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THE JUNGLE BOOK, by RUDYARD KIPLING.

Digitized by Cardinalis Etext Press, C.E.K.
Posted to Wiretap in July 1993, as jungle.rk.

This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.



                  The Works of Rudyard Kipling

                         The Jungle Book

                         Rudyard Kipling

                            New York
                         The Century Co.
                              1899

                    Copyright 1893,1894, by
                        RUDYARD KIPLING
                      Copyright, 1894, by
                      HARPER and BROTHERS
                    Copyright 1893,1894, by
                        THE CENTURY CO.

                      THE DE VINNE PRESS.


CONTENTS

MOWGLI'S BROTHERS
HUNTING-SONG OF THE SEEONEE PACK
KAA'S HUNTING
ROAD-SONG OF THE BANDAR-LOG
"TIGER! TIGER!"
MOWGLI'S SONG
THE WHITE SEAL
LUKANNON
"RIKKI-TIKKI-TAVI"
DARZEE'S CHAUNT
TOOMAI OF THE ELEPHANTS
SHIV AND THE GRASSHOPPER
HER MAJESTY'S SERVANTS
PARADE-SONG OF THE CAMP ANIMALS


Now Rann, the Kite, brings home the night
That Mang, the Bat, sets free --
The herds are shut in byre and hut,
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call! -- Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
Night-Song in the Jungle.


MOWGLI'S BROTHERS

IT WAS seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills
when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself,
yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid
of the sleepy feeling in the tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big
gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and
the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived.
"Augrh!" said Father Wolf, "it is time to hunt again"; and he
was going to spring downhill when a little shadow with a bushy
tail crossed the threshold and whined: "Good luck go with you,
O Chief of the Wolves; and good luck and strong white teeth go
with the noble children, that they may never forget the hungry in
this world."
     It was the jackal -- Tabaqui, the Dish-licker -- and the
wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making
mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of
leather from the village rubbish-heaps. They are afraid of him
too, because Tabaqui, more than any one else in the jungle, is
apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of
any one, and runs through the forest biting everything in his
way. Even the tiger hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for
madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild
creature. We call it hydrophobia, but they call it dewanee --
the madness -- and run.
     "Enter, then, and look," said Father Wolf, stiffly; "but
there is no food here."
     "For a wolf, no," said Tabaqui; "but for so mean a person
as myself a dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log
[the Jackal People], to pick and choose?" He scuttled to the
back of the cave, where he found the bone of a buck with some
meat on it, and sat cracking the end merrily.
     "All thanks for this good meal," he said, licking his lips.
"How beautiful are the noble children! How large are their eyes!
And so young too! Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that
the children of kings are men from the beginning."
     Now, Tabaqui knew as well as any one else that there is
nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces; and
it pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.
     Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had
made, and then he said spitefully:
     "Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting-grounds.
He will hunt among these hills during the next moon, so he has
told me."
     Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga
River, twenty miles away.
     "He has no right!" Father Wolf began angrily. "By the Law
of the Jungle he has no right to change his quarters without
fair warning. He will frighten every head of game within ten
miles; and I -- I have to kill for two, these days."
     "His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for
nothing," said Mother Wolf, quietly. "He has been lame in one
foot from his birth. That is why he has only killed cattle. Now
the villagers of the Waingunga are angry with him, and he has
come here to make our villagers angry. They will scour the jungle
for him when he is far away, and we and our children must run
when the grass is set alight. Indeed: we are very grateful
to Shere Khan!"
     "Shall I tell him of your gratitude?" said Tabaqui.
     "Out!" snapped Father Wolf. "Out, and hunt with thy master.
Thou hast done harm enough for one night."
     "I go," said Tabaqui, quietly. "Ye can hear Shere Khan
below in the thickets. I might have saved myself the message."
     Father Wolf listened, and in the dark valley that ran down
to a little river, he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong
whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all
the jungle knows it.
     "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?"
     "H'sh! It is neither bullock nor buck that he hunts
to-night," said Mother Wolf; "it is Man." The whine had changed
to a sort of humming purr that seemed to roll from every quarter
of the compass. It was the noise that bewilders wood-cutters,
and gipsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes
into the very mouth of the tiger.
     "Man!" said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth.
"Faugh! Are there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that
he must eat Man -- and on our ground too!"
     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 his children how to kill, and then he must hunt
outside the hunting-grounds of his 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, and hundreds of
brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in
the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves
is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living
things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too --
and it is true -- that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their
teeth.
     The purr grew louder, and ended in the full-throated
"Aaarh!" of the tiger's charge.
     Then there was a howl -- an untigerish howl -- from Shere
Khan. "He has missed," said Mother Wolf. "What is it?"
     Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan
muttering and mumbling savagely, as he tumbled about in the scrub.
     "The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a
wood-cutters' camp-fire, so he has burned his feet," said Father
Wolf, with a grunt. "Tabaqui is with him."
     "Something is coming uphill," said Mother Wolf, twitching
one ear. "Get ready."
     The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf
dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then,
if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful
thing in the world -- the wolf checked in mid-spring. He made
his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then
he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up
straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost
where he left ground.
     "Man!" he snapped. "A man's cub. Look!"
     Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood
a naked brown baby who could just walk, as soft and as dimpled
a little thing as ever came to a wolf's cave at night. He looked
up into Father Wolf's face and laughed.
     "Is that a man's cub?" said Mother Wolf. "I have never seen
one. Bring it here."
     A wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary,
mouth an egg without breaking it, and though Father Wolf's jaws
closed right on the child's back not a tooth even scratched the
skin, as he laid it down among the cubs.
     "How little! How naked, and -- how bold!" said Mother Wolf,
softly. The baby 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 her children?"
     "I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in
our pack or in my time," said Father Wolf. "He is altogether
without hair, and I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But
see, he looks up and is not afraid."
     The moonlight was blocked out of the mouth of the cave, for
Shere Khan's great square head and shoulders were thrust into
the entrance, Tabaqui, behind him, was squeaking: "My Lord, my
Lord, it went in here!"
     "Shere Khan does us great honour," said Father Wolf, but
his eyes were very angry. "What does Shere Khan need?"
     "My quarry. A man's cub went this, way" said Shere Khan.
"Its parents have run off. Give it to me."
     Shere Khan had jumped at a wood-cutter's campfire, as
Father Wolf had said, and was furious from the pain of his
burned feet. But Father Wolf knew that the mouth of the cave was
too narrow for a tiger to come in by. Even where he was, Shere
Khan's shoulders and fore paws were cramped for want of room, as
a man's would be if he tried to fight in a barrel.
     "The Wolves are a free people," said Father Wolf. "They
take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped
cattle-killer. The man's cub is ours -- to kill if we choose."
     "Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of
choosing? By the Bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into
your dog's den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who
speak!"
     The tiger's roar filled the cave with thunder. Mother Wolf
shook herself clear of the cubs and sprang forward, her eyes,
like two green moons in the darkness, facing the blazing eyes of
Shere Khan.
     "And it is I, Raksha [the Demon], who answer. The man's cub
is mine, Lungri -- mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall
live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the
end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs -- frog-eater --
fish-killer, shall hunt thee! Now get hence, or by the Sambhur
that I killed (I eat no starved cattle), back thou goest to thy
mother, burned beast of the jungle, lamer than ever thou
camest into the world! Go!"
     Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the
days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other
wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called the Demon
for compliment's sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf,
but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that
where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would
fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave-mouth growling,
and when he was clear he shouted:
     "Each dog barks in his own yard! We will see what the Pack
will say to this fostering of man-cubs. The cub is mine, and to
my teeth he will come in the end, O bush-tailed thieves!"
     Mother Wolf threw herself down panting among the cubs, and
Father Wolf said to her gravely:
     "Shere Khan speaks this much truth. The cub must be shown
to the Pack. Wilt thou still keep him, Mother?"
     "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 side already. And that lame butcher would have
killed him, and would have run off to the Waingunga while the
villagers here hunted through all our lairs in revenge! Keep
him? Assuredly I will keep him. Lie still, little frog. O thou
Mowgli, -- for Mowgli, the Frog, I will call thee, -- the time
will come when thou wilt hunt Shere Khan as he has hunted thee!"
     "But what will our Pack say?" said Father Wolf.
     The Law of the Jungle lays down very clearly that any wolf
may, when he marries, withdraw from the Pack he belongs to; but
as soon as his cubs are old 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 other wolves may
identify them. After that inspection the cubs are free to run
where they please, and until they have killed their first buck
no excuse is accepted if a grown wolf of the Pack kills one of
them. The punishment is death where the murderer can be found;
and if you think for a minute you will see that this must be so.
     Father Wolf waited till his cubs could run a little, and
then on the night of the Pack Meeting took them and Mowgli
and Mother Wolf to the Council Rock -- a hilltop covered with
stones and boulders where a hundred wolves could hide. Akela,
the great gray Lone Wolf, who led all the Pack by strength and
cunning, lay out at full length on his rock, and below him sat
forty or more wolves of every size and colour, from
badger-coloured veterans who could handle a buck alone, to
young black three-year-olds who thought they could.  The Lone
Wolf had led them for a year now. He had fallen twice
into a wolf-trap in his youth, and once he had been beaten and
left for dead; so he knew the manners and customs of men.
     There was very little talking at the Rock. The cubs tumbled
over one another in the center of the circle where their mothers
and fathers sat, and now and again 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 push her cub
far out into the moonlight, to be sure that he had not been
overlooked. Akela from his rock would cry: "Ye know the Law --
ye know the Law! Look well, O Wolves!" And the anxious mothers
would take up the call: "Look -- look well, O Wolves!"
     At last -- and Mother Wolf's neck-bristles lifted as the
time came -- Father Wolf pushed "Mowgli, the Frog," as they
called him, into the center, where he sat laughing and
playing with some pebbles that glistened in the moonlight.
     Akela never raised his head from his paws, but went on with
the monotonous cry, "Look well!" A muffled roar came up from
behind the rocks -- the voice of Shere Khan crying, "The cub is
mine; give him to me. What have the Free People to do with a
man's cub?"
     Akela never even twitched his ears. All he said was, "Look
well, O Wolves! What have the Free People to do with the orders
of any save the Free People? Look well!"
     There was a chorus of deep growls, and a young wolf in his
fourth year flung back Shere Khan's question to Akela: "What
have the Free People to do with a man's cub?"
     Now the Law of the Jungle lays down that if there is any
dispute as to the right of a cub to be accepted by the Pack, he
must be spoken for by at least two members of the Pack who are
not his father and mother.
     "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 be her last fight, if things came
to fighting.
     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, old Baloo -- who can come and go
where he pleases because he eats only nuts and roots and honey
-- rose up on his hind quarters and grunted.
     "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 the truth. Let him run with the Pack, and be
entered with the others. I myself will teach him."
     "We need yet another," said Akela. "Baloo has spoken, and
he is our teacher for the young cubs. Who speaks besides Baloo?"
     A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was
Bagheera, the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the
panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern
of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to
cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the
wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he
had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a
skin softer than down.
     "O Akela, and ye, the Free People," he purred, "I have no
right in your assembly; but the Law of the Jungle says that if
there is a doubt which is not a killing matter in regard to a
new cub, the life of that cub may be bought at a price. And
the Law does not say who may or may not pay that price. Am I right?"
     "Good! good!" said the young wolves, who are always hungry.
"Listen to Bagheera. The cub can be bought for a price. It is
the Law."
     "Knowing that I have no right to speak here, I ask your
leave."
     "Speak then," cried twenty voices.
     "To kill a naked cub is shame. Besides, he may make better
sport for you when he is grown. Baloo has spoken in his behalf.
Now to Baloo's word I will 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?"
     There was a clamour of scores of voices, saying: "What
matter? He will die in the winter rains. He will scorch in the
sun. What harm can a naked frog do us? Let him run with the
Pack. Where is the bull, Bagheera? Let him be accepted." And
then came Akela's deep bay, crying: "Look well -- look well, O
Wolves!"
     Mowgli was still playing with the pebbles, and he did not
notice when the wolves came and looked at him one by one. At
last they all went down the hill for the dead bull, and only
Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, and Mowgli's own wolves were left. Shere
Khan roared still in the night, for he was very angry that
Mowgli had not been handed over to him.
     "Ay, roar well," said Bagheera, under his whiskers; "for
the time comes when this naked thing will make thee roar to
another tune, or I know nothing of Man."
     "It was well done," said Akela. "Men and their cubs are
very wise. He may be a help in time."
     "Truly, a help in time of need; for none can hope to lead
the Pack forever," said Bagheera.
     Akela said nothing. He was thinking of the time that comes
to every leader of every pack when his strength goes from him
and he gets feebler and feebler, till at last he is killed by
the wolves and a new leader comes up -- to be killed in his
turn.
     "Take him, away" he said to Father Wolf, "and train him as
befits one of the Free People."
     And that is how Mowgli was entered into the Seeonee
wolf-pack for the price of a bull and on Baloo's good word.
     Now you must be content to skip ten or eleven whole years,
and only guess at all the wonderful life that Mowgli led among
the wolves, because if it were written out it would fill ever so
many books. He grew up with the cubs, though they of course were
grown wolves almost before he was a child, and Father Wolf
taught him his business, and the meaning of things in the
jungle, till every rustle in the grass, every breath of the warm
night air, every note of the owls above his head, every scratch
of a bat's claws as it roosted for a while in a tree, and every
splash of every little fish jumping in a pool, meant just as
much to him as the work of his office means to a business man.
When he was not learning he sat out in the sun and slept, and
ate, and went to sleep again; when he felt dirty or hot he swam
in the forest pools; and when he wanted honey (Baloo told him
that honey and nuts were just as pleasant to eat as raw meat) he
climbed up for it, and that Bagheera showed him how to do.
     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
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; and 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 dares not kill thee in the jungle for fear of those that
love thee; 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 round 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 ploughed fields to-night"; 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 our 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 fore foot.
     He did not wait for anything more, but dashed on; and the
yells grew fainter behind him as he ran into the crop-lands
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 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 around 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. Half-way 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 ploughed lands. I am ready. Look!" 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.
     Akela the Lone Wolf lay by the side of his rock as a sign
that the leadership of the Pack was open, and Shere Khan with
his following of scrap-fed wolves walked to and fro openly,
being flattered. Bagheera lay close to Mowgli, and the fire-pot
was between MowglI's knees. When they were all gathered
together, Shere Khan began to speak -- a thing he would never
have dared to do when Akela was in his prime.
     "He has no right," whispered Bagheera. "Say so. He is a
dog's son. He will be frightened."
     Mowgli sprang to his feet. "Free People," he cried, "does
Shere Khan lead the Pack? What has a tiger to do with our
leadership?"
     "Seeing that the leadership is yet open, and being asked to
speak -- "Shere Khan began.
     "By whom?" said Mowgli. "Are we all jackals, to fawn on
this cattle-butcher? The leadership of the Pack is with the Pack
alone."
     There were yells of "Silence, thou man's cub!"  "Let him
speak; he has kept our law!" And at last the seniors of the Pack
thundered: "Let the Dead Wolf speak!"
     When a leader of the Pack has missed his kill, he is called
the Dead Wolf as long as he lives, which is not long, as a rule.
     Akela raised his old head wearily:
     "Free people, and ye too, jackals of Shere Khan, for twelve
seasons I have led ye to and from the kill, and in all that time
not one has been trapped or maimed. Now I have missed my kill.
Ye know how that plot was made. Ye know how ye brought me up to
an untried buck to make my weakness known. It was 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 my
right, by the Law of the Jungle, that ye come one by one."
     There was a long hush, for no single wolf cared to fight
Akela to the death. Then Shere Khan roared: "Bah! What have we
to do with this toothless fool? He is doomed to die! It is the
man-cub who has lived too long. Free People, he was my meat from
the first. Give him to me. I am weary 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 one bone! He is a man
-- a man's child, and from the marrow of my bones I hate him!"
     Then more than half the Pack yelled: "A man -- a man! What
has a man to do with us? Let him go to his own place."
     "And turn all the people of the villages against us?"
snarled Shere Khan. "No; give him to me. He is a man, and none
of us can look him between the eyes."
     Akela lifted his head again, and said: "He has eaten our
food; he has slept with us; he has driven game for us; he has
broken no word of the Law of the Jungle."
     "Also, I paid for him with a bull when he was accepted. The
worth of a bull is little, but Bagheera's honour is something
that he will perhaps fight for," said Bagheera in his gentlest voice.
     "A bull paid ten years ago!" the Pack snarled. "What do we
care for bones ten years old?"
     "Or for a pledge?" said Bagheera, his white teeth bared
under his lip. "Well are ye called the Free People!"
     "No man's cub can run with the people of the jungle!"
roared Shere Khan. "Give him to me."
     "He is our brother in all but blood," Akela went on; "and
ye would kill him here. In truth, I have lived too long. Some of
ye are eaters of cattle, and of others I have heard that, under
Shere Khan's teaching, ye go 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 is certain that I must die, and
my life is of no worth or I would offer that in the man-cub's
place. But for the sake of the Honour of the Pack, -- a little
matter that, by being without a leader, ye have forgotten, -- I
promise that if ye let the man-cub go to his own place, I will
not, when my time comes to die, bare one tooth against ye. I
will die without fighting. 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 brother against whom there is
no fault -- a brother spoken for and bought into the Pack
according to the Law of the Jungle."
     "He is a man -- a man -- a man!" snarled the Pack; and most
of the wolves began to gather round Shere Khan, whose tail was
beginning to switch.
     "Now the business is in thy hands," said Bagheera to
Mowgli. "We can do no more except fight."
     Mowgli stood upright -- the fire-pot in his hands. Then he
stretched out his arms, and yawned in the face of the Council;
but he was furious with rage and sorrow, for, wolf-like, the
wolves had never told him how they hated him.
     "Listen, you!" he cried. "There is no need for this dog's
jabber. Ye have told me so often to-night that I am a man
(though indeed I would have been a wolf with you to my life's
end) that I feel your words are true. So I do not call ye my
brothers any more, but sag [dogs], as a man 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."
     He flung the fire-pot on the ground, and some of the red
coals lit a tuft of dried moss that flared up as all the Council
drew back in terror before the leaping flames.
     Mowgli thrust his dead branch into the fire till the twigs
lit and crackled, and whirled it above his head among the
cowering wolves.
     "Thou art the master," said Bagheera, in an undertone.
"Save Akela from the death. He was ever thy friend."
     Akela, the grim old wolf who had never asked for mercy in
his life, gave one piteous look at Mowgli as the boy stood all
naked, his long black hair tossing over his shoulders in the
light of the blazing branch that made the shadows jump and
quiver.
     "Good!" said Mowgli, staring around slowly, and thrusting
out his lower lip. "I see that ye are dogs. I go from you to my
own people -- if they be my own people. The jungle is shut to
me, and I must forget your talk and your companionship; but I
will be 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 ye have betrayed me." He kicked the
fire with his foot, and the sparks flew up. "There shall be no
war between any of us and the Pack. But here is a debt to pay
before I go." He strode forward to where Shere Khan sat blinking
stupidly at the flames, and caught him by the tuft on his chin.
Bagheera followed close, in case of accidents. "Up, dog!" Mowgli
cried. "Up, when a man speaks, or I will set that coat ablaze!"
     Shere Khan's ears lay flat back on his head, and he shut
his eyes, for the blazing branch was very near.
     "This cattle-killer said he would kill me in the Council
because he had not killed me when I was a cub. Thus and thus,
then, do we beat dogs when we are men! Stir a whisker, Lungri,
and I ram the Red Flower down thy gullet!" He beat Shere Khan
over the head with the branch, and the tiger whimpered and
whined in an agony of fear.
     "Pah! Singed jungle-cat -- go now! But remember when next
I come to the Council Rock, as a man should come, it will be
with Shere Khan's hide on my head. For the rest, Akela goes free
to live as he pleases. Ye will not kill him, because that is not
my will. Nor do I think that ye will sit here any longer,
lolling out your tongues as though ye were somebodies, instead
of dogs whom I drive out -- thus! Go!"
     The fire was burning furiously at the end of the branch,
and Mowgli struck right and left round the circle, and the
wolves ran howling with the spark burning their fur. At last
there were only Akela, Bagheera, and perhaps ten wolves that had
taken MowglI's part. Then something began to hurt Mowgli inside
him, as he had never been hurt in his life before, and he caught
his breath and sobbed, and the tears ran down his face.
     "What is it? What is it?" he said. "I do not wish to leave
the jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying,
Bagheera?"
     "No, Little Brother. Those are 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 shut indeed 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 never cried in all his
life before.
     "Now," he said, "I will go to men. But first I must say
farewell to my mother"; and he went to the cave where she lived
with Father Wolf, and he cried on her coat, while the four cubs
howled miserably.
     "Ye will not forget me?" said Mowgli.
     "Never while we can follow a trail," said the cubs. "Come
to the foot of the hill when thou art a man, and we will talk to
thee; and we will come into the croplands to play with thee by
night."
     "Come soon!" said Father Wolf. "Oh, wise little Frog, come
again soon; for we be old, thy mother and I."
     "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."
     "I will surely come," said Mowgli; "and when I come it will
be to lay out Shere Khan's hide upon the Council Rock. Do not
forget me! Tell them in the jungle never to forget me!"
     The dawn was beginning to break when Mowgli went down the
hillside alone to the crops to meet those mysterious things that
are called men.


