with his following ofscrap-fed wolves walked to and fro openly being flattered. Bagheera layclose to Mowgli, and the fire pot was between Mowgli’s knees. When theywere all gathered together, Shere Khan began to speak—a thing hewould never have dared to do when Akela was in his prime.<br />“He has no right,” whispered Bagheera. “Say so. He is a dog’s son. He willbe frightened.”<br />Mowgli sprang to his feet. “Free People,” he cried, “does Shere Khan leadthe Pack? What has a tiger to do with our leadership?”<br />“Seeing that the leadership is yet open, and being asked to speak—”Shere Khan began.<br />“By whom?” said Mowgli. “Are we all jackals, to fawn on this cattlebutcher? The leadership of the Pack is with the Pack alone.”<br />There were yells of “Silence, thou man’s cub!” “Let him speak. He has keptour Law”; and at last the seniors of the Pack thundered: “Let the DeadWolf speak.” When a leader of the Pack has missed his kill, he is calledthe Dead Wolf as long as he lives, which is not long.<br />Akela raised his old head wearily:—<br />“Free People, and ye too, jackals of Shere Khan, for twelve seasons I haveled ye to and from the kill, and in all that time not one has been trappedor maimed. Now I have missed my kill. Ye know how that plot was made. Yeknow how ye brought me up to an untried buck to make my weakness known. Itwas cleverly done. Your right is to kill me here on the Council Rock, now.Therefore, I ask, who comes to make an end of the Lone Wolf? For it is myright, by the Law of the Jungle, that ye come one by one.”<br />There was a long hush, for no single wolf cared to fight Akela to thedeath. Then Shere Khan roared: “Bah! What have we to do with thistoothless fool? He is doomed to die! It is the man-cub who has lived toolong. Free People, he was my meat from the first. Give him to me. I amweary of this man-wolf folly. He has troubled the jungle for ten seasons.Give me the man-cub, or I will hunt here always, and not give you onebone. He is a man, a man’s child, and from the marrow of my bones I hatehim!”<br />Then more than half the Pack yelled: “A man! A man! What has a man to dowith us? Let him go to his own place.”<br />“And turn all the people of the villages against us?” clamored Shere Khan.“No, give him to me. He is a man, and none of us can look him between theeyes.”<br />Akela lifted his head again and said, “He has eaten our food. He has sleptwith us. He has driven game for us. He has broken no word of the Law ofthe Jungle.”<br />“Also, I paid for him with a bull when he was accepted. The worth of abull is little, but Bagheera’s honor is something that he will perhapsfight for,” said Bagheera in his gentlest voice.<br />“A bull paid ten years ago!” the Pack snarled. “What do we care for bonesten years old?”<br />“Or for a pledge?” said Bagheera, his white teeth bared under his lip.“Well are ye called the Free People!”<br />“No man’s cub can run with the people of the jungle,” howled Shere Khan.“Give him to me!”<br />“He is our brother in all but blood,” Akela went on, “and ye would killhim here! In truth, I have lived too long. Some of ye are eaters ofcattle, and of others I have heard that, under Shere Khan’s teaching, yego by dark night and snatch children from the villager’s doorstep.Therefore I know ye to be cowards, and it is to cowards I speak. It iscertain that I must die, and my life is of no worth, or I would offer thatin the man-cub’s place. But for the sake of the Honor of the Pack,—alittle matter that by being without a leader ye have forgotten,—Ipromise that if ye let the man-cub go to his own place, I will not, whenmy time comes to die, bare one tooth against ye. I will die withoutfighting. That will at least save the Pack three lives. More I cannot do;but if ye will, I can save ye the shame that comes of killing a brotheragainst whom there is no fault—a brother spoken for and bought intothe Pack according to the Law of the Jungle.”<br />“He is a man—a man—a man!” snarled the Pack. And most of thewolves began to gather round Shere Khan, whose tail was beginning toswitch.<br />“Now the business is in thy hands,” said Bagheera to Mowgli. “We can do nomore except fight.”<br />Mowgli stood upright—the fire pot in his hands. Then he stretchedout his arms, and yawned in the face of the Council; but he was furiouswith rage and sorrow, for, wolflike, the wolves had never told him howthey hated him. “Listen you!” he cried. “There is no need for this dog’sjabber. Ye have told me so often tonight that I am a man (and indeed Iwould have been a wolf with you to my life’s end) that I feel your wordsare true. So I do not call ye my brothers any more, but sag [dogs], as aman should. What ye will do, and what ye will not do, is not yours to say.That matter is with me; and that we may see the matter more plainly, I,the man, have brought here a little of the Red Flower which ye, dogs,fear.”<br />He flung the fire pot on the ground, and some of the red coals lit a tuftof dried moss that flared up, as all the Council drew back in terrorbefore the leaping flames.<br />Mowgli thrust his dead branch into the fire till the twigs lit andcrackled, and whirled it above his head among the cowering wolves.<br />“Thou art the master,” said Bagheera in an undertone. “Save Akela from thedeath. He was ever thy friend.”<br />Akela, the grim old wolf who had never asked for mercy in his life, gaveone piteous look at Mowgli as the boy stood all naked, his long black hairtossing over his shoulders in the light of the blazing branch that madethe shadows jump and quiver.<br />“Good!” said Mowgli, staring round slowly. “I see that ye are dogs. I gofrom you to my own people—if they be my own people. The jungle isshut to me, and I must forget your talk and your companionship. But I willbe more merciful than ye are. Because I was all but your brother in blood,I promise that when I am a man among men I will not betray ye to men as yehave betrayed me.” He kicked the fire with his foot, and the sparks flewup. “There shall be no war between any of us in the Pack. But here is adebt to pay before I go.” He strode forward to where Shere Khan satblinking stupidly at the flames, and caught him by the tuft on his chin.Bagheera followed in case of accidents. “Up, dog!” Mowgli cried. “Up, whena man speaks, or I will set that coat ablaze!”<br />Shere Khan’s ears lay flat back on his head, and he shut his eyes, for theblazing branch was very near.<br />“This cattle-killer said he would kill me in the Council because he hadnot killed me when I was a cub. Thus and thus, then, do we beat dogs whenwe are men. Stir a whisker, Lungri, and I ram the Red Flower down thygullet!” He beat Shere Khan over the head with the branch, and the tigerwhimpered and whined in an agony of fear.<br />“Pah! Singed jungle cat—go now! But remember when next I come to theCouncil Rock, as a man should come, it will be with Shere Khan’s hide onmy head. For the rest, Akela goes free to live as he pleases. Ye will notkill him, because that is not my will. Nor do I think that ye will sithere any longer, lolling out your tongues as though ye were somebodies,instead of dogs whom I drive out—thus! Go!” The fire was burningfuriously at the end of the branch, and Mowgli struck right and left roundthe circle, and the wolves ran howling with the sparks burning their fur.At last there were only Akela, Bagheera, and perhaps ten wolves that hadtaken Mowgli’s part. Then something began to hurt Mowgli inside him, as hehad never been hurt in his life before, and he caught his breath andsobbed, and the tears ran down his face.<br />“What is it? What is it?” he said. “I do not wish to leave the jungle, andI do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?”
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“No, Little Brother. That is only tears such as men use,” said Bagheera.“Now I know thou art a man, and a man’s cub no longer. The jungle is shutindeed to thee henceforward. Let them fall, Mowgli. They are only tears.”So Mowgli sat and cried as though his heart would break; and he had nevercried in all his life before.<br />“Now,” he said, “I will go to men. But first I must say farewell to mymother.” And he went to the cave where she lived with Father Wolf, and hecried on her coat, while the four cubs howled miserably.<br />“Ye will not forget me?” said Mowgli.<br />“Never while we can follow a trail,” said the cubs. “Come to the foot ofthe hill when thou art a man, and we will talk to thee; and we will comeinto the croplands to play with thee by night.”<br />“Come soon!” said Father Wolf. “Oh, wise little frog, come again soon; forwe be old, thy mother and I.”<br />“Come soon,” said Mother Wolf, “little naked son of mine. For, listen,child of man, I loved thee more than ever I loved my cubs.”<br />“I will surely come,” said Mowgli. “And when I come it will be to lay outShere Khan’s hide upon the Council Rock. Do not forget me! Tell them inthe jungle never to forget me!”<br />The dawn was beginning to break when Mowgli went down the hillside alone,to meet those mysterious things that are called men.<br />[]()
Hunting-Song of the Seeonee PackAs the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belledOnce, twice and again!And a doe leaped up, and a doe leaped upFrom the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup.This I, scouting alone, beheld,Once, twice and again!As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belledOnce, twice and again!And a wolf stole back, and a wolf stole backTo carry the word to the waiting pack,And we sought and we found and we bayed on his trackOnce, twice and again!As the dawn was breaking the Wolf Pack yelledOnce, twice and again!Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!Eyes that can see in the dark—the dark!Tongue—give tongue to it! Hark! O hark!Once, twice and again![]()
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Kaa’s HuntingHis spots are the joy of the Leopard: his horns are theBuffalo’s pride.Be clean, for the strength of the hunter is known by thegloss of his hide.If ye find that the Bullock can toss you, or the heavy-browedSambhur can gore;Ye need not stop work to inform us: we knew it ten seasonsbefore.Oppress not the cubs of the stranger, but hail them as Sisterand Brother,For though they are little and fubsy, it may be the Bear istheir mother.“There is none like to me!” says the Cub in the pride of hisearliest kill;But the jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let himthink and be still.Maxims of BalooAll that is told here happened some time before Mowgli was turned out ofthe Seeonee Wolf Pack, or revenged himself on Shere Khan the tiger. It wasin the days when Baloo was teaching him the Law of the Jungle. The big,serious, old brown bear was delighted to have so quick a pupil, for theyoung wolves will only learn as much of the Law of the Jungle as appliesto their own pack and tribe, and run away as soon as they can repeat theHunting Verse—“Feet that make no noise; eyes that can see in thedark; ears that can hear the winds in their lairs, and sharp white teeth,all these things are the marks of our brothers except Tabaqui the Jackaland the Hyaena whom we hate.” But Mowgli, as a man-cub, had to learn agreat deal more than this. Sometimes Bagheera the Black Panther would comelounging through the jungle to see how his pet was getting on, and wouldpurr with his head against a tree while Mowgli recited the day’s lesson toBaloo. The boy could climb almost as well as he could swim, and swimalmost as well as he could run. So Baloo, the Teacher of the Law, taughthim the Wood and Water Laws: how to tell a rotten branch from a sound one;how to speak politely to the wild bees when he came upon a hive of themfifty feet above ground; what to say to Mang the Bat when he disturbed himin the branches at midday; and how to warn the water-snakes in the poolsbefore he splashed down among them. None of the Jungle People like beingdisturbed, and all are very ready to fly at an intruder. Then, too, Mowgliwas taught the Strangers’ Hunting Call, which must be repeated aloud tillit is answered, whenever one of the Jungle-People hunts outside his owngrounds. It means, translated, “Give me leave to hunt here because I amhungry.” And the answer is, “Hunt then for food, but not for pleasure.”<br />All this will show you how much Mowgli had to learn by heart, and he grewvery tired of saying the same thing over a hundred times. But, as Baloosaid to Bagheera, one day when Mowgli had been cuffed and run off in atemper, “A man’s cub is a man’s cub, and he must learn all the Law of theJungle.”<br />“But think how small he is,” said the Black Panther, who would havespoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. “How can his little head carryall thy long talk?”<br />“Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is whyI teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when heforgets.”<br />“Softly! What dost thou know of softness, old Iron-feet?” Bagheeragrunted. “His face is all bruised today by thy—softness. Ugh.”<br />“Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him thanthat he should come to harm through ignorance,” Baloo answered veryearnestly. “I am now teaching him the Master Words of the Jungle thatshall protect him with the birds and the Snake People, and all that hunton four feet, except his own pack. He can now claim protection, if he willonly remember the words, from all in the jungle. Is not that worth alittle beating?”<br />“Well, look to it then that thou dost not kill the man-cub. He is no treetrunk to sharpen thy blunt claws upon. But what are those Master Words? Iam more likely to give help than to ask it”—Bagheera stretched outone paw and admired the steel-blue, ripping-chisel talons at the end of it—“stillI should like to know.”<br />“I will call Mowgli and he shall say them—if he will. Come, LittleBrother!”<br />“My head is ringing like a bee tree,” said a sullen little voice overtheir heads, and Mowgli slid down a tree trunk very angry and indignant,adding as he reached the ground: “I come for Bagheera and not for thee,fat old Baloo!”<br />“That is all one to me,” said Baloo, though he was hurt and grieved. “TellBagheera, then, the Master Words of the Jungle that I have taught theethis day.”<br />“Master Words for which people?” said Mowgli, delighted to show off. “Thejungle has many tongues. I know them all.”<br />“A little thou knowest, but not much. See, O Bagheera, they never thanktheir teacher. Not one small wolfling has ever come back to thank oldBaloo for his teachings. Say the word for the Hunting-People, then—greatscholar.”<br />“We be of one blood, ye and I,” said Mowgli, giving the words the Bearaccent which all the Hunting People use.<br />“Good. Now for the birds.”<br />Mowgli repeated, with the Kite’s whistle at the end of the sentence.<br />“Now for the Snake-People,” said Bagheera.<br />The answer was a perfectly indescribable hiss, and Mowgli kicked up hisfeet behind, clapped his hands together to applaud himself, and jumped onto Bagheera’s back, where he sat sideways, drumming with his heels on theglossy skin and making the worst faces he could think of at Baloo.<br />“There—there! That was worth a little bruise,” said the brown beartenderly. “Some day thou wilt remember me.” Then he turned aside to tellBagheera how he had begged the Master Words from Hathi the Wild Elephant,who knows all about these things, and how Hathi had taken Mowgli down to apool to get the Snake Word from a water-snake, because Baloo could notpronounce it, and how Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidentsin the jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt him.<br />“No one then is to be feared,” Baloo wound up, patting his big furrystomach with pride.<br />“Except his own tribe,” said Bagheera, under his breath; and then aloud toMowgli, “Have a care for my ribs, Little Brother! What is all this dancingup and down?”<br />Mowgli had been trying to make himself heard by pulling at Bagheera’sshoulder fur and kicking hard. When the two listened to him he wasshouting at the top of his voice, “And so I shall have a tribe of my own,and lead them through the branches all day long.”<br />“What is this new folly, little dreamer of dreams?” said Bagheera.<br />“Yes, and throw branches and dirt at old Baloo,” Mowgli went on. “Theyhave promised me this. Ah!”<br />“Whoof!” Baloo’s big paw scooped Mowgli off Bagheera’s back, and as theboy lay between the big fore-paws he could see the Bear was angry.<br />“Mowgli,” said Baloo, “thou hast been talking with the Bandar-log—theMonkey People.”<br />Mowgli looked at Bagheera to see if the Panther was angry too, andBagheera’s eyes were as hard as jade stones.<br />“Thou hast been with the Monkey People—the gray apes—thepeople without a law—the eaters of everything. That is great shame.”<br />“When Baloo hurt my head,” said Mowgli (he was still on his back), “I wentaway, and the gray apes came down from the trees and had pity on me. Noone else cared.” He snuffled a little.<br />“The pity of the Monkey People!” Baloo snorted. “The stillness of themountain stream! The cool of the summer sun! And then, man-cub?”<br />“And then, and then, they gave me nuts and pleasant things to eat, andthey—they carried me in their arms up to the top of the trees andsaid I was their blood brother except that I had no tail, and should betheir leader some day.”<br />“They have no leader,” said Bagheera. “They lie. They have always lied.”<br />“They were very kind and bade me come again. Why have I never been takenamong the Monkey People? They stand on their feet as I do. They do not hitme with their hard paws. They play all day. Let me get up! Bad Baloo, letme up! I will play with them again.”<br />“Listen, man-cub,” said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on ahot night. “I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all thepeoples of the jungle—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees.They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, butuse the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, andwait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are withoutleaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend thatthey are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but thefalling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We ofthe jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeysdrink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt;we do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of theBandar-log till today?”<br />“No,” said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very still now Baloohad finished.<br />“The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds.They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they haveany fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle People. But we do not noticethem even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads.”<br />He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered downthrough the branches; and they could hear coughings and howlings and angryjumpings high up in the air among the thin branches.<br />“The Monkey-People are forbidden,” said Baloo, “forbidden to theJungle-People. Remember.”<br />“Forbidden,” said Bagheera, “but I still think Baloo should have warnedthee against them.”<br />“I—I? How was I to guess he would play with such dirt. The MonkeyPeople! Faugh!”<br />A fresh shower came down on their heads and the two trotted away, takingMowgli with them. What Baloo had said about the monkeys was perfectlytrue. They belonged to the tree-tops, and as beasts very seldom look up,there was no occasion for the monkeys and the Jungle-People to cross eachother’s path. But whenever they found a sick wolf, or a wounded tiger, orbear, the monkeys would torment him, and would throw sticks and nuts atany beast for fun and in the hope of being noticed. Then they would howland shriek senseless songs, and invite the Jungle-People to climb up theirtrees and fight them, or would start furious battles over nothing amongthemselves, and leave the dead monkeys where the Jungle-People could seethem. They were always just going to have a leader, and laws and customsof their own, but they never did, because their memories would not holdover from day to day, and so they compromised things by making up asaying, “What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later,” andthat comforted them a great deal. None of the beasts could reach them, buton the other hand none of the beasts would notice them, and that was whythey were so pleased when Mowgli came to play with them, and they heardhow angry Baloo was.<br />They never meant to do any more—the Bandar-log never mean anythingat all; but one of them invented what seemed to him a brilliant idea, andhe told all the others that Mowgli would be a useful person to keep in thetribe, because he could weave sticks together for protection from thewind; so, if they caught him, they could make him teach them. Of courseMowgli, as a woodcutter’s child, inherited all sorts of instincts, andused to make little huts of fallen branches without thinking how he cameto do it. The Monkey-People, watching in the trees, considered his playmost wonderful. This time, they said, they were really going to have aleader and become the wisest people in the jungle—so wise thateveryone else would notice and envy them. Therefore they followed Balooand Bagheera and Mowgli through the jungle very quietly till it was timefor the midday nap, and Mowgli, who was very much ashamed of himself,slept between the Panther and the Bear, resolving to have no more to dowith the Monkey People.<br />The next thing he remembered was feeling hands on his legs and arms—hard,strong, little hands—and then a swash of branches in his face, andthen he was staring down through the swaying boughs as Baloo woke thejungle with his deep cries and Bagheera bounded up the trunk with everytooth bared. The Bandar-log howled with triumph and scuffled away to theupper branches where Bagheera dared not follow, shouting: “He has noticedus! Bagheera has noticed us. All the Jungle-People admire us for our skilland our cunning.” Then they began their flight; and the flight of theMonkey-People through tree-land is one of the things nobody can describe.They have their regular roads and crossroads, up hills and down hills, alllaid out from fifty to seventy or a hundred feet above ground, and bythese they can travel even at night if necessary. Two of the strongestmonkeys caught Mowgli under the arms and swung off with him through thetreetops, twenty feet at a bound. Had they been alone they could have gonetwice as fast, but the boy’s weight held them back. Sick and giddy asMowgli was he could not help enjoying the wild rush, though the glimpsesof earth far down below frightened him, and the terrible check and jerk atthe end of the swing over nothing but empty air brought his heart betweenhis teeth. His escort would rush him up a tree till he felt the thinnesttopmost branches crackle and bend under them, and then with a cough and awhoop would fling themselves into the air outward and downward, and bringup, hanging by their hands or their feet to the lower limbs of the nexttree. Sometimes he could see for miles and miles across the still greenjungle, as a man on the top of a mast can see for miles across the sea,and then the branches and leaves would lash him across the face, and heand his two guards would be almost down to earth again. So, bounding andcrashing and whooping and yelling, the whole tribe of Bandar-log sweptalong the tree-roads with Mowgli their prisoner.<br />For a time he was afraid of being dropped. Then he grew angry but knewbetter than to struggle, and then he began to think. The first thing wasto send back word to Baloo and Bagheera, for, at the pace the monkeys weregoing, he knew his friends would be left far behind. It was useless tolook down, for he could only see the topsides of the branches, so hestared upward and saw, far away in the blue, Rann the Kite balancing andwheeling as he kept watch over the jungle waiting for things to die. Rannsaw that the monkeys were carrying something, and dropped a few hundredyards to find out whether their load was good to eat. He whistled withsurprise when he saw Mowgli being dragged up to a treetop and heard himgive the Kite call for—“We be of one blood, thou and I.” The wavesof the branches closed over the boy, but Rann balanced away to the nexttree in time to see the little brown face come up again. “Mark my trail!”Mowgli shouted. “Tell Baloo of the Seeonee Pack and Bagheera of theCouncil Rock.”<br />“In whose name, Brother?” Rann had never seen Mowgli before, though ofcourse he had heard of him.<br />“Mowgli, the Frog. Man-cub they call me! Mark my trail!”<br />The last words were shrieked as he was being swung through the air, butRann nodded and rose up till he looked no bigger than a speck of dust, andthere he hung, watching with his telescope eyes the swaying of thetreetops as Mowgli’s escort whirled along.