HUNTING-SONG OF THE SEEONEE PACK

As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled
         Once, twice, and again!
And a doe leaped up -- and a doe leaped up
From 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 belled
         Once, twice, and again!
And a wolf stole back -- and a wolf stole back
To carry the word to the waiting Pack;
And we sought and we found and we bayed on his track
         Once, twice, and again!

As the dawn was breaking the Wolf-pack yelled
         Once, 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!

His spots are the joy of the Leopard: his horns are the
Buffalo's
         pride --
Be clean, for the strength of the hunter is known by the gloss
         of his hide.

If ye find that the Bullock can toss you, or the heavy-browed
         Sambhur can gore;
Ye need not stop work to inform us; we knew it ten seasons
         before.

Oppress not the cubs of the stranger, but hail them as Sister
         and Brother,
For though they are little and fubsy, it may be the Bear is
         their mother.

"There is none like to me!" says the Cub in the pride of his
         earliest kill;
But the Jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think
         and be still.

                                         Maxims of Baloo.

                                 KAA'S HUNTING

ALL that is told here happened some time before Mowgli was
turned out of the Seeonee wolfpack. It was in 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 the
young wolves will only learn as much of the Law of the Jungle as
applies to their own pack and tribe, and run away as soon as
they can repeat the Hunting Verse: "Feet that make no noise;
eyes that can see in the dark; ears that can hear the winds in
their lairs, and sharp white teeth -- all these things are
the mark of our brothers except Tabaqui and the Hyena, whom we
hate." But Mowgli, as a man-cub, had to learn a great deal more
than this. Sometimes Bagheera, the Black Panther, would come
lounging through the jungle to see how his pet was getting on,
and would purr with his head against a tree while Mowgli recited
the day's lesson to Baloo. The boy could climb almost as well as
he could swim, and swim almost as well as he could run; so
Baloo, the Teacher of the Law, taught him 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 them fifty
feet aboveground; what to say to Mang, the Bat, when he
disturbed him in the branches at midday; and how to warn the
water-snakes in the pools before he splashed down among them.
None of the Jungle People like being disturbed, and all are very
ready to fly at an intruder. Then, too, Mowgli was taught the
Strangers' Hunting Call, which must be repeated aloud till it is
answered, whenever one of the Jungle People hunts outside his
own grounds. It means, translated: "Give me leave to hunt here
because I am hungry"; and the answer is: "Hunt, then, for food,
but not for pleasure."
     All this will show you how much Mowgli had to learn by
heart, and he grew very tired of repeating the same thing a
hundred times; but, as Baloo said to Bagheera one day when
Mowgli had been cuffed and had run off in a temper: "A man's cub
is a man's cub, and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle."
     "But think how small he is," said the Black Panther, who
would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. "How can
his little head carry all thy long talk?"
     "Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed?
No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit
him, very softly, when he forgets."
     "Softly! What dost thou know of softness, old Iron-feet?"
Bagheera grunted. "His face is all bruised to-day by thy --
softness. Ugh!"
     "Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who
love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance,"
Baloo answered, very earnestly. "I am now teaching him the
Master Words of the Jungle that shall protect him with the Birds
and the Snake People, and all that hunt on four feet, except his
own pack. He can now claim protection, if he will only remember
the Words, from all in the jungle. Is not that worth a little
beating?"
     "Well, look to it then that thou dost not kill the man-cub.
He is no tree-trunk to sharpen thy blunt claws upon. But what
are those Master Words? I am more likely to give help than to
ask it" -- Bagheera stretched out one paw and admired the
steel-blue ripping-chisel talons at the end of it -- "Still I
should like to know."
     "I will call Mowgli and he shall say them -- if he will.
Come, Little Brother!"
     "My head is ringing like a bee-tree," said a sullen voice
over their 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!"
     "That is all one to me," said Baloo, though he was hurt and
grieved. "Tell Bagheera, then, the Master Words of the Jungle
that I have taught thee this day."
     "Master Words for which people?" said Mowgli, delighted to
show off. "The jungle has many tongues. I know them all."
     "A little thou knowest, but not much. See, O Bagheera, they
never thank their teacher! Not one small wolfling has come back
to thank old Baloo for his teachings. Say the Word for the
Hunting People, then, -- great scholar!"
     "We be of one blood, ye and I," said Mowgli,
giving the words the Bear accent which all the Hunting People of
the Jungle use.
     "Good! Now for the Birds."
     Mowgli repeated, with the Kite's whistle at the end of the
sentence.
     "Now for the Snake People," said Bagheera.
     The answer was a perfectly indescribable hiss, and Mowgli
kicked up his feet behind, clapped his hands together to applaud
himself, and jumped on Bagheera's back, where he sat sideways,
drumming with his heels on the glossy skin and making the worst
faces that he could think of at Baloo.
     "There -- there! That was worth a little bruise," said the
Brown Bear, tenderly. "Some day thou wilt remember me." Then he
turned aside to tell Bagheera 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 a pool to get the Snake
Word from a water-snake, because Baloo could not pronounce it,
and how Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidents in
the jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt
him.
     "No one then is to be feared," Baloo wound up, patting his
big furry stomach with pride.
     "Except his own tribe," said Bagheera, under his breath;
and then aloud to Mowgli: "Have a care for my ribs, Little
Brother! What is all this dancing up and down?"
     Mowgli had been trying to make himself heard by pulling at
Bagheera's shoulder-fur and kicking hard. When the two listened
to him he was shouting 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."
     "What is this new folly, little dreamer of dreams?" said
Bagheera.
     "Yes, and throw branches and dirt at old Baloo," Mowgli
went on. "They have promised me this, ah!"
     "Whoof!" Baloo's big paw scooped Mowgli off Bagheera's
back, and as the boy lay between the big fore paws he could see
the bear was angry.
     "Mowgli," said Baloo, "thou hast been talking with the
Bandar-log -- the Monkey People."
     Mowgli looked at Bagheera to see if the panther was angry
too, and Bagheera's eyes were as hard as jade-stones.
     "Thou hast been with the Monkey People -- the gray apes --
the people without a Law -- the eaters of everything. That is
great shame."
     "When Baloo hurt my head," said Mowgli (he was still down
on his back), "I went away, and the gray apes came down from the
trees and had pity on me. No one else cared." He snuffled a
little.
     "The pity of the Monkey People!" Baloo snorted.
     "The stillness of the mountain stream! The coo of the
summer sun! And then, man-cub?"
     "And then -- and then they gave me nuts and pleasant things
to eat, and they -- they carried me in their arms up to the top
of the trees and said I was their blood-brother, except that I
had no tail, and should be their leader some day."
     "They have no leader" said Bagheera. "They lie. They have
always lied."
     "They were very kind, and bade me come again. Why have I
never been taken among the Monkey People? They stand on their
feet as I do. They do not hit me with hard paws. They play all
day. Let me get up! Bad Baloo, let me up! I will go play with
them again."
     "Listen, man-cub," said the bear, and his voice rumbled
like thunder on a hot night. "I have taught thee all the Law of
the Jungle for all the Peoples of the Jungle -- except the
Monkey Folk who live in the trees. They have no Law. They
are outcastes. They have no speech of their own but use the
stolen words which they overhear when they listen and peep and
wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They
are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and
chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do
great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns
their minds to laughter, and all is forgotten. We of the jungle
have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys
drink; 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 the Bandar-log till to-day?"
     "No," said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very
still now that Baloo had finished.
     "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 have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the
Jungle People. But we do not notice them even when they throw
nuts and filth on our heads."
     He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs
spattered down through the branches; and they could hear
coughings and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air
among the thin branches.
     "The Monkey People are forbidden," said Baloo, "forbidden
to the Jungle People. Remember."
     "Forbidden," said Bagheera; "but I still think Baloo should
have warned thee against them."
     "I -- I? How was I to guess he would play with such dirt.
The Monkey People! Faugh!"
     A fresh shower came down on their heads, and the two
trotted away, taking Mowgli with them. What Baloo had said about
the monkeys was perfectly true. 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 one another's path. But
whenever they found a sick wolf, or a wounded tiger or bear, the
monkeys would torment him, and would throw sticks and nuts at
any beast for fun and in the hope of being noticed. Then they
would howl and shriek senseless songs, and invite the Jungle
People to climb up their trees and fight them, or would start
furious battles over nothing among themselves, and leave the
dead monkeys where the Jungle People could see them.
     They were always just going to have a leader and laws and
customs of their own, but they never did, because their memories
would not hold over from day to day, and so they settled things
by making up a saying: "What the Bandar-log think
now the Jungle will think later": and that comforted them a
great deal. None of the beasts could reach them, but on the
other hand none of the beasts would notice them, and that was
why they were so pleased when Mowgli came to play with them, and
when they heard how angry Baloo was.
     They never meant to do any more, -- the Bandar-log never
mean anything at all, -- but one of them invented what seemed to
him a brilliant idea, and he told all the others that Mowgli
would be a useful person to keep in the tribe, because he could
weave sticks together for protection from the wind; so, if they
caught him, they could make him teach them. Of course Mowgli, as
a wood-cutter's child, inherited all sorts of instincts, and
used to make little play-huts of fallen branches without
thinking how he came to do it. The Monkey People, watching in
the trees, considered these huts most wonderful. This time, they
said, they were really going to have a leader and become the
wisest people in the jungle -- so wise that every one else would
notice and envy them. Therefore they followed Baloo and Bagheera
and Mowgli through the jungle very quietly till it was time for
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 do with the Monkey People.
     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; and then he was staring down through the
swaying boughs as Baloo woke the jungle with his deep cries and
Bagheera bounded up the trunk with every tooth bared. The
Bandar-log howled with triumph, and scuffled away to the upper
branches where Bagheera dared not follow, shouting: "He has
noticed us! Bagheera has noticed us! All the Jungle People
admire us for our skill and our cunning!" Then they began their
flight; and the flight of the Monkey People through treeland is
one of the things nobody can describe. They have their regular
roads and cross-roads, uphills and downhills, all laid out from
fifty to seventy or a hundred feet aboveground, and by these
they can travel even at night if necessary.
     Two of the strongest monkeys caught Mowgli under the arms
and swung off with him through the tree-tops, twenty feet at a
bound. Had they been alone they could have gone twice as fast,
but the boy's weight held them back. Sick and giddy as Mowgli
was he could not help enjoying the wild rush, though the
glimpses of earth far down below frightened him, and the
terrible check and jerk at the end of the swing over nothing
but empty air brought his heart between his teeth.
     His escort would rush him up a tree till he felt the weak
topmost branches crackle and bend under them, and, then, with a
cough and a whoop, would fling themselves into the air outward
and downward, and bring up hanging by their hands or their feet
to the lower limbs of the next tree. Sometimes he could see for
miles and miles over the still green jungle, 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 he and
his two guards would be almost down to earth again.
     So bounding and crashing and whooping and yelling, the
whole tribe of Bandar-log swept along the tree-roads with Mowgli
their prisoner.
     For a time he was afraid of being dropped; then he grew
angry, but he knew better than to struggle; and then he began to
think. The first thing was to send back word to Baloo and
Bagheera, for, at the pace the monkeys were going, he knew his
friends would be left far behind. It was useless to look down,
for he could see only the top sides of the branches, so he
stared upward and saw, far away in the blue, Rann, the Kite,
balancing and wheeling as he kept watch over the jungle waiting
for things to die. Rann noticed that the monkeys were carrying
something, and dropped a few hundred yards to find out whether
their load was good to eat. He whistled with surprise when he
saw Mowgli being dragged up to a tree-top, and heard him give
the Kite call for "We be of one blood, thou and I." The waves
of the branches closed over the boy, but Rann balanced away
to the next tree 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 the Council Rock."
     "In whose name, Brother?" Rann had never seen Mowgli
before, though of course he had heard of him.
     "Mowgli, the Frog. Man-cub they call me! Mark my tra --
il!"
     The last words were shrieked as he was being swung through
the air, but Rann nodded, and rose up till he looked no bigger
than a speck of dust, and there he hung, watching with his
telescope eyes the swaying of the tree-tops as Mowgli's escort
whirled along.
     "They never go far," he said with a chuckle. "They never do
what they set out to do. Always pecking at new things are the
Bandar-log. This time, if I have any eyesight, they have pecked
down trouble for themselves, for Baloo is no fledgling and
Bagheera can, as I know, kill more than goats."
     Then he rocked on his wings, his feet gathered up under
him, and waited.