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“They never go far,” he said with a chuckle. “They never do what they setout to do. Always pecking at new things are the Bandar-log. This time, ifI have any eye-sight, they have pecked down trouble for themselves, forBaloo is no fledgling and Bagheera can, as I know, kill more than goats.”<br />So he rocked on his wings, his feet gathered up under him, and waited.<br />Meantime, Baloo and Bagheera were furious with rage and grief. Bagheeraclimbed as he had never climbed before, but the thin branches brokebeneath his weight, and he slipped down, his claws full of bark.<br />“Why didst thou not warn the man-cub?” he roared to poor Baloo, who hadset off at a clumsy trot in the hope of overtaking the monkeys. “What wasthe use of half slaying him with blows if thou didst not warn him?”<br />“Haste! O haste! We—we may catch them yet!” Baloo panted.<br />“At that speed! It would not tire a wounded cow. Teacher of the Law—cub-beater—amile of that rolling to and fro would burst thee open. Sit still andthink! Make a plan. This is no time for chasing. They may drop him if wefollow too close.”<br />“Arrula! Whoo! They may have dropped him already, being tired of carryinghim. Who can trust the Bandar-log? Put dead bats on my head! Give me blackbones to eat! Roll me into the hives of the wild bees that I may be stungto death, and bury me with the Hyaena, for I am most miserable of bears!Arulala! Wahooa! O Mowgli, Mowgli! Why did I not warn thee against theMonkey-Folk instead of breaking thy head? Now perhaps I may have knockedthe day’s lesson out of his mind, and he will be alone in the junglewithout the Master Words.”<br />Baloo clasped his paws over his ears and rolled to and fro moaning.<br />“At least he gave me all the Words correctly a little time ago,” saidBagheera impatiently. “Baloo, thou hast neither memory nor respect. Whatwould the jungle think if I, the Black Panther, curled myself up like Ikkithe Porcupine, and howled?”<br />“What do I care what the jungle thinks? He may be dead by now.”<br />“Unless and until they drop him from the branches in sport, or kill himout of idleness, I have no fear for the man-cub. He is wise and welltaught, and above all he has the eyes that make the Jungle-People afraid.But (and it is a great evil) he is in the power of the Bandar-log, andthey, because they live in trees, have no fear of any of our people.”Bagheera licked one forepaw thoughtfully.<br />“Fool that I am! Oh, fat, brown, root-digging fool that I am,” said Baloo,uncoiling himself with a jerk, “it is true what Hathi the Wild Elephantsays: `To each his own fear’; and they, the Bandar-log, fear Kaa the RockSnake. He can climb as well as they can. He steals the young monkeys inthe night. The whisper of his name makes their wicked tails cold. Let usgo to Kaa.”<br />“What will he do for us? He is not of our tribe, being footless—andwith most evil eyes,” said Bagheera.<br />“He is very old and very cunning. Above all, he is always hungry,” saidBaloo hopefully. “Promise him many goats.”<br />“He sleeps for a full month after he has once eaten. He may be asleep now,and even were he awake what if he would rather kill his own goats?”Bagheera, who did not know much about Kaa, was naturally suspicious.<br />“Then in that case, thou and I together, old hunter, might make him seereason.” Here Baloo rubbed his faded brown shoulder against the Panther,and they went off to look for Kaa the Rock Python.<br />They found him stretched out on a warm ledge in the afternoon sun,admiring his beautiful new coat, for he had been in retirement for thelast ten days changing his skin, and now he was very splendid—dartinghis big blunt-nosed head along the ground, and twisting the thirty feet ofhis body into fantastic knots and curves, and licking his lips as hethought of his dinner to come.<br />“He has not eaten,” said Baloo, with a grunt of relief, as soon as he sawthe beautifully mottled brown and yellow jacket. “Be careful, Bagheera! Heis always a little blind after he has changed his skin, and very quick tostrike.”<br />Kaa was not a poison snake—in fact he rather despised the poisonsnakes as cowards—but his strength lay in his hug, and when he hadonce lapped his huge coils round anybody there was no more to be said.“Good hunting!” cried Baloo, sitting up on his haunches. Like all snakesof his breed Kaa was rather deaf, and did not hear the call at first. Thenhe curled up ready for any accident, his head lowered.<br />“Good hunting for us all,” he answered. “Oho, Baloo, what dost thou dohere? Good hunting, Bagheera. One of us at least needs food. Is there anynews of game afoot? A doe now, or even a young buck? I am as empty as adried well.”<br />“We are hunting,” said Baloo carelessly. He knew that you must not hurryKaa. He is too big.<br />“Give me permission to come with you,” said Kaa. “A blow more or less isnothing to thee, Bagheera or Baloo, but I—I have to wait and waitfor days in a wood-path and climb half a night on the mere chance of ayoung ape. Psshaw! The branches are not what they were when I was young.Rotten twigs and dry boughs are they all.”<br />“Maybe thy great weight has something to do with the matter,” said Baloo.<br />“I am a fair length—a fair length,” said Kaa with a little pride.“But for all that, it is the fault of this new-grown timber. I came verynear to falling on my last hunt—very near indeed—and the noiseof my slipping, for my tail was not tight wrapped around the tree, wakedthe Bandar-log, and they called me most evil names.”<br />“Footless, yellow earth-worm,” said Bagheera under his whiskers, as thoughhe were trying to remember something.<br />“Sssss! Have they ever called me that?” said Kaa.<br />“Something of that kind it was that they shouted to us last moon, but wenever noticed them. They will say anything—even that thou hast lostall thy teeth, and wilt not face anything bigger than a kid, because (theyare indeed shameless, these Bandar-log)—because thou art afraid ofthe he-goat’s horns,” Bagheera went on sweetly.<br />Now a snake, especially a wary old python like Kaa, very seldom shows thathe is angry, but Baloo and Bagheera could see the big swallowing muscleson either side of Kaa’s throat ripple and bulge.<br />“The Bandar-log have shifted their grounds,” he said quietly. “When I cameup into the sun today I heard them whooping among the tree-tops.”<br />“It—it is the Bandar-log that we follow now,” said Baloo, but thewords stuck in his throat, for that was the first time in his memory thatone of the Jungle-People had owned to being interested in the doings ofthe monkeys.<br />“Beyond doubt then it is no small thing that takes two such hunters—leadersin their own jungle I am certain—on the trail of the Bandar-log,”Kaa replied courteously, as he swelled with curiosity.<br />“Indeed,” Baloo began, “I am no more than the old and sometimes veryfoolish Teacher of the Law to the Seeonee wolf-cubs, and Bagheera here—”<br />“Is Bagheera,” said the Black Panther, and his jaws shut with a snap, forhe did not believe in being humble. “The trouble is this, Kaa. Thosenut-stealers and pickers of palm leaves have stolen away our man-cub ofwhom thou hast perhaps heard.”<br />“I heard some news from Ikki (his quills make him presumptuous) of aman-thing that was entered into a wolf pack, but I did not believe. Ikkiis full of stories half heard and very badly told.”<br />“But it is true. He is such a man-cub as never was,” said Baloo. “The bestand wisest and boldest of man-cubs—my own pupil, who shall make thename of Baloo famous through all the jungles; and besides, I—we—lovehim, Kaa.”<br />“Ts! Ts!” said Kaa, weaving his head to and fro. “I also have known whatlove is. There are tales I could tell that—”<br />“That need a clear night when we are all well fed to praise properly,”said Bagheera quickly. “Our man-cub is in the hands of the Bandar-log now,and we know that of all the Jungle-People they fear Kaa alone.”<br />“They fear me alone. They have good reason,” said Kaa. “Chattering,foolish, vain—vain, foolish, and chattering, are the monkeys. But aman-thing in their hands is in no good luck. They grow tired of the nutsthey pick, and throw them down. They carry a branch half a day, meaning todo great things with it, and then they snap it in two. That man-thing isnot to be envied. They called me also—`yellow fish’ was it not?”<br />“Worm—worm—earth-worm,” said Bagheera, “as well as otherthings which I cannot now say for shame.”<br />“We must remind them to speak well of their master. Aaa-ssp! We must helptheir wandering memories. Now, whither went they with the cub?”<br />“The jungle alone knows. Toward the sunset, I believe,” said Baloo. “Wehad thought that thou wouldst know, Kaa.”<br />“I? How? I take them when they come in my way, but I do not hunt theBandar-log, or frogs—or green scum on a water-hole, for thatmatter.”<br />“Up, Up! Up, Up! Hillo! Illo! Illo, look up, Baloo of the Seeonee WolfPack!”<br />Baloo looked up to see where the voice came from, and there was Rann theKite, sweeping down with the sun shining on the upturned flanges of hiswings. It was near Rann’s bedtime, but he had ranged all over the junglelooking for the Bear and had missed him in the thick foliage.<br />“What is it?” said Baloo.<br />“I have seen Mowgli among the Bandar-log. He bade me tell you. I watched.The Bandar-log have taken him beyond the river to the monkey city—tothe Cold Lairs. They may stay there for a night, or ten nights, or anhour. I have told the bats to watch through the dark time. That is mymessage. Good hunting, all you below!”<br />“Full gorge and a deep sleep to you, Rann,” cried Bagheera. “I willremember thee in my next kill, and put aside the head for thee alone, Obest of kites!”<br />“It is nothing. It is nothing. The boy held the Master Word. I could havedone no less,” and Rann circled up again to his roost.<br />“He has not forgotten to use his tongue,” said Baloo with a chuckle ofpride. “To think of one so young remembering the Master Word for the birdstoo while he was being pulled across trees!”<br />“It was most firmly driven into him,” said Bagheera. “But I am proud ofhim, and now we must go to the Cold Lairs.”<br />They all knew where that place was, but few of the Jungle People ever wentthere, because what they called the Cold Lairs was an old deserted city,lost and buried in the jungle, and beasts seldom use a place that men haveonce used. The wild boar will, but the hunting tribes do not. Besides, themonkeys lived there as much as they could be said to live anywhere, and noself-respecting animal would come within eyeshot of it except in times ofdrought, when the half-ruined tanks and reservoirs held a little water.<br />“It is half a night’s journey—at full speed,” said Bagheera, andBaloo looked very serious. “I will go as fast as I can,” he saidanxiously.<br />“We dare not wait for thee. Follow, Baloo. We must go on the quick-foot—Kaaand I.”<br />“Feet or no feet, I can keep abreast of all thy four,” said Kaa shortly.Baloo made one effort to hurry, but had to sit down panting, and so theyleft him to come on later, while Bagheera hurried forward, at the quickpanther-canter. Kaa said nothing, but, strive as Bagheera might, the hugeRock-python held level with him. When they came to a hill stream, Bagheeragained, because he bounded across while Kaa swam, his head and two feet ofhis neck clearing the water, but on level ground Kaa made up the distance.<br />“By the Broken Lock that freed me,” said Bagheera, when twilight hadfallen, “thou art no slow goer!”<br />“I am hungry,” said Kaa. “Besides, they called me speckled frog.”<br />“Worm—earth-worm, and yellow to boot.”<br />“All one. Let us go on,” and Kaa seemed to pour himself along the ground,finding the shortest road with his steady eyes, and keeping to it.<br />In the Cold Lairs the Monkey-People were not thinking of Mowgli’s friendsat all. They had brought the boy to the Lost City, and were very muchpleased with themselves for the time. Mowgli had never seen an Indian citybefore, and though this was almost a heap of ruins it seemed verywonderful and splendid. Some king had built it long ago on a little hill.You could still trace the stone causeways that led up to the ruined gateswhere the last splinters of wood hung to the worn, rusted hinges. Treeshad grown into and out of the walls; the battlements were tumbled down anddecayed, and wild creepers hung out of the windows of the towers on thewalls in bushy hanging clumps.<br />A great roofless palace crowned the hill, and the marble of the courtyardsand the fountains was split, and stained with red and green, and the verycobblestones in the courtyard where the king’s elephants used to live hadbeen thrust up and apart by grasses and young trees. From the palace youcould see the rows and rows of roofless houses that made up the citylooking like empty honeycombs filled with blackness; the shapeless blockof stone that had been an idol in the square where four roads met; thepits and dimples at street corners where the public wells once stood, andthe shattered domes of temples with wild figs sprouting on their sides.The monkeys called the place their city, and pretended to despise theJungle-People because they lived in the forest. And yet they never knewwhat the buildings were made for nor how to use them. They would sit incircles on the hall of the king’s council chamber, and scratch for fleasand pretend to be men; or they would run in and out of the roofless housesand collect pieces of plaster and old bricks in a corner, and forget wherethey had hidden them, and fight and cry in scuffling crowds, and thenbreak off to play up and down the terraces of the king’s garden, wherethey would shake the rose trees and the oranges in sport to see the fruitand flowers fall. They explored all the passages and dark tunnels in thepalace and the hundreds of little dark rooms, but they never rememberedwhat they had seen and what they had not; and so drifted about in ones andtwos or crowds telling each other that they were doing as men did. Theydrank at the tanks and made the water all muddy, and then they fought overit, and then they would all rush together in mobs and shout: “There is noone in the jungle so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as theBandar-log.” Then all would begin again till they grew tired of the cityand went back to the tree-tops, hoping the Jungle-People would noticethem.<br />Mowgli, who had been trained under the Law of the Jungle, did not like orunderstand this kind of life. The monkeys dragged him into the Cold Lairslate in the afternoon, and instead of going to sleep, as Mowgli would havedone after a long journey, they joined hands and danced about and sangtheir foolish songs. One of the monkeys made a speech and told hiscompanions that Mowgli’s capture marked a new thing in the history of theBandar-log, for Mowgli was going to show them how to weave sticks andcanes together as a protection against rain and cold. Mowgli picked upsome creepers and began to work them in and out, and the monkeys tried toimitate; but in a very few minutes they lost interest and began to pulltheir friends’ tails or jump up and down on all fours, coughing.<br />“I wish to eat,” said Mowgli. “I am a stranger in this part of the jungle.Bring me food, or give me leave to hunt here.”<br />Twenty or thirty monkeys bounded away to bring him nuts and wild pawpaws.But they fell to fighting on the road, and it was too much trouble to goback with what was left of the fruit. Mowgli was sore and angry as well ashungry, and he roamed through the empty city giving the Strangers’ HuntingCall from time to time, but no one answered him, and Mowgli felt that hehad reached a very bad place indeed. “All that Baloo has said about theBandar-log is true,” he thought to himself. “They have no Law, no HuntingCall, and no leaders—nothing but foolish words and little pickingthievish hands. So if I am starved or killed here, it will be all my ownfault. But I must try to return to my own jungle. Baloo will surely beatme, but that is better than chasing silly rose leaves with theBandar-log.”<br />No sooner had he walked to the city wall than the monkeys pulled him back,telling him that he did not know how happy he was, and pinching him tomake him grateful. He set his teeth and said nothing, but went with theshouting monkeys to a terrace above the red sandstone reservoirs that werehalf-full of rain water. There was a ruined summer-house of white marblein the center of the terrace, built for queens dead a hundred years ago.The domed roof had half fallen in and blocked up the underground passagefrom the palace by which the queens used to enter. But the walls were madeof screens of marble tracery—beautiful milk-white fretwork, set withagates and cornelians and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came upbehind the hill it shone through the open work, casting shadows on theground like black velvet embroidery. Sore, sleepy, and hungry as he was,Mowgli could not help laughing when the Bandar-log began, twenty at atime, to tell him how great and wise and strong and gentle they were, andhow foolish he was to wish to leave them. “We are great. We are free. Weare wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We allsay so, and so it must be true,” they shouted. “Now as you are a newlistener and can carry our words back to the Jungle-People so that theymay notice us in future, we will tell you all about our most excellentselves.” Mowgli made no objection, and the monkeys gathered by hundredsand hundreds on the terrace to listen to their own speakers singing thepraises of the Bandar-log, and whenever a speaker stopped for want ofbreath they would all shout together: “This is true; we all say so.”Mowgli nodded and blinked, and said “Yes” when they asked him a question,and his head spun with the noise. “Tabaqui the Jackal must have bitten allthese people,” he said to himself, “and now they have madness. Certainlythis is dewanee, the madness. Do they never go to sleep? Now there is acloud coming to cover that moon. If it were only a big enough cloud Imight try to run away in the darkness. But I am tired.”<br />That same cloud was being watched by two good friends in the ruined ditchbelow the city wall, for Bagheera and Kaa, knowing well how dangerous theMonkey-People were in large numbers, did not wish to run any risks. Themonkeys never fight unless they are a hundred to one, and few in thejungle care for those odds.<br />“I will go to the west wall,” Kaa whispered, “and come down swiftly withthe slope of the ground in my favor. They will not throw themselves uponmy back in their hundreds, but—”<br />“I know it,” said Bagheera. “Would that Baloo were here, but we must dowhat we can. When that cloud covers the moon I shall go to the terrace.They hold some sort of council there over the boy.”<br />“Good hunting,” said Kaa grimly, and glided away to the west wall. Thathappened to be the least ruined of any, and the big snake was delayedawhile before he could find a way up the stones. The cloud hid the moon,and as Mowgli wondered what would come next he heard Bagheera’s light feeton the terrace. The Black Panther had raced up the slope almost without asound and was striking—he knew better than to waste time in biting—rightand left among the monkeys, who were seated round Mowgli in circles fiftyand sixty deep. There was a howl of fright and rage, and then as Bagheeratripped on the rolling kicking bodies beneath him, a monkey shouted:“There is only one here! Kill him! Kill.” A scuffling mass of monkeys,biting, scratching, tearing, and pulling, closed over Bagheera, while fiveor six laid hold of Mowgli, dragged him up the wall of the summerhouse andpushed him through the hole of the broken dome. A man-trained boy wouldhave been badly bruised, for the fall was a good fifteen feet, but Mowglifell as Baloo had taught him to fall, and landed on his feet.
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“Stay there,” shouted the monkeys, “till we have killed thy friends, andlater we will play with thee—if the Poison-People leave thee alive.”<br />“We be of one blood, ye and I,” said Mowgli, quickly giving the Snake’sCall. He could hear rustling and hissing in the rubbish all round him andgave the Call a second time, to make sure.<br />“Even ssso! Down hoods all!” said half a dozen low voices (every ruin inIndia becomes sooner or later a dwelling place of snakes, and the oldsummerhouse was alive with cobras). “Stand still, Little Brother, for thyfeet may do us harm.”<br />Mowgli stood as quietly as he could, peering through the open work andlistening to the furious din of the fight round the Black Panther—theyells and chatterings and scufflings, and Bagheera’s deep, hoarse cough ashe backed and bucked and twisted and plunged under the heaps of hisenemies. For the first time since he was born, Bagheera was fighting forhis life.<br />“Baloo must be at hand; Bagheera would not have come alone,” Mowglithought. And then he called aloud: “To the tank, Bagheera. Roll to thewater tanks. Roll and plunge! Get to the water!”<br />Bagheera heard, and the cry that told him Mowgli was safe gave him newcourage. He worked his way desperately, inch by inch, straight for thereservoirs, halting in silence. Then from the ruined wall nearest thejungle rose up the rumbling war-shout of Baloo. The old Bear had done hisbest, but he could not come before. “Bagheera,” he shouted, “I am here. Iclimb! I haste! Ahuwora! The stones slip under my feet! Wait my coming, Omost infamous Bandar-log!” He panted up the terrace only to disappear tothe head in a wave of monkeys, but he threw himself squarely on hishaunches, and, spreading out his forepaws, hugged as many as he couldhold, and then began to hit with a regular bat-bat-bat, like the flippingstrokes of a paddle wheel. A crash and a splash told Mowgli that Bagheerahad fought his way to the tank where the monkeys could not follow. ThePanther lay gasping for breath, his head just out of the water, while themonkeys stood three deep on the red steps, dancing up and down with rage,ready to spring upon him from all sides if he came out to help Baloo. Itwas then that Bagheera lifted up his dripping chin, and in despair gavethe Snake’s Call for protection—“We be of one blood, ye and I”—forhe believed that Kaa had turned tail at the last minute. Even Baloo, halfsmothered under the monkeys on the edge of the terrace, could not helpchuckling as he heard the Black Panther asking for help.<br />Kaa had only just worked his way over the west wall, landing with a wrenchthat dislodged a coping stone into the ditch. He had no intention oflosing any advantage of the ground, and coiled and uncoiled himself onceor twice, to be sure that every foot of his long body was in workingorder. All that while the fight with Baloo went on, and the monkeys yelledin the tank round Bagheera, and Mang the Bat, flying to and fro, carriedthe news of the great battle over the jungle, till even Hathi the WildElephant trumpeted, and, far away, scattered bands of the Monkey-Folk wokeand came leaping along the tree-roads to help their comrades in the ColdLairs, and the noise of the fight roused all the day birds for milesround. Then Kaa came straight, quickly, and anxious to kill. The fightingstrength of a python is in the driving blow of his head backed by all thestrength and weight of his body. If you can imagine a lance, or abattering ram, or a hammer weighing nearly half a ton driven by a cool,quiet mind living in the handle of it, you can roughly imagine what Kaawas like when he fought. A python four or five feet long can knock a mandown if he hits him fairly in the chest, and Kaa was thirty feet long, asyou know. His first stroke was delivered into the heart of the crowd roundBaloo. It was sent home with shut mouth in silence, and there was no needof a second. The monkeys scattered with cries of—“Kaa! It is Kaa!Run! Run!”
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Generations of monkeys had been scared into good behavior by the storiestheir elders told them of Kaa, the night thief, who could slip along thebranches as quietly as moss grows, and steal away the strongest monkeythat ever lived; of old Kaa, who could make himself look so like a deadbranch or a rotten stump that the wisest were deceived, till the branchcaught them. Kaa was everything that the monkeys feared in the jungle, fornone of them knew the limits of his power, none of them could look him inthe face, and none had ever come alive out of his hug. And so they ran,stammering with terror, to the walls and the roofs of the houses, andBaloo drew a deep breath of relief. His fur was much thicker thanBagheera’s, but he had suffered sorely in the fight. Then Kaa opened hismouth for the first time and spoke one long hissing word, and the far-awaymonkeys, hurrying to the defense of the Cold Lairs, stayed where theywere, cowering, till the loaded branches bent and crackled under them. Themonkeys on the walls and the empty houses stopped their cries, and in thestillness that fell upon the city Mowgli heard Bagheera shaking his wetsides as he came up from the tank. Then the clamor broke out again. Themonkeys leaped higher up the walls. They clung around the necks of the bigstone idols and shrieked as they skipped along the battlements, whileMowgli, dancing in the summerhouse, put his eye to the screenwork andhooted owl-fashion between his front teeth, to show his derision andcontempt.<br />“Get the man-cub out of that trap; I can do no more,” Bagheera gasped.“Let us take the man-cub and go. They may attack again.”<br />“They will not move till I order them. Stay you sssso!” Kaa hissed, andthe city was silent once more. “I could not come before, Brother, but Ithink I heard thee call”—this was to Bagheera.<br />“I—I may have cried out in the battle,” Bagheera answered. “Baloo,art thou hurt?<br />“I am not sure that they did not pull me into a hundred little bearlings,”said Baloo, gravely shaking one leg after the other. “Wow! I am sore. Kaa,we owe thee, I think, our lives—Bagheera and I.”<br />“No matter. Where is the manling?”<br />“Here, in a trap. I cannot climb out,” cried Mowgli. The curve of thebroken dome was above his head.<br />“Take him away. He dances like Mao the Peacock. He will crush our young,”said the cobras inside.<br />“Hah!” said Kaa with a chuckle, “he has friends everywhere, this manling.Stand back, manling. And hide you, O Poison People. I break down thewall.”<br />Kaa looked carefully till he found a discolored crack in the marbletracery showing a weak spot, made two or three light taps with his head toget the distance, and then lifting up six feet of his body clear of theground, sent home half a dozen full-power smashing blows, nose-first. Thescreen-work broke and fell away in a cloud of dust and rubbish, and Mowglileaped through the opening and flung himself between Baloo and Bagheera—anarm around each big neck.<br />“Art thou hurt?” said Baloo, hugging him softly.<br />“I am sore, hungry, and not a little bruised. But, oh, they have handledye grievously, my Brothers! Ye bleed.”<br />“Others also,” said Bagheera, licking his lips and looking at themonkey-dead on the terrace and round the tank.<br />“It is nothing, it is nothing, if thou art safe, oh, my pride of alllittle frogs!” whimpered Baloo.<br />“Of that we shall judge later,” said Bagheera, in a dry voice that Mowglidid not at all like. “But here is Kaa to whom we owe the battle and thouowest thy life. Thank him according to our customs, Mowgli.”<br />Mowgli turned and saw the great Python’s head swaying a foot above hisown.<br />“So this is the manling,” said Kaa. “Very soft is his skin, and he is notunlike the Bandar-log. Have a care, manling, that I do not mistake theefor a monkey some twilight when I have newly changed my coat.”<br />“We be one blood, thou and I,” Mowgli answered. “I take my life from theetonight. My kill shall be thy kill if ever thou art hungry, O Kaa.”<br />“All thanks, Little Brother,” said Kaa, though his eyes twinkled. “Andwhat may so bold a hunter kill? I ask that I may follow when next he goesabroad.”<br />“I kill nothing,—I am too little,—but I drive goats towardsuch as can use them. When thou art empty come to me and see if I speakthe truth. I have some skill in these [he held out his hands], and if everthou art in a trap, I may pay the debt which I owe to thee, to Bagheera,and to Baloo, here. Good hunting to ye all, my masters.”<br />“Well said,” growled Baloo, for Mowgli had returned thanks very prettily.The Python dropped his head lightly for a minute on Mowgli’s shoulder. “Abrave heart and a courteous tongue,” said he. “They shall carry thee farthrough the jungle, manling. But now go hence quickly with thy friends. Goand sleep, for the moon sets, and what follows it is not well that thoushouldst see.”<br />The moon was sinking behind the hills and the lines of trembling monkeyshuddled together on the walls and battlements looked like ragged shakyfringes of things. Baloo went down to the tank for a drink and Bagheerabegan to put his fur in order, as Kaa glided out into the center of theterrace and brought his jaws together with a ringing snap that drew allthe monkeys’ eyes upon him.<br />“The moon sets,” he said. “Is there yet light enough to see?”<br />From the walls came a moan like the wind in the tree-tops—“We see, OKaa.”<br />“Good. Begins now the dance—the Dance of the Hunger of Kaa. Sitstill and watch.”<br />He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right toleft. Then he began making loops and figures of eight with his body, andsoft, oozy triangles that melted into squares and five-sided figures, andcoiled mounds, never resting, never hurrying, and never stopping his lowhumming song. It grew darker and darker, till at last the dragging,shifting coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales.<br />Baloo and Bagheera stood still as stone, growling in their throats, theirneck hair bristling, and Mowgli watched and wondered.<br />“Bandar-log,” said the voice of Kaa at last, “can ye stir foot or handwithout my order? Speak!”<br />“Without thy order we cannot stir foot or hand, O Kaa!”<br />“Good! Come all one pace nearer to me.”<br />The lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly, and Baloo and Bagheeratook one stiff step forward with them.<br />“Nearer!” hissed Kaa, and they all moved again.<br />Mowgli laid his hands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them away, and the twogreat beasts started as though they had been waked from a dream.<br />“Keep thy hand on my shoulder,” Bagheera whispered. “Keep it there, or Imust go back—must go back to Kaa. Aah!”<br />“It is only old Kaa making circles on the dust,” said Mowgli. “Let us go.”And the three slipped off through a gap in the walls to the jungle.<br />“Whoof!” said Baloo, when he stood under the still trees again. “Nevermore will I make an ally of Kaa,” and he shook himself all over.<br />“He knows more than we,” said Bagheera, trembling. “In a little time, hadI stayed, I should have walked down his throat.”<br />“Many will walk by that road before the moon rises again,” said Baloo. “Hewill have good hunting—after his own fashion.”<br />“But what was the meaning of it all?” said Mowgli, who did not knowanything of a python’s powers of fascination. “I saw no more than a bigsnake making foolish circles till the dark came. And his nose was allsore. Ho! Ho!”<br />“Mowgli,” said Bagheera angrily, “his nose was sore on thy account, as myears and sides and paws, and Baloo’s neck and shoulders are bitten on thyaccount. Neither Baloo nor Bagheera will be able to hunt with pleasure formany days.”<br />“It is nothing,” said Baloo; “we have the man-cub again.”<br />“True, but he has cost us heavily in time which might have been spent ingood hunting, in wounds, in hair—I am half plucked along my back—andlast of all, in honor. For, remember, Mowgli, I, who am the Black Panther,was forced to call upon Kaa for protection, and Baloo and I were both madestupid as little birds by the Hunger Dance. All this, man-cub, came of thyplaying with the Bandar-log.”<br />“True, it is true,” said Mowgli sorrowfully. “I am an evil man-cub, and mystomach is sad in me.”<br />“Mf! What says the Law of the Jungle, Baloo?”<br />Baloo did not wish to bring Mowgli into any more trouble, but he could nottamper with the Law, so he mumbled: “Sorrow never stays punishment. Butremember, Bagheera, he is very little.”<br />“I will remember. But he has done mischief, and blows must be dealt now.Mowgli, hast thou anything to say?”<br />“Nothing. I did wrong. Baloo and thou are wounded. It is just.”<br />Bagheera gave him half a dozen love-taps from a panther’s point of view(they would hardly have waked one of his own cubs), but for aseven-year-old boy they amounted to as severe a beating as you could wishto avoid. When it was all over Mowgli sneezed, and picked himself upwithout a word.<br />“Now,” said Bagheera, “jump on my back, Little Brother, and we will gohome.”<br />One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores.There is no nagging afterward.<br />Mowgli laid his head down on Bagheera’s back and slept so deeply that henever waked when he was put down in the home-cave.<br />[]()
Road-Song of the Bandar-LogHere we go in a flung festoon,Half-way up to the jealous moon!Don’t you envy our pranceful bands?Don’t you wish you had extra hands?Wouldn’t you like if your tails were—so—Curved in the shape of a Cupid’s bow?Now you’re angry, but—never mind,Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!Here we sit in a branchy row,Thinking of beautiful things we know;Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,All complete, in a minute or two—Something noble and wise and good,Done by merely wishing we could.We’ve forgotten, but—never mind,Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!All the talk we ever have heardUttered by bat or beast or bird—Hide or fin or scale or feather—Jabber it quickly and all together!Excellent! Wonderful! Once again!Now we are talking just like men!Let’s pretend we are ... never mind,Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!This is the way of the Monkey-kind.Then join our leaping lines that scumfish through the pines,That rocket by where, light and high, the wild grape swings.By the rubbish in our wake, and the noble noise we make,Be sure, be sure, we’re going to do some splendid things![]()
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“Tiger! Tiger!”What of the hunting, hunter bold?Brother, the watch was long and cold.What of the quarry ye went to kill?Brother, he crops in the jungle still.Where is the power that made your pride?Brother, it ebbs from my flank and side.Where is the haste that ye hurry by?Brother, I go to my lair—to die.Now we must go back to the first tale. When Mowgli left the wolf’s caveafter the fight with the Pack at the Council Rock, he went down to theplowed lands where the villagers lived, but he would not stop therebecause it was too near to the jungle, and he knew that he had made atleast one bad enemy at the Council. So he hurried on, keeping to the roughroad that ran down the valley, and followed it at a steady jog-trot fornearly twenty miles, till he came to a country that he did not know. Thevalley opened out into a great plain dotted over with rocks and cut up byravines. At one end stood a little village, and at the other the thickjungle came down in a sweep to the grazing-grounds, and stopped there asthough it had been cut off with a hoe. All over the plain, cattle andbuffaloes were grazing, and when the little boys in charge of the herdssaw Mowgli they shouted and ran away, and the yellow pariah dogs that hangabout every Indian village barked. Mowgli walked on, for he was feelinghungry, and when he came to the village gate he saw the big thorn-bushthat was drawn up before the gate at twilight, pushed to one side.<br />“Umph!” he said, for he had come across more than one such barricade inhis night rambles after things to eat. “So men are afraid of the People ofthe Jungle here also.” He sat down by the gate, and when a man came out hestood up, opened his mouth, and pointed down it to show that he wantedfood. The man stared, and ran back up the one street of the villageshouting for the priest, who was a big, fat man dressed in white, with ared and yellow mark on his forehead. The priest came to the gate, and withhim at least a hundred people, who stared and talked and shouted andpointed at Mowgli.<br />“They have no manners, these Men Folk,” said Mowgli to himself. “Only thegray ape would behave as they do.” So he threw back his long hair andfrowned at the crowd.<br />“What is there to be afraid of?” said the priest. “Look at the marks onhis arms and legs. They are the bites of wolves. He is but a wolf-childrun away from the jungle.”<br />Of course, in playing together, the cubs had often nipped Mowgli harderthan they intended, and there were white scars all over his arms and legs.But he would have been the last person in the world to call these bites,for he knew what real biting meant.<br />“Arre! Arre!” said two or three women together. “To be bitten by wolves,poor child! He is a handsome boy. He has eyes like red fire. By my honor,Messua, he is not unlike thy boy that was taken by the tiger.”<br />“Let me look,” said a woman with heavy copper rings on her wrists andankles, and she peered at Mowgli under the palm of her hand. “Indeed he isnot. He is thinner, but he has the very look of my boy.”<br />The priest was a clever man, and he knew that Messua was wife to therichest villager in the place. So he looked up at the sky for a minute andsaid solemnly: “What the jungle has taken the jungle has restored. Takethe boy into thy house, my sister, and forget not to honor the priest whosees so far into the lives of men.”<br />“By the Bull that bought me,” said Mowgli to himself, “but all thistalking is like another looking-over by the Pack! Well, if I am a man, aman I must become.”<br />The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut, where there wasa red lacquered bedstead, a great earthen grain chest with funny raisedpatterns on it, half a dozen copper cooking pots, an image of a Hindu godin a little alcove, and on the wall a real looking glass, such as theysell at the country fairs.<br />She gave him a long drink of milk and some bread, and then she laid herhand on his head and looked into his eyes; for she thought perhaps that hemight be her real son come back from the jungle where the tiger had takenhim. So she said, “Nathoo, O Nathoo!” Mowgli did not show that he knew thename. “Dost thou not remember the day when I gave thee thy new shoes?” Shetouched his foot, and it was almost as hard as horn. “No,” she saidsorrowfully, “those feet have never worn shoes, but thou art very like myNathoo, and thou shalt be my son.”<br />Mowgli was uneasy, because he had never been under a roof before. But ashe looked at the thatch, he saw that he could tear it out any time if hewanted to get away, and that the window had no fastenings. “What is thegood of a man,” he said to himself at last, “if he does not understandman’s talk? Now I am as silly and dumb as a man would be with us in thejungle. I must speak their talk.”<br />It was not for fun that he had learned while he was with the wolves toimitate the challenge of bucks in the jungle and the grunt of the littlewild pig. So, as soon as Messua pronounced a word Mowgli would imitate italmost perfectly, and before dark he had learned the names of many thingsin the hut.<br />There was a difficulty at bedtime, because Mowgli would not sleep underanything that looked so like a panther trap as that hut, and when theyshut the door he went through the window. “Give him his will,” saidMessua’s husband. “Remember he can never till now have slept on a bed. Ifhe is indeed sent in the place of our son he will not run away.”<br />So Mowgli stretched himself in some long, clean grass at the edge of thefield, but before he had closed his eyes a soft gray nose poked him underthe chin.<br />“Phew!” said Gray Brother (he was the eldest of Mother Wolf’s cubs). “Thisis a poor reward for following thee twenty miles. Thou smellest of woodsmoke and cattle—altogether like a man already. Wake, LittleBrother; I bring news.”