     Meanwhile, Baloo and Bagheera were furious with rage and
grief. Bagheera climbed as he had never climbed before, but the
branches broke beneath his weight, and he slipped down, his
claws full of bark.
     "Why didst thou not warn the man-cub!" he roared to poor
Baloo, who had set off at a clumsy trot in the hope of
overtaking the monkeys. "What was the use of half slaying him
with blows if thou didst not warn him?"
     "Haste! O haste! We -- we may catch them yet!" Baloo
panted.
     "At that speed! It would not tire a wounded cow. Teacher of
the Law, cub-beater -- a mile of that rolling to and fro would
burst thee open. Sit still and think! Make a plan. This is no
time for chasing. They may drop him if we follow too close."
     "Arrula! Whoo! They may have dropped him already, being
tired of carrying him. Who can trust the Bandar-log? Put dead
bats on my head! Give me black bones to eat! Roll me into the
hives of the wild bees that I may be stung to death, and bury me
with the hyena; for I am the most miserable of bears! Arulala!
Wahooa! O Mowgli, Mowgli! Why did I not warn thee against the
Monkey Folk instead of breaking thy head? Now perhaps I may have
knocked the day's lesson out of his mind, and he will be alone
in the jungle without the Master Words!"
     Baloo clasped his paws over his ears and rolled to and fro,
moaning.
     "At least he gave me all the Words correctly a little time
ago," said Bagheera, impatiently. "Baloo, thou hast neither
memory nor respect. What would the jungle think if I, the Black
Panther, curled myself up like Ikki, the Porcupine, and howled?"
     "What do I care what the jungle thinks? He may be dead by
now."
     "Unless and until they drop him from the branches in sport,
or kill him out of idleness, I have no fear for the man-cub. He
is wise and well-taught, 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, and they,
because they live in trees, have no fear of any of our people."
Bagheera licked his one fore paw thoughtfully.
     "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 Elephant, says: 'To each his own fear'; and
they, the Bandar-log, fear Kaa, the Rock Snake. He can climb as
well as they can. He steals the young monkeys in the night. The
mere whisper of his name makes their wicked tails cold. Let us
go to Kaa."
     "What will he do for us? He is not of our tribe, being
footless and with most evil eyes," said Bagheera.
     "He is very old and very cunning. Above all, he is always
hungry," said Baloo, hopefully." Promise him many goats."
     "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.
     "Then in that case, thou and I together, old hunter, may
make him see reason." Here Baloo rubbed his faded brown shoulder
against the panther, and they went off to look for Kaa,
the Rock Python.
     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 the last ten days changing his skin, and now
he was very splendid -- darting his big blunt-nosed head along
the ground, and twisting the thirty feet of his body into
fantastic knots and curves, and licking his lips as he thought
of his dinner to come.
     "He has not eaten," said Baloo, with a grunt of relief, as
soon as he saw the beautifully mottled brown and yellow jacket.
"Be careful, Bagheera! He is always a little blind after he has
changed his skin, and very quick to strike."
     Kaa was not a poison snake -- in fact he rather despised
the Poison Snakes for cowards; but his strength lay in his hug,
and when he had once lapped his huge coils round anybody there
was no more to be said. "Good hunting!" cried Baloo, sitting up
on his haunches. Like all snakes of his breed Kaa was rather
deaf, and did not hear the call at first. Then he curled up
ready for any accident, his head lowered.
     "Good hunting for us all," he answered. "Oho, Baloo, what
dost thou do here? Good hunting, Bagheera. One of us at least
needs food. Is there any news of game afoot? A doe now, or even a
young buck? I am as empty as a dried well."
     "We are hunting," said Baloo, carelessly. He knew that you
must not hurry Kaa. He is too big.
     "Give me permission to come with you," said Kaa. "A blow
more or less is nothing to thee, Bagheera or Baloo, but I -- I
have to wait and wait for days in a wood path and climb half a
night on the mere chance of a young ape. Pss naw! The branches
are not what they were when I was young. Rotten twigs and dry
boughs are they all."
     "Maybe thy great weight has something to do with the
matter," said Baloo.
     "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 very near to falling on my last hunt,
-- very near indeed, -- and the noise of my slipping, for my
tail was not tight wrapped round the tree, waked the Bandar-log,
and they called me most evil names."
     " 'Footless, yellow earthworm,' " said Bagheera under his
whiskers, as though he were trying to remember something.
     "Sssss! Have they ever called me that?" said Kaa.
     "Something of that kind it was that they shouted to us last
moon, but we never noticed them. They will say anything -- even
that thou hast lost all thy teeth, and dare not face anything
bigger than a kid, because (they are indeed shameless, these
Bandar-log) -- because thou art afraid of the he-goats' horns,"
Bagheera went on sweetly.
     Now a snake, especially a wary old python like Kaa, very
seldom shows that he is angry, but Baloo and Bagheera could see
the big swallowing muscles on either side of Kaa's throat ripple
and bulge.
     "The Bandar-log have shifted their grounds," he said,
quietly. "When I came up into the sun to-day I heard them
whooping among the tree-tops."
     "It -- it is the Bandar-log that we follow now," said
Baloo; but the words stuck in his throat, for this was the first
time in his memory that one of the Jungle People had owned to
being interested in the doings of the monkeys.
     "Beyond doubt, then, it is no small thing that takes two
such hunters -- leaders in their own jungle, I am certain -- on
the trail of the Bandar-log," Kaa replied, courteously, as he
swelled with curiosity.
     "Indeed," Baloo began, "I am no more than the old, and
sometimes very foolish, Teacher of the Law to the Seeonee
wolf-cubs, and Bagheera here --"
     "Is Bagheera," said the Black Panther, and his jaws shut
with a snap, for he did not believe in being humble. "The
trouble is this, Kaa. Those nut-stealers and pickers of
palm-leaves have stolen away our man-cub, of whom thou hast
perhaps heard."
     "I heard some news from Ikki (his quills make him
presumptuous) of a man-thing that was entered into a wolf-pack,
but I did not believe. Ikki is full of stories half heard and
very badly told."
     "But it is true. He is such a man-cub as never was," said
Baloo. "The best and wisest and boldest of man-cubs. My own
pupil, who shall make the name of Baloo famous through all the
jungles; and besides I -- we -- love him, Kaa."
     "Ts! Ts!" said Kaa, shaking his head to and fro. "I have
also known what love is. There are tales I could tell that --"
     "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."
     "They fear me alone. They have good reason," said Kaa."
Chattering, foolish, vain -- vain, foolish, and chattering --
are the monkeys. But a man-thing in their hands is in no good
luck. They grow tired of the nuts they pick, and throw them
down. They carry a branch half a day, meaning to do great things
with it, and then snap it in two. That manling is not to be
envied. They called me also -- 'yellow fish,' was it not?"
     "Worm -- worm -- earthworm," said Bagheera; "as well as
other things which I cannot now say for shame."
     "We must remind them to speak well of their master.
Aaa-sssh! We must help their wandering memories. Now, whither
went they with thy cub?"
     "The jungle alone knows. Toward the sunset, I believe,"
said Baloo. "We had thought that thou wouldst know, Kaa."
     "I? How? I take them when they come in my way, but I do not
hunt the Bandar-log -- or frogs -- or green scum on a
water-hole, for that matter."
     "Up, up! Up, up! Hillo! Illo! Illo! Look up, Baloo of the
Seeonee Wolf Pack!"
     Baloo looked up to see where the voice came from, and there
was Rann, the Kite, sweeping down with the sun shining on the
upturned flanges of his wings. It was near Rann's bedtime, but he
had ranged all over the jungle looking for the bear, and
missed him in the thick foliage.
     "What is it?" said Baloo.
     "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 -- to the Cold Lairs. They may stay there for
a night, or ten nights, or an hour. I have told the bats to
watch through the dark time. That is my message. Good hunting,
all you below!"
     "Full gorge and a deep sleep to you, Rann!" cried Bagheera.
"I will remember thee in my next kill, and put aside the head
for thee alone, O best of kites!"
     "It is nothing. It is nothing. The boy held the Master
Word. I could have done no less," and Rann circled up again to
his roost.
     "He has not forgotten to use his tongue," said Baloo, with
a chuckle of pride. "To think of one so young remembering the
Master Word for the birds while he was being pulled across
trees!"
     "It was most firmly driven into him," said Bagheera. "But
I am proud of him, and now we must go to the Cold Lairs."
     They all knew where that place was, but few of the Jungle
People ever went there, 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 have once used. The wild boar
will, but the hunting-tribes do not. Besides, the monkeys lived
there as much as they could be said to live anywhere, and no
self-respecting animal would come within eye-shot of it except
in times of drouth, when the half-ruined tanks and reservoirs
held a little water.
     "It is half a night's journey -- at full speed," said
Bagheera. Baloo looked very serious. "I will go as fast as I
can," he said, anxiously.
     "We dare not wait for thee. Follow, Baloo. We must go on
the quick-foot -- Kaa and I."
     "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 they left him to come on later, while Bagheera
hurried forward, at the rocking panther-canter. Kaa said
nothing, but, strive as Bagheera might, the huge Rock Python
held level with him. When they came to a hill-stream, Bagheera
gained, because he bounded across while Kaa swam, his head and
two feet of his neck clearing the water, but on level ground
Kaa made up the distance.
     "By the Broken Lock that freed me," said Bagheera, when
twilight had fallen, "thou art no slow-goer."
     "I am hungry," said Kaa. "Besides, they called me speckled
frog."
     "Worm -- earthworm, and yellow to boot."
     "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.
     In the Cold Lairs the Monkey People were not thinking of
Mowgli's friends at all. They had brought the boy to the Lost
City, and were very pleased with themselves for the time. Mowgli
had never seen an indian city before, and though this was almost
a heap of ruins it seemed very wonderful 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 gates where the
last splinters of wood hung to the worn, rusted hinges. Trees
had grown into and out of the walls; the battlements were
tumbled down and decayed, and wild creepers hung out of the
windows of the towers on the walls in bushy hanging clumps.
     A great roofless palace crowned the hill, and the marble of
the courtyards and the fountains was split and stained with red
and green, and the very cobblestones in the courtyard where the
king's elephants used to live had been thrust up and apart by
grasses and young trees. From the palace you could see the rows
and rows of roofless houses that made up the city, looking like
empty honeycombs filled with blackness; the shapeless block of
stone that had been an idol in the square where four roads met;
the pits and dimples at street corners where the public wells
once stood, and the shattered domes of temples with wild figs
sprouting on their sides.
     The monkeys called the place their city, and pretended to
despise the Jungle People because they lived in the forest. And
yet they never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to
use them. They would sit in circles on the hall of the king's
council-chamber, and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men; or
they would run in and out of the roofless houses and collect
pieces of plaster and old bricks in a corner, and forget where
they had hidden them, and fight and cry in scuffling crowds, and
then break off to play up and down the terraces of the king's
garden, where they would shake the rose-trees and the oranges
in sport to see the fruit and flowers fall. They explored
all the passages and dark tunnels in the palace and the
hundreds of little dark rooms; but they never remembered what
they had seen and what they had not, and so drifted about in
ones and twos or crowds, telling one another that they were
doing as men did. They drank at the tanks and made the water all
muddy, and then they fought over it, and then they would all
rush together in mobs and shout: "There are none in the jungle
so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as the
Bandar-log." Then all would begin again till they grew tired of
the city and went back to the tree-tops, hoping the Jungle
People would notice them.
     Mowgli, who had been trained under the Law of the Jungle,
did not like or understand this kind of life. The monkeys
dragged him into the Cold Lairs late in the afternoon, and
instead of going to sleep, as Mowgli would have done after a
long journey, they joined hands and danced about and sang their
foolish songs.
     One of the monkeys made a speech, and told his companions
that Mowgli's capture marked a new thing in the history of the
Bandar-log, for Mowgli was going to show them how to weave
sticks and canes together as a protection against rain
and cold. Mowgli picked up some creepers and began to work
them in and out, and the monkeys tried to imitate; but in a very
few minutes they lost interest and began to pull their friends'
tails or jump up and down on all fours, coughing.
     "I want to eat," said Mowgli. "I am a stranger in this part
of the jungle. Bring me food, or give me leave to hunt here."
     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 go back with what was left of the fruit.
Mowgli was sore and angry as well as hungry and he roamed
through the empty city giving the Strangers' Hunting Call from
time to time, but no one answered him, and Mowgli felt that he
had reached a very bad place indeed.
     "All that Baloo has said about the Bandar-log is true," he
thought to himself. "They have no Law, no Hunting Call, and no
leaders -- nothing but foolish words and little picking,
thievish hands. So if I am starved or killed here, it will be
all my own fault. But I must try to return to my own jungle.
Baloo will surely beat me, but that is better than chasing silly
rose-leaves with the Bandar-log."
     But 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 to make him grateful. He set his
teeth and said nothing, but went with the shouting monkeys to a
terrace above the red sand-stone reservoirs that were half full
of rain-water. There was a ruined summer-house of white marble
in 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 passage from the palace by which the queens used to
enter; but the walls were made of screens of marble tracery --
beautiful, milk-white fretwork, set with agates and cornelians
and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the
hill it shone through the openwork, casting shadows on the
ground like black-velvet embroidery.
     Sore, sleepy, and hungry as he was, Mowgli could not help