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“Are all well in the jungle?” said Mowgli, hugging him.<br />“All except the wolves that were burned with the Red Flower. Now, listen.Shere Khan has gone away to hunt far off till his coat grows again, for heis badly singed. When he returns he swears that he will lay thy bones inthe Waingunga.”<br />“There are two words to that. I also have made a little promise. But newsis always good. I am tired to-night,—very tired with new things,Gray Brother,—but bring me the news always.”<br />“Thou wilt not forget that thou art a wolf? Men will not make theeforget?” said Gray Brother anxiously.<br />“Never. I will always remember that I love thee and all in our cave. Butalso I will always remember that I have been cast out of the Pack.”<br />“And that thou mayest be cast out of another pack. Men are only men,Little Brother, and their talk is like the talk of frogs in a pond. When Icome down here again, I will wait for thee in the bamboos at the edge ofthe grazing-ground.”<br />For three months after that night Mowgli hardly ever left the villagegate, he was so busy learning the ways and customs of men. First he had towear a cloth round him, which annoyed him horribly; and then he had tolearn about money, which he did not in the least understand, and aboutplowing, of which he did not see the use. Then the little children in thevillage made him very angry. Luckily, the Law of the Jungle had taught himto keep his temper, for in the jungle life and food depend on keeping yourtemper; but when they made fun of him because he would not play games orfly kites, or because he mispronounced some word, only the knowledge thatit was unsportsmanlike to kill little naked cubs kept him from pickingthem up and breaking them in two.<br />He did not know his own strength in the least. In the jungle he knew hewas weak compared with the beasts, but in the village people said that hewas as strong as a bull.<br />And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makesbetween man and man. When the potter’s donkey slipped in the clay pit,Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for theirjourney to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for thepotter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priestscolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey too, and thepriest told Messua’s husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as soonas possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli that he would have to goout with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they grazed. No onewas more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he had beenappointed a servant of the village, as it were, he went off to a circlethat met every evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree. Itwas the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the barber,who knew all the gossip of the village, and old Buldeo, the villagehunter, who had a Tower musket, met and smoked. The monkeys sat and talkedin the upper branches, and there was a hole under the platform where acobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because hewas sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked, and pulled atthe big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into the night. They toldwonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and Buldeo told even morewonderful ones of the ways of beasts in the jungle, till the eyes of thechildren sitting outside the circle bulged out of their heads. Most of thetales were about animals, for the jungle was always at their door. Thedeer and the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tigercarried off a man at twilight, within sight of the village gates.
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Mowgli, who naturally knew something about what they were talking of, hadto cover his face not to show that he was laughing, while Buldeo, theTower musket across his knees, climbed on from one wonderful story toanother, and Mowgli’s shoulders shook.<br />Buldeo was explaining how the tiger that had carried away Messua’s son wasa ghost-tiger, and his body was inhabited by the ghost of a wicked, oldmoney-lender, who had died some years ago. “And I know that this is true,”he said, “because Purun Dass always limped from the blow that he got in ariot when his account books were burned, and the tiger that I speak of helimps, too, for the tracks of his pads are unequal.”<br />“True, true, that must be the truth,” said the gray-beards, noddingtogether.
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“Are all these tales such cobwebs and moon talk?” said Mowgli. “That tigerlimps because he was born lame, as everyone knows. To talk of the soul ofa money-lender in a beast that never had the courage of a jackal ischild’s talk.”<br />Buldeo was speechless with surprise for a moment, and the head-man stared.<br />“Oho! It is the jungle brat, is it?” said Buldeo. “If thou art so wise,better bring his hide to Khanhiwara, for the Government has set a hundredrupees on his life. Better still, talk not when thy elders speak.”<br />Mowgli rose to go. “All the evening I have lain here listening,” he calledback over his shoulder, “and, except once or twice, Buldeo has not saidone word of truth concerning the jungle, which is at his very doors. How,then, shall I believe the tales of ghosts and gods and goblins which hesays he has seen?”<br />“It is full time that boy went to herding,” said the head-man, whileBuldeo puffed and snorted at Mowgli’s impertinence.<br />The custom of most Indian villages is for a few boys to take the cattleand buffaloes out to graze in the early morning, and bring them back atnight. The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allowthemselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardlycome up to their noses. So long as the boys keep with the herds they aresafe, for not even the tiger will charge a mob of cattle. But if theystraggle to pick flowers or hunt lizards, they are sometimes carried off.Mowgli went through the village street in the dawn, sitting on the back ofRama, the great herd bull. The slaty-blue buffaloes, with their long,backward-sweeping horns and savage eyes, rose out their byres, one by one,and followed him, and Mowgli made it very clear to the children with himthat he was the master. He beat the buffaloes with a long, polishedbamboo, and told Kamya, one of the boys, to graze the cattle bythemselves, while he went on with the buffaloes, and to be very carefulnot to stray away from the herd.<br />An Indian grazing ground is all rocks and scrub and tussocks and littleravines, among which the herds scatter and disappear. The buffaloesgenerally keep to the pools and muddy places, where they lie wallowing orbasking in the warm mud for hours. Mowgli drove them on to the edge of theplain where the Waingunga came out of the jungle; then he dropped fromRama’s neck, trotted off to a bamboo clump, and found Gray Brother. “Ah,”said Gray Brother, “I have waited here very many days. What is the meaningof this cattle-herding work?”<br />“It is an order,” said Mowgli. “I am a village herd for a while. What newsof Shere Khan?”<br />“He has come back to this country, and has waited here a long time forthee. Now he has gone off again, for the game is scarce. But he means tokill thee.”<br />“Very good,” said Mowgli. “So long as he is away do thou or one of thefour brothers sit on that rock, so that I can see thee as I come out ofthe village. When he comes back wait for me in the ravine by the dhak treein the center of the plain. We need not walk into Shere Khan’s mouth.”<br />Then Mowgli picked out a shady place, and lay down and slept while thebuffaloes grazed round him. Herding in India is one of the laziest thingsin the world. The cattle move and crunch, and lie down, and move on again,and they do not even low. They only grunt, and the buffaloes very seldomsay anything, but get down into the muddy pools one after another, andwork their way into the mud till only their noses and staring china-blueeyes show above the surface, and then they lie like logs. The sun makesthe rocks dance in the heat, and the herd children hear one kite (neverany more) whistling almost out of sight overhead, and they know that ifthey died, or a cow died, that kite would sweep down, and the next kitemiles away would see him drop and follow, and the next, and the next, andalmost before they were dead there would be a score of hungry kites comeout of nowhere. Then they sleep and wake and sleep again, and weave littlebaskets of dried grass and put grasshoppers in them; or catch two prayingmantises and make them fight; or string a necklace of red and black junglenuts; or watch a lizard basking on a rock, or a snake hunting a frog nearthe wallows. Then they sing long, long songs with odd native quavers atthe end of them, and the day seems longer than most people’s whole lives,and perhaps they make a mud castle with mud figures of men and horses andbuffaloes, and put reeds into the men’s hands, and pretend that they arekings and the figures are their armies, or that they are gods to beworshiped. Then evening comes and the children call, and the buffaloeslumber up out of the sticky mud with noises like gunshots going off oneafter the other, and they all string across the gray plain back to thetwinkling village lights.<br />Day after day Mowgli would lead the buffaloes out to their wallows, andday after day he would see Gray Brother’s back a mile and a half awayacross the plain (so he knew that Shere Khan had not come back), and dayafter day he would lie on the grass listening to the noises round him, anddreaming of old days in the jungle. If Shere Khan had made a false stepwith his lame paw up in the jungles by the Waingunga, Mowgli would haveheard him in those long, still mornings.
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At last a day came when he did not see Gray Brother at the signal place,and he laughed and headed the buffaloes for the ravine by the dhk tree,which was all covered with golden-red flowers. There sat Gray Brother,every bristle on his back lifted.<br />“He has hidden for a month to throw thee off thy guard. He crossed theranges last night with Tabaqui, hot-foot on thy trail,” said the Wolf,panting.<br />Mowgli frowned. “I am not afraid of Shere Khan, but Tabaqui is verycunning.”<br />“Have no fear,” said Gray Brother, licking his lips a little. “I metTabaqui in the dawn. Now he is telling all his wisdom to the kites, but hetold me everything before I broke his back. Shere Khan’s plan is to waitfor thee at the village gate this evening—for thee and for no oneelse. He is lying up now, in the big dry ravine of the Waingunga.”<br />“Has he eaten today, or does he hunt empty?” said Mowgli, for the answermeant life and death to him.<br />“He killed at dawn,—a pig,—and he has drunk too. Remember,Shere Khan could never fast, even for the sake of revenge.”<br />“Oh! Fool, fool! What a cub’s cub it is! Eaten and drunk too, and hethinks that I shall wait till he has slept! Now, where does he lie up? Ifthere were but ten of us we might pull him down as he lies. Thesebuffaloes will not charge unless they wind him, and I cannot speak theirlanguage. Can we get behind his track so that they may smell it?”<br />“He swam far down the Waingunga to cut that off,” said Gray Brother.<br />“Tabaqui told him that, I know. He would never have thought of it alone.”Mowgli stood with his finger in his mouth, thinking. “The big ravine ofthe Waingunga. That opens out on the plain not half a mile from here. Ican take the herd round through the jungle to the head of the ravine andthen sweep down—but he would slink out at the foot. We must blockthat end. Gray Brother, canst thou cut the herd in two for me?”<br />“Not I, perhaps—but I have brought a wise helper.” Gray Brothertrotted off and dropped into a hole. Then there lifted up a huge gray headthat Mowgli knew well, and the hot air was filled with the most desolatecry of all the jungle—the hunting howl of a wolf at midday.<br />“Akela! Akela!” said Mowgli, clapping his hands. “I might have known thatthou wouldst not forget me. We have a big work in hand. Cut the herd intwo, Akela. Keep the cows and calves together, and the bulls and the plowbuffaloes by themselves.”<br />The two wolves ran, ladies’-chain fashion, in and out of the herd, whichsnorted and threw up its head, and separated into two clumps. In one, thecow-buffaloes stood with their calves in the center, and glared and pawed,ready, if a wolf would only stay still, to charge down and trample thelife out of him. In the other, the bulls and the young bulls snorted andstamped, but though they looked more imposing they were much lessdangerous, for they had no calves to protect. No six men could havedivided the herd so neatly.<br />“What orders!” panted Akela. “They are trying to join again.”<br />Mowgli slipped on to Rama’s back. “Drive the bulls away to the left,Akela. Gray Brother, when we are gone, hold the cows together, and drivethem into the foot of the ravine.”<br />“How far?” said Gray Brother, panting and snapping.<br />“Till the sides are higher than Shere Khan can jump,” shouted Mowgli.“Keep them there till we come down.” The bulls swept off as Akela bayed,and Gray Brother stopped in front of the cows. They charged down on him,and he ran just before them to the foot of the ravine, as Akela drove thebulls far to the left.<br />“Well done! Another charge and they are fairly started. Careful, now—careful,Akela. A snap too much and the bulls will charge. Hujah! This is wilderwork than driving black-buck. Didst thou think these creatures could moveso swiftly?” Mowgli called.<br />“I have—have hunted these too in my time,” gasped Akela in the dust.“Shall I turn them into the jungle?”<br />“Ay! Turn. Swiftly turn them! Rama is mad with rage. Oh, if I could onlytell him what I need of him to-day.”<br />The bulls were turned, to the right this time, and crashed into thestanding thicket. The other herd children, watching with the cattle half amile away, hurried to the village as fast as their legs could carry them,crying that the buffaloes had gone mad and run away.<br />But Mowgli’s plan was simple enough. All he wanted to do was to make a bigcircle uphill and get at the head of the ravine, and then take the bullsdown it and catch Shere Khan between the bulls and the cows; for he knewthat after a meal and a full drink Shere Khan would not be in anycondition to fight or to clamber up the sides of the ravine. He wassoothing the buffaloes now by voice, and Akela had dropped far to therear, only whimpering once or twice to hurry the rear-guard. It was along, long circle, for they did not wish to get too near the ravine andgive Shere Khan warning. At last Mowgli rounded up the bewildered herd atthe head of the ravine on a grassy patch that sloped steeply down to theravine itself. From that height you could see across the tops of the treesdown to the plain below; but what Mowgli looked at was the sides of theravine, and he saw with a great deal of satisfaction that they ran nearlystraight up and down, while the vines and creepers that hung over themwould give no foothold to a tiger who wanted to get out.<br />“Let them breathe, Akela,” he said, holding up his hand. “They have notwinded him yet. Let them breathe. I must tell Shere Khan who comes. Wehave him in the trap.”<br />He put his hands to his mouth and shouted down the ravine—it wasalmost like shouting down a tunnel—and the echoes jumped from rockto rock.<br />After a long time there came back the drawling, sleepy snarl of a full-fedtiger just wakened.<br />“Who calls?” said Shere Khan, and a splendid peacock fluttered up out ofthe ravine screeching.<br />“I, Mowgli. Cattle thief, it is time to come to the Council Rock! Down—hurrythem down, Akela! Down, Rama, down!”<br />The herd paused for an instant at the edge of the slope, but Akela gavetongue in the full hunting-yell, and they pitched over one after theother, just as steamers shoot rapids, the sand and stones spurting upround them. Once started, there was no chance of stopping, and before theywere fairly in the bed of the ravine Rama winded Shere Khan and bellowed.
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“Ha! Ha!” said Mowgli, on his back. “Now thou knowest!” and the torrent ofblack horns, foaming muzzles, and staring eyes whirled down the ravinejust as boulders go down in floodtime; the weaker buffaloes beingshouldered out to the sides of the ravine where they tore through thecreepers. They knew what the business was before them—the terriblecharge of the buffalo herd against which no tiger can hope to stand. ShereKhan heard the thunder of their hoofs, picked himself up, and lumbereddown the ravine, looking from side to side for some way of escape, but thewalls of the ravine were straight and he had to hold on, heavy with hisdinner and his drink, willing to do anything rather than fight. The herdsplashed through the pool he had just left, bellowing till the narrow cutrang. Mowgli heard an answering bellow from the foot of the ravine, sawShere Khan turn (the tiger knew if the worst came to the worst it wasbetter to meet the bulls than the cows with their calves), and then Ramatripped, stumbled, and went on again over something soft, and, with thebulls at his heels, crashed full into the other herd, while the weakerbuffaloes were lifted clean off their feet by the shock of the meeting.That charge carried both herds out into the plain, goring and stamping andsnorting. Mowgli watched his time, and slipped off Rama’s neck, layingabout him right and left with his stick.<br />“Quick, Akela! Break them up. Scatter them, or they will be fighting oneanother. Drive them away, Akela. Hai, Rama! Hai, hai, hai! my children.Softly now, softly! It is all over.”<br />Akela and Gray Brother ran to and fro nipping the buffaloes’ legs, andthough the herd wheeled once to charge up the ravine again, Mowgli managedto turn Rama, and the others followed him to the wallows.<br />Shere Khan needed no more trampling. He was dead, and the kites werecoming for him already.<br />“Brothers, that was a dog’s death,” said Mowgli, feeling for the knife healways carried in a sheath round his neck now that he lived with men. “Buthe would never have shown fight. His hide will look well on the CouncilRock. We must get to work swiftly.”<br />A boy trained among men would never have dreamed of skinning a ten-foottiger alone, but Mowgli knew better than anyone else how an animal’s skinis fitted on, and how it can be taken off. But it was hard work, andMowgli slashed and tore and grunted for an hour, while the wolves lolledout their tongues, or came forward and tugged as he ordered them.Presently a hand fell on his shoulder, and looking up he saw Buldeo withthe Tower musket. The children had told the village about the buffalostampede, and Buldeo went out angrily, only too anxious to correct Mowglifor not taking better care of the herd. The wolves dropped out of sight assoon as they saw the man coming.<br />“What is this folly?” said Buldeo angrily. “To think that thou canst skina tiger! Where did the buffaloes kill him? It is the Lame Tiger too, andthere is a hundred rupees on his head. Well, well, we will overlook thyletting the herd run off, and perhaps I will give thee one of the rupeesof the reward when I have taken the skin to Khanhiwara.” He fumbled in hiswaist cloth for flint and steel, and stooped down to singe Shere Khan’swhiskers. Most native hunters always singe a tiger’s whiskers to preventhis ghost from haunting them.<br />“Hum!” said Mowgli, half to himself as he ripped back the skin of aforepaw. “So thou wilt take the hide to Khanhiwara for the reward, andperhaps give me one rupee? Now it is in my mind that I need the skin formy own use. Heh! Old man, take away that fire!”<br />“What talk is this to the chief hunter of the village? Thy luck and thestupidity of thy buffaloes have helped thee to this kill. The tiger hasjust fed, or he would have gone twenty miles by this time. Thou canst noteven skin him properly, little beggar brat, and forsooth I, Buldeo, mustbe told not to singe his whiskers. Mowgli, I will not give thee one annaof the reward, but only a very big beating. Leave the carcass!”<br />“By the Bull that bought me,” said Mowgli, who was trying to get at theshoulder, “must I stay babbling to an old ape all noon? Here, Akela, thisman plagues me.”<br />Buldeo, who was still stooping over Shere Khan’s head, found himselfsprawling on the grass, with a gray wolf standing over him, while Mowgliwent on skinning as though he were alone in all India.<br />“Ye-es,” he said, between his teeth. “Thou art altogether right, Buldeo.Thou wilt never give me one anna of the reward. There is an old warbetween this lame tiger and myself—a very old war, and—I havewon.”<br />To do Buldeo justice, if he had been ten years younger he would have takenhis chance with Akela had he met the wolf in the woods, but a wolf whoobeyed the orders of this boy who had private wars with man-eating tigerswas not a common animal. It was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, thoughtBuldeo, and he wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protecthim. He lay as still as still, expecting every minute to see Mowgli turninto a tiger too.
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“Maharaj! Great King,” he said at last in a husky whisper.<br />“Yes,” said Mowgli, without turning his head, chuckling a little.<br />“I am an old man. I did not know that thou wast anything more than aherdsboy. May I rise up and go away, or will thy servant tear me topieces?”<br />“Go, and peace go with thee. Only, another time do not meddle with mygame. Let him go, Akela.”<br />Buldeo hobbled away to the village as fast as he could, looking back overhis shoulder in case Mowgli should change into something terrible. When hegot to the village he told a tale of magic and enchantment and sorcerythat made the priest look very grave.<br />Mowgli went on with his work, but it was nearly twilight before he and thewolves had drawn the great gay skin clear of the body.
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“Now we must hide this and take the buffaloes home! Help me to herd them,Akela.”<br />The herd rounded up in the misty twilight, and when they got near thevillage Mowgli saw lights, and heard the conches and bells in the templeblowing and banging. Half the village seemed to be waiting for him by thegate. “That is because I have killed Shere Khan,” he said to himself. Buta shower of stones whistled about his ears, and the villagers shouted:“Sorcerer! Wolf’s brat! Jungle demon! Go away! Get hence quickly or thepriest will turn thee into a wolf again. Shoot, Buldeo, shoot!”<br />The old Tower musket went off with a bang, and a young buffalo bellowed inpain.<br />“More sorcery!” shouted the villagers. “He can turn bullets. Buldeo, thatwas thy buffalo.”<br />“Now what is this?” said Mowgli, bewildered, as the stones flew thicker.<br />“They are not unlike the Pack, these brothers of thine,” said Akela,sitting down composedly. “It is in my head that, if bullets mean anything,they would cast thee out.”<br />“Wolf! Wolf’s cub! Go away!” shouted the priest, waving a sprig of thesacred tulsi plant.<br />“Again? Last time it was because I was a man. This time it is because I ama wolf. Let us go, Akela.”<br />A woman—it was Messua—ran across to the herd, and cried: “Oh,my son, my son! They say thou art a sorcerer who can turn himself into abeast at will. I do not believe, but go away or they will kill thee.Buldeo says thou art a wizard, but I know thou hast avenged Nathoo’sdeath.”<br />“Come back, Messua!” shouted the crowd. “Come back, or we will stonethee.”<br />Mowgli laughed a little short ugly laugh, for a stone had hit him in themouth. “Run back, Messua. This is one of the foolish tales they tell underthe big tree at dusk. I have at least paid for thy son’s life. Farewell;and run quickly, for I shall send the herd in more swiftly than theirbrickbats. I am no wizard, Messua. Farewell!”<br />“Now, once more, Akela,” he cried. “Bring the herd in.”<br />The buffaloes were anxious enough to get to the village. They hardlyneeded Akela’s yell, but charged through the gate like a whirlwind,scattering the crowd right and left.<br />“Keep count!” shouted Mowgli scornfully. “It may be that I have stolen oneof them. Keep count, for I will do your herding no more. Fare you well,children of men, and thank Messua that I do not come in with my wolves andhunt you up and down your street.”<br />He turned on his heel and walked away with the Lone Wolf, and as he lookedup at the stars he felt happy. “No more sleeping in traps for me, Akela.Let us get Shere Khan’s skin and go away. No, we will not hurt thevillage, for Messua was kind to me.”
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When the moon rose over the plain, making it look all milky, the horrifiedvillagers saw Mowgli, with two wolves at his heels and a bundle on hishead, trotting across at the steady wolf’s trot that eats up the longmiles like fire. Then they banged the temple bells and blew the concheslouder than ever. And Messua cried, and Buldeo embroidered the story ofhis adventures in the jungle, till he ended by saying that Akela stood upon his hind legs and talked like a man.<br />The moon was just going down when Mowgli and the two wolves came to thehill of the Council Rock, and they stopped at Mother Wolf’s cave.<br />“They have cast me out from the Man-Pack, Mother,” shouted Mowgli, “but Icome with the hide of Shere Khan to keep my word.”<br />Mother Wolf walked stiffly from the cave with the cubs behind her, and hereyes glowed as she saw the skin.<br />“I told him on that day, when he crammed his head and shoulders into thiscave, hunting for thy life, Little Frog—I told him that the hunterwould be the hunted. It is well done.”<br />“Little Brother, it is well done,” said a deep voice in the thicket. “Wewere lonely in the jungle without thee,” and Bagheera came running toMowgli’s bare feet. They clambered up the Council Rock together, andMowgli spread the skin out on the flat stone where Akela used to sit, andpegged it down with four slivers of bamboo, and Akela lay down upon it,and called the old call to the Council, “Look—look well, O Wolves,”exactly as he had called when Mowgli was first brought there.