laughing when the Bandar-log began, twenty at a time, to tell
him how great and wise and strong and gentle they were, and how
foolish he was to wish to leave them. "We are great. We are
free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all
the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true," they
shouted. "Now as you are a new listener and can carry our words
back to the Jungle People so that they may notice us in future,
we will tell you all about our most excellent selves."
     Mowgli made no objection, and the monkeys gathered by
hundreds and hundreds on the terrace to listen to their own
speakers singing the praises of the Bandar-log, and whenever a
speaker stopped for want of breath 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 all these people," he said to himself,
"and now they have the madness. Certainly this is dewanee -- the
madness. Do they never go to sleep? Now there is a cloud coming
to cover that moon. If it were only a big enough cloud I might
try to run away in the darkness. But I am tired."
     That same cloud was being watched by two good friends in
the ruined ditch below the city wall, for Bagheera and Kaa,
knowing well how dangerous the Monkey People were in large
numbers, did not wish to run any risks. The monkeys never fight
unless they are a hundred to one, and few in the jungle care for
those odds.
     "I will go to the west wall," Kaa whispered, "and come down
swiftly with the slope of the ground in my favour. They will not
throw themselves upon my back in their hundreds, but --"
     "I know it," said Bagheera. "Would that Baloo were here;
but we must do what we can. When that cloud covers the moon I
shall go to the terrace. They hold some sort of council there
over the boy."
     "Good hunting," said Kaa, grimly, and glided away to the
west wall. That happened to be the least ruined of any, and the
big snake was delayed a while 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 feet on the terrace. The
Black Panther had raced up the slope almost without a sound, and
was striking -- he knew better than to waste time in biting --
right and left among the monkeys, who were seated round Mowgli
in circles fifty and sixty deep. There was a howl of fright and
rage, and then as Bagheera tripped 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
five or six laid hold of Mowgli, dragged him up the wall of the
summer-house, and pushed him through the hole of the broken
dome. A man-trained boy would have been badly bruised, for the
fall was a good ten feet, but Mowgli fell as Baloo had taught
him to fall, and landed light.
     "Stay there," shouted the monkeys, "till we have killed thy
friend. Later we will play with thee, if the Poison People leave
thee alive."
     "We be of one blood, ye and I," said Mowgli, quickly giving
the Snake's Call. He could hear rustling and hissing in the
rubbish all round him, and gave the Call a second time to make
sure.
     "Down hoods all," said half a dozen low voices. Every old
ruin in India becomes sooner or later a dwelling-place of
snakes, and the old summer-house was alive with cobras. "Stand
still, Little Brother, lest thy feet do us harm."
     Mowgli stood as quietly as he could, peering through the
openwork and listening to the furious din of the fight round the
Black Panther -- the yells and chatterings and scufflings, and
Bagheera's deep, hoarse cough as he backed and bucked and
twisted and plunged under the heaps of his enemies. For the
first time since he was born, Bagheera was fighting for his
life.
     "Baloo must be at hand; Bagheera would not
have come alone," Mowgli thought; and then he called aloud: "To
the tank, Bagheera! Roll to the watertanks! Roll and plunge! Get
to the water!"
     Bagheera heard, and the cry that told him Mowgli was safe
gave him new courage. He worked his way desperately, inch by
inch, straight for the reservoirs, hitting in silence.
     Then from the ruined wall nearest the jungle rose up the
rumbling war-shout of Baloo. The old bear had done his best, but
he could not come before. "Bagheera," he shouted, "I am here! I
climb! I haste! Ahuwora! The stones slip under my feet! Wait my
coming, O most infamous Bandar-log!"
     He panted up the terrace only to disappear to the head in
a wave of monkeys, but he threw himself squarely on his
haunches, and spreading out his fore paws, hugged as many as he
could hold, and then began to hit with a regular bat-bat-bat,
like the flipping strokes of a paddle-wheel.
     A crash and a splash told Mowgli that Bagheera had fought
his way to the tank, where the monkeys could not follow. The
panther lay gasping for breath, his head just out of water,
while the monkeys stood three deep on the red stone steps,
dancing up and down with rage, ready to spring upon him from
all sides if he came out to help Baloo. It was then that
Bagheera lifted up his dripping chin, and in despair gave
the Snake's Call for protection, -- "We be of one blood, ye and
I," -- for he believed that Kaa had turned tail at the last
minute. Even Baloo, half smothered under the monkeys on the edge
of the terrace, could not help chuckling as he heard the big
Black Panther asking for help.
     Kaa had only just worked his way over the west wall,
landing with a wrench that dislodged a coping-stone into the
ditch. He had no intention of losing any advantage of the
ground, and coiled and uncoiled himself once or twice, to be
sure that every foot of his long body was in working order.
     All that while the fight with Baloo went on, and the
monkeys yelled in the tank round Bagheera, and Mang, the Bat,
flying to and fro, carried the news of the great battle over the
jungle, till even Hathi, the Wild Elephant, trumpeted, and, far
away, scattered bands of the Monkey Folk woke and came leaping
along the tree-roads to help their comrades in the Cold Lairs,
and the noise of the fight roused all the day-birds for miles
round.
     Then Kaa came straight, quickly, and anxious to kill. The
fighting strength of a python is in the driving blow of his
head, backed by all the strength and weight of his body. If you
can imagine a lance, or a battering-ram, or a hammer, weighing
nearly half a ton driven by a cool, quiet mind living in the
handle of it, you can imagine roughly what Kaa was like when he
fought. A python four or five feet long can knock a man down if
he hits him fairly in the chest, and Kaa was thirty feet long,
as you know. His first stroke was delivered into the heart of
the crowd round Baloo -- was sent home with shut mouth in
silence, and there was no need of a second. The monkeys
scattered with cries of "Kaa! It is Kaa! Run! Run!"
     Generations of monkeys have been scared into good behaviour
by the stories their elders told them of Kaa, the night-thief,
who could slip along the branches as quietly as moss grows, and
steal away the strongest monkey that ever lived; of old Kaa, who
could make himself look so like a dead branch or a rotten stump
that the wisest were deceived till the branch caught them, and
then --
     Kaa was everything the monkeys feared in the jungle, for
none of them knew the limits of his power, none of them could
look him in the 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, and Baloo drew a deep breath of
relief His fur was much thicker than Bagheera's, but he had
suffered sorely in the fight. Then Kaa opened his mouth for the
first time and spoke one long hissing word, and the far-away
monkeys, hurrying to the defense of the Cold Lairs, stayed
where they were, cowering, till the loaded branches bent and
cracked under them. The monkeys on the walls and the empty
houses stopped their cries, and in the stillness that fell upon
the city Mowgli heard Bagheera shaking his wet sides as he came
up from the tank.
     Then the clamour broke out again. The monkeys leaped higher
up the walls; they clung round the necks of the big stone idols
and shrieked as they skipped along the battlements; while
Mowgli, dancing in the summer-house, put his eye to the
screenwork and hooted owl-fashion between his front teeth, to
show his derision and contempt.
     "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."
     "They will not move till I order them. Stay you sssso!" Kaa
hissed and the city was silent once more. "I could not come
before, brother, but, I think I heard thee call" -- this was to
Bagheera.
     "I -- I may have cried out in the battle," Bagheera
answered. "Baloo, art thou hurt?"
     "I am not sure that they have not pulled 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."
     "No matter. Where is the manling?"
     "Here, in a trap. I cannot climb out," cried Mowgli. The
curve of the broken dome was above his head.
     "Take him away. He dances like Mao, the Peacock. He will
crush our young," said the cobras inside.
     "Hah!" said Kaa, with a chuckle, "he has friends
everywhere, this manling. Stand back, Manling; and hide you, O
Poison People. I break down the wall."
     Kaa looked carefully till he found a discoloured crack in
the marble tracery showing a weak spot, made two or three light
taps with his head to get the distance, and then lifting up six
feet of his body clear of the ground, sent home half a dozen
full-power, smashing blows, nose-first. The screenwork broke and
fell away in a cloud of dust and rubbish, and Mowgli leaped
through the opening and flung himself between Baloo and Bagheera
-- an arm round each big neck.
     "Art thou hurt?" said Baloo, hugging him softly.
     "I am sore, hungry, and not a little bruised; but, oh, they
have handled ye grievously, my Brothers! Ye bleed."
     "Others also," said Bagheera, licking his lips and looking
at the monkey-dead on the terrace and round the tank.
     "It is nothing, it is nothing if thou art safe, O my pride
of all little frogs!" whimpered Baloo.
     "Of that we shall judge later," said Bagheera, in a dry
voice that Mowgli did not at all like. "But here is Kaa, to whom
we owe the battle and thou owest thy life. Thank him according
to our customs, Mowgli."
     Mowgli turned and saw the great python's head swaying a
foot above his own.
     "So this is the manling," said Kaa. "Very soft is his skin,
and he is not so unlike the Bandar-log. Have a care, Manling,
that I do not mistake thee for a monkey some twilight when I
have newly changed my coat."
     "We be of one blood, thou and I," Mowgli answered. "I take
my life from thee, to-night. My kill shall be thy kill if ever
thou art hungry, O Kaa."
     "All thanks, Little Brother," said Kaa, though his eyes
twinkled. "And what may so bold a hunter kill? I ask that I may
follow when next he goes abroad."
     "I kill nothing, -- I am too little, -- but I drive goats
toward such as can use them. When thou art empty come to me and
see if I speak the truth. I have some skill in these [he held
out his hands], and if ever thou 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."
     "Well said," growled Baloo, for Mowgli had returned thanks
very prettily. The python dropped his head lightly for a minute
on Mowgli's shoulder. "A brave heart and a courteous tongue,"
said he. "They shall carry thee far through the jungle, Manling.
But now go hence quickly with thy friends. Go and sleep, for the
moon sets, and what follows it is not well that thou shouldst
see."
     The moon was sinking behind the hills and the lines of
trembling monkeys huddled together on the walls and battlements
looked like ragged, shaky fringes of things. Baloo went down
to the tank for a drink, and Bagheera began to put his fur in
order, as Kaa glided out into the center of the terrace and
brought his jaws together with a ringing snap that drew all the
monkeys' eyes upon him.
     "The moon sets," he said. "Is there yet light to see?"
     From the walls came a moan like the wind in the tree-tops:
"We see, O Kaa!"
     "Good! Begins now the Dance -- the Dance of the Hunger of
Kaa. Sit still and watch."
     He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head
from right to left. Then he began making loops and figures of
eight with his body, and soft, oozy triangles that melted into
squares and five-side figures, and coiled mounds, never resting,
never hurrying, and never stopping his low, humming song. It
grew darker and darker, till at last the dragging, shifting
coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales.
     Baloo and Bagheera stood still as stone, growling in their
throats, their neck-hair bristling, and Mowgli watched and
wondered.
     "Bandar-log," said the voice of Kaa at last,
"can ye stir foot or hand without my order? Speak!"
     "Without thy order we cannot stir foot or hand, O Kaa!"
     "Good! Come all one pace nearer to me."
     The lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly, and
Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with them.
     "Nearer!" hissed Kaa, and they all moved again.
     Mowgli laid his hands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them
away, and the two great beasts started as though they had been
waked from a dream.
     "Keep thy hand on my shoulder," Bagheera whispered. "Keep
it there, or I must go back -- must go back to Kaa. Aah!"
     "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.
     "Whoof!" said Baloo, when he stood under the still trees
again. "Never more will I make an ally of Kaa," and he shook
himself all over.
     "He knows more than we," said Bagheera, trembling. "In a
little time, had I stayed, I should have walked down his
throat."
     "Many will walk that road before the moon rises again,"
said Baloo. "He will have good hunting -- after his own
fashion."
     "But what was the meaning of it all?" said Mowgli, who did
not know anything of a python's powers of fascination. "I saw no
more than a big snake making foolish circles till the dark came.
And his nose was all sore. Ho! Ho!"
     "Mowgli," said Bagheera, angrily, "his nose was sore on thy
account; as my ears and sides and paws, and Baloo's neck and
shoulders are bitten on thy account. Neither Baloo nor Bagheera
will be able to hunt with pleasure for many days."
     "It is nothing," said Baloo; "we have the man-cub again."
     "True; but he has cost us most heavily in time which might
have been spent in good hunting, in wounds, in hair, -- I am
half plucked along my back, -- and last of all, in honour. For,
remember, Mowgli, I, who am the Black Panther, was forced to
call upon Kaa for protection, and Baloo and I were both made
stupid as little birds by the Hunger-Dance. All this, Man-cub,
came of thy playing with the Bandar-log."
     "True; it is true," said Mowgli, sorrowfully. "I am an evil
man-cub, and my stomach is sad in me."
     "Mf! What says the Law of the Jungle, Baloo?"
     Baloo did not wish to bring Mowgli into any more trouble,
but he could not tamper with the Law, so he mumbled, "Sorrow
never stays punishment. But remember, Bagheera, he is very
little."
     "I will remember; but he has done mischief; and blows must
be dealt now. Mowgli, hast thou anything to say?"
     "Nothing. I did wrong. Baloo and thou art wounded. It is
just."
     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 a seven year-old boy they amounted to as severe a
beating as you could wish to avoid. When it was all over Mowgli
sneezed, and picked himself up without a word.
     "Now," said Bagheera, "jump on my back, Little Brother, and
we will go home."
     One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment
settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward.
     Mowgli laid his head down on Bagheera's back and slept so
deeply that he never waked when he was put down by Mother Wolf's
side in the home-cave.