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Ever since Akela had been deposed, the Pack had been without a leader,hunting and fighting at their own pleasure. But they answered the callfrom habit; and some of them were lame from the traps they had falleninto, and some limped from shot wounds, and some were mangy from eatingbad food, and many were missing. But they came to the Council Rock, allthat were left of them, and saw Shere Khan’s striped hide on the rock, andthe huge claws dangling at the end of the empty dangling feet. It was thenthat Mowgli made up a song that came up into his throat all by itself, andhe shouted it aloud, leaping up and down on the rattling skin, and beatingtime with his heels till he had no more breath left, while Gray Brotherand Akela howled between the verses.<br />“Look well, O Wolves. Have I kept my word?” said Mowgli. And the wolvesbayed “Yes,” and one tattered wolf howled:<br />“Lead us again, O Akela. Lead us again, O Man-cub, for we be sick of thislawlessness, and we would be the Free People once more.”<br />“Nay,” purred Bagheera, “that may not be. When ye are full-fed, themadness may come upon you again. Not for nothing are ye called the FreePeople. Ye fought for freedom, and it is yours. Eat it, O Wolves.”<br />“Man-Pack and Wolf-Pack have cast me out,” said Mowgli. “Now I will huntalone in the jungle.”<br />“And we will hunt with thee,” said the four cubs.<br />So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the jungle from thatday on. But he was not always alone, because, years afterward, he became aman and married.<br />But that is a story for grown-ups.<br />[]()
Mowgli’s SongTHAT HE SANG AT THE COUNCIL ROCK WHEN HEDANCED ON SHERE KHAN’S HIDEThe Song of Mowgli—I, Mowgli, am singing. Let the junglelisten to the things I have done.Shere Khan said he would kill—would kill! At the gates in thetwilight he would kill Mowgli, the Frog!He ate and he drank. Drink deep, Shere Khan, for when wilt thoudrink again? Sleep and dream of the kill.I am alone on the grazing-grounds. Gray Brother, come to me!Come to me, Lone Wolf, for there is big game afoot!Bring up the great bull buffaloes, the blue-skinned herd bullswith the angry eyes. Drive them to and fro as I order.Sleepest thou still, Shere Khan? Wake, oh, wake! Here come I,and the bulls are behind.Rama, the King of the Buffaloes, stamped with his foot. Waters ofthe Waingunga, whither went Shere Khan?He is not Ikki to dig holes, nor Mao, the Peacock, that he shouldfly. He is not Mang the Bat, to hang in the branches. Littlebamboos that creak together, tell me where he ran?Ow! He is there. Ahoo! He is there. Under the feet of Ramalies the Lame One! Up, Shere Khan!Up and kill! Here is meat; break the necks of the bulls!Hsh! He is asleep. We will not wake him, for his strength isvery great. The kites have come down to see it. The blackants have come up to know it. There is a great assembly in hishonor.Alala! I have no cloth to wrap me. The kites will see that I amnaked. I am ashamed to meet all these people.Lend me thy coat, Shere Khan. Lend me thy gay striped coat that Imay go to the Council Rock.By the Bull that bought me I made a promise—a little promise.Only thy coat is lacking before I keep my word.With the knife, with the knife that men use, with the knife of thehunter, I will stoop down for my gift.Waters of the Waingunga, Shere Khan gives me his coat for the lovethat he bears me. Pull, Gray Brother! Pull, Akela! Heavy isthe hide of Shere Khan.The Man Pack are angry. They throw stones and talk child’s talk.My mouth is bleeding. Let me run away.Through the night, through the hot night, run swiftly with me, mybrothers. We will leave the lights of the village and go tothe low moon.Waters of the Waingunga, the Man-Pack have cast me out. I didthem no harm, but they were afraid of me. Why?Wolf Pack, ye have cast me out too. The jungle is shut to me andthe village gates are shut. Why?As Mang flies between the beasts and birds, so fly I between thevillage and the jungle. Why?I dance on the hide of Shere Khan, but my heart is very heavy. Mymouth is cut and wounded with the stones from the village, butmy heart is very light, because I have come back to the jungle.Why?These two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in thespring. The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while itfalls. Why?I am two Mowglis, but the hide of Shere Khan is under my feet.All the jungle knows that I have killed Shere Khan. Look—lookwell, O Wolves!Ahae! My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.[]()
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The White SealOh! hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,And black are the waters that sparkled so green.The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find usAt rest in the hollows that rustle between.Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow,Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas!Seal LullabyAll these things happened several years ago at a place calledNovastoshnah, or North East Point, on the Island of St. Paul, away andaway in the Bering Sea. Limmershin, the Winter Wren, told me the tale whenhe was blown on to the rigging of a steamer going to Japan, and I took himdown into my cabin and warmed and fed him for a couple of days till he wasfit to fly back to St. Paul’s again. Limmershin is a very quaint littlebird, but he knows how to tell the truth.<br />Nobody comes to Novastoshnah except on business, and the only people whohave regular business there are the seals. They come in the summer monthsby hundreds and hundreds of thousands out of the cold gray sea. ForNovastoshnah Beach has the finest accommodation for seals of any place inall the world.<br />Sea Catch knew that, and every spring would swim from whatever place hehappened to be in—would swim like a torpedo-boat straight forNovastoshnah and spend a month fighting with his companions for a goodplace on the rocks, as close to the sea as possible. Sea Catch was fifteenyears old, a huge gray fur seal with almost a mane on his shoulders, andlong, wicked dog teeth. When he heaved himself up on his front flippers hestood more than four feet clear of the ground, and his weight, if anyonehad been bold enough to weigh him, was nearly seven hundred pounds. He wasscarred all over with the marks of savage fights, but he was always readyfor just one fight more. He would put his head on one side, as though hewere afraid to look his enemy in the face; then he would shoot it out likelightning, and when the big teeth were firmly fixed on the other seal’sneck, the other seal might get away if he could, but Sea Catch would nothelp him.<br />Yet Sea Catch never chased a beaten seal, for that was against the Rulesof the Beach. He only wanted room by the sea for his nursery. But as therewere forty or fifty thousand other seals hunting for the same thing eachspring, the whistling, bellowing, roaring, and blowing on the beach wassomething frightful.<br />From a little hill called Hutchinson’s Hill, you could look over three anda half miles of ground covered with fighting seals; and the surf wasdotted all over with the heads of seals hurrying to land and begin theirshare of the fighting. They fought in the breakers, they fought in thesand, and they fought on the smooth-worn basalt rocks of the nurseries,for they were just as stupid and unaccommodating as men. Their wives nevercame to the island until late in May or early in June, for they did notcare to be torn to pieces; and the young two-, three-, and four-year-oldseals who had not begun housekeeping went inland about half a mile throughthe ranks of the fighters and played about on the sand dunes in droves andlegions, and rubbed off every single green thing that grew. They werecalled the holluschickie—the bachelors—and there were perhapstwo or three hundred thousand of them at Novastoshnah alone.<br />Sea Catch had just finished his forty-fifth fight one spring when Matkah,his soft, sleek, gentle-eyed wife, came up out of the sea, and he caughther by the scruff of the neck and dumped her down on his reservation,saying gruffly: “Late as usual. Where have you been?”<br />It was not the fashion for Sea Catch to eat anything during the fourmonths he stayed on the beaches, and so his temper was generally bad.Matkah knew better than to answer back. She looked round and cooed: “Howthoughtful of you. You’ve taken the old place again.”<br />“I should think I had,” said Sea Catch. “Look at me!”<br />He was scratched and bleeding in twenty places; one eye was almost out,and his sides were torn to ribbons.<br />“Oh, you men, you men!” Matkah said, fanning herself with her hindflipper. “Why can’t you be sensible and settle your places quietly? Youlook as though you had been fighting with the Killer Whale.”<br />“I haven’t been doing anything but fight since the middle of May. Thebeach is disgracefully crowded this season. I’ve met at least a hundredseals from Lukannon Beach, house hunting. Why can’t people stay where theybelong?”<br />“I’ve often thought we should be much happier if we hauled out at OtterIsland instead of this crowded place,” said Matkah.<br />“Bah! Only the holluschickie go to Otter Island. If we went there theywould say we were afraid. We must preserve appearances, my dear.”<br />Sea Catch sunk his head proudly between his fat shoulders and pretended togo to sleep for a few minutes, but all the time he was keeping a sharplookout for a fight. Now that all the seals and their wives were on theland, you could hear their clamor miles out to sea above the loudestgales. At the lowest counting there were over a million seals on the beach—oldseals, mother seals, tiny babies, and holluschickie, fighting, scuffling,bleating, crawling, and playing together—going down to the sea andcoming up from it in gangs and regiments, lying over every foot of groundas far as the eye could reach, and skirmishing about in brigades throughthe fog. It is nearly always foggy at Novastoshnah, except when the suncomes out and makes everything look all pearly and rainbow-colored for alittle while.<br />Kotick, Matkah’s baby, was born in the middle of that confusion, and hewas all head and shoulders, with pale, watery blue eyes, as tiny sealsmust be, but there was something about his coat that made his mother lookat him very closely.<br />“Sea Catch,” she said, at last, “our baby’s going to be white!”<br />“Empty clam-shells and dry seaweed!” snorted Sea Catch. “There never hasbeen such a thing in the world as a white seal.”<br />“I can’t help that,” said Matkah; “there’s going to be now.” And she sangthe low, crooning seal song that all the mother seals sing to theirbabies:You mustn’t swim till you’re six weeks old,Or your head will be sunk by your heels;And summer gales and Killer WhalesAre bad for baby seals.Are bad for baby seals, dear rat,As bad as bad can be;But splash and grow strong,And you can’t be wrong.Child of the Open Sea!Of course the little fellow did not understand the words at first. Hepaddled and scrambled about by his mother’s side, and learned to scuffleout of the way when his father was fighting with another seal, and the tworolled and roared up and down the slippery rocks. Matkah used to go to seato get things to eat, and the baby was fed only once in two days, but thenhe ate all he could and throve upon it.<br />The first thing he did was to crawl inland, and there he met tens ofthousands of babies of his own age, and they played together like puppies,went to sleep on the clean sand, and played again. The old people in thenurseries took no notice of them, and the holluschickie kept to their owngrounds, and the babies had a beautiful playtime.<br />When Matkah came back from her deep-sea fishing she would go straight totheir playground and call as a sheep calls for a lamb, and wait until sheheard Kotick bleat. Then she would take the straightest of straight linesin his direction, striking out with her fore flippers and knocking theyoungsters head over heels right and left. There were always a few hundredmothers hunting for their children through the playgrounds, and the babieswere kept lively. But, as Matkah told Kotick, “So long as you don’t lie inmuddy water and get mange, or rub the hard sand into a cut or scratch, andso long as you never go swimming when there is a heavy sea, nothing willhurt you here.”<br />Little seals can no more swim than little children, but they are unhappytill they learn. The first time that Kotick went down to the sea a wavecarried him out beyond his depth, and his big head sank and his littlehind flippers flew up exactly as his mother had told him in the song, andif the next wave had not thrown him back again he would have drowned.<br />After that, he learned to lie in a beach pool and let the wash of thewaves just cover him and lift him up while he paddled, but he always kepthis eye open for big waves that might hurt. He was two weeks learning touse his flippers; and all that while he floundered in and out of thewater, and coughed and grunted and crawled up the beach and took catnapson the sand, and went back again, until at last he found that he trulybelonged to the water.<br />Then you can imagine the times that he had with his companions, duckingunder the rollers; or coming in on top of a comber and landing with aswash and a splutter as the big wave went whirling far up the beach; orstanding up on his tail and scratching his head as the old people did; orplaying “I’m the King of the Castle” on slippery, weedy rocks that juststuck out of the wash. Now and then he would see a thin fin, like a bigshark’s fin, drifting along close to shore, and he knew that that was theKiller Whale, the Grampus, who eats young seals when he can get them; andKotick would head for the beach like an arrow, and the fin would jig offslowly, as if it were looking for nothing at all.<br />Late in October the seals began to leave St. Paul’s for the deep sea, byfamilies and tribes, and there was no more fighting over the nurseries,and the holluschickie played anywhere they liked. “Next year,” said Matkahto Kotick, “you will be a holluschickie; but this year you must learn howto catch fish.”<br />They set out together across the Pacific, and Matkah showed Kotick how tosleep on his back with his flippers tucked down by his side and his littlenose just out of the water. No cradle is so comfortable as the long,rocking swell of the Pacific. When Kotick felt his skin tingle all over,Matkah told him he was learning the “feel of the water,” and that tingly,prickly feelings meant bad weather coming, and he must swim hard and getaway.
“In a little time,” she said, “you’ll know where to swim to, but just now
we’ll follow Sea Pig, the Porpoise, for he is very wise.” A school of
porpoises were ducking and tearing through the water, and little Kotick
followed them as fast as he could. “How do you know where to go to?” he
panted. The leader of the school rolled his white eye and ducked under.
“My tail tingles, youngster,” he said. “That means there’s a gale behind
me. Come along! When you’re south of the Sticky Water [he meant the
Equator] and your tail tingles, that means there’s a gale in front of you
and you must head north. Come along! The water feels bad here.”
This was one of very many things that Kotick learned, and he was always
learning. Matkah taught him to follow the cod and the halibut along the
under-sea banks and wrench the rockling out of his hole among the weeds;
how to skirt the wrecks lying a hundred fathoms below water and dart like
a rifle bullet in at one porthole and out at another as the fishes ran;
how to dance on the top of the waves when the lightning was racing all
over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed Albatross
and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind; how to jump three or
four feet clear of the water like a dolphin, flippers close to the side
and tail curved; to leave the flying fish alone because they are all bony;
to take the shoulder-piece out of a cod at full speed ten fathoms deep,
and never to stop and look at a boat or a ship, but particularly a
row-boat. At the end of six months what Kotick did not know about deep-sea
fishing was not worth the knowing. And all that time he never set flipper
on dry ground.
One day, however, as he was lying half asleep in the warm water somewhere
off the Island of Juan Fernandez, he felt faint and lazy all over, just as
human people do when the spring is in their legs, and he remembered the
good firm beaches of Novastoshnah seven thousand miles away, the games his
companions played, the smell of the seaweed, the seal roar, and the
fighting. That very minute he turned north, swimming steadily, and as he
went on he met scores of his mates, all bound for the same place, and they
said: “Greeting, Kotick! This year we are all holluschickie, and we can
dance the Fire-dance in the breakers off Lukannon and play on the new
grass. But where did you get that coat?”
Kotick’s fur was almost pure white now, and though he felt very proud of
it, he only said, “Swim quickly! My bones are aching for the land.” And so
they all came to the beaches where they had been born, and heard the old
seals, their fathers, fighting in the rolling mist.
That night Kotick danced the Fire-dance with the yearling seals. The sea
is full of fire on summer nights all the way down from Novastoshnah to
Lukannon, and each seal leaves a wake like burning oil behind him and a
flaming flash when he jumps, and the waves break in great phosphorescent
streaks and swirls. Then they went inland to the holluschickie grounds and
rolled up and down in the new wild wheat and told stories of what they had
done while they had been at sea. They talked about the Pacific as boys
would talk about a wood that they had been nutting in, and if anyone had
understood them he could have gone away and made such a chart of that
ocean as never was. The three- and four-year-old holluschickie romped down
from Hutchinson’s Hill crying: “Out of the way, youngsters! The sea is
deep and you don’t know all that’s in it yet. Wait till you’ve rounded the
Horn. Hi, you yearling, where did you get that white coat?”
“I didn’t get it,” said Kotick. “It grew.” And just as he was going to
roll the speaker over, a couple of black-haired men with flat red faces
came from behind a sand dune, and Kotick, who had never seen a man before,
coughed and lowered his head. The holluschickie just bundled off a few
yards and sat staring stupidly. The men were no less than Kerick Booterin,
the chief of the seal-hunters on the island, and Patalamon, his son. They
came from the little village not half a mile from the sea nurseries, and
they were deciding what seals they would drive up to the killing pens—for
the seals were driven just like sheep—to be turned into seal-skin
jackets later on.
“Ho!” said Patalamon. “Look! There’s a white seal!”
Kerick Booterin turned nearly white under his oil and smoke, for he was an
Aleut, and Aleuts are not clean people. Then he began to mutter a prayer.
“Don’t touch him, Patalamon. There has never been a white seal since—since
I was born. Perhaps it is old Zaharrof’s ghost. He was lost last year in
the big gale.”
“I’m not going near him,” said Patalamon. “He’s unlucky. Do you really
think he is old Zaharrof come back? I owe him for some gulls’ eggs.”
“Don’t look at him,” said Kerick. “Head off that drove of four-year-olds.
The men ought to skin two hundred to-day, but it’s the beginning of the
season and they are new to the work. A hundred will do. Quick!”
Patalamon rattled a pair of seal’s shoulder bones in front of a herd of
holluschickie and they stopped dead, puffing and blowing. Then he stepped
near and the seals began to move, and Kerick headed them inland, and they
never tried to get back to their companions. Hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of seals watched them being driven, but they went on playing
just the same. Kotick was the only one who asked questions, and none of
his companions could tell him anything, except that the men always drove
seals in that way for six weeks or two months of every year.
“I am going to follow,” he said, and his eyes nearly popped out of his
head as he shuffled along in the wake of the herd.
“The white seal is coming after us,” cried Patalamon. “That’s the first
time a seal has ever come to the killing-grounds alone.”
“Hsh! Don’t look behind you,” said Kerick. “It is Zaharrof’s ghost! I must
speak to the priest about this.”
The distance to the killing-grounds was only half a mile, but it took an
hour to cover, because if the seals went too fast Kerick knew that they
would get heated and then their fur would come off in patches when they
were skinned. So they went on very slowly, past Sea Lion’s Neck, past
Webster House, till they came to the Salt House just beyond the sight of
the seals on the beach. Kotick followed, panting and wondering. He thought
that he was at the world’s end, but the roar of the seal nurseries behind
him sounded as loud as the roar of a train in a tunnel. Then Kerick sat
down on the moss and pulled out a heavy pewter watch and let the drove
cool off for thirty minutes, and Kotick could hear the fog-dew dripping
off the brim of his cap. Then ten or twelve men, each with an iron-bound
club three or four feet long, came up, and Kerick pointed out one or two
of the drove that were bitten by their companions or too hot, and the men
kicked those aside with their heavy boots made of the skin of a walrus’s
throat, and then Kerick said, “Let go!” and then the men clubbed the seals
on the head as fast as they could.
Ten minutes later little Kotick did not recognize his friends any more,
for their skins were ripped off from the nose to the hind flippers,
whipped off and thrown down on the ground in a pile. That was enough for
Kotick. He turned and galloped (a seal can gallop very swiftly for a short
time) back to the sea; his little new mustache bristling with horror. At
Sea Lion’s Neck, where the great sea lions sit on the edge of the surf, he
flung himself flipper-overhead into the cool water and rocked there,
gasping miserably. “What’s here?” said a sea lion gruffly, for as a rule
the sea lions keep themselves to themselves.
“Scoochnie! Ochen scoochnie!” (“I’m lonesome, very lonesome!”) said
Kotick. “They’re killing all the holluschickie on all the beaches!”
The Sea Lion turned his head inshore. “Nonsense!” he said. “Your friends
are making as much noise as ever. You must have seen old Kerick polishing
off a drove. He’s done that for thirty years.”
“It’s horrible,” said Kotick, backing water as a wave went over him, and
steadying himself with a screw stroke of his flippers that brought him all
standing within three inches of a jagged edge of rock.
“Well done for a yearling!” said the Sea Lion, who could appreciate good
swimming. “I suppose it is rather awful from your way of looking at it,
but if you seals will come here year after year, of course the men get to
know of it, and unless you can find an island where no men ever come you
will always be driven.”
“Isn’t there any such island?” began Kotick.
“I’ve followed the poltoos [the halibut] for twenty years, and I can’t say
I’ve found it yet. But look here—you seem to have a fondness for
talking to your betters—suppose you go to Walrus Islet and talk to
Sea Vitch. He may know something. Don’t flounce off like that. It’s a
six-mile swim, and if I were you I should haul out and take a nap first,
little one.”
Kotick thought that that was good advice, so he swam round to his own
beach, hauled out, and slept for half an hour, twitching all over, as
seals will. Then he headed straight for Walrus Islet, a little low sheet
of rocky island almost due northeast from Novastoshnah, all ledges and
rock and gulls’ nests, where the walrus herded by themselves.
He landed close to old Sea Vitch—the big, ugly, bloated, pimpled,
fat-necked, long-tusked walrus of the North Pacific, who has no manners
except when he is asleep—as he was then, with his hind flippers half
in and half out of the surf.
“Wake up!” barked Kotick, for the gulls were making a great noise.
“Hah! Ho! Hmph! What’s that?” said Sea Vitch, and he struck the next
walrus a blow with his tusks and waked him up, and the next struck the
next, and so on till they were all awake and staring in every direction
but the right one.
#####
“Hi! It’s me,” said Kotick, bobbing in the surf and looking like a littlewhite slug.<br />“Well! May I be—skinned!” said Sea Vitch, and they all looked atKotick as you can fancy a club full of drowsy old gentlemen would look ata little boy. Kotick did not care to hear any more about skinning justthen; he had seen enough of it. So he called out: “Isn’t there any placefor seals to go where men don’t ever come?”<br />“Go and find out,” said Sea Vitch, shutting his eyes. “Run away. We’rebusy here.”<br />Kotick made his dolphin-jump in the air and shouted as loud as he could:“Clam-eater! Clam-eater!” He knew that Sea Vitch never caught a fish inhis life but always rooted for clams and seaweed; though he pretended tobe a very terrible person. Naturally the Chickies and the Gooverooskiesand the Epatkas—the Burgomaster Gulls and the Kittiwakes and thePuffins, who are always looking for a chance to be rude, took up the cry,and—so Limmershin told me—for nearly five minutes you couldnot have heard a gun fired on Walrus Islet. All the population was yellingand screaming “Clam-eater! Stareek [old man]!” while Sea Vitch rolled fromside to side grunting and coughing.<br />“Now will you tell?” said Kotick, all out of breath.<br />“Go and ask Sea Cow,” said Sea Vitch. “If he is living still, he’ll beable to tell you.”<br />“How shall I know Sea Cow when I meet him?” said Kotick, sheering off.<br />“He’s the only thing in the sea uglier than Sea Vitch,” screamed aBurgomaster gull, wheeling under Sea Vitch’s nose. “Uglier, and with worsemanners! Stareek!”<br />Kotick swam back to Novastoshnah, leaving the gulls to scream. There hefound that no one sympathized with him in his little attempt to discover aquiet place for the seals. They told him that men had always driven theholluschickie—it was part of the day’s work—and that if he didnot like to see ugly things he should not have gone to the killinggrounds. But none of the other seals had seen the killing, and that madethe difference between him and his friends. Besides, Kotick was a whiteseal.<br />“What you must do,” said old Sea Catch, after he had heard his son’sadventures, “is to grow up and be a big seal like your father, and have anursery on the beach, and then they will leave you alone. In another fiveyears you ought to be able to fight for yourself.” Even gentle Matkah, hismother, said: “You will never be able to stop the killing. Go and play inthe sea, Kotick.” And Kotick went off and danced the Fire-dance with avery heavy little heart.<br />That autumn he left the beach as soon as he could, and set off alonebecause of a notion in his bullet-head. He was going to find Sea Cow, ifthere was such a person in the sea, and he was going to find a quietisland with good firm beaches for seals to live on, where men could notget at them. So he explored and explored by himself from the North to theSouth Pacific, swimming as much as three hundred miles in a day and anight. He met with more adventures than can be told, and narrowly escapedbeing caught by the Basking Shark, and the Spotted Shark, and theHammerhead, and he met all the untrustworthy ruffians that loaf up anddown the seas, and the heavy polite fish, and the scarlet spotted scallopsthat are moored in one place for hundreds of years, and grow very proud ofit; but he never met Sea Cow, and he never found an island that he couldfancy.<br />If the beach was good and hard, with a slope behind it for seals to playon, there was always the smoke of a whaler on the horizon, boiling downblubber, and Kotick knew what that meant. Or else he could see that sealshad once visited the island and been killed off, and Kotick knew thatwhere men had come once they would come again.<br />He picked up with an old stumpy-tailed albatross, who told him thatKerguelen Island was the very place for peace and quiet, and when Kotickwent down there he was all but smashed to pieces against some wicked blackcliffs in a heavy sleet-storm with lightning and thunder. Yet as he pulledout against the gale he could see that even there had once been a sealnursery. And it was so in all the other islands that he visited.<br />Limmershin gave a long list of them, for he said that Kotick spent fiveseasons exploring, with a four months’ rest each year at Novastoshnah,when the holluschickie used to make fun of him and his imaginary islands.He went to the Gallapagos, a horrid dry place on the Equator, where he wasnearly baked to death; he went to the Georgia Islands, the Orkneys,Emerald Island, Little Nightingale Island, Gough’s Island, Bouvet’sIsland, the Crossets, and even to a little speck of an island south of theCape of Good Hope. But everywhere the People of the Sea told him the samethings. Seals had come to those islands once upon a time, but men hadkilled them all off. Even when he swam thousands of miles out of thePacific and got to a place called Cape Corrientes (that was when he wascoming back from Gough’s Island), he found a few hundred mangy seals on arock and they told him that men came there too.<br />That nearly broke his heart, and he headed round the Horn back to his ownbeaches; and on his way north he hauled out on an island full of greentrees, where he found an old, old seal who was dying, and Kotick caughtfish for him and told him all his sorrows. “Now,” said Kotick, “I am goingback to Novastoshnah, and if I am driven to the killing-pens with theholluschickie I shall not care.”<br />The old seal said, “Try once more. I am the last of the Lost Rookery ofMasafuera, and in the days when men killed us by the hundred thousandthere was a story on the beaches that some day a white seal would come outof the North and lead the seal people to a quiet place. I am old, and Ishall never live to see that day, but others will. Try once more.”<br />And Kotick curled up his mustache (it was a beauty) and said, “I am theonly white seal that has ever been born on the beaches, and I am the onlyseal, black or white, who ever thought of looking for new islands.”<br />This cheered him immensely; and when he came back to Novastoshnah thatsummer, Matkah, his mother, begged him to marry and settle down, for hewas no longer a holluschick but a full-grown sea-catch, with a curly whitemane on his shoulders, as heavy, as big, and as fierce as his father.“Give me another season,” he said. “Remember, Mother, it is always theseventh wave that goes farthest up the beach.”<br />Curiously enough, there was another seal who thought that she would putoff marrying till the next year, and Kotick danced the Fire-dance with herall down Lukannon Beach the night before he set off on his lastexploration. This time he went westward, because he had fallen on thetrail of a great shoal of halibut, and he needed at least one hundredpounds of fish a day to keep him in good condition. He chased them till hewas tired, and then he curled himself up and went to sleep on the hollowsof the ground swell that sets in to Copper Island. He knew the coastperfectly well, so about midnight, when he felt himself gently bumped on aweed-bed, he said, “Hm, tide’s running strong tonight,” and turning overunder water opened his eyes slowly and stretched. Then he jumped like acat, for he saw huge things nosing about in the shoal water and browsingon the heavy fringes of the weeds.<br />“By the Great Combers of Magellan!” he said, beneath his mustache. “Who inthe Deep Sea are these people?”<br />They were like no walrus, sea lion, seal, bear, whale, shark, fish, squid,or scallop that Kotick had ever seen before. They were between twenty andthirty feet long, and they had no hind flippers, but a shovel-like tailthat looked as if it had been whittled out of wet leather. Their headswere the most foolish-looking things you ever saw, and they balanced onthe ends of their tails in deep water when they weren’t grazing, bowingsolemnly to each other and waving their front flippers as a fat man waveshis arm.<br />“Ahem!” said Kotick. “Good sport, gentlemen?” The big things answered bybowing and waving their flippers like the Frog Footman. When they beganfeeding again Kotick saw that their upper lip was split into two piecesthat they could twitch apart about a foot and bring together again with awhole bushel of seaweed between the splits. They tucked the stuff intotheir mouths and chumped solemnly.<br />“Messy style of feeding, that,” said Kotick. They bowed again, and Kotickbegan to lose his temper. “Very good,” he said. “If you do happen to havean extra joint in your front flipper you needn’t show off so. I see youbow gracefully, but I should like to know your names.” The split lipsmoved and twitched; and the glassy green eyes stared, but they did notspeak.<br />“Well!” said Kotick. “You’re the only people I’ve ever met uglier than SeaVitch—and with worse manners.”<br />Then he remembered in a flash what the Burgomaster gull had screamed tohim when he was a little yearling at Walrus Islet, and he tumbled backwardin the water, for he knew that he had found Sea Cow at last.<br />The sea cows went on schlooping and grazing and chumping in the weed, andKotick asked them questions in every language that he had picked up in histravels; and the Sea People talk nearly as many languages as human beings.But the sea cows did not answer because Sea Cow cannot talk. He has onlysix bones in his neck where he ought to have seven, and they say under thesea that that prevents him from speaking even to his companions. But, asyou know, he has an extra joint in his foreflipper, and by waving it upand down and about he makes what answers to a sort of clumsy telegraphiccode.<br />By daylight Kotick’s mane was standing on end and his temper was gonewhere the dead crabs go. Then the Sea Cow began to travel northward veryslowly, stopping to hold absurd bowing councils from time to time, andKotick followed them, saying to himself, “People who are such idiots asthese are would have been killed long ago if they hadn’t found out somesafe island. And what is good enough for the Sea Cow is good enough forthe Sea Catch. All the same, I wish they’d hurry.”<br />It was weary work for Kotick. The herd never went more than forty or fiftymiles a day, and stopped to feed at night, and kept close to the shore allthe time; while Kotick swam round them, and over them, and under them, buthe could not hurry them up one-half mile. As they went farther north theyheld a bowing council every few hours, and Kotick nearly bit off hismustache with impatience till he saw that they were following up a warmcurrent of water, and then he respected them more.<br />One night they sank through the shiny water—sank like stones—andfor the first time since he had known them began to swim quickly. Kotickfollowed, and the pace astonished him, for he never dreamed that Sea Cowwas anything of a swimmer. They headed for a cliff by the shore—acliff that ran down into deep water, and plunged into a dark hole at thefoot of it, twenty fathoms under the sea. It was a long, long swim, andKotick badly wanted fresh air before he was out of the dark tunnel theyled him through.<br />“My wig!” he said, when he rose, gasping and puffing, into open water atthe farther end. “It was a long dive, but it was worth it.”<br />The sea cows had separated and were browsing lazily along the edges of thefinest beaches that Kotick had ever seen. There were long stretches ofsmooth-worn rock running for miles, exactly fitted to make seal-nurseries,and there were play-grounds of hard sand sloping inland behind them, andthere were rollers for seals to dance in, and long grass to roll in, andsand dunes to climb up and down, and, best of all, Kotick knew by the feelof the water, which never deceives a true sea catch, that no men had evercome there.<br />The first thing he did was to assure himself that the fishing was good,and then he swam along the beaches and counted up the delightful low sandyislands half hidden in the beautiful rolling fog. Away to the northward,out to sea, ran a line of bars and shoals and rocks that would never let aship come within six miles of the beach, and between the islands and themainland was a stretch of deep water that ran up to the perpendicularcliffs, and somewhere below the cliffs was the mouth of the tunnel.<br />“It’s Novastoshnah over again, but ten times better,” said Kotick. “SeaCow must be wiser than I thought. Men can’t come down the cliffs, even ifthere were any men; and the shoals to seaward would knock a ship tosplinters. If any place in the sea is safe, this is it.”<br />He began to think of the seal he had left behind him, but though he was ina hurry to go back to Novastoshnah, he thoroughly explored the newcountry, so that he would be able to answer all questions.<br />Then he dived and made sure of the mouth of the tunnel, and raced throughto the southward. No one but a sea cow or a seal would have dreamed ofthere being such a place, and when he looked back at the cliffs evenKotick could hardly believe that he had been under them.<br />He was six days going home, though he was not swimming slowly; and when hehauled out just above Sea Lion’s Neck the first person he met was the sealwho had been waiting for him, and she saw by the look in his eyes that hehad found his island at last.<br />But the holluschickie and Sea Catch, his father, and all the other sealslaughed at him when he told them what he had discovered, and a young sealabout his own age said, “This is all very well, Kotick, but you can’t comefrom no one knows where and order us off like this. Remember we’ve beenfighting for our nurseries, and that’s a thing you never did. Youpreferred prowling about in the sea.”<br />The other seals laughed at this, and the young seal began twisting hishead from side to side. He had just married that year, and was making agreat fuss about it.<br />“I’ve no nursery to fight for,” said Kotick. “I only want to show you alla place where you will be safe. What’s the use of fighting?”<br />“Oh, if you’re trying to back out, of course I’ve no more to say,” saidthe young seal with an ugly chuckle.<br />“Will you come with me if I win?” said Kotick. And a green light came intohis eye, for he was very angry at having to fight at all.<br />“Very good,” said the young seal carelessly. “If you win, I’ll come.”<br />He had no time to change his mind, for Kotick’s head was out and his teethsunk in the blubber of the young seal’s neck. Then he threw himself backon his haunches and hauled his enemy down the beach, shook him, andknocked him over. Then Kotick roared to the seals: “I’ve done my best foryou these five seasons past. I’ve found you the island where you’ll besafe, but unless your heads are dragged off your silly necks you won’tbelieve. I’m going to teach you now. Look out for yourselves!”<br />Limmershin told me that never in his life—and Limmershin sees tenthousand big seals fighting every year—never in all his little lifedid he see anything like Kotick’s charge into the nurseries. He flunghimself at the biggest sea catch he could find, caught him by the throat,choked him and bumped him and banged him till he grunted for mercy, andthen threw him aside and attacked the next. You see, Kotick had neverfasted for four months as the big seals did every year, and his deep-seaswimming trips kept him in perfect condition, and, best of all, he hadnever fought before. His curly white mane stood up with rage, and his eyesflamed, and his big dog teeth glistened, and he was splendid to look at.Old Sea Catch, his father, saw him tearing past, hauling the grizzled oldseals about as though they had been halibut, and upsetting the youngbachelors in all directions; and Sea Catch gave a roar and shouted: “Hemay be a fool, but he is the best fighter on the beaches! Don’t tackleyour father, my son! He’s with you!”<br />Kotick roared in answer, and old Sea Catch waddled in with his mustache onend, blowing like a locomotive, while Matkah and the seal that was goingto marry Kotick cowered down and admired their men-folk. It was a gorgeousfight, for the two fought as long as there was a seal that dared lift uphis head, and when there were none they paraded grandly up and down thebeach side by side, bellowing.<br />At night, just as the Northern Lights were winking and flashing throughthe fog, Kotick climbed a bare rock and looked down on the scatterednurseries and the torn and bleeding seals. “Now,” he said, “I’ve taughtyou your lesson.”<br />“My wig!” said old Sea Catch, boosting himself up stiffly, for he wasfearfully mauled. “The Killer Whale himself could not have cut them upworse. Son, I’m proud of you, and what’s more, I’ll come with you to yourisland—if there is such a place.”<br />“Hear you, fat pigs of the sea. Who comes with me to the Sea Cow’s tunnel?Answer, or I shall teach you again,” roared Kotick.<br />There was a murmur like the ripple of the tide all up and down thebeaches. “We will come,” said thousands of tired voices. “We will followKotick, the White Seal.”<br />Then Kotick dropped his head between his shoulders and shut his eyesproudly. He was not a white seal any more, but red from head to tail. Allthe same he would have scorned to look at or touch one of his wounds.<br />A week later he and his army (nearly ten thousand holluschickie and oldseals) went away north to the Sea Cow’s tunnel, Kotick leading them, andthe seals that stayed at Novastoshnah called them idiots. But next spring,when they all met off the fishing banks of the Pacific, Kotick’s sealstold such tales of the new beaches beyond Sea Cow’s tunnel that more andmore seals left Novastoshnah. Of course it was not all done at once, forthe seals are not very clever, and they need a long time to turn thingsover in their minds, but year after year more seals went away fromNovastoshnah, and Lukannon, and the other nurseries, to the quiet,sheltered beaches where Kotick sits all the summer through, getting biggerand fatter and stronger each year, while the holluschickie play aroundhim, in that sea where no man comes.<br />[]()
Lukannon
This is the great deep-sea song that all the St. Paul seals sing when they
are heading back to their beaches in the summer. It is a sort of very sad
seal National Anthem.
I met my mates in the morning (and, oh, but I am old!)
Where roaring on the ledges the summer ground-swell rolled;
I heard them lift the chorus that drowned the breakers’ song—
The Beaches of Lukannon—two million voices strong.
The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,
The song of blowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunes,
The song of midnight dances that churned the sea to flame—
The Beaches of Lukannon—before the sealers came!
I met my mates in the morning (I’ll never meet them more!);
They came and went in legions that darkened all the shore.
And o’er the foam-flecked offing as far as voice could reach
We hailed the landing-parties and we sang them up the beach.
The Beaches of Lukannon—the winter wheat so tall—
The dripping, crinkled lichens, and the sea-fog drenching all!
The platforms of our playground, all shining smooth and worn!
The Beaches of Lukannon—the home where we were born!
I met my mates in the morning, a broken, scattered band.
Men shoot us in the water and club us on the land;
Men drive us to the Salt House like silly sheep and tame,
And still we sing Lukannon—before the sealers came.
Wheel down, wheel down to southward; oh, Gooverooska, go!
And tell the Deep-Sea Viceroys the story of our woe;
Ere, empty as the shark’s egg the tempest flings ashore,
The Beaches of Lukannon shall know their sons no more!
[
]()
#####
“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”
At the hole where he went in
Red-Eye called to Wrinkle-Skin.
Hear what little Red-Eye saith:
“Nag, come up and dance with death!”
Eye to eye and head to head,
(Keep the measure, Nag.)
This shall end when one is dead;
(At thy pleasure, Nag.)
Turn for turn and twist for twist—
(Run and hide thee, Nag.)
Hah! The hooded Death has missed!
(Woe betide thee, Nag!)
This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought
single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee
cantonment. Darzee, the Tailorbird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the
musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always
creeps round by the wall, gave him advice, but Rikki-tikki did the real
fighting.
<br />
He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but
quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of
his restless nose were pink. He could scratch himself anywhere he pleased
with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use. He could fluff up his
tail till it looked like a bottle brush, and his war cry as he scuttled
through the long grass was: “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”
<br />
One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived
with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a
roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung
to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot
sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed, and a small boy
was saying, “Here’s a dead mongoose. Let’s have a funeral.”
<br />
“No,” said his mother, “let’s take him in and dry him. Perhaps he isn’t
really dead.”
<br />
They took him into the house, and a big man picked him up between his
finger and thumb and said he was not dead but half choked. So they wrapped
him in cotton wool, and warmed him over a little fire, and he opened his
eyes and sneezed.
<br />
“Now,” said the big man (he was an Englishman who had just moved into the
bungalow), “don’t frighten him, and we’ll see what he’ll do.”
<br />
It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is
eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose
family is “Run and find out,” and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. He
looked at the cotton wool, decided that it was not good to eat, ran all
round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched himself, and
jumped on the small boy’s shoulder.
“Don’t be frightened, Teddy,” said his father. “That’s his way of making
friends.”
“Ouch! He’s tickling under my chin,” said Teddy.
Rikki-tikki looked down between the boy’s collar and neck, snuffed at his
ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rubbing his nose.
“Good gracious,” said Teddy’s mother, “and that’s a wild creature! I
suppose he’s so tame because we’ve been kind to him.”
“All mongooses are like that,” said her husband. “If Teddy doesn’t pick
him up by the tail, or try to put him in a cage, he’ll run in and out of
the house all day long. Let’s give him something to eat.”
They gave him a little piece of raw meat. Rikki-tikki liked it immensely,
and when it was finished he went out into the veranda and sat in the
sunshine and fluffed up his fur to make it dry to the roots. Then he felt
better.
#####
“There are more things to find out about in this house,” he said to
himself, “than all my family could find out in all their lives. I shall
certainly stay and find out.”
<br />
He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in
the bath-tubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing table, and burned it
on the end of the big man’s cigar, for he climbed up in the big man’s lap
to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy’s nursery to
watch how kerosene lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed
Rikki-tikki climbed up too. But he was a restless companion, because he
had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find
out what made it. Teddy’s mother and father came in, the last thing, to
look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow. “I don’t like
that,” said Teddy’s mother. “He may bite the child.” “He’ll do no such
thing,” said the father. “Teddy’s safer with that little beast than if he
had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now—”
#####
But Teddy’s mother wouldn’t think of anything so awful.
<br />
Early in the morning Rikki-tikki came to early breakfast in the veranda
riding on Teddy’s shoulder, and they gave him banana and some boiled egg.
He sat on all their laps one after the other, because every
well-brought-up mongoose always hopes to be a house mongoose some day and
have rooms to run about in; and Rikki-tikki’s mother (she used to live in
the general’s house at Segowlee) had carefully told Rikki what to do if
ever he came across white men.
Then Rikki-tikki went out into the garden to see what was to be seen. It
was a large garden, only half cultivated, with bushes, as big as
summer-houses, of Marshal Niel roses, lime and orange trees, clumps of
bamboos, and thickets of high grass. Rikki-tikki licked his lips. “This is
a splendid hunting-ground,” he said, and his tail grew bottle-brushy at
the thought of it, and he scuttled up and down the garden, snuffing here
and there till he heard very sorrowful voices in a thorn-bush.
It was Darzee, the Tailor-bird, and his wife. They had made a beautiful
nest by pulling two big leaves together and stitching them up the edges
with fibers, and had filled the hollow with cotton and downy fluff. The
nest swayed to and fro, as they sat on the rim and cried.
#####
“What is the matter?” asked Rikki-tikki.
<br />
“We are very miserable,” said Darzee. “One of our babies fell out of the
nest yesterday and Nag ate him.”
<br />
“H’m!” said Rikki-tikki, “that is very sad—but I am a stranger here.
Who is Nag?”
<br />
Darzee and his wife only cowered down in the nest without answering, for
from the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss—a
horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet. Then
inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the
big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he
had lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing
to and fro exactly as a dandelion tuft balances in the wind, and he looked
at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake’s eyes that never change their
expression, whatever the snake may be thinking of.
<br />
“Who is Nag?” said he. “I am Nag. The great God Brahm put his mark upon
all our people, when the first cobra spread his hood to keep the sun off
Brahm as he slept. Look, and be afraid!”
#####
He spread out his hood more than ever, and Rikki-tikki saw the
spectacle-mark on the back of it that looks exactly like the eye part of a
hook-and-eye fastening. He was afraid for the minute, but it is impossible
for a mongoose to stay frightened for any length of time, and though
Rikki-tikki had never met a live cobra before, his mother had fed him on
dead ones, and he knew that all a grown mongoose’s business in life was to
fight and eat snakes. Nag knew that too and, at the bottom of his cold
heart, he was afraid.
#####
“Well,” said Rikki-tikki, and his tail began to fluff up again, “marks or
no marks, do you think it is right for you to eat fledglings out of a
nest?”
<br />
Nag was thinking to himself, and watching the least little movement in the
grass behind Rikki-tikki. He knew that mongooses in the garden meant death
sooner or later for him and his family, but he wanted to get Rikki-tikki
off his guard. So he dropped his head a little, and put it on one side.
<br />
“Let us talk,” he said. “You eat eggs. Why should not I eat birds?”
<br />
“Behind you! Look behind you!” sang Darzee.
#####
Rikki-tikki knew better than to waste time in staring. He jumped up in the
air as high as he could go, and just under him whizzed by the head of
Nagaina, Nag’s wicked wife. She had crept up behind him as he was talking,
to make an end of him. He heard her savage hiss as the stroke missed. He
came down almost across her back, and if he had been an old mongoose he
would have known that then was the time to break her back with one bite;
but he was afraid of the terrible lashing return stroke of the cobra. He
bit, indeed, but did not bite long enough, and he jumped clear of the
whisking tail, leaving Nagaina torn and angry.
<br />
“Wicked, wicked Darzee!” said Nag, lashing up as high as he could reach
toward the nest in the thorn-bush. But Darzee had built it out of reach of
snakes, and it only swayed to and fro.
<br />
Rikki-tikki felt his eyes growing red and hot (when a mongoose’s eyes grow
red, he is angry), and he sat back on his tail and hind legs like a little
kangaroo, and looked all round him, and chattered with rage. But Nag and
Nagaina had disappeared into the grass. When a snake misses its stroke, it
never says anything or gives any sign of what it means to do next.
Rikki-tikki did not care to follow them, for he did not feel sure that he
could manage two snakes at once. So he trotted off to the gravel path near
the house, and sat down to think. It was a serious matter for him.
<br />
If you read the old books of natural history, you will find they say that
when the mongoose fights the snake and happens to get bitten, he runs off
and eats some herb that cures him. That is not true. The victory is only a
matter of quickness of eye and quickness of foot—snake’s blow
against mongoose’s jump—and as no eye can follow the motion of a
snake’s head when it strikes, this makes things much more wonderful than
any magic herb. Rikki-tikki knew he was a young mongoose, and it made him
all the more pleased to think that he had managed to escape a blow from
behind. It gave him confidence in himself, and when Teddy came running
down the path, Rikki-tikki was ready to be petted.
<br />
But just as Teddy was stooping, something wriggled a little in the dust,
and a tiny voice said: “Be careful. I am Death!” It was Karait, the dusty
brown snakeling that lies for choice on the dusty earth; and his bite is
as dangerous as the cobra’s. But he is so small that nobody thinks of him,
and so he does the more harm to people.
<br />
Rikki-tikki’s eyes grew red again, and he danced up to Karait with the
peculiar rocking, swaying motion that he had inherited from his family. It
looks very funny, but it is so perfectly balanced a gait that you can fly
off from it at any angle you please, and in dealing with snakes this is an
advantage. If Rikki-tikki had only known, he was doing a much more
dangerous thing than fighting Nag, for Karait is so small, and can turn so
quickly, that unless Rikki bit him close to the back of the head, he would
get the return stroke in his eye or his lip. But Rikki did not know. His
eyes were all red, and he rocked back and forth, looking for a good place
to hold. Karait struck out. Rikki jumped sideways and tried to run in, but
the wicked little dusty gray head lashed within a fraction of his
shoulder, and he had to jump over the body, and the head followed his
heels close.
<br />
Teddy shouted to the house: “Oh, look here! Our mongoose is killing a
snake.” And Rikki-tikki heard a scream from Teddy’s mother. His father ran
out with a stick, but by the time he came up, Karait had lunged out once
too far, and Rikki-tikki had sprung, jumped on the snake’s back, dropped
his head far between his forelegs, bitten as high up the back as he could
get hold, and rolled away. That bite paralyzed Karait, and Rikki-tikki was
just going to eat him up from the tail, after the custom of his family at
dinner, when he remembered that a full meal makes a slow mongoose, and if
he wanted all his strength and quickness ready, he must keep himself thin.
<br />
He went away for a dust bath under the castor-oil bushes, while Teddy’s
father beat the dead Karait. “What is the use of that?” thought
Rikki-tikki. “I have settled it all;” and then Teddy’s mother picked him
up from the dust and hugged him, crying that he had saved Teddy from
death, and Teddy’s father said that he was a providence, and Teddy looked
on with big scared eyes. Rikki-tikki was rather amused at all the fuss,
which, of course, he did not understand. Teddy’s mother might just as well
have petted Teddy for playing in the dust. Rikki was thoroughly enjoying
himself.
<br />
That night at dinner, walking to and fro among the wine-glasses on the
table, he might have stuffed himself three times over with nice things.
But he remembered Nag and Nagaina, and though it was very pleasant to be
patted and petted by Teddy’s mother, and to sit on Teddy’s shoulder, his
eyes would get red from time to time, and he would go off into his long
war cry of “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”
#####
Teddy carried him off to bed, and insisted on Rikki-tikki sleeping under
his chin. Rikki-tikki was too well bred to bite or scratch, but as soon as
Teddy was asleep he went off for his nightly walk round the house, and in
the dark he ran up against Chuchundra, the musk-rat, creeping around by
the wall. Chuchundra is a broken-hearted little beast. He whimpers and
cheeps all the night, trying to make up his mind to run into the middle of
the room. But he never gets there.
<br />
“Don’t kill me,” said Chuchundra, almost weeping. “Rikki-tikki, don’t kill
me!”
<br />
“Do you think a snake-killer kills muskrats?” said Rikki-tikki scornfully.
<br />
“Those who kill snakes get killed by snakes,” said Chuchundra, more
sorrowfully than ever. “And how am I to be sure that Nag won’t mistake me
for you some dark night?”
<br />
“There’s not the least danger,” said Rikki-tikki. “But Nag is in the
garden, and I know you don’t go there.”
<br />
“My cousin Chua, the rat, told me—” said Chuchundra, and then he
stopped.
<br />
“Told you what?”
<br />
“H’sh! Nag is everywhere, Rikki-tikki. You should have talked to Chua in
the garden.”
<br />
“I didn’t—so you must tell me. Quick, Chuchundra, or I’ll bite you!”
<br />
Chuchundra sat down and cried till the tears rolled off his whiskers. “I
am a very poor man,” he sobbed. “I never had spirit enough to run out into
the middle of the room. H’sh! I mustn’t tell you anything. Can’t you hear,
Rikki-tikki?”
<br />
Rikki-tikki listened. The house was as still as still, but he thought he
could just catch the faintest scratch-scratch in the world—a noise
as faint as that of a wasp walking on a window-pane—the dry scratch
of a snake’s scales on brick-work.
<br />
“That’s Nag or Nagaina,” he said to himself, “and he is crawling into the
bath-room sluice. You’re right, Chuchundra; I should have talked to Chua.”
<br />
He stole off to Teddy’s bath-room, but there was nothing there, and then
to Teddy’s mother’s bathroom. At the bottom of the smooth plaster wall
there was a brick pulled out to make a sluice for the bath water, and as
Rikki-tikki stole in by the masonry curb where the bath is put, he heard
Nag and Nagaina whispering together outside in the moonlight.
<br />
“When the house is emptied of people,” said Nagaina to her husband, “he
will have to go away, and then the garden will be our own again. Go in
quietly, and remember that the big man who killed Karait is the first one
to bite. Then come out and tell me, and we will hunt for Rikki-tikki
together.”
<br />
“But are you sure that there is anything to be gained by killing the
people?” said Nag.
<br />
“Everything. When there were no people in the bungalow, did we have any
mongoose in the garden? So long as the bungalow is empty, we are king and
queen of the garden; and remember that as soon as our eggs in the melon
bed hatch (as they may tomorrow), our children will need room and quiet.”
<br />
“I had not thought of that,” said Nag. “I will go, but there is no need
that we should hunt for Rikki-tikki afterward. I will kill the big man and
his wife, and the child if I can, and come away quietly. Then the bungalow
will be empty, and Rikki-tikki will go.”
<br />
Rikki-tikki tingled all over with rage and hatred at this, and then Nag’s
head came through the sluice, and his five feet of cold body followed it.
Angry as he was, Rikki-tikki was very frightened as he saw the size of the
big cobra. Nag coiled himself up, raised his head, and looked into the
bathroom in the dark, and Rikki could see his eyes glitter.
<br />
“Now, if I kill him here, Nagaina will know; and if I fight him on the
open floor, the odds are in his favor. What am I to do?” said
Rikki-tikki-tavi.
<br />
Nag waved to and fro, and then Rikki-tikki heard him drinking from the
biggest water-jar that was used to fill the bath. “That is good,” said the
snake. “Now, when Karait was killed, the big man had a stick. He may have
that stick still, but when he comes in to bathe in the morning he will not
have a stick. I shall wait here till he comes. Nagaina—do you hear
me?—I shall wait here in the cool till daytime.”
<br />
There was no answer from outside, so Rikki-tikki knew Nagaina had gone
away. Nag coiled himself down, coil by coil, round the bulge at the bottom
of the water jar, and Rikki-tikki stayed still as death. After an hour he
began to move, muscle by muscle, toward the jar. Nag was asleep, and
Rikki-tikki looked at his big back, wondering which would be the best
place for a good hold. “If I don’t break his back at the first jump,” said
Rikki, “he can still fight. And if he fights—O Rikki!” He looked at
the thickness of the neck below the hood, but that was too much for him;
and a bite near the tail would only make Nag savage.
<br />
“It must be the head”’ he said at last; “the head above the hood. And,
when I am once there, I must not let go.”
#####
Then he jumped. The head was lying a little clear of the water jar, under
the curve of it; and, as his teeth met, Rikki braced his back against the
bulge of the red earthenware to hold down the head. This gave him just one
second’s purchase, and he made the most of it. Then he was battered to and
fro as a rat is shaken by a dog—to and fro on the floor, up and
down, and around in great circles, but his eyes were red and he held on as
the body cart-whipped over the floor, upsetting the tin dipper and the
soap dish and the flesh brush, and banged against the tin side of the
bath. As he held he closed his jaws tighter and tighter, for he made sure
he would be banged to death, and, for the honor of his family, he
preferred to be found with his teeth locked. He was dizzy, aching, and
felt shaken to pieces when something went off like a thunderclap just
behind him. A hot wind knocked him senseless and red fire singed his fur.