ROAD-SONG OF THE BANDAR-LOG

Here 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?
Would n'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 grand and good,
Won by merely wishing we could.
         Now we're going to -- never mind,
         Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!


All the talk we ever have heard
Uttered 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!


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.

                                 "TIGER! TIGER!"

NOW we must go back to the last tale but one. When Mowgli left
the wolf's cave after the fight with the Pack at the Council
Rock, he went down to the plowed lands where the villagers
lived, but he would not stop there because it was too near to
the jungle, and he knew that he had made at least one bad enemy
at the Council. So he hurried on, keeping to the rough road that
ran down the valley, and followed it at a steady jog-trot for
nearly twenty miles, till he came to a country that he did not
know. The valley opened out into a great plain dotted
over with rocks and cut up by ravines. At one end stood a little
village, and at the other the thick jungle came down in a sweep
to the grazing-grounds, and stopped there as though it had been
cut off with a hoe. All over the plain, cattle and buffaloes
were grazing, and when the little boys in charge of the herds
saw Mowgli they shouted and ran away, and the yellow pariah dogs
that hang about every Indian village barked. Mowgli walked on,
for he was feeling hungry, and when he came to the village gate
he saw the big thorn-bush that was drawn up before the gate at
twilight, pushed to one side.
     "Umph!" he said, for he had come across more than one such
barricade in his night rambles after things to eat. "So men are
afraid of the People of the Jungle here also." He sat down by
the gate, and when a man came out he stood up, opened his mouth,
and pointed down it to show that he wanted food. The man stared
and ran back up the one street of the village shouting for the
priest, who was a big, fat man dressed in white, with a red and
yellow mark on his forehead. The priest came to the gate, and
with him at least a hundred people who stared and talked and
shouted and pointed at Mowgli.
     "They have no manners, these Men Folk,"
said Mowgli to himself. "Only the gray ape would behave as they
do." So he threw back his long hair and frowned at the crowd.
     "What is there to be afraid of?" said the priest. "Look at
the marks on his arms and legs. They are the bites of wolves. He
is but a wolf-child runaway from the jungle."
     Of course, in playing together, the cubs had often nipped
Mowgli harder than 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.
     "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 honour, Messua, he is not unlike thy boy
that was taken by the tiger."
     "Let me look," said a woman with heavy copper rings on her
wrists and ankles, and she peered at Mowgli under the palm of
her hand. "Indeed he is not. He is thinner, but he has the very
look of my boy."
     The priest was a clever man, and he knew that Messua was
wife to the richest villager in the place. So he looked up at
the sky for a minute, and said solemnly: "What the jungle has taken
the jungle has restored. Take the boy into thy house, my sister,
and forget not to honour the priest who sees so far into the
lives of men."
     "By the Bull that bought me," said Mowgli to himself, "but
all this talking is like another looking-over by the Pack! Well,
if I am a man, a man I must become."
     The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut,
where there was a red lacquered bedstead, a great earthen
grain-chest with curious raised patterns on it, half a dozen
copper cooking-pots, an image of a Hindu god in a little alcove,
and on the wall a real looking-glass, such as they sell at the
country fairs.
     She gave him a long drink of milk and some bread, and then
she laid her hand on his head and looked into his eyes; for she
thought perhaps that he might be her real son come back from the
jungle where the tiger had taken him. So she said: "Nathoo, O
Nathoo!" Mowgli did not show that he knew the name. "Dost thou
not remember the day when I gave thee thy new shoes?" She
touched his foot, and it was almost as hard as horn. "No," she
said sorrowfully; "those feet have never worn shoes, but thou
art very like my Nathoo, and thou shalt be my son."
     Mowgli was uneasy, because he had never
been under a roof before; but as he looked at the thatch, he saw
that he could tear it out any time if he wanted to get away, and
that the window had no fastenings. "What is the good of a man,"
he said to himself at last, "if he does not understand man's
talk? Now I am as silly and dumb as a man would be with us in
the jungle. I must learn their talk."
     It was not for fun that he had learned while he was with
the wolves to imitate the challenge of bucks in the jungle and
the grunt of the little wild pig. So as soon as Messua
pronounced a word Mowgli would imitate it almost perfectly, and
before dark he had learned the names of many things in the hut.
     There was a difficulty at bedtime, because Mowgli would not
sleep under anything that looked so like a panther-trap as that
hut, and when they shut the door he went through the window.
"Give him his will," said Messua's husband. "Remember he can
never till now have slept on a bed. If he is indeed sent in the
place of our son he will not run away."
     So Mowgli stretched himself in some long, clean grass at
the edge of the field, but before he had closed his eyes a soft
gray nose poked him under the chin.
     "Phew!" said Gray Brother (he was the eldest of Mother
Wolf's cubs). "This is a poor reward for following thee twenty
miles. Thou smellest of wood-smoke and cattle -- altogether like
a man already. Wake, Little Brother; I bring news."
     "Are all well in the jungle?" said Mowgli, hugging him.
     "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 he is badly singed. When he
returns he swears that he will lay thy bones in the Waingunga."
     "There are two words to that. I also have made a little
promise. But news is always good. I am tired tonight, -- very
tired with new things, Gray Brother, -- but bring me the news
always."
     "Thou wilt not forget that thou art a wolf? Men will not
make thee forget?" said Gray Brother, anxiously.
     "Never. I will always remember that I love thee and all in
our cave; but also I will always remember that I have been cast
out of the Pack."
     "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 I come down here again, I will wait for
thee in the bamboos at the edge of the grazing-ground."
     For three months after that night Mowgli hardly ever left
the village gate, he was so busy learning the ways and customs
of men. First he had to wear a cloth round him, which annoyed
him horribly; and then he had to learn about money, which he did
not in the least understand, and about plowing, of which he did
not see the use. Then the little children in the village made
him very angry. Luckily, the Law of the Jungle had taught him to
keep his temper, for in the jungle, life and food depend on
keeping your temper; but when they made fun of him because he
would not play games or fly kites, or because he mispronounced
some word, only the knowledge that it was unsportsmanlike to
kill little naked cubs kept him from picking them up and
breaking them in two.
     He did not know his own strength in the least. In the
jungle he knew he was weak compared with the beasts, but in the
village, people said he was as strong as a bull.
     And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that
caste makes between 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 their journey to the market at
Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a
low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded
him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey, too, and the
priest told Messua's husband that Mowgli had better be set to
work as soon as possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli
that he would have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and
herd them while they grazed. No one was more pleased than Mowgli;
and that night, because he had been appointed a servant of the
village, as it were, he went off to a circle that met every
evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree. It was
the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the
barbet (who knew all the gossip of the village), and old
Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and
smoked. The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches,
and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra
lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because
he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked,
and pulled at the big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into the
night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and
Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in
the jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the
circle bulged out of their heads. Most of the tales were about
animals, for the jungle was always at their door. The deer and
the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tiger
carried off a man at twilight, within sight of the village
gates.
     Mowgli, who naturally knew something about what they were
talking of, had to cover his face not to show that he was
laughing, while Buldeo, the Tower musket across his knees,
climbed on from one wonderful story to another, and Mowgli's
shoulders shook.
     Buldeo was explaining how the tiger that had carried away
Messua's son was a ghost-tiger, and his body was inhabited by
the ghost of a wicked old money-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 a riot when his
account-books were burned, and the tiger that I speak of he
limps, too, for the tracks of his pads are unequal."
     "True, true; that must be the truth," said the graybeards,
nodding together.
     "Are all these tales such cobwebs and moon-talk?" said
Mowgli. "That tiger limps because he was born lame, as every one
knows. To talk of the soul of a money-lender in a beast that
never had the courage of a jackal is child's talk."
     Buldeo was speechless with surprise for a moment, and the
head-man stared.
     "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 hundred rupees [$30] on his life. Better
still, do not talk when thy elders speak."
     Mowgli rose to go. "All the evening I have lain here
listening," he called back over his shoulder, "and, except once
or twice, Buldeo has not said one 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 he says he has
seen?"
     "It is full time that boy went to herding," said the
head-man, while Buldeo puffed and snorted at Mowgli's
impertinence.
     The custom of most Indian villages is for a few boys to
take the cattle and buffaloes out to graze in the early morning,
and bring them back at night; and the very cattle that would
trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged
and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to
their noses. So long as the boys keep with the herds they are
safe, for not even the tiger will charge a mob of cattle. But if
they straggle to pick flowers or hunt lizards, they are
sometimes carried off. Mowgli went through the village street in
the dawn, sitting on the back of Rama, the great herd bull; and
the slaty-blue buffaloes, with their long, backward-sweeping
horns and savage eyes, rose out of their byres, one by one, and
followed him, and Mowgli made it very clear to the children with
him that he was the master. He beat the buffaloes with a long
polished bamboo, and told Kamya, one of the boys, to graze the
cattle by themselves, while he went on with the buffaloes, and
to be very careful not to stray away from the herd.
     An Indian grazing-ground is all rocks and scrub and
tussocks and little ravines, among which the herds scatter and
disappear. The buffaloes generally keep to the pools and muddy
places, where they lie wallowing or basking in the warm mud for
hours. Mowgli drove them on to the edge of the plain where the
Waingunga River came out of the jungle; then he dropped from
Rama'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 meaning of this cattle-herding work?"
     "It is an order," said Mowgli. "I am a village herd for a
while. What news of Shere Khan?"
     "He has come back to this country, and has waited here a
long time for thee. Now he has gone off again, for the game is
scarce. But he means to kill thee."
     "Very good," said Mowgli. "So long as he is away do thou or
one of the brothers sit on that rock so that I can see thee as
I come out of the village. When he comes back wait for me in the
ravine by the dhak-tree in the center of the plain. We need not
walk into Shere Khan's mouth."
     Then Mowgli picked out a shady place, and lay down and
slept while the buffaloes grazed round him. Herding in India is
one of the laziest things in 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 seldom say
anything, but get down into the muddy pools one after another,
and work their way into the mud till only their noses and
staring china-blue eyes show above the surface, and there they
lie like logs. The sun makes the rocks dance in the heat,
and the herd-children hear one kite (never any more) whistling
almost out of sight overhead, and they know that if they
died, or a cow died that kite would sweep down, and the next
kite miles away would see him drop and follow, and the
next, and the next, and almost before they were dead there would
be a score of hungry kites come out of nowhere. Then they sleep
and wake and sleep again, and weave little baskets of dried
grass and put grasshoppers in them; or catch two
praying-mantises 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 near the wallows. Then they sing long,
long songs with odd native quavers at the 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 and
buffaloes, and put reeds into the men's hands, and pretend that
they are kings and the figures are their armies or that they are
gods to be worshiped. Then evening comes, and the children call,
and the buffaloes lumber up out of the sticky mud with noises
like gun-shots going off one after the other, and they all
string across the gray plain back to the twinkling village
lights.
     Day after day Mowgli would lead the buffaloes out to their
wallows, and day after day he would see Gray Brother's back a
mile and a half away across the plain (so he knew that Shere
Khan had not come back), and day after day he would lie on the
grass listening to the noise around him, and dreaming of old
days in the jungle. If Shere Khan had made a false step with
his lame paw up in the jungles by the Waingunga, Mowgli would
have heard him in those long still mornings.
     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 dhak-tree, which was all covered
with golden-red flowers. There sat Gray Brother, every bristle
on his back lifted.
     "He has hidden for a month to throw thee off thy guard. He
crossed the ranges last night with Tabaqui, hot-foot on thy
trail," said the wolf, panting.
     Mowgli frowned. "I am not afraid of Shere Khan, but Tabaqui
is very cunning."
     "Have no fear," said Gray Brother, licking his lips a
little. "I met Tabaqui in the dawn. Now he is telling all his
wisdom to the kites, but he told me everything before I broke
his back. Shere Khan's plan is to wait for thee at the village
gate this evening -- for thee and for no one else. He is lying