The big man had been wakened by the noise, and had fired both barrels of a
shotgun into Nag just behind the hood.
<br />
Rikki-tikki held on with his eyes shut, for now he was quite sure he was
dead. But the head did not move, and the big man picked him up and said,
“It’s the mongoose again, Alice. The little chap has saved our lives now.”
<br />
Then Teddy’s mother came in with a very white face, and saw what was left
of Nag, and Rikki-tikki dragged himself to Teddy’s bedroom and spent half
the rest of the night shaking himself tenderly to find out whether he
really was broken into forty pieces, as he fancied.
<br />
When morning came he was very stiff, but well pleased with his doings.
“Now I have Nagaina to settle with, and she will be worse than five Nags,
and there’s no knowing when the eggs she spoke of will hatch. Goodness! I
must go and see Darzee,” he said.
<br />
Without waiting for breakfast, Rikki-tikki ran to the thornbush where
Darzee was singing a song of triumph at the top of his voice. The news of
Nag’s death was all over the garden, for the sweeper had thrown the body
on the rubbish-heap.
<br />
“Oh, you stupid tuft of feathers!” said Rikki-tikki angrily. “Is this the
time to sing?”
<br />
“Nag is dead—is dead—is dead!” sang Darzee. “The valiant
Rikki-tikki caught him by the head and held fast. The big man brought the
bang-stick, and Nag fell in two pieces! He will never eat my babies
again.”
<br />
“All that’s true enough. But where’s Nagaina?” said Rikki-tikki, looking
carefully round him.
<br />
“Nagaina came to the bathroom sluice and called for Nag,” Darzee went on,
“and Nag came out on the end of a stick—the sweeper picked him up on
the end of a stick and threw him upon the rubbish heap. Let us sing about
the great, the red-eyed Rikki-tikki!” And Darzee filled his throat and
sang.
<br />
“If I could get up to your nest, I’d roll your babies out!” said
Rikki-tikki. “You don’t know when to do the right thing at the right time.
You’re safe enough in your nest there, but it’s war for me down here. Stop
singing a minute, Darzee.”
<br />
“For the great, the beautiful Rikki-tikki’s sake I will stop,” said
Darzee. “What is it, O Killer of the terrible Nag?”
<br />
“Where is Nagaina, for the third time?”
<br />
“On the rubbish heap by the stables, mourning for Nag. Great is
Rikki-tikki with the white teeth.”
<br />
“Bother my white teeth! Have you ever heard where she keeps her eggs?”
<br />
“In the melon bed, on the end nearest the wall, where the sun strikes
nearly all day. She hid them there weeks ago.”
<br />
“And you never thought it worth while to tell me? The end nearest the
wall, you said?”
<br />
“Rikki-tikki, you are not going to eat her eggs?”
#####
“Not eat exactly; no. Darzee, if you have a grain of sense you will fly
off to the stables and pretend that your wing is broken, and let Nagaina
chase you away to this bush. I must get to the melon-bed, and if I went
there now she’d see me.”
<br />
Darzee was a feather-brained little fellow who could never hold more than
one idea at a time in his head. And just because he knew that Nagaina’s
children were born in eggs like his own, he didn’t think at first that it
was fair to kill them. But his wife was a sensible bird, and she knew that
cobra’s eggs meant young cobras later on. So she flew off from the nest,
and left Darzee to keep the babies warm, and continue his song about the
death of Nag. Darzee was very like a man in some ways.
<br />
She fluttered in front of Nagaina by the rubbish heap and cried out, “Oh,
my wing is broken! The boy in the house threw a stone at me and broke it.”
Then she fluttered more desperately than ever.
<br />
Nagaina lifted up her head and hissed, “You warned Rikki-tikki when I
would have killed him. Indeed and truly, you’ve chosen a bad place to be
lame in.” And she moved toward Darzee’s wife, slipping along over the
dust.
<br />
“The boy broke it with a stone!” shrieked Darzee’s wife.
<br />
“Well! It may be some consolation to you when you’re dead to know that I
shall settle accounts with the boy. My husband lies on the rubbish heap
this morning, but before night the boy in the house will lie very still.
What is the use of running away? I am sure to catch you. Little fool, look
at me!”
<br />
Darzee’s wife knew better than to do that, for a bird who looks at a
snake’s eyes gets so frightened that she cannot move. Darzee’s wife
fluttered on, piping sorrowfully, and never leaving the ground, and
Nagaina quickened her pace.
<br />
Rikki-tikki heard them going up the path from the stables, and he raced
for the end of the melon patch near the wall. There, in the warm litter
above the melons, very cunningly hidden, he found twenty-five eggs, about
the size of a bantam’s eggs, but with whitish skin instead of shell.
<br />
“I was not a day too soon,” he said, for he could see the baby cobras
curled up inside the skin, and he knew that the minute they were hatched
they could each kill a man or a mongoose. He bit off the tops of the eggs
as fast as he could, taking care to crush the young cobras, and turned
over the litter from time to time to see whether he had missed any. At
last there were only three eggs left, and Rikki-tikki began to chuckle to
himself, when he heard Darzee’s wife screaming:
<br />
“Rikki-tikki, I led Nagaina toward the house, and she has gone into the
veranda, and—oh, come quickly—she means killing!”
<br />
Rikki-tikki smashed two eggs, and tumbled backward down the melon-bed with
the third egg in his mouth, and scuttled to the veranda as hard as he
could put foot to the ground. Teddy and his mother and father were there
at early breakfast, but Rikki-tikki saw that they were not eating
anything. They sat stone-still, and their faces were white. Nagaina was
coiled up on the matting by Teddy’s chair, within easy striking distance
of Teddy’s bare leg, and she was swaying to and fro, singing a song of
triumph.
<br />
“Son of the big man that killed Nag,” she hissed, “stay still. I am not
ready yet. Wait a little. Keep very still, all you three! If you move I
strike, and if you do not move I strike. Oh, foolish people, who killed my
Nag!”
<br />
Teddy’s eyes were fixed on his father, and all his father could do was to
whisper, “Sit still, Teddy. You mustn’t move. Teddy, keep still.”
<br />
Then Rikki-tikki came up and cried, “Turn round, Nagaina. Turn and fight!”
<br />
“All in good time,” said she, without moving her eyes. “I will settle my
account with you presently. Look at your friends, Rikki-tikki. They are
still and white. They are afraid. They dare not move, and if you come a
step nearer I strike.”
<br />
“Look at your eggs,” said Rikki-tikki, “in the melon bed near the wall. Go
and look, Nagaina!”
<br />
The big snake turned half around, and saw the egg on the veranda. “Ah-h!
Give it to me,” she said.
<br />
Rikki-tikki put his paws one on each side of the egg, and his eyes were
blood-red. “What price for a snake’s egg? For a young cobra? For a young
king cobra? For the last—the very last of the brood? The ants are
eating all the others down by the melon bed.”
<br />
Nagaina spun clear round, forgetting everything for the sake of the one
egg. Rikki-tikki saw Teddy’s father shoot out a big hand, catch Teddy by
the shoulder, and drag him across the little table with the tea-cups, safe
and out of reach of Nagaina.
<br />
“Tricked! Tricked! Tricked! Rikk-tck-tck!” chuckled Rikki-tikki. “The boy
is safe, and it was I—I—I that caught Nag by the hood last
night in the bathroom.” Then he began to jump up and down, all four feet
together, his head close to the floor. “He threw me to and fro, but he
could not shake me off. He was dead before the big man blew him in two. I
did it! Rikki-tikki-tck-tck! Come then, Nagaina. Come and fight with me.
You shall not be a widow long.”
<br />
Nagaina saw that she had lost her chance of killing Teddy, and the egg lay
between Rikki-tikki’s paws. “Give me the egg, Rikki-tikki. Give me the
last of my eggs, and I will go away and never come back,” she said,
lowering her hood.
<br />
“Yes, you will go away, and you will never come back. For you will go to
the rubbish heap with Nag. Fight, widow! The big man has gone for his gun!
Fight!”
#####
Rikki-tikki was bounding all round Nagaina, keeping just out of reach of
her stroke, his little eyes like hot coals. Nagaina gathered herself
together and flung out at him. Rikki-tikki jumped up and backward. Again
and again and again she struck, and each time her head came with a whack
on the matting of the veranda and she gathered herself together like a
watch spring. Then Rikki-tikki danced in a circle to get behind her, and
Nagaina spun round to keep her head to his head, so that the rustle of her
tail on the matting sounded like dry leaves blown along by the wind.
<br />
He had forgotten the egg. It still lay on the veranda, and Nagaina came
nearer and nearer to it, till at last, while Rikki-tikki was drawing
breath, she caught it in her mouth, turned to the veranda steps, and flew
like an arrow down the path, with Rikki-tikki behind her. When the cobra
runs for her life, she goes like a whip-lash flicked across a horse’s
neck.
<br />
Rikki-tikki knew that he must catch her, or all the trouble would begin
again. She headed straight for the long grass by the thorn-bush, and as he
was running Rikki-tikki heard Darzee still singing his foolish little song
of triumph. But Darzee’s wife was wiser. She flew off her nest as Nagaina
came along, and flapped her wings about Nagaina’s head. If Darzee had
helped they might have turned her, but Nagaina only lowered her hood and
went on. Still, the instant’s delay brought Rikki-tikki up to her, and as
she plunged into the rat-hole where she and Nag used to live, his little
white teeth were clenched on her tail, and he went down with her—and
very few mongooses, however wise and old they may be, care to follow a
cobra into its hole. It was dark in the hole; and Rikki-tikki never knew
when it might open out and give Nagaina room to turn and strike at him. He
held on savagely, and stuck out his feet to act as brakes on the dark
slope of the hot, moist earth.
<br />
Then the grass by the mouth of the hole stopped waving, and Darzee said,
“It is all over with Rikki-tikki! We must sing his death song. Valiant
Rikki-tikki is dead! For Nagaina will surely kill him underground.”
<br />
So he sang a very mournful song that he made up on the spur of the minute,
and just as he got to the most touching part, the grass quivered again,
and Rikki-tikki, covered with dirt, dragged himself out of the hole leg by
leg, licking his whiskers. Darzee stopped with a little shout. Rikki-tikki
shook some of the dust out of his fur and sneezed. “It is all over,” he
said. “The widow will never come out again.” And the red ants that live
between the grass stems heard him, and began to troop down one after
another to see if he had spoken the truth.
<br />
Rikki-tikki curled himself up in the grass and slept where he was—slept
and slept till it was late in the afternoon, for he had done a hard day’s
work.
<br />
“Now,” he said, when he awoke, “I will go back to the house. Tell the
Coppersmith, Darzee, and he will tell the garden that Nagaina is dead.”
#####
The Coppersmith is a bird who makes a noise exactly like the beating of a
little hammer on a copper pot; and the reason he is always making it is
because he is the town crier to every Indian garden, and tells all the
news to everybody who cares to listen. As Rikki-tikki went up the path, he
heard his “attention” notes like a tiny dinner gong, and then the steady
“Ding-dong-tock! Nag is dead—dong! Nagaina is dead! Ding-dong-tock!”
That set all the birds in the garden singing, and the frogs croaking, for
Nag and Nagaina used to eat frogs as well as little birds.
<br />
When Rikki got to the house, Teddy and Teddy’s mother (she looked very
white still, for she had been fainting) and Teddy’s father came out and
almost cried over him; and that night he ate all that was given him till
he could eat no more, and went to bed on Teddy’s shoulder, where Teddy’s
mother saw him when she came to look late at night.
<br />
“He saved our lives and Teddy’s life,” she said to her husband. “Just
think, he saved all our lives.”
<br />
Rikki-tikki woke up with a jump, for the mongooses are light sleepers.
<br />
“Oh, it’s you,” said he. “What are you bothering for? All the cobras are
dead. And if they weren’t, I’m here.”
<br />
Rikki-tikki had a right to be proud of himself. But he did not grow too
proud, and he kept that garden as a mongoose should keep it, with tooth
and jump and spring and bite, till never a cobra dared show its head
inside the walls.
<br />
[
]()
Darzee’s Chant
(Sung in honor of Rikki-tikki-tavi)
Singer and tailor am I—
Doubled the joys that I know—
Proud of my lilt to the sky,
Proud of the house that I sew—
Over and under, so weave I my music—so weave I the house that I
sew.
Sing to your fledglings again,
Mother, oh lift up your head!
Evil that plagued us is slain,
Death in the garden lies dead.
Terror that hid in the roses is impotent—flung on the dung-hill
and dead!
Who has delivered us, who?
Tell me his nest and his name.
Rikki, the valiant, the true,
Tikki, with eyeballs of flame,
Rikk-tikki-tikki, the ivory-fanged, the hunter with eyeballs of
flame!
Give him the Thanks of the Birds,
Bowing with tail feathers spread!
Praise him with nightingale words—
Nay, I will praise him instead.
Hear! I will sing you the praise of the bottle-tailed Rikki, with
eyeballs of red!
(Here Rikki-tikki interrupted, and the rest of the song is
lost.)
[
]()
#####
Toomai of the Elephants
I will remember what I was, I am sick of rope and chain—
I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs.
I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar-cane:
I will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their lairs.
I will go out until the day, until the morning break—
Out to the wind’s untainted kiss, the water’s clean caress;
I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket stake.
I will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!
Kala Nag, which means Black Snake, had served the Indian Government in
every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and as he
was fully twenty years old when he was caught, that makes him nearly
seventy—a ripe age for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a
big leather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was
before the Afghan War of 1842, and he had not then come to his full
strength.
<br />
His mother Radha Pyari,—Radha the darling,—who had been caught
in the same drive with Kala Nag, told him, before his little milk tusks
had dropped out, that elephants who were afraid always got hurt. Kala Nag
knew that that advice was good, for the first time that he saw a shell
burst he backed, screaming, into a stand of piled rifles, and the bayonets
pricked him in all his softest places. So, before he was twenty-five, he
gave up being afraid, and so he was the best-loved and the
best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of India. He
had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds’ weight of tents, on the march in
Upper India. He had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam crane
and taken for days across the water, and made to carry a mortar on his
back in a strange and rocky country very far from India, and had seen the
Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala, and had come back again in the
steamer entitled, so the soldiers said, to the Abyssinian War medal. He
had seen his fellow elephants die of cold and epilepsy and starvation and
sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid, ten years later; and afterward
he had been sent down thousands of miles south to haul and pile big balks
of teak in the timberyards at Moulmein. There he had half killed an
insubordinate young elephant who was shirking his fair share of work.
#####
After that he was taken off timber-hauling, and employed, with a few score
other elephants who were trained to the business, in helping to catch wild
elephants among the Garo hills. Elephants are very strictly preserved by
the Indian Government. There is one whole department which does nothing
else but hunt them, and catch them, and break them in, and send them up
and down the country as they are needed for work.
<br />
Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the shoulders, and his tusks had been cut
off short at five feet, and bound round the ends, to prevent them
splitting, with bands of copper; but he could do more with those stumps
than any untrained elephant could do with the real sharpened ones. When,
after weeks and weeks of cautious driving of scattered elephants across
the hills, the forty or fifty wild monsters were driven into the last
stockade, and the big drop gate, made of tree trunks lashed together,
jarred down behind them, Kala Nag, at the word of command, would go into
that flaring, trumpeting pandemonium (generally at night, when the flicker
of the torches made it difficult to judge distances), and, picking out the
biggest and wildest tusker of the mob, would hammer him and hustle him
into quiet while the men on the backs of the other elephants roped and
tied the smaller ones.
<br />
There was nothing in the way of fighting that Kala Nag, the old wise Black
Snake, did not know, for he had stood up more than once in his time to the
charge of the wounded tiger, and, curling up his soft trunk to be out of
harm’s way, had knocked the springing brute sideways in mid-air with a
quick sickle cut of his head, that he had invented all by himself; had
knocked him over, and kneeled upon him with his huge knees till the life
went out with a gasp and a howl, and there was only a fluffy striped thing
on the ground for Kala Nag to pull by the tail.
<br />
“Yes,” said Big Toomai, his driver, the son of Black Toomai who had taken
him to Abyssinia, and grandson of Toomai of the Elephants who had seen him
caught, “there is nothing that the Black Snake fears except me. He has
seen three generations of us feed him and groom him, and he will live to
see four.”
<br />
“He is afraid of me also,” said Little Toomai, standing up to his full
height of four feet, with only one rag upon him. He was ten years old, the
eldest son of Big Toomai, and, according to custom, he would take his
father’s place on Kala Nag’s neck when he grew up, and would handle the
heavy iron ankus, the elephant goad, that had been worn smooth by his
father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather.
#####
He knew what he was talking of; for he had been born under Kala Nag’s
shadow, had played with the end of his trunk before he could walk, had
taken him down to water as soon as he could walk, and Kala Nag would no
more have dreamed of disobeying his shrill little orders than he would
have dreamed of killing him on that day when Big Toomai carried the little
brown baby under Kala Nag’s tusks, and told him to salute his master that
was to be.
<br />
“Yes,” said Little Toomai, “he is afraid of me,” and he took long strides
up to Kala Nag, called him a fat old pig, and made him lift up his feet
one after the other.
<br />
“Wah!” said Little Toomai, “thou art a big elephant,” and he wagged his
fluffy head, quoting his father. “The Government may pay for elephants,
but they belong to us mahouts. When thou art old, Kala Nag, there will
come some rich rajah, and he will buy thee from the Government, on account
of thy size and thy manners, and then thou wilt have nothing to do but to
carry gold earrings in thy ears, and a gold howdah on thy back, and a red
cloth covered with gold on thy sides, and walk at the head of the
processions of the King. Then I shall sit on thy neck, O Kala Nag, with a
silver ankus, and men will run before us with golden sticks, crying, `Room
for the King’s elephant!’ That will be good, Kala Nag, but not so good as
this hunting in the jungles.”
<br />
“Umph!” said Big Toomai. “Thou art a boy, and as wild as a buffalo-calf.
This running up and down among the hills is not the best Government
service. I am getting old, and I do not love wild elephants. Give me brick
elephant lines, one stall to each elephant, and big stumps to tie them to
safely, and flat, broad roads to exercise upon, instead of this
come-and-go camping. Aha, the Cawnpore barracks were good. There was a
bazaar close by, and only three hours’ work a day.”
<br />
Little Toomai remembered the Cawnpore elephant-lines and said nothing. He
very much preferred the camp life, and hated those broad, flat roads, with
the daily grubbing for grass in the forage reserve, and the long hours
when there was nothing to do except to watch Kala Nag fidgeting in his
pickets.
<br />
What Little Toomai liked was to scramble up bridle paths that only an
elephant could take; the dip into the valley below; the glimpses of the
wild elephants browsing miles away; the rush of the frightened pig and
peacock under Kala Nag’s feet; the blinding warm rains, when all the hills
and valleys smoked; the beautiful misty mornings when nobody knew where
they would camp that night; the steady, cautious drive of the wild
elephants, and the mad rush and blaze and hullabaloo of the last night’s
drive, when the elephants poured into the stockade like boulders in a
landslide, found that they could not get out, and flung themselves at the
heavy posts only to be driven back by yells and flaring torches and
volleys of blank cartridge.
<br />
Even a little boy could be of use there, and Toomai was as useful as three
boys. He would get his torch and wave it, and yell with the best. But the
really good time came when the driving out began, and the Keddah—that
is, the stockade—looked like a picture of the end of the world, and
men had to make signs to one another, because they could not hear
themselves speak. Then Little Toomai would climb up to the top of one of
the quivering stockade posts, his sun-bleached brown hair flying loose all
over his shoulders, and he looking like a goblin in the torch-light. And
as soon as there was a lull you could hear his high-pitched yells of
encouragement to Kala Nag, above the trumpeting and crashing, and snapping
of ropes, and groans of the tethered elephants. “Mael, mael, Kala Nag! (Go
on, go on, Black Snake!) Dant do! (Give him the tusk!) Somalo! Somalo!
(Careful, careful!) Maro! Mar! (Hit him, hit him!) Mind the post! Arre!
Arre! Hai! Yai! Kya-a-ah!” he would shout, and the big fight between Kala
Nag and the wild elephant would sway to and fro across the Keddah, and the
old elephant catchers would wipe the sweat out of their eyes, and find
time to nod to Little Toomai wriggling with joy on the top of the posts.
<br />
He did more than wriggle. One night he slid down from the post and slipped
in between the elephants and threw up the loose end of a rope, which had
dropped, to a driver who was trying to get a purchase on the leg of a
kicking young calf (calves always give more trouble than full-grown
animals). Kala Nag saw him, caught him in his trunk, and handed him up to
Big Toomai, who slapped him then and there, and put him back on the post.
<br />
Next morning he gave him a scolding and said, “Are not good brick elephant
lines and a little tent carrying enough, that thou must needs go elephant
catching on thy own account, little worthless? Now those foolish hunters,
whose pay is less than my pay, have spoken to Petersen Sahib of the
matter.” Little Toomai was frightened. He did not know much of white men,
but Petersen Sahib was the greatest white man in the world to him. He was
the head of all the Keddah operations—the man who caught all the
elephants for the Government of India, and who knew more about the ways of
elephants than any living man.
<br />
“What—what will happen?” said Little Toomai.
<br />
“Happen! The worst that can happen. Petersen Sahib is a madman. Else why
should he go hunting these wild devils? He may even require thee to be an
elephant catcher, to sleep anywhere in these fever-filled jungles, and at
last to be trampled to death in the Keddah. It is well that this nonsense
ends safely. Next week the catching is over, and we of the plains are sent
back to our stations. Then we will march on smooth roads, and forget all
this hunting. But, son, I am angry that thou shouldst meddle in the
business that belongs to these dirty Assamese jungle folk. Kala Nag will
obey none but me, so I must go with him into the Keddah, but he is only a
fighting elephant, and he does not help to rope them. So I sit at my ease,
as befits a mahout,—not a mere hunter,—a mahout, I say, and a
man who gets a pension at the end of his service. Is the family of Toomai
of the Elephants to be trodden underfoot in the dirt of a Keddah? Bad one!
Wicked one! Worthless son! Go and wash Kala Nag and attend to his ears,
and see that there are no thorns in his feet. Or else Petersen Sahib will
surely catch thee and make thee a wild hunter—a follower of
elephant’s foot tracks, a jungle bear. Bah! Shame! Go!”
<br />
Little Toomai went off without saying a word, but he told Kala Nag all his
grievances while he was examining his feet. “No matter,” said Little
Toomai, turning up the fringe of Kala Nag’s huge right ear. “They have
said my name to Petersen Sahib, and perhaps—and perhaps—and
perhaps—who knows? Hai! That is a big thorn that I have pulled out!”
<br />
The next few days were spent in getting the elephants together, in walking
the newly caught wild elephants up and down between a couple of tame ones
to prevent them giving too much trouble on the downward march to the
plains, and in taking stock of the blankets and ropes and things that had
been worn out or lost in the forest.
<br />
Petersen Sahib came in on his clever she-elephant Pudmini; he had been
paying off other camps among the hills, for the season was coming to an
end, and there was a native clerk sitting at a table under a tree, to pay
the drivers their wages. As each man was paid he went back to his
elephant, and joined the line that stood ready to start. The catchers, and
hunters, and beaters, the men of the regular Keddah, who stayed in the
jungle year in and year out, sat on the backs of the elephants that
belonged to Petersen Sahib’s permanent force, or leaned against the trees
with their guns across their arms, and made fun of the drivers who were
going away, and laughed when the newly caught elephants broke the line and
ran about.
<br />
Big Toomai went up to the clerk with Little Toomai behind him, and Machua
Appa, the head tracker, said in an undertone to a friend of his, “There
goes one piece of good elephant stuff at least. ‘Tis a pity to send that
young jungle-cock to molt in the plains.”
<br />
Now Petersen Sahib had ears all over him, as a man must have who listens
to the most silent of all living things—the wild elephant. He turned
where he was lying all along on Pudmini’s back and said, “What is that? I
did not know of a man among the plains-drivers who had wit enough to rope
even a dead elephant.”
<br />
“This is not a man, but a boy. He went into the Keddah at the last drive,
and threw Barmao there the rope, when we were trying to get that young
calf with the blotch on his shoulder away from his mother.”
<br />
Machua Appa pointed at Little Toomai, and Petersen Sahib looked, and
Little Toomai bowed to the earth.
<br />
“He throw a rope? He is smaller than a picket-pin. Little one, what is thy
name?” said Petersen Sahib.
<br />
Little Toomai was too frightened to speak, but Kala Nag was behind him,
and Toomai made a sign with his hand, and the elephant caught him up in
his trunk and held him level with Pudmini’s forehead, in front of the
great Petersen Sahib. Then Little Toomai covered his face with his hands,
for he was only a child, and except where elephants were concerned, he was
just as bashful as a child could be.
<br />
“Oho!” said Petersen Sahib, smiling underneath his mustache, “and why
didst thou teach thy elephant that trick? Was it to help thee steal green
corn from the roofs of the houses when the ears are put out to dry?”
#####
“Not green corn, Protector of the Poor,—melons,” said Little Toomai,
and all the men sitting about broke into a roar of laughter. Most of them
had taught their elephants that trick when they were boys. Little Toomai
was hanging eight feet up in the air, and he wished very much that he were
eight feet underground.
<br />
“He is Toomai, my son, Sahib,” said Big Toomai, scowling. “He is a very
bad boy, and he will end in a jail, Sahib.”
<br />
“Of that I have my doubts,” said Petersen Sahib. “A boy who can face a
full Keddah at his age does not end in jails. See, little one, here are
four annas to spend in sweetmeats because thou hast a little head under
that great thatch of hair. In time thou mayest become a hunter too.” Big
Toomai scowled more than ever. “Remember, though, that Keddahs are not
good for children to play in,” Petersen Sahib went on.
<br />
“Must I never go there, Sahib?” asked Little Toomai with a big gasp.
<br />
“Yes.” Petersen Sahib smiled again. “When thou hast seen the elephants
dance. That is the proper time. Come to me when thou hast seen the
elephants dance, and then I will let thee go into all the Keddahs.”