up now in the big dry ravine of the Waingunga."
     "Has he eaten to-day, or does he hunt empty?" said Mowgli,
for the answer meant life or death to him.
     "He killed at dawn, -- a pig -- and he has drunk too.
Remember, Shere Khan could never fast even for the sake of
revenge."
     "Oh! Fool, fool! What a cub's cub it is! Eaten and drunk
too, and he thinks that I shall wait till he has slept! Now,
where does he lie up? If there were but ten of us we might pull
him down as he lies. These buffaloes will not charge unless
they wind him, and I cannot speak their language. Can we get
behind his track so that they may smell it?"
     "He swam far down the Waingunga to cut that off," said Gray
Brother.
     "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 of the Waingunga. That opens out on
the plain not half a mile from here. I can take the herd round
through the jungle to the head of the ravine and then sweep down
-- but he would slink out at the foot. We must block that end.
Gray Brother, canst thou cut the herd in two for me?"
     "Not I, perhaps -- but I have brought a wise helper." Gray
Brother trotted off and dropped into a hole. Then there lifted
up a huge gray head that Mowgli knew well, and the hot air was
filled with the most desolate cry of all the jungle -- the
hunting-howl of a wolf at midday.
     "Akela! Akela!" said Mowgli, clapping his hands. "I might
have known that thou wouldst not forget me. We have a big work
in hand. Cut the herd in two, Akela. Keep the cows and
calves together, and the bulls and the plow-buffaloes by
themselves."
     The two wolves ran, ladies'-chain fashion, in and out of
the herd, which snorted and threw up its head and separated into
two clumps. In one the cow-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 the life out of him. In
the other the bulls and the young bulls snorted and stampeded;
but, though they looked more imposing, they were much less
dangerous, for they had no calves to protect. No six men could
have divided the herd so neatly.
     "What orders!" panted Akela. "They are trying to join
again."
     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 drive them into the foot of the ravine."
     "How far?" said Gray Brother, panting and snapping.
     "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 the bulls far
to the left.
     "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 wilder work than driving black-buck.
Didst thou think these creatures could move so swiftly?" Mowgli
called.
     "I have -- have hunted these too in my time," gasped Akela
in the dust. "Shall I turn them into the jungle?"
     "Ay, turn! Swiftly turn them. Rama is mad with rage. Oh, if
I could only tell him what I need of him to-day!"
     The bulls were turned to the right this time, and crashed
into the standing thicket. The other herd-children, watching
with the cattle half a mile away, hurried to the village as fast
as their legs could carry them, crying that the buffaloes had
gone mad and run away.
     But Mowgli's plan was simple enough. All he wanted to do
was to make a big circle uphill and get at the head of the
ravine, and then take the bulls down it and catch Shere Khan
between the bulls and the cows, for he knew that after a meal
and a full drink Shere Khan would not be in any condition to
fight or to clamber up the sides of the ravine. He was
soothing the buffaloes now by voice, and Akela had dropped
far to the rear, only whimpering once or twice to hurry
the rear-guard. It was a long, long circle, for they did
not wish to get too near the ravine and give Shere Khan
warning. At last Mowgli rounded up the bewildered herd at
the head of the ravine on a grassy patch that sloped steeply
down to the ravine itself. From that height you could see
across the tops of the trees down to the plain below:
but what Mowgli looked at was the sides of the ravine, and he
saw with a great deal of satisfaction that they ran nearly
straight up and down, and the vines and creepers that hung over
them would give no foothold to a tiger who wanted to get out.
     "Let them breathe, Akela," he said, holding up his hand.
"They have not winded him yet. Let them breathe. I must tell
Shere Khan who comes. We have him in the trap."
     He put his hands to his mouth and shouted down the ravine,
-- it was almost like shouting down a tunnel, -- and the echoes
jumped from rock to rock.
     After a long time there came back the drawling, sleepy
snarl of a full-fed tiger just awakened.
     "Who calls?" said Shere Khan, and a splendid peacock
fluttered up out of the ravine, screeching.
     "I, Mowgli. Cattle-thief, it is time to come to the Council
Rock! Down -- hurry them down, Akela. Down, Rama, down!"
     The herd paused for an instant at the edge of the slope,
but Akela gave tongue in the full hunting-yell, and they pitched
over one after the other just as steamers shoot rapids, the sand
and stones spurting up round them. Once started, there was no
chance of stopping, and before they were fairly in the bed of
the ravine Rama winded Shere Khan and bellowed.
     "Ha! Ha!" said Mowgli, on his back. "Now thou knowest!" and
the torrent of black horns, foaming muzzles, and staring eyes
whirled down the ravine like boulders in flood-time; the weaker
buffaloes being shouldered out to the sides of the ravine where
they tore through the creepers. They knew what the business was
before them -- the terrible charge of the buffalo-herd, against
which no tiger can hope to stand. Shere Khan heard the thunder
of their hoofs, picked himself up, and lumbered down the ravine,
looking from side to side for some way of escape, but the walls
of the ravine were straight, and he had to keep on, heavy
with his dinner and his drink, willing to do anything rather
than fight. The herd splashed through the pool he had just
left, bellowing till the narrow cut rang. Mowgli heard an
answering bellow from the foot of the ravine, saw Shere
Khan turn (the tiger knew if the worse came to the worst it was
better to meet the bulls than the cows with their calves), and
then Rama tripped, stumbled, and went on again over something
soft, and, with the bulls at his heels, crashed full into the
other herd, while the weaker buffaloes were lifted clean off
their feet by the shock of the meeting. That charge carried both
herds out into the plain, goring and stamping and snorting.
Mowgli watched his time, and slipped off Rama's neck, laying
about him right and left with his stick.
     "Quick, Akela! Break them up. Scatter them, or they will be
fighting one another. Drive them away, Akela. Hai, Rama! Hai!
hai! hai! my children. Softly now, softly! It is all over."
     Akela and Gray Brother ran to and fro nipping the
buffaloes' legs, and though the herd wheeled once to charge up
the ravine again, Mowgli managed to turn Rama, and the others
followed him to the wallows.
     Shere Khan needed no more trampling. He was dead, and the
kites were coming for him already.
     "Brothers, that was a dog's death," said Mowgli, feeling
for the knife he always carried in a sheath round his neck now
that he lived with men. "But he would never have shown fight.
His hide will look well on the Council Rock. We must get to work
swiftly."
     A boy trained among men would never have dreamed of
skinning a ten-foot tiger alone, but Mowgli knew better than any
one else how an animal's skin is fitted on, and how it can be
taken off. But it was hard work, and Mowgli slashed and tore and
grunted for an hour, while the wolves lolled out their tongues,
or came forward and tugged as he ordered them.
     Presently a hand fell on his shoulder, and looking up he
saw Buldeo with the Tower musket. The children had told the
village about the buffalo stampede, and Buldeo went out angrily,
only too anxious to correct Mowgli for not taking better care of
the herd. The wolves dropped out of sight as soon as they saw
the man coming.
     "What is this folly?" said Buldeo, angrily. "To think that
thou canst skin a tiger! Where did the buffaloes kill him? It is
the Lame Tiger too, and there is a hundred rupees on his head.
Well, well, we will overlook thy letting the herd run off, and
perhaps I will give thee one of the rupees of the reward when I
have taken the skin to Khanhiwara." He fumbled in his waist-cloth
for flint and steel, and stooped down to singe Shere Khan's
whiskers. Most native hunters singe a tiger's whiskers to prevent
his ghost haunting them.
     "Hum!" said Mowgli, half to himself as he ripped back the
skin of a fore paw. "So thou wilt take the hide to Khanhiwara
for the reward, and perhaps give me one rupee? Now it is in my
mind that I need the skin for my own use. Heh! old man, take
away that fire!"
     "What talk is this to the chief hunter of the village? Thy
luck and the stupidity of thy buffaloes have helped thee to this
kill. The tiger has just fed, or he would have gone twenty miles
by this time. Thou canst not even skin him properly, little
beggar-brat, and forsooth I, Buldeo, must be told not to singe
his whiskers. Mowgli, I will not give thee one anna of the
reward, but only a very big beating. Leave the carcass!"
     "By the Bull that bought me," said Mowgli, who was trying
to get at the shoulder, "must I stay babbling to an old ape all
noon? Here, Akela, this man plagues me."
     Buldeo, who was still stooping over Shere Khan's head,
found himself sprawling on the grass, with a gray wolf standing
over him, while Mowgli went on skinning as though he were alone
in all India.
     "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 war between this lame tiger and myself -- a very
old war, and -- I have won."
     To do Buldeo justice, if he had been ten years younger he
would have taken his chance with Akela had he met the wolf in
the woods, but a wolf who obeyed the orders of this boy who had
private wars with man-eating tigers was not a common animal. It
was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, thought Buldeo, and he
wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protect him. He
lay as still as still, expecting every minute to see Mowgli turn
into a tiger, too.
     "Maharaj! Great King," he said at last, in a husky whisper.
     "Yes," said Mowgli, without turning his head, chuckling a
little.
     "I am an old man. I did not know that thou wast anything
more than a herd-boy. May I rise up and go away, Or will thy
servant tear me to pieces?"
     "Go, and peace go with thee. Only, another time do not
meddle with my game. Let him go, Akela."
     Buldeo hobbled away to the village as fast as he could,
looking back over his shoulder in case Mowgli should change into
something terrible. When he got to the village he told a tale of
magic and enchantment and sorcery that made the priest look very
grave.
     Mowgli went on with his work, but it was nearly twilight
before he and the wolves had drawn the great gay skin clear of
the body.
     "Now we must hide this and take the buffaloes home! Help me
to herd them, Akela."
     The herd rounded up in the misty twilight, and when they
got near the village Mowgli saw lights, and heard the conches
and bells in the temple blowing and banging. Half the village
seemed to be waiting for him by the gate. "That is because I
have killed Shere Khan," he said to himself; but a shower of
stones whistled about his ears, and the villagers shouted:
"Sorcerer! Wolf's brat! Jungle-demon! Go away! Get hence quickly,
or the priest will turn thee into a wolf again. Shoot, Buldeo, shoot!"
     The old Tower musket went off with a bang, and a young
buffalo bellowed in pain.
     "More sorcery!" shouted the villagers. "He can turn
bullets. Buldeo, that was thy buffalo."
     "Now what is this?" said Mowgli, bewildered, as the stones
flew thicker.
     "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."
     "Wolf! Wolf's cub! Go away!" shouted the priest, waving a
sprig of the sacred tulsi plant.
     "Again? Last time it was because I was a man. This time it
is because I am a wolf. Let us go, Akela."
     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 a beast 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's death."
     "Come back, Messua!" shouted the crowd. "Come back, or we
will stone thee."
     Mowgli laughed a little short ugly laugh, for a stone had
hit him in the mouth. "Run back, Messua. This is one of the
foolish tales they tell under the 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 their brickbats. I am
no wizard, Messua. Farewell!
     "Now, once more, Akela," he cried. "Bring the herd."
     The buffaloes were anxious enough to get to the village.
They hardly needed Akela's yell, but charged through the gate
like a whirlwind, scattering the crowd right and left.
     "Keep count!" shouted Mowgli, scornfully. "It may be that
I have stolen one of 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 and hunt you up and
down your street."
     He turned on his heel and walked away with the Lone Wolf;
and as he looked up 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 the village, for Messua was
kind to me."
     When the moon rose over the plain, making it look all
milky, the horrified villagers saw Mowgli, with two wolves at
his heels and a bundle on his head, trotting across at the
steady wolf's trot that eats up the long miles like fire. Then they
banged the temple bells and blew the conches louder than ever;
and Messua cried, and Buldeo embroidered the story of his
adventures in the jungle, till he ended by saying that Akela
stood up on his hind legs and talked like a man.
     The moon was just going down when Mowgli and the two wolves
came to the hill of the Council Rock, and they stopped at Mother
Wolf's cave.
     "They have cast me out from the Man Pack,
Mother," shouted Mowgli, "but I come with the hide of Shere Khan
to keep my word." Mother Wolf walked stiffly from the cave with
the cubs behind her, and her eyes glowed as she saw the skin.
     "I told him on that day, when he crammed his head and
shoulders into this cave, hunting for thy life, Little Frog --
I told him that the hunter would be the hunted. It is well
done."
     "Little Brother, it is well done," said a deep voice in the
thicket. "We were lonely in the jungle without thee," and
Bagheera came running to Mowgli's bare feet. They clambered up
the Council Rock together, and Mowgli spread the skin out on the
flat stone where Akela used to sit, and pegged 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.
     Ever since Akela had been deposed, the Pack had been
without a leader, hunting and fighting at their own pleasure.
But they answered the call from habit, and some of them were
lame from the traps they had fallen into, and some limped from
shot-wounds, and some were mangy from eating bad food, and many
were missing; but they came to the Council Rock, all that were
left of them, and saw Shere Khan's striped hide on the rock, and
the huge claws dangling at the end of the empty, dangling feet. It
was then that Mowgli made up a song without any rhymes, a song
that came up into his throat all by itself, and he shouted it
aloud, leaping up and down on the rattling skin, and beating
time with his heels till he had no more breath left, while Gray
Brother and Akela howled between the verses.
     "Look well, O Wolves. Have I kept my word?" said Mowgli
when he had finished; and the wolves bayed "Yes," and one
tattered wolf howled:
     "Lead us again, O Akela. Lead us again, O Man-cub, for we
be sick of this lawlessness, and we would be the Free People
once more."
     "Nay," purred Bagheera, "that may not be. When ye are
full-fed, the madness may come upon ye again.