<br />
There was another roar of laughter, for that is an old joke among
elephant-catchers, and it means just never. There are great cleared flat
places hidden away in the forests that are called elephants’ ball-rooms,
but even these are only found by accident, and no man has ever seen the
elephants dance. When a driver boasts of his skill and bravery the other
drivers say, “And when didst thou see the elephants dance?”
<br />
Kala Nag put Little Toomai down, and he bowed to the earth again and went
away with his father, and gave the silver four-anna piece to his mother,
who was nursing his baby brother, and they all were put up on Kala Nag’s
back, and the line of grunting, squealing elephants rolled down the hill
path to the plains. It was a very lively march on account of the new
elephants, who gave trouble at every ford, and needed coaxing or beating
every other minute.
<br />
Big Toomai prodded Kala Nag spitefully, for he was very angry, but Little
Toomai was too happy to speak. Petersen Sahib had noticed him, and given
him money, so he felt as a private soldier would feel if he had been
called out of the ranks and praised by his commander-in-chief.
<br />
“What did Petersen Sahib mean by the elephant dance?” he said, at last,
softly to his mother.
<br />
Big Toomai heard him and grunted. “That thou shouldst never be one of
these hill buffaloes of trackers. That was what he meant. Oh, you in
front, what is blocking the way?”
<br />
An Assamese driver, two or three elephants ahead, turned round angrily,
crying: “Bring up Kala Nag, and knock this youngster of mine into good
behavior. Why should Petersen Sahib have chosen me to go down with you
donkeys of the rice fields? Lay your beast alongside, Toomai, and let him
prod with his tusks. By all the Gods of the Hills, these new elephants are
possessed, or else they can smell their companions in the jungle.” Kala
Nag hit the new elephant in the ribs and knocked the wind out of him, as
Big Toomai said, “We have swept the hills of wild elephants at the last
catch. It is only your carelessness in driving. Must I keep order along
the whole line?”
<br />
“Hear him!” said the other driver. “We have swept the hills! Ho! Ho! You
are very wise, you plains people. Anyone but a mud-head who never saw the
jungle would know that they know that the drives are ended for the season.
Therefore all the wild elephants to-night will—but why should I
waste wisdom on a river-turtle?”
<br />
“What will they do?” Little Toomai called out.
<br />
“Ohe, little one. Art thou there? Well, I will tell thee, for thou hast a
cool head. They will dance, and it behooves thy father, who has swept all
the hills of all the elephants, to double-chain his pickets to-night.”
<br />
“What talk is this?” said Big Toomai. “For forty years, father and son, we
have tended elephants, and we have never heard such moonshine about
dances.”
<br />
“Yes; but a plainsman who lives in a hut knows only the four walls of his
hut. Well, leave thy elephants unshackled tonight and see what comes. As
for their dancing, I have seen the place where—Bapree-bap! How many
windings has the Dihang River? Here is another ford, and we must swim the
calves. Stop still, you behind there.”
<br />
And in this way, talking and wrangling and splashing through the rivers,
they made their first march to a sort of receiving camp for the new
elephants. But they lost their tempers long before they got there.
<br />
Then the elephants were chained by their hind legs to their big stumps of
pickets, and extra ropes were fitted to the new elephants, and the fodder
was piled before them, and the hill drivers went back to Petersen Sahib
through the afternoon light, telling the plains drivers to be extra
careful that night, and laughing when the plains drivers asked the reason.
<br />
Little Toomai attended to Kala Nag’s supper, and as evening fell, wandered
through the camp, unspeakably happy, in search of a tom-tom. When an
Indian child’s heart is full, he does not run about and make a noise in an
irregular fashion. He sits down to a sort of revel all by himself. And
Little Toomai had been spoken to by Petersen Sahib! If he had not found
what he wanted, I believe he would have been ill. But the sweetmeat seller
in the camp lent him a little tom-tom—a drum beaten with the flat of
the hand—and he sat down, cross-legged, before Kala Nag as the stars
began to come out, the tom-tom in his lap, and he thumped and he thumped
and he thumped, and the more he thought of the great honor that had been
done to him, the more he thumped, all alone among the elephant fodder.
There was no tune and no words, but the thumping made him happy.
<br />
The new elephants strained at their ropes, and squealed and trumpeted from
time to time, and he could hear his mother in the camp hut putting his
small brother to sleep with an old, old song about the great God Shiv, who
once told all the animals what they should eat. It is a very soothing
lullaby, and the first verse says:
Shiv, who poured the harvest and made the winds to blow,
Sitting at the doorways of a day of long ago,
Gave to each his portion, food and toil and fate,
From the King upon the guddee to the Beggar at the gate.
All things made he—Shiva the Preserver.
Mahadeo! Mahadeo! He made all—
Thorn for the camel, fodder for the kine,
And mother’s heart for sleepy head, O little son of mine!
Little Toomai came in with a joyous tunk-a-tunk at the end of each verse,
till he felt sleepy and stretched himself on the fodder at Kala Nag’s
side. At last the elephants began to lie down one after another as is
their custom, till only Kala Nag at the right of the line was left
standing up; and he rocked slowly from side to side, his ears put forward
to listen to the night wind as it blew very slowly across the hills. The
air was full of all the night noises that, taken together, make one big
silence—the click of one bamboo stem against the other, the rustle
of something alive in the undergrowth, the scratch and squawk of a
half-waked bird (birds are awake in the night much more often than we
imagine), and the fall of water ever so far away. Little Toomai slept for
some time, and when he waked it was brilliant moonlight, and Kala Nag was
still standing up with his ears cocked. Little Toomai turned, rustling in
the fodder, and watched the curve of his big back against half the stars
in heaven, and while he watched he heard, so far away that it sounded no
more than a pinhole of noise pricked through the stillness, the
“hoot-toot” of a wild elephant.
<br />
All the elephants in the lines jumped up as if they had been shot, and
their grunts at last waked the sleeping mahouts, and they came out and
drove in the picket pegs with big mallets, and tightened this rope and
knotted that till all was quiet. One new elephant had nearly grubbed up
his picket, and Big Toomai took off Kala Nag’s leg chain and shackled that
elephant fore-foot to hind-foot, but slipped a loop of grass string round
Kala Nag’s leg, and told him to remember that he was tied fast. He knew
that he and his father and his grandfather had done the very same thing
hundreds of times before. Kala Nag did not answer to the order by
gurgling, as he usually did. He stood still, looking out across the
moonlight, his head a little raised and his ears spread like fans, up to
the great folds of the Garo hills.
<br />
“Tend to him if he grows restless in the night,” said Big Toomai to Little
Toomai, and he went into the hut and slept. Little Toomai was just going
to sleep, too, when he heard the coir string snap with a little “tang,”
and Kala Nag rolled out of his pickets as slowly and as silently as a
cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley. Little Toomai pattered after
him, barefooted, down the road in the moonlight, calling under his breath,
“Kala Nag! Kala Nag! Take me with you, O Kala Nag!” The elephant turned,
without a sound, took three strides back to the boy in the moonlight, put
down his trunk, swung him up to his neck, and almost before Little Toomai
had settled his knees, slipped into the forest.
<br />
There was one blast of furious trumpeting from the lines, and then the
silence shut down on everything, and Kala Nag began to move. Sometimes a
tuft of high grass washed along his sides as a wave washes along the sides
of a ship, and sometimes a cluster of wild-pepper vines would scrape along
his back, or a bamboo would creak where his shoulder touched it. But
between those times he moved absolutely without any sound, drifting
through the thick Garo forest as though it had been smoke. He was going
uphill, but though Little Toomai watched the stars in the rifts of the
trees, he could not tell in what direction.
<br />
Then Kala Nag reached the crest of the ascent and stopped for a minute,
and Little Toomai could see the tops of the trees lying all speckled and
furry under the moonlight for miles and miles, and the blue-white mist
over the river in the hollow. Toomai leaned forward and looked, and he
felt that the forest was awake below him—awake and alive and
crowded. A big brown fruit-eating bat brushed past his ear; a porcupine’s
quills rattled in the thicket; and in the darkness between the tree stems
he heard a hog-bear digging hard in the moist warm earth, and snuffing as
it digged.
<br />
Then the branches closed over his head again, and Kala Nag began to go
down into the valley—not quietly this time, but as a runaway gun
goes down a steep bank—in one rush. The huge limbs moved as steadily
as pistons, eight feet to each stride, and the wrinkled skin of the elbow
points rustled. The undergrowth on either side of him ripped with a noise
like torn canvas, and the saplings that he heaved away right and left with
his shoulders sprang back again and banged him on the flank, and great
trails of creepers, all matted together, hung from his tusks as he threw
his head from side to side and plowed out his pathway. Then Little Toomai
laid himself down close to the great neck lest a swinging bough should
sweep him to the ground, and he wished that he were back in the lines
again.
#####
The grass began to get squashy, and Kala Nag’s feet sucked and squelched
as he put them down, and the night mist at the bottom of the valley
chilled Little Toomai. There was a splash and a trample, and the rush of
running water, and Kala Nag strode through the bed of a river, feeling his
way at each step. Above the noise of the water, as it swirled round the
elephant’s legs, Little Toomai could hear more splashing and some
trumpeting both upstream and down—great grunts and angry snortings,
and all the mist about him seemed to be full of rolling, wavy shadows.
<br />
“Ai!” he said, half aloud, his teeth chattering. “The elephant-folk are
out tonight. It is the dance, then!”
<br />
Kala Nag swashed out of the water, blew his trunk clear, and began another
climb. But this time he was not alone, and he had not to make his path.
That was made already, six feet wide, in front of him, where the bent
jungle-grass was trying to recover itself and stand up. Many elephants
must have gone that way only a few minutes before. Little Toomai looked
back, and behind him a great wild tusker with his little pig’s eyes
glowing like hot coals was just lifting himself out of the misty river.
Then the trees closed up again, and they went on and up, with trumpetings
and crashings, and the sound of breaking branches on every side of them.
#####
At last Kala Nag stood still between two tree-trunks at the very top of
the hill. They were part of a circle of trees that grew round an irregular
space of some three or four acres, and in all that space, as Little Toomai
could see, the ground had been trampled down as hard as a brick floor.
Some trees grew in the center of the clearing, but their bark was rubbed
away, and the white wood beneath showed all shiny and polished in the
patches of moonlight. There were creepers hanging from the upper branches,
and the bells of the flowers of the creepers, great waxy white things like
convolvuluses, hung down fast asleep. But within the limits of the
clearing there was not a single blade of green—nothing but the
trampled earth.
<br />
The moonlight showed it all iron gray, except where some elephants stood
upon it, and their shadows were inky black. Little Toomai looked, holding
his breath, with his eyes starting out of his head, and as he looked, more
and more and more elephants swung out into the open from between the tree
trunks. Little Toomai could only count up to ten, and he counted again and
again on his fingers till he lost count of the tens, and his head began to
swim. Outside the clearing he could hear them crashing in the undergrowth
as they worked their way up the hillside, but as soon as they were within
the circle of the tree trunks they moved like ghosts.
<br />
There were white-tusked wild males, with fallen leaves and nuts and twigs
lying in the wrinkles of their necks and the folds of their ears; fat,
slow-footed she-elephants, with restless, little pinky black calves only
three or four feet high running under their stomachs; young elephants with
their tusks just beginning to show, and very proud of them; lanky, scraggy
old-maid elephants, with their hollow anxious faces, and trunks like rough
bark; savage old bull elephants, scarred from shoulder to flank with great
weals and cuts of bygone fights, and the caked dirt of their solitary mud
baths dropping from their shoulders; and there was one with a broken tusk
and the marks of the full-stroke, the terrible drawing scrape, of a
tiger’s claws on his side.
<br />
They were standing head to head, or walking to and fro across the ground
in couples, or rocking and swaying all by themselves—scores and
scores of elephants.
<br />
Toomai knew that so long as he lay still on Kala Nag’s neck nothing would
happen to him, for even in the rush and scramble of a Keddah drive a wild
elephant does not reach up with his trunk and drag a man off the neck of a
tame elephant. And these elephants were not thinking of men that night.
Once they started and put their ears forward when they heard the chinking
of a leg iron in the forest, but it was Pudmini, Petersen Sahib’s pet
elephant, her chain snapped short off, grunting, snuffling up the
hillside. She must have broken her pickets and come straight from Petersen
Sahib’s camp; and Little Toomai saw another elephant, one that he did not
know, with deep rope galls on his back and breast. He, too, must have run
away from some camp in the hills about.
<br />
At last there was no sound of any more elephants moving in the forest, and
Kala Nag rolled out from his station between the trees and went into the
middle of the crowd, clucking and gurgling, and all the elephants began to
talk in their own tongue, and to move about.
#####
Still lying down, Little Toomai looked down upon scores and scores of
broad backs, and wagging ears, and tossing trunks, and little rolling
eyes. He heard the click of tusks as they crossed other tusks by accident,
and the dry rustle of trunks twined together, and the chafing of enormous
sides and shoulders in the crowd, and the incessant flick and hissh of the
great tails. Then a cloud came over the moon, and he sat in black
darkness. But the quiet, steady hustling and pushing and gurgling went on
just the same. He knew that there were elephants all round Kala Nag, and
that there was no chance of backing him out of the assembly; so he set his
teeth and shivered. In a Keddah at least there was torchlight and
shouting, but here he was all alone in the dark, and once a trunk came up
and touched him on the knee.
<br />
Then an elephant trumpeted, and they all took it up for five or ten
terrible seconds. The dew from the trees above spattered down like rain on
the unseen backs, and a dull booming noise began, not very loud at first,
and Little Toomai could not tell what it was. But it grew and grew, and
Kala Nag lifted up one forefoot and then the other, and brought them down
on the ground—one-two, one-two, as steadily as trip-hammers. The
elephants were stamping all together now, and it sounded like a war drum
beaten at the mouth of a cave. The dew fell from the trees till there was
no more left to fall, and the booming went on, and the ground rocked and
shivered, and Little Toomai put his hands up to his ears to shut out the
sound. But it was all one gigantic jar that ran through him—this
stamp of hundreds of heavy feet on the raw earth. Once or twice he could
feel Kala Nag and all the others surge forward a few strides, and the
thumping would change to the crushing sound of juicy green things being
bruised, but in a minute or two the boom of feet on hard earth began
again. A tree was creaking and groaning somewhere near him. He put out his
arm and felt the bark, but Kala Nag moved forward, still tramping, and he
could not tell where he was in the clearing. There was no sound from the
elephants, except once, when two or three little calves squeaked together.
Then he heard a thump and a shuffle, and the booming went on. It must have
lasted fully two hours, and Little Toomai ached in every nerve, but he
knew by the smell of the night air that the dawn was coming.
<br />
The morning broke in one sheet of pale yellow behind the green hills, and
the booming stopped with the first ray, as though the light had been an
order. Before Little Toomai had got the ringing out of his head, before
even he had shifted his position, there was not an elephant in sight
except Kala Nag, Pudmini, and the elephant with the rope-galls, and there
was neither sign nor rustle nor whisper down the hillsides to show where
the others had gone.
<br />
Little Toomai stared again and again. The clearing, as he remembered it,
had grown in the night. More trees stood in the middle of it, but the
undergrowth and the jungle grass at the sides had been rolled back. Little
Toomai stared once more. Now he understood the trampling. The elephants
had stamped out more room—had stamped the thick grass and juicy cane
to trash, the trash into slivers, the slivers into tiny fibers, and the
fibers into hard earth.
<br />
“Wah!” said Little Toomai, and his eyes were very heavy. “Kala Nag, my
lord, let us keep by Pudmini and go to Petersen Sahib’s camp, or I shall
drop from thy neck.”
<br />
The third elephant watched the two go away, snorted, wheeled round, and
took his own path. He may have belonged to some little native king’s
establishment, fifty or sixty or a hundred miles away.
<br />
Two hours later, as Petersen Sahib was eating early breakfast, his
elephants, who had been double chained that night, began to trumpet, and
Pudmini, mired to the shoulders, with Kala Nag, very footsore, shambled
into the camp. Little Toomai’s face was gray and pinched, and his hair was
full of leaves and drenched with dew, but he tried to salute Petersen
Sahib, and cried faintly: “The dance—the elephant dance! I have seen
it, and—I die!” As Kala Nag sat down, he slid off his neck in a dead
faint.
<br />
But, since native children have no nerves worth speaking of, in two hours
he was lying very contentedly in Petersen Sahib’s hammock with Petersen
Sahib’s shooting-coat under his head, and a glass of warm milk, a little
brandy, with a dash of quinine, inside of him, and while the old hairy,
scarred hunters of the jungles sat three deep before him, looking at him
as though he were a spirit, he told his tale in short words, as a child
will, and wound up with:
<br />
“Now, if I lie in one word, send men to see, and they will find that the
elephant folk have trampled down more room in their dance-room, and they
will find ten and ten, and many times ten, tracks leading to that
dance-room. They made more room with their feet. I have seen it. Kala Nag
took me, and I saw. Also Kala Nag is very leg-weary!”
<br />
Little Toomai lay back and slept all through the long afternoon and into
the twilight, and while he slept Petersen Sahib and Machua Appa followed
the track of the two elephants for fifteen miles across the hills.
Petersen Sahib had spent eighteen years in catching elephants, and he had
only once before found such a dance-place. Machua Appa had no need to look
twice at the clearing to see what had been done there, or to scratch with
his toe in the packed, rammed earth.
<br />
“The child speaks truth,” said he. “All this was done last night, and I
have counted seventy tracks crossing the river. See, Sahib, where
Pudmini’s leg-iron cut the bark of that tree! Yes; she was there too.”
<br />
They looked at one another and up and down, and they wondered. For the
ways of elephants are beyond the wit of any man, black or white, to
fathom.
<br />
“Forty years and five,” said Machua Appa, “have I followed my lord, the
elephant, but never have I heard that any child of man had seen what this
child has seen. By all the Gods of the Hills, it is—what can we
say?” and he shook his head.
<br />
When they got back to camp it was time for the evening meal. Petersen
Sahib ate alone in his tent, but he gave orders that the camp should have
two sheep and some fowls, as well as a double ration of flour and rice and
salt, for he knew that there would be a feast.
#####
Big Toomai had come up hotfoot from the camp in the plains to search for
his son and his elephant, and now that he had found them he looked at them
as though he were afraid of them both. And there was a feast by the
blazing campfires in front of the lines of picketed elephants, and Little
Toomai was the hero of it all. And the big brown elephant catchers, the
trackers and drivers and ropers, and the men who know all the secrets of
breaking the wildest elephants, passed him from one to the other, and they
marked his forehead with blood from the breast of a newly killed
jungle-cock, to show that he was a forester, initiated and free of all the
jungles.
<br />
And at last, when the flames died down, and the red light of the logs made
the elephants look as though they had been dipped in blood too, Machua
Appa, the head of all the drivers of all the Keddahs—Machua Appa,
Petersen Sahib’s other self, who had never seen a made road in forty
years: Machua Appa, who was so great that he had no other name than Machua
Appa,—leaped to his feet, with Little Toomai held high in the air
above his head, and shouted: “Listen, my brothers. Listen, too, you my
lords in the lines there, for I, Machua Appa, am speaking! This little one
shall no more be called Little Toomai, but Toomai of the Elephants, as his
great-grandfather was called before him. What never man has seen he has
seen through the long night, and the favor of the elephant-folk and of the
Gods of the Jungles is with him. He shall become a great tracker. He shall
become greater than I, even I, Machua Appa! He shall follow the new trail,
and the stale trail, and the mixed trail, with a clear eye! He shall take
no harm in the Keddah when he runs under their bellies to rope the wild
tuskers; and if he slips before the feet of the charging bull elephant,
the bull elephant shall know who he is and shall not crush him. Aihai! my
lords in the chains,”—he whirled up the line of pickets—“here
is the little one that has seen your dances in your hidden places,—the
sight that never man saw! Give him honor, my lords! Salaam karo, my
children. Make your salute to Toomai of the Elephants! Gunga Pershad,
ahaa! Hira Guj, Birchi Guj, Kuttar Guj, ahaa! Pudmini,—thou hast
seen him at the dance, and thou too, Kala Nag, my pearl among elephants!—ahaa!
Together! To Toomai of the Elephants. Barrao!”
#####
And at that last wild yell the whole line flung up their trunks till the
tips touched their foreheads, and broke out into the full salute—the
crashing trumpet-peal that only the Viceroy of India hears, the Salaamut
of the Keddah.
<br />
But it was all for the sake of Little Toomai, who had seen what never man
had seen before—the dance of the elephants at night and alone in the
heart of the Garo hills!
<br />
[
]()
Shiv and the Grasshopper
(The song that Toomai’s mother sang to the baby)
Shiv, who poured the harvest and made the winds to blow,
Sitting at the doorways of a day of long ago,
Gave to each his portion, food and toil and fate,
From the King upon the guddee to the Beggar at the gate.
All things made he—Shiva the Preserver.
Mahadeo! Mahadeo! He made all,—
Thorn for the camel, fodder for the kine,
And mother’s heart for sleepy head, O little son of mine!
Wheat he gave to rich folk, millet to the poor,
Broken scraps for holy men that beg from door to door;
Battle to the tiger, carrion to the kite,
And rags and bones to wicked wolves without the wall at night.
Naught he found too lofty, none he saw too low—
Parbati beside him watched them come and go;
Thought to cheat her husband, turning Shiv to jest—
Stole the little grasshopper and hid it in her breast.
So she tricked him, Shiva the Preserver.
Mahadeo! Mahadeo! Turn and see.
Tall are the camels, heavy are the kine,
But this was Least of Little Things, O little son of mine!
When the dole was ended, laughingly she said,
“Master, of a million mouths, is not one unfed?”
Laughing, Shiv made answer, “All have had their part,
Even he, the little one, hidden ‘neath thy heart.”
From her breast she plucked it, Parbati the thief,
Saw the Least of Little Things gnawed a new-grown leaf!
Saw and feared and wondered, making prayer to Shiv,
Who hath surely given meat to all that live.
All things made he—Shiva the Preserver.
Mahadeo! Mahadeo! He made all,—
Thorn for the camel, fodder for the kine,
And mother’s heart for sleepy head, O little son of mine!
[
]()
#####
Her Majesty’s Servants
You can work it out by Fractions or by simple Rule of Three,
But the way of Tweedle-dum is not the way of Tweedle-dee.
You can twist it, you can turn it, you can plait it till you drop,
But the way of Pilly Winky’s not the way of Winkie Pop!
It had been raining heavily for one whole month—raining on a camp of
thirty thousand men and thousands of camels, elephants, horses, bullocks,
and mules all gathered together at a place called Rawal Pindi, to be
reviewed by the Viceroy of India. He was receiving a visit from the Amir
of Afghanistan—a wild king of a very wild country. The Amir had
brought with him for a bodyguard eight hundred men and horses who had
never seen a camp or a locomotive before in their lives—savage men
and savage horses from somewhere at the back of Central Asia. Every night
a mob of these horses would be sure to break their heel ropes and stampede
up and down the camp through the mud in the dark, or the camels would
break loose and run about and fall over the ropes of the tents, and you
can imagine how pleasant that was for men trying to go to sleep. My tent
lay far away from the camel lines, and I thought it was safe. But one
night a man popped his head in and shouted, “Get out, quick! They’re
coming! My tent’s gone!”
<br />
I knew who “they” were, so I put on my boots and waterproof and scuttled
out into the slush. Little Vixen, my fox terrier, went out through the
other side; and then there was a roaring and a grunting and bubbling, and
I saw the tent cave in, as the pole snapped, and begin to dance about like
a mad ghost. A camel had blundered into it, and wet and angry as I was, I
could not help laughing. Then I ran on, because I did not know how many
camels might have got loose, and before long I was out of sight of the
camp, plowing my way through the mud.
#####
At last I fell over the tail-end of a gun, and by that knew I was
somewhere near the artillery lines where the cannon were stacked at night.
As I did not want to plowter about any more in the drizzle and the dark, I
put my waterproof over the muzzle of one gun, and made a sort of wigwam
with two or three rammers that I found, and lay along the tail of another
gun, wondering where Vixen had got to, and where I might be.
<br />
Just as I was getting ready to go to sleep I heard a jingle of harness and
a grunt, and a mule passed me shaking his wet ears. He belonged to a
screw-gun battery, for I could hear the rattle of the straps and rings and
chains and things on his saddle pad. The screw-guns are tiny little cannon
made in two pieces, that are screwed together when the time comes to use
them. They are taken up mountains, anywhere that a mule can find a road,
and they are very useful for fighting in rocky country.
<br />
Behind the mule there was a camel, with his big soft feet squelching and
slipping in the mud, and his neck bobbing to and fro like a strayed hen’s.
Luckily, I knew enough of beast language—not wild-beast language,
but camp-beast language, of course—from the natives to know what he
was saying.
<br />
He must have been the one that flopped into my tent, for he called to the
mule, “What shall I do? Where shall I go? I have fought with a white thing
that waved, and it took a stick and hit me on the neck.” (That was my
broken tent pole, and I was very glad to know it.) “Shall we run on?”
<br />
“Oh, it was you,” said the mule, “you and your friends, that have been
disturbing the camp? All right. You’ll be beaten for this in the morning.
But I may as well give you something on account now.”
<br />
I heard the harness jingle as the mule backed and caught the camel two
kicks in the ribs that rang like a drum. “Another time,” he said, “you’ll
know better than to run through a mule battery at night, shouting `Thieves
and fire!’ Sit down, and keep your silly neck quiet.”
<br />
The camel doubled up camel-fashion, like a two-foot rule, and sat down
whimpering. There was a regular beat of hoofs in the darkness, and a big
troop-horse cantered up as steadily as though he were on parade, jumped a
gun tail, and landed close to the mule.
<br />
“It’s disgraceful,” he said, blowing out his nostrils. “Those camels have
racketed through our lines again—the third time this week. How’s a
horse to keep his condition if he isn’t allowed to sleep. Who’s here?”
<br />
“I’m the breech-piece mule of number two gun of the First Screw Battery,”
said the mule, “and the other’s one of your friends. He’s waked me up too.
Who are you?”
<br />
“Number Fifteen, E troop, Ninth Lancers—Dick Cunliffe’s horse. Stand
over a little, there.”
<br />
“Oh, beg your pardon,” said the mule. “It’s too dark to see much. Aren’t
these camels too sickening for anything? I walked out of my lines to get a
little peace and quiet here.”
<br />
“My lords,” said the camel humbly, “we dreamed bad dreams in the night,
and we were very much afraid. I am only a baggage camel of the 39th Native
Infantry, and I am not as brave as you are, my lords.”
<br />
“Then why didn’t you stay and carry baggage for the 39th Native Infantry,
instead of running all round the camp?” said the mule.
<br />
“They were such very bad dreams,” said the camel. “I am sorry. Listen!
What is that? Shall we run on again?”
<br />
“Sit down,” said the mule, “or you’ll snap your long stick-legs between
the guns.” He cocked one ear and listened. “Bullocks!” he said. “Gun
bullocks. On my word, you and your friends have waked the camp very
thoroughly. It takes a good deal of prodding to put up a gun-bullock.”
<br />
I heard a chain dragging along the ground, and a yoke of the great sulky
white bullocks that drag the heavy siege guns when the elephants won’t go
any nearer to the firing, came shouldering along together. And almost
stepping on the chain was another battery mule, calling wildly for
“Billy.”
<br />
“That’s one of our recruits,” said the old mule to the troop horse. “He’s
calling for me. Here, youngster, stop squealing. The dark never hurt
anybody yet.”
<br />
The gun-bullocks lay down together and began chewing the cud, but the
young mule huddled close to Billy.
<br />
“Things!” he said. “Fearful and horrible, Billy! They came into our lines
while we were asleep. D’you think they’ll kill us?”
<br />
“I’ve a very great mind to give you a number-one kicking,” said Billy.
“The idea of a fourteen-hand mule with your training disgracing the
battery before this gentleman!”
<br />
“Gently, gently!” said the troop-horse. “Remember they are always like
this to begin with. The first time I ever saw a man (it was in Australia
when I was a three-year-old) I ran for half a day, and if I’d seen a
camel, I should have been running still.”
<br />
Nearly all our horses for the English cavalry are brought to India from
Australia, and are broken in by the troopers themselves.
<br />
“True enough,” said Billy. “Stop shaking, youngster. The first time they
put the full harness with all its chains on my back I stood on my forelegs
and kicked every bit of it off. I hadn’t learned the real science of
kicking then, but the battery said they had never seen anything like it.”
<br />
“But this wasn’t harness or anything that jingled,” said the young mule.
“You know I don’t mind that now, Billy. It was Things like trees, and they
fell up and down the lines and bubbled; and my head-rope broke, and I
couldn’t find my driver, and I couldn’t find you, Billy, so I ran off with—with
these gentlemen.”
<br />
“H’m!” said Billy. “As soon as I heard the camels were loose I came away
on my own account. When a battery—a screw-gun mule calls
gun-bullocks gentlemen, he must be very badly shaken up. Who are you
fellows on the ground there?”
<br />
The gun bullocks rolled their cuds, and answered both together: “The
seventh yoke of the first gun of the Big Gun Battery. We were asleep when
the camels came, but when we were trampled on we got up and walked away.
It is better to lie quiet in the mud than to be disturbed on good bedding.
We told your friend here that there was nothing to be afraid of, but he
knew so much that he thought otherwise. Wah!”
<br />
They went on chewing.
<br />
“That comes of being afraid,” said Billy. “You get laughed at by
gun-bullocks. I hope you like it, young un.”
<br />
The young mule’s teeth snapped, and I heard him say something about not
being afraid of any beefy old bullock in the world. But the bullocks only
clicked their horns together and went on chewing.
#####
“Now, don’t be angry after you’ve been afraid. That’s the worst kind of
cowardice,” said the troop-horse. “Anybody can be forgiven for being
scared in the night, I think, if they see things they don’t understand.
We’ve broken out of our pickets, again and again, four hundred and fifty
of us, just because a new recruit got to telling tales of whip snakes at
home in Australia till we were scared to death of the loose ends of our
head-ropes.”
<br />
“That’s all very well in camp,” said Billy. “I’m not above stampeding
myself, for the fun of the thing, when I haven’t been out for a day or
two. But what do you do on active service?”
<br />
“Oh, that’s quite another set of new shoes,” said the troop horse. “Dick
Cunliffe’s on my back then, and drives his knees into me, and all I have
to do is to watch where I am putting my feet, and to keep my hind legs
well under me, and be bridle-wise.”
<br />
“What’s bridle-wise?” said the young mule.
<br />
“By the Blue Gums of the Back Blocks,” snorted the troop-horse, “do you
mean to say that you aren’t taught to be bridle-wise in your business? How
can you do anything, unless you can spin round at once when the rein is
pressed on your neck? It means life or death to your man, and of course
that’s life and death to you. Get round with your hind legs under you the
instant you feel the rein on your neck. If you haven’t room to swing
round, rear up a little and come round on your hind legs. That’s being
bridle-wise.”
<br />
“We aren’t taught that way,” said Billy the mule stiffly. “We’re taught to
obey the man at our head: step off when he says so, and step in when he
says so. I suppose it comes to the same thing. Now, with all this fine
fancy business and rearing, which must be very bad for your hocks, what do
you do?”
<br />
“That depends,” said the troop-horse. “Generally I have to go in among a
lot of yelling, hairy men with knives—long shiny knives, worse than
the farrier’s knives—and I have to take care that Dick’s boot is
just touching the next man’s boot without crushing it. I can see Dick’s
lance to the right of my right eye, and I know I’m safe. I shouldn’t care
to be the man or horse that stood up to Dick and me when we’re in a
hurry.”
<br />
“Don’t the knives hurt?” said the young mule.
<br />
“Well, I got one cut across the chest once, but that wasn’t Dick’s fault—”
<br />
“A lot I should have cared whose fault it was, if it hurt!” said the young
mule.
<br />
“You must,” said the troop horse. “If you don’t trust your man, you may as
well run away at once. That’s what some of our horses do, and I don’t
blame them. As I was saying, it wasn’t Dick’s fault. The man was lying on
the ground, and I stretched myself not to tread on him, and he slashed up
at me. Next time I have to go over a man lying down I shall step on him—hard.”
#####
“H’m!” said Billy. “It sounds very foolish. Knives are dirty things at any
time. The proper thing to do is to climb up a mountain with a
well-balanced saddle, hang on by all four feet and your ears too, and
creep and crawl and wriggle along, till you come out hundreds of feet
above anyone else on a ledge where there’s just room enough for your
hoofs. Then you stand still and keep quiet—never ask a man to hold
your head, young un—keep quiet while the guns are being put
together, and then you watch the little poppy shells drop down into the
tree-tops ever so far below.”
<br />
“Don’t you ever trip?” said the troop-horse.
<br />
“They say that when a mule trips you can split a hen’s ear,” said Billy.
“Now and again perhaps a badly packed saddle will upset a mule, but it’s
very seldom. I wish I could show you our business. It’s beautiful. Why, it
took me three years to find out what the men were driving at. The science
of the thing is never to show up against the sky line, because, if you do,
you may get fired at. Remember that, young un. Always keep hidden as much
as possible, even if you have to go a mile out of your way. I lead the
battery when it comes to that sort of climbing.”
<br />
“Fired at without the chance of running into the people who are firing!”
said the troop-horse, thinking hard. “I couldn’t stand that. I should want
to charge—with Dick.”
<br />
“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. You know that as soon as the guns are in position
they’ll do all the charging. That’s scientific and neat. But knives—pah!”
<br />
The baggage-camel had been bobbing his head to and fro for some time past,
anxious to get a word in edgewise. Then I heard him say, as he cleared his
throat, nervously:
<br />
“I—I—I have fought a little, but not in that climbing way or
that running way.”
<br />
“No. Now you mention it,” said Billy, “you don’t look as though you were
made for climbing or running—much. Well, how was it, old Hay-bales?”
<br />
“The proper way,” said the camel. “We all sat down—”
<br />
“Oh, my crupper and breastplate!” said the troop-horse under his breath.
“Sat down!”
<br />
“We sat down—a hundred of us,” the camel went on, “in a big square,
and the men piled our packs and saddles, outside the square, and they
fired over our backs, the men did, on all sides of the square.”
<br />
“What sort of men? Any men that came along?” said the troop-horse. “They
teach us in riding school to lie down and let our masters fire across us,
but Dick Cunliffe is the only man I’d trust to do that. It tickles my
girths, and, besides, I can’t see with my head on the ground.”
<br />
“What does it matter who fires across you?” said the camel. “There are
plenty of men and plenty of other camels close by, and a great many clouds
of smoke. I am not frightened then. I sit still and wait.”
<br />
“And yet,” said Billy, “you dream bad dreams and upset the camp at night.
Well, well! Before I’d lie down, not to speak of sitting down, and let a
man fire across me, my heels and his head would have something to say to
each other. Did you ever hear anything so awful as that?”
<br />
There was a long silence, and then one of the gun bullocks lifted up his
big head and said, “This is very foolish indeed. There is only one way of
fighting.”
<br />
“Oh, go on,” said Billy. “Please don’t mind me. I suppose you fellows
fight standing on your tails?”
<br />
“Only one way,” said the two together. (They must have been twins.) “This
is that way. To put all twenty yoke of us to the big gun as soon as Two
Tails trumpets.” (“Two Tails” is camp slang for the elephant.)
<br />
“What does Two Tails trumpet for?” said the young mule.
<br />
“To show that he is not going any nearer to the smoke on the other side.
Two Tails is a great coward. Then we tug the big gun all together—Heya—Hullah!
Heeyah! Hullah! We do not climb like cats nor run like calves. We go
across the level plain, twenty yoke of us, till we are unyoked again, and
we graze while the big guns talk across the plain to some town with mud
walls, and pieces of the wall fall out, and the dust goes up as though
many cattle were coming home.”
<br />
“Oh! And you choose that time for grazing?” said the young mule.
<br />
“That time or any other. Eating is always good. We eat till we are yoked
up again and tug the gun back to where Two Tails is waiting for it.
Sometimes there are big guns in the city that speak back, and some of us
are killed, and then there is all the more grazing for those that are
left. This is Fate. None the less, Two Tails is a great coward. That is
the proper way to fight. We are brothers from Hapur. Our father was a
sacred bull of Shiva. We have spoken.”
<br />
“Well, I’ve certainly learned something tonight,” said the troop-horse.
“Do you gentlemen of the screw-gun battery feel inclined to eat when you
are being fired at with big guns, and Two Tails is behind you?”
<br />
“About as much as we feel inclined to sit down and let men sprawl all over
us, or run into people with knives. I never heard such stuff. A mountain
ledge, a well-balanced load, a driver you can trust to let you pick your
own way, and I’m your mule. But—the other things—no!” said
Billy, with a stamp of his foot.
<br />
“Of course,” said the troop horse, “everyone is not made in the same way,
and I can quite see that your family, on your father’s side, would fail to
understand a great many things.”
<br />
“Never you mind my family on my father’s side,” said Billy angrily, for
every mule hates to be reminded that his father was a donkey. “My father
was a Southern gentleman, and he could pull down and bite and kick into
rags every horse he came across. Remember that, you big brown Brumby!”
<br />
Brumby means wild horse without any breeding. Imagine the feelings of
Sunol if a car-horse called her a “skate,” and you can imagine how the
Australian horse felt. I saw the white of his eye glitter in the dark.
<br />
“See here, you son of an imported Malaga jackass,” he said between his
teeth, “I’d have you know that I’m related on my mother’s side to Carbine,
winner of the Melbourne Cup, and where I come from we aren’t accustomed to
being ridden over roughshod by any parrot-mouthed, pig-headed mule in a
pop-gun pea-shooter battery. Are you ready?”
<br />
“On your hind legs!” squealed Billy. They both reared up facing each
other, and I was expecting a furious fight, when a gurgly, rumbly voice,
called out of the darkness to the right—“Children, what are you
fighting about there? Be quiet.”
<br />
Both beasts dropped down with a snort of disgust, for neither horse nor
mule can bear to listen to an elephant’s voice.
<br />
“It’s Two Tails!” said the troop-horse. “I can’t stand him. A tail at each
end isn’t fair!”
<br />
“My feelings exactly,” said Billy, crowding into the troop-horse for
company. “We’re very alike in some things.”
<br />
“I suppose we’ve inherited them from our mothers,” said the troop horse.
“It’s not worth quarreling about. Hi! Two Tails, are you tied up?”
<br />
“Yes,” said Two Tails, with a laugh all up his trunk. “I’m picketed for
the night. I’ve heard what you fellows have been saying. But don’t be
afraid. I’m not coming over.”
<br />
The bullocks and the camel said, half aloud, “Afraid of Two Tails—what
nonsense!” And the bullocks went on, “We are sorry that you heard, but it
is true. Two Tails, why are you afraid of the guns when they fire?”
<br />
“Well,” said Two Tails, rubbing one hind leg against the other, exactly
like a little boy saying a poem, “I don’t quite know whether you’d
understand.”
<br />
“We don’t, but we have to pull the guns,” said the bullocks.
<br />
“I know it, and I know you are a good deal braver than you think you are.
But it’s different with me. My battery captain called me a Pachydermatous
Anachronism the other day.”
<br />
“That’s another way of fighting, I suppose?” said Billy, who was
recovering his spirits.
<br />
“You don’t know what that means, of course, but I do. It means betwixt and
between, and that is just where I am. I can see inside my head what will
happen when a shell bursts, and you bullocks can’t.”
<br />
“I can,” said the troop-horse. “At least a little bit. I try not to think
about it.”
<br />
“I can see more than you, and I do think about it. I know there’s a great
deal of me to take care of, and I know that nobody knows how to cure me
when I’m sick. All they can do is to stop my driver’s pay till I get well,
and I can’t trust my driver.”
<br />
“Ah!” said the troop horse. “That explains it. I can trust Dick.”
<br />
“You could put a whole regiment of Dicks on my back without making me feel
any better. I know just enough to be uncomfortable, and not enough to go
on in spite of it.”
<br />
“We do not understand,” said the bullocks.
<br />
“I know you don’t. I’m not talking to you. You don’t know what blood is.”
<br />
“We do,” said the bullocks. “It is red stuff that soaks into the ground
and smells.”
<br />
The troop-horse gave a kick and a bound and a snort.
<br />
“Don’t talk of it,” he said. “I can smell it now, just thinking of it. It
makes me want to run—when I haven’t Dick on my back.”
<br />
“But it is not here,” said the camel and the bullocks. “Why are you so
stupid?”
<br />
“It’s vile stuff,” said Billy. “I don’t want to run, but I don’t want to
talk about it.”
<br />
“There you are!” said Two Tails, waving his tail to explain.
<br />
“Surely. Yes, we have been here all night,” said the bullocks.
<br />
Two Tails stamped his foot till the iron ring on it jingled. “Oh, I’m not
talking to you. You can’t see inside your heads.”
<br />
“No. We see out of our four eyes,” said the bullocks. “We see straight in
front of us.”
<br />
“If I could do that and nothing else, you wouldn’t be needed to pull the
big guns at all. If I was like my captain—he can see things inside
his head before the firing begins, and he shakes all over, but he knows
too much to run away—if I was like him I could pull the guns. But if
I were as wise as all that I should never be here. I should be a king in
the forest, as I used to be, sleeping half the day and bathing when I
liked. I haven’t had a good bath for a month.”
<br />
“That’s all very fine,” said Billy. “But giving a thing a long name
doesn’t make it any better.”
<br />
“H’sh!” said the troop horse. “I think I understand what Two Tails means.”
<br />
“You’ll understand better in a minute,” said Two Tails angrily. “Now you
just explain to me why you don’t like this!”
<br />
He began trumpeting furiously at the top of his trumpet.
<br />
“Stop that!” said Billy and the troop horse together, and I could hear
them stamp and shiver. An elephant’s trumpeting is always nasty,
especially on a dark night.
<br />
“I shan’t stop,” said Two Tails. “Won’t you explain that, please? Hhrrmph!
Rrrt! Rrrmph! Rrrhha!” Then he stopped suddenly, and I heard a little
whimper in the dark, and knew that Vixen had found me at last. She knew as
well as I did that if there is one thing in the world the elephant is more
afraid of than another it is a little barking dog. So she stopped to bully
Two Tails in his pickets, and yapped round his big feet. Two Tails
shuffled and squeaked. “Go away, little dog!” he said. “Don’t snuff at my
ankles, or I’ll kick at you. Good little dog—nice little doggie,
then! Go home, you yelping little beast! Oh, why doesn’t someone take her
away? She’ll bite me in a minute.”
<br />
“Seems to me,” said Billy to the troop horse, “that our friend Two Tails
is afraid of most things. Now, if I had a full meal for every dog I’ve
kicked across the parade-ground I should be as fat as Two Tails nearly.”
<br />
I whistled, and Vixen ran up to me, muddy all over, and licked my nose,
and told me a long tale about hunting for me all through the camp. I never
let her know that I understood beast talk, or she would have taken all
sorts of liberties. So I buttoned her into the breast of my overcoat, and
Two Tails shuffled and stamped and growled to himself.
<br />
“Extraordinary! Most extraordinary!” he said. “It runs in our family. Now,
where has that nasty little beast gone to?”
<br />
I heard him feeling about with his trunk.
<br />
“We all seem to be affected in various ways,” he went on, blowing his
nose. “Now, you gentlemen were alarmed, I believe, when I trumpeted.”
<br />
“Not alarmed, exactly,” said the troop-horse, “but it made me feel as
though I had hornets where my saddle ought to be. Don’t begin again.”
<br />
“I’m frightened of a little dog, and the camel here is frightened by bad
dreams in the night.”
<br />
“It is very lucky for us that we haven’t all got to fight in the same
way,” said the troop-horse.
<br />
“What I want to know,” said the young mule, who had been quiet for a long
time—“what I want to know is, why we have to fight at all.”
<br />
“Because we’re told to,” said the troop-horse, with a snort of contempt.
<br />
“Orders,” said Billy the mule, and his teeth snapped.
<br />
“Hukm hai!” (It is an order!), said the camel with a gurgle, and Two Tails
and the bullocks repeated, “Hukm hai!”
<br />
“Yes, but who gives the orders?” said the recruit-mule.
<br />
“The man who walks at your head—Or sits on your back—Or holds
the nose rope—Or twists your tail,” said Billy and the troop-horse
and the camel and the bullocks one after the other.
<br />
“But who gives them the orders?”
<br />
“Now you want to know too much, young un,” said Billy, “and that is one
way of getting kicked. All you have to do is to obey the man at your head
and ask no questions.”
<br />
“He’s quite right,” said Two Tails. “I can’t always obey, because I’m
betwixt and between. But Billy’s right. Obey the man next to you who gives
the order, or you’ll stop all the battery, besides getting a thrashing.”
<br />
The gun-bullocks got up to go. “Morning is coming,” they said. “We will go
back to our lines. It is true that we only see out of our eyes, and we are
not very clever. But still, we are the only people to-night who have not
been afraid. Good-night, you brave people.”
<br />
Nobody answered, and the troop-horse said, to change the conversation,
“Where’s that little dog? A dog means a man somewhere about.”
<br />
“Here I am,” yapped Vixen, “under the gun tail with my man. You big,
blundering beast of a camel you, you upset our tent. My man’s very angry.”
<br />
“Phew!” said the bullocks. “He must be white!”
<br />
“Of course he is,” said Vixen. “Do you suppose I’m looked after by a black
bullock-driver?”
<br />
“Huah! Ouach! Ugh!” said the bullocks. “Let us get away quickly.”
<br />
They plunged forward in the mud, and managed somehow to run their yoke on
the pole of an ammunition wagon, where it jammed.
<br />
“Now you have done it,” said Billy calmly. “Don’t struggle. You’re hung up
till daylight. What on earth’s the matter?”
<br />
The bullocks went off into the long hissing snorts that Indian cattle
give, and pushed and crowded and slued and stamped and slipped and nearly
fell down in the mud, grunting savagely.
<br />
“You’ll break your necks in a minute,” said the troop-horse. “What’s the
matter with white men? I live with ‘em.”
<br />
“They—eat—us! Pull!” said the near bullock. The yoke snapped
with a twang, and they lumbered off together.
<br />
I never knew before what made Indian cattle so scared of Englishmen. We
eat beef—a thing that no cattle-driver touches—and of course
the cattle do not like it.
<br />
“May I be flogged with my own pad-chains! Who’d have thought of two big
lumps like those losing their heads?” said Billy.
<br />
“Never mind. I’m going to look at this man. Most of the white men, I know,
have things in their pockets,” said the troop-horse.
<br />
“I’ll leave you, then. I can’t say I’m over-fond of ‘em myself. Besides,
white men who haven’t a place to sleep in are more than likely to be
thieves, and I’ve a good deal of Government property on my back. Come
along, young un, and we’ll go back to our lines. Good-night, Australia!
See you on parade to-morrow, I suppose. Good-night, old Hay-bale!—try
to control your feelings, won’t you? Good-night, Two Tails! If you pass us
on the ground tomorrow, don’t trumpet. It spoils our formation.”
<br />
Billy the Mule stumped off with the swaggering limp of an old campaigner,
as the troop-horse’s head came nuzzling into my breast, and I gave him
biscuits, while Vixen, who is a most conceited little dog, told him fibs
about the scores of horses that she and I kept.
<br />
“I’m coming to the parade to-morrow in my dog-cart,” she said. “Where will
you be?”
<br />
“On the left hand of the second squadron. I set the time for all my troop,
little lady,” he said politely. “Now I must go back to Dick. My tail’s all
muddy, and he’ll have two hours’ hard work dressing me for parade.”
<br />
The big parade of all the thirty thousand men was held that afternoon, and
Vixen and I had a good place close to the Viceroy and the Amir of
Afghanistan, with high, big black hat of astrakhan wool and the great
diamond star in the center. The first part of the review was all sunshine,
and the regiments went by in wave upon wave of legs all moving together,
and guns all in a line, till our eyes grew dizzy. Then the cavalry came
up, to the beautiful cavalry canter of “Bonnie Dundee,” and Vixen cocked
her ear where she sat on the dog-cart. The second squadron of the Lancers
shot by, and there was the troop-horse, with his tail like spun silk, his
head pulled into his breast, one ear forward and one back, setting the
time for all his squadron, his legs going as smoothly as waltz music. Then
the big guns came by, and I saw Two Tails and two other elephants
harnessed in line to a forty-pounder siege gun, while twenty yoke of oxen
walked behind. The seventh pair had a new yoke, and they looked rather
stiff and tired. Last came the screw guns, and Billy the mule carried
himself as though he commanded all the troops, and his harness was oiled
and polished till it winked. I gave a cheer all by myself for Billy the
mule, but he never looked right or left.
<br />
The rain began to fall again, and for a while it was too misty to see what
the troops were doing. They had made a big half circle across the plain,
and were spreading out into a line. That line grew and grew and grew till
it was three-quarters of a mile long from wing to wing—one solid
wall of men, horses, and guns. Then it came on straight toward the Viceroy
and the Amir, and as it got nearer the ground began to shake, like the
deck of a steamer when the engines are going fast.
<br />
Unless you have been there you cannot imagine what a frightening effect
this steady come-down of troops has on the spectators, even when they know
it is only a review. I looked at the Amir. Up till then he had not shown
the shadow of a sign of astonishment or anything else. But now his eyes
began to get bigger and bigger, and he picked up the reins on his horse’s
neck and looked behind him. For a minute it seemed as though he were going
to draw his sword and slash his way out through the English men and women
in the carriages at the back. Then the advance stopped dead, the ground
stood still, the whole line saluted, and thirty bands began to play all
together. That was the end of the review, and the regiments went off to
their camps in the rain, and an infantry band struck up with—
The animals went in two by two,
Hurrah!
The animals went in two by two,
The elephant and the battery mul’,
and they all got into the Ark
For to get out of the rain!
Then I heard an old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had
come down with the Amir, asking questions of a native officer.
<br />
“Now,” said he, “in what manner was this wonderful thing done?”
<br />
And the officer answered, “An order was given, and they obeyed.”
<br />
“But are the beasts as wise as the men?” said the chief.
<br />
“They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his
driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and
the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his
colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the
brigadier the general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the
Empress. Thus it is done.”
<br />
“Would it were so in Afghanistan!” said the chief, “for there we obey only
our own wills.”
<br />
“And for that reason,” said the native officer, twirling his mustache,
“your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our
Viceroy.”
<br />
[
]()
Parade Song of the Camp Animals
ELEPHANTS OF THE GUN TEAMS
We lent to Alexander the strength of Hercules,
The wisdom of our foreheads, the cunning of our knees;
We bowed our necks to service: they ne’er were loosed again,—
Make way there—way for the ten-foot teams
Of the Forty-Pounder train!
GUN BULLOCKS
Those heroes in their harnesses avoid a cannon-ball,
And what they know of powder upsets them one and all;
Then we come into action and tug the guns again—
Make way there—way for the twenty yoke
Of the Forty-Pounder train!
CAVALRY HORSES
By the brand on my shoulder, the finest of tunes
Is played by the Lancers, Hussars, and Dragoons,
And it’s sweeter than “Stables” or “Water” to me—
The Cavalry Canter of “Bonnie Dundee”!
Then feed us and break us and handle and groom,
And give us good riders and plenty of room,
And launch us in column of squadron and see
The way of the war-horse to “Bonnie Dundee”!
SCREW-GUN MULES
As me and my companions were scrambling up a hill,
The path was lost in rolling stones, but we went forward still;
For we can wriggle and climb, my lads, and turn up everywhere,
Oh, it’s our delight on a mountain height, with a leg or two to
spare!
Good luck to every sergeant, then, that lets us pick our road;
Bad luck to all the driver-men that cannot pack a load:
For we can wriggle and climb, my lads, and turn up everywhere,
Oh, it’s our delight on a mountain height, with a leg or two to
spare!
COMMISSARIAT CAMELS
We haven’t a camelty tune of our own
To help us trollop along,
But every neck is a hair trombone
(Rtt-ta-ta-ta! is a hair trombone!)
And this our marching-song:
Can’t! Don’t! Shan’t! Won’t!
Pass it along the line!
Somebody’s pack has slid from his back,
Wish it were only mine!
Somebody’s load has tipped off in the road—
Cheer for a halt and a row!
Urrr! Yarrh! Grr! Arrh!
Somebody’s catching it now!
ALL THE BEASTS TOGETHER
Children of the Camp are we,
Serving each in his degree;
Children of the yoke and goad,
Pack and harness, pad and load.
See our line across the plain,
Like a heel-rope bent again,
Reaching, writhing, rolling far,
Sweeping all away to war!
While the men that walk beside,
Dusty, silent, heavy-eyed,
Cannot tell why we or they
March and suffer day by day.
Children of the Camp are we,
Serving each in his degree;
Children of the yoke and goad,
Pack and harness, pad and load!
<br /> <br />
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