Not for nothing are ye called the Free People. Ye fought for
freedom, and it is yours. Eat it, O Wolves."
     "Man Pack and Wolf Pack have cast me out," said Mowgli.
"Now I will hunt alone in the jungle."
     "And we will hunt with thee," said the four cubs.
     So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the
jungle from that day on. But he was not always alone, because
years afterward he became a man and married.
     But that is a story for grown-ups.

                                 MOWGLI'S SONG

THAT HE SANG AT THE COUNCIL ROCK WHEN HE
      DANCED ON SHERE KHAN'S HIDE

The Song of Mowgli -- I, Mowgli, am singing. Let
      the jungle listen to the things I have done.
Shere Khan said he would kill -- would kill! At the
      gates in the twilight he would kill Mowgli, the
      Frog!
He ate and he drank. Drink deep, Shere Khan, for
      when wilt thou drink 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-bulls with the angry eyes. Drive them to
      and fro as I order.
Sleepest thou still, Shere Khan? Wake, O wake!
      Here come I, and the bulls are behind.
Rama, the King of the Buffaloes, stamped with his
      foot. Waters of the Waingunga, whither went
      Shere Khan?
He is not Ikki to dig holes, nor Mao, the Peacock, that
      he should fly. He is not Mang, the Bat, to hang
      in the branches. Little bamboos that creak to-
      gether, tell me where he ran?
Ow! He is there. Ahoo! He is there. Under the
      feet of Rama lies 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 is very great. The kites have come down
      to see it. The black ants have come up to know
      it. There is a great assembly in his honour.
Alala! I have no cloth to wrap me. The kites will
      see that I am naked. I am ashamed to meet all
      these people.
Lend me thy coat, Shere Khan. Lend me thy gay
      striped coat that I may go to the Council Rock.
By the Bull that bought me I have 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 the hunter, the man, I will stoop down
      for my gift.
Waters of the Waingunga, bear witness that Shere
      Khan gives me his coat for the love that he bears
      me. Pull, Gray Brother! Pull, Akela! Heavy is
      the hide of Shere Khan.
The Man Pack are angry. They throw stones and talk
      child's talk. My mouth is bleeding. Let us run
      away.
Through the night, through the hot night, run swiftly
      with me, my brothers. We will leave the lights
      of the village and go to the low moon.
Waters of the Waingunga, the Man Pack have cast me
      out. I did them no harm, but they were afraid of
      me. Why?
Wolf Pack, ye have cast me out too. The jungle is
      shut to me and the village gates are shut. Why?
As Mang flies between the beasts and the birds so fly
      I between the village and the jungle. Why?
I dance on the hide of Shere Khan, but my heart is
      very heavy. My mouth is cut and wounded with
      the stones from the village, but my 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 the spring. The water comes out of my
      eyes; yet I laugh while it falls. 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 -- look well, O Wolves!
Ahae! My heart is heavy with the things that I do
      not understand.

Oh! 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 us
      At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, there 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 Lullaby.


THE WHITE SEAL

ALL these things happened several years ago at a place called
Novastoshnah, or North East Point, on the Island of St. Paul,
away and away in the Bering Sea. Limmershin, the Winter Wren,
told me the tale when he was blown on to the rigging of a
steamer going to Japan, and I took him down into my cabin and
warmed and fed him for a couple of days till he was fit to fly
back to St. Paul's again. Limmershin is a very odd little bird,
but he knows how to tell the truth.
     Nobody comes to Novastoshnah except on business, and the
only people who have regular business there are the seals. They
come in the summer months by hundreds and hundreds of thousands
out of the cold gray sea; for Novastoshnah Beach has the
finest accommodation for seals of any place in all the world.
     Sea Catch knew that, and every spring would swim from
whatever place he happened to be in -- would swim like a
torpedo-boat straight for Novastoshnah and spend a month
fighting with his companions for a good place on the rocks as
close to the sea as possible. Sea Catch was fifteen years old,
a huge gray fur-seal with almost a mane on his shoulders, and
long, wicked dog-teeth. When he heaved himself up on his front
flippers he stood more than four feet clear of the ground and
his weight, if any one had been bold enough to weigh him, was
nearly seven hundred pounds. He was scarred all over with the
marks of savage fights, but he was always ready for just one
fight more. He would put his head on one side, as though he were
afraid to look his enemy in the face; then he would shoot it out
like lightning, and when the big teeth were firmly fixed on the
other seal's neck, the other seal might get away if he could,
but Sea Catch would not help him.
     Yet Sea Catch never chased a beaten seal, for that was
against the Rules of the Beach. He only wanted room by the sea
for his nursery; but as there were forty or fifty thousand
other seals hunting for the same thing each spring, the
whistling, bellowing, roaring, and blowing on the beach was
something frightful.
     From a little hill called Hutchinson's Hill you could look
over three and a half miles of ground covered with fighting
seals; and the surf was dotted all over with the heads of seals
hurrying to land and begin their share of the fighting. They
fought in the breakers, they fought in the sand, and they fought
on the smooth-worn basalt rocks of the nurseries; for they were
just as stupid and unaccommodating as men. Their wives never
came to the island until late in May or early in June, for they
did not care to be torn to pieces; and the young two-, three-,
and four-year-old seals who had not begun housekeeping went
inland about half a mile through the ranks of the fighters and
played about on the sand-dunes in droves and legions, and rubbed
off every single green thing that grew. They were called the
holluschickie, -- the bachelors, -- and there were perhaps two
or three hundred thousand of them at Novastoshnah alone.
     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 caught her by the scruff of the
neck and dumped her down on his reservation, saying gruffly:
"Late, as usual. Where have you been?"
     It was not the fashion for Sea Catch to eat anything during
the four months he stayed on the beaches, and so his temper was
generally bad. Matkah knew better than to answer back. She
looked around and cooed: "How thoughtful of you. You've taken
the old place again."
     "I should think I had," said Sea Catch. "Look at me!"
     He was scratched and bleeding in twenty places; one eye was
almost blind, and his sides were torn to ribbons.
     "Oh, you men, you men!" Matkah said, fanning herself with
her hind flipper. "Why can't you be sensible and settle your
places quietly? You look as though you had been fighting with
the Killer Whale."
     "I have n't been doing anything but fight since the middle
of May. The beach is disgracefully crowded this season. I've met
at least a hundred seals from Lukannon Beach, house-hunting. Why
can't people stay where they belong?"
     "I've often thought we should be much happier if we hauled
out at Otter Island instead of this crowded place," said Matkah.
     "Bah! Only the holluschickie go to Otter Island. If we went
there they would say we were afraid. We must preserve
appearances, my dear."
     Sea Catch sunk his head proudly between his fat shoulders
and pretended to go to sleep for a few minutes, but all the time
he was keeping a sharp lookout for a fight. Now that all the
seals and their wives were on the land you could hear their
clamour miles out to sea above the loudest gales. At the lowest
counting there were over a million seals on the beach -- old
seals, mother seals, tiny babies, and holluschickie, fighting,
scuffling, bleating, crawling, and playing together, -- going
down to the sea and coming up from it in gangs and regiments,
lying over every foot of ground as far as the eye could reach,
and skirmishing about in brigades through the fog. It is nearly
always foggy at Novastoshnah, except when the sun comes out and
makes everything look all pearly and rainbow-coloured for a
little while.
     Kotick, Matkah's baby, was born in the middle of that
confusion, and he was all head and shoulders, with pale, watery
blue eyes, as tiny seals must be; but there was something about
his coat that made his mother look at him very closely.
     "Sea Catch," she said, at last, "our baby's going to be
white!"
     "Empty clam-shells and dry seaweed!" snorted Sea Catch.
"There never has been such a thing in the world as a white
seal."
     "I can't help that," said Matkah; "there's going to be
now"; and she sang the low, crooning seal-song, that all the
mother seals sing to their babies:


         You must n't swim till you're six weeks old,
              Or your head will be sunk by your heels;
         And summer gales and Killer Whales
              Are 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. He paddled and scrambled about by his mother's side, and
learned to scuffle out of the way when his father was fighting
with another seal, and the two rolled and roared up and down the
slippery rocks. Matkah used to go to sea to get things to eat,
and the baby was fed only once in two days; but then he ate all
he could, and throve upon it.
     The first thing he did was to crawl inland, and there he
met tens of thousands 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 the nurseries took no notice of
them, and the holluschickie kept to their own grounds, so the
babies had a beautiful playtime.
     When Matkah came back from her deep-sea fishing she would
go straight to their playground and call as a sheep calls for a
lamb, and wait until she heard Kotick bleat. Then she would take
the straightest of straight lines in his direction, striking out
with her fore flippers and knocking the youngsters head over
heels right and left. There were always a few hundred mothers
hunting for their children through the playgrounds, and the
babies were kept lively; but, as Matkah told Kotick, "So long as
you don't lie in muddy water and get mange; or rub the hard sand
into a cut or scratch; and so long as you never go swimming when
there is a heavy sea, nothing will hurt you here."
     Little seals can no more swim than little children, but
they are unhappy till they learn. The first time that Kotick
went down to the sea a wave carried him out beyond his depth, and
his big head sank and his little hind flippers flew up exactly as
his mother had told him in the song, and if the next wave had
not thrown him back again he would have drowned.
     After that he learned to lie in a beach-pool and let the
wash of the waves just cover him and lift him up while he
paddled, but he always kept his eye open for big waves that
might hurt. He was two weeks learning to use his flippers; and
all that while he floundered in and out of the water, and
coughed and grunted and crawled up the beach and took cat-naps
on the sand, and went back again, until at last he found that he
truly belonged to the water.
     Then you can imagine the times that he had with his
companions, ducking under the rollers; or coming in on top of a
comber and landing with a swash and a splutter as the big wave
went whirling far up the beach; or standing up on his tail and
scratching his head as the old people did; or playing "I'm the
King of the Castle" on slippery, weedy rocks that just stuck out
of the wash. Now and then he would see a thin fin, like a big
shark's fin, drifting along close to shore, and he knew that
that was the Killer Whale, the Grampus, who eats young seals
when he can get them; and Kotick would head for the beach like an
arrow, and the fin would jig off slowly, as if it were looking
for nothing at all.
     Late in October the seals began to leave St. Paul's for the
deep sea, by families and tribes, and there was no more fighting
over the nurseries, and the holluschickie played anywhere they
liked. "Next year," said Matkah to Kotick, "you will be a
holluschickie; but this year you must learn how to catch fish."
     They set out together across the Pacific, and Matkah showed
Kotick how to sleep on his back with his flippers tucked down by
his side and his little nose 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 get
away.
     "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 eyes, 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 how 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 any one 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 did n'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 seal
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 sealskin 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," said 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 from 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 were 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 over-head 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 up 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."
     "Is n'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 of 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 little white slug.
     "Well! May I be --  -- skinned!" said Sea
Vitch, and they all looked at Kotick as you can fancy a club
full of drowsy old gentlemen would look at a little boy. Kotick
did not care to hear any more about skinning just then; he had
seen enough of it; so he called out: "Is n't there any place for
seals to go where men don't ever come?"
     "Go and find out," said Sea Vitch, shutting his eyes. "Run
away. We're busy here."
     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 in his life, but always rooted for clams and
seaweeds; though he pretended to be a very terrible person.
Naturally the Chickies and the Gooverooskies and the Epatkas,
the Burgomaster Gulls and the Kittiwakes and the Puffins, who
are always looking for a chance to be rude, took up the cry, and
-- so Limmershin told me -- for nearly five minutes you could
not have heard a gun fired on Walrus Islet. All the population
was yelling and screaming" Clam-eater! Stareek [old man]!" while
Sea Vitch rolled from side to side grunting and coughing.
     "Now will you tell?" said Kotick, all out of breath.
     "Go and ask Sea Cow," said Sea Vitch. "If he is living
still, he'll be able to tell you."
     "How shall I know Sea Cow when I meet him?" said Kotick,
sheering off.
     "He's the only thing in the sea uglier than Sea Vitch,"
screamed a burgomaster gull, wheeling under Sea Vitch's nose.
"Uglier, and with worse manners! Stareek!"
     Kotick swam back to Novastoshnah, leaving the gulls to
scream. There he found that no one sympathized with him in his
little attempts to discover a quiet place for the seals. They
told him that men had always driven the holluschickie -- it was
part of the day's work -- and that if he did not like to see
ugly things he should not have gone to the killing-grounds. But
none of the other seals had seen the killing, and that made the
difference between him and his friends. Besides, Kotick was a
white seal.
     "What you must do," said old Sea Catch, after he had heard
his son's adventures, "is to grow up and be a big seal like your
father, and have a nursery on the beach, and then they will
leave you alone. In another five years you ought to be able to
fight for yourself." Even gentle Matkah, his mother, said: "You
will never be able to stop the killing. Go and play in the sea,
Kotick." And Kotick went off and danced the Fire-dance with a
very heavy little heart.
     That autumn he left the beach as soon as he could, and set
off alone because of a notion in his bullet-head. He was going
to find Sea Cow, if there was such a person in the sea, and he
was going to find a quiet island with good firm beaches for
seals to live on, where men could not get at them. So he
explored and explored by himself from the North to the South
Pacific, swimming as much as three hundred miles in a day and a
night. He met with more adventures than can be told, and
narrowly escaped being caught by the Basking Shark, and the
Spotted Shark, and the Hammerhead, and he met all the
untrustworthy ruffians that loaf up and down the high seas, and
the heavy polite fish, and the scarlet-spotted scallops that are
moored in one place for hundreds of years, and grow very proud
of it; but he never met Sea Cow, and he never found an island
that he could fancy.
     If the beach was good and hard, with a slope behind it for
seals to play on, there was always the smoke of a whaler on the
horizon, boiling down blubber, and Kotick knew what that meant.
Or else he could see that seals had once visited the island and
been killed off, and Kotick knew that where men had come once
they would come again.
     He picked up with an old stumpy-tailed albatross, who told
him that Kerguelen Island was the very place for peace and
quiet, and when Kotick went down there he was all but smashed to
pieces against some wicked black cliffs in a heavy sleet-storm
with lightning and thunder. Yet as he pulled out against the
gale he could see that even there had once been a seal nursery.
And it was so in all the other islands that he visited.
     Limmershin gave a long list of them, for he said that
Kotick spent five seasons exploring, with a four months' rest
each year at Novastoshnah, where 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 was nearly baked to
death; he went to the Georgia Islands, the Orkneys, Emerald
Island, Little Nightingale Island, Gough's Island, Bouvet's
Island, the Crossets, and even to a little speck of an island
south of the Cape of Good Hope. But everywhere the People of the
Sea told him the same things. Seals had come to those islands
once upon a time, but men had killed them all off. Even when he
swam thousands of miles out of the Pacific, and got to a place
called Cape Corientes (that was when he was coming back from
Gough's Island), he found a few hundred mangy seals on a rock,
and they told him that men came there too.
     That nearly broke his heart, and he headed round the Horn
back to his own beaches; and on his way north he hauled out on
an island full of green trees, where he found an old, old seal
who was dying, and Kotick caught fish for him and told him all
his sorrows. "Now," said Kotick, "I am going back to
Novastoshnah, and if I am driven to the killing-pens with the
holluschickie I shall not care."
     The old seal said: "Try once more. I am the last of the
Lost Rookery of Masafuera, and in the days when men killed us by
the hundred thousand there was a story on the beaches that some
day a white seal would come out of the north and lead the seal
people to a quiet place. I am old and I shall never live to see
that day, but others will. Try once more."
     And Kotick curled up his mustache (it was a beauty), and
said: "I am the only white seal that has ever been born on the
beaches, and I am the only seal, black or white, who ever
thought of looking for new islands."
     That cheered him immensely; and when he came back to
Novastoshnah that summer, Matkah, his mother, begged him to
marry and settle down, for he was no longer a holluschick, but
a full-grown sea-catch, with a curly white mane on his
shoulders, as heavy, as big, and as fierce as his father.
"Give me another season," he said. "Remember, Mother, it is
always the seventh wave that goes farthest up the beach."
     Curiously enough, there was another seal who thought that
she would put off marrying till the next year, and Kotick danced
the Fire-dance with her all down Lukannon Beach the night before
he set off on his last exploration.
     This time he went westward, because he had fallen on the
trail of a great shoal of halibut, and he needed at least one
hundred pounds of fish a day to keep him in good condition. He
chased them till he was tired, and then he curled himself up and
went to sleep on the hollows of the ground-swell that sets in to
Copper island. He knew the coast perfectly well, so about
midnight, when he felt himself gently bumped on a weed bed, he
said: "Hm, tide's running strong to-night," and turning over
under water opened his eyes slowly and stretched. Then he jumped
like a cat, for he saw huge things nosing about in the shoal
water and browsing on the heavy fringes of the weeds.
     "By the Great Combers of Magellan!" he said beneath his
mustache. "Who in the Deep Sea are these people!"
     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 and thirty feet long, and they had no
hind flippers, but a shovel-like tail that looked as if it had
been whittled out of wet leather. Their heads were the most
foolish-looking things you ever saw, and they balanced on the
ends of their tails in deep water when they were n't grazing,
bowing solemnly to one another and waving their front flippers
as a fat man waves his arm.
     "Ahem!" said Kotick. "Good sport, gentlemen?" The big
things answered by bowing and waving their flippers like the
Fog-Footman. When they began feeding again Kotick saw that their
upper lip was split into two pieces, that they could twitch
apart about a foot and bring together again with a whole bushel
of seaweed between the splits. They tucked the stuff into their
mouths and chumped solemnly.
     "Messy style of feeding that," said Kotick. They bowed
again, and Kotick began to lose his temper. "Very good," he
said. "if you do happen to have an extra joint in your front flipper
you need n't show off so. I see you bow gracefully, but I should
like to know your names." The split lips moved and twitched, and
the glassy green eyes stared; but they did not speak.
     "Well!" said Kotick, "you're the only people
I've ever met uglier than Sea Vitch -- and with worse manners."
     Then he remembered in a flash what the Burgomaster Gull had
screamed to him when he was a little yearling at Walrus islet,
and he tumbled backward in the water, for he knew that he had
found Sea Cow at last.
     The sea cows went on schlooping and grazing, and chumping
in the weed and Kotick asked them questions in every language
that he had picked up in his travels; and the Sea People talk
nearly as many languages as human beings. But the Sea Cow did
not answer, because Sea Cow cannot talk. He has only six
bones in his neck where he ought to have seven, and they say
under the sea that that prevents him from speaking even to
his companions; but, as you know, he has an extra joint in his
fore flipper, and by waving it up and down and about he makes
what answers to a sort of clumsy telegraphic code.
     By daylight Kotick's mane was standing on end and his
temper was gone where the dead crabs go. Then the Sea Cow began
to travel northward very slowly, stopping to hold absurd bowing
councils from time to time, and Kotick followed them, saying to
himself: "People who are such idiots as these are would have
been killed long ago if they had n't found out some safe island;
and what is good enough for the Sea Cow is good enough for the
Sea Catch. All the same, I wish they'd hurry."
     It was weary work for Kotick. The herd never went more than
forty or fifty miles a day, and stopped to feed at night, and
kept close to the shore all the time; while Kotick swam round
them, and over them, and under them, but he could not hurry
them up one half-mile. As they went farther north they
held a bowing council every few hours, and Kotick nearly bit
off his mustache with impatience till he saw that they were
following up a warm current of water, and then he
respected them more.
     One night they sank through the shiny water -- sank like
stones -- and, for the first time since he had known them, began
to swim quickly. Kotick followed, and the pace astonished him,
for he never dreamed that Sea Cow was anything of a swimmer.
They headed for a cliff by the shore, a cliff that ran down into
deep water, and plunged into a dark hole at the foot of it,
twenty fathoms under the sea. It was a long, long swim, and
Kotick badly wanted fresh air before he was out of the dark
tunnel they led him through.
     "My wig!" he said, when he rose, gasping and puffing, into
open water at the farther end. "It was a long dive, but it was
worth it."
     The sea cows had separated, and were browsing lazily along
the edges of the finest beaches that Kotick had ever seen. There
were long stretches of smooth worn rock running for miles,
exactly fitted to make seal nurseries, and there were
playgrounds of hard sand, sloping inland behind them, and there
were rollers for seal to dance in, and long grass to roll in,
and sand-dunes to climb up and down, and best of all, Kotick
knew by the feel of the water, which never deceives a true Sea
Catch, that no men had ever come there.
     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 sandy islands 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 a ship come within six
miles of the beach; and between the islands and the mainland was
a stretch of deep water that ran up to the perpendicular cliffs,
and somewhere below the cliffs was the mouth of the tunnel.
     "It's Novastoshnah over again, but ten times better," said
Kotick. "Sea Cow must be wiser than I thought. Men can't come
down the cliffs, even if there were any men; and the shoals to
seaward would knock a ship to splinters. If any place in the sea
is safe, this is it."
     He began to think of the seal he had left behind him, but
though he was in a hurry to go back to Novastoshnah, he
thoroughly explored the new country, so that he would be able to
answer all questions.
     Then he dived and made sure of the mouth of the tunnel, and
raced through to the southward. No one but a sea cow or a seal
would have dreamed of there being such a place, and when he
looked back at the cliffs even Kotick could hardly believe that
he had been under them.
     He was six days going home, though he was not swimming
slowly; and when he hauled out just above Sea-Lion's Neck the
first person he met was the seal who had been waiting for him,
and she saw by the look in his eyes that he had found his island
at last.
     But the holluschickie and Sea Catch, his father, and all
the other seals, laughed at him when he told them what he had
discovered, and a young seal about his own age said: "This is
all very well, Kotick, but you can't come from no one knows
where and order us off like this. Remember we've been fighting
for our nurseries, and that's a thing you never did. You
preferred prowling about in the sea."
     The other seals laughed at this, and the young seal began
twisting his head from side to side. He had just married that
year, and was making a great fuss about it.
     "I've no nursery to fight for," said Kotick. "I want only
to show you all a place where you will be safe. What's the use
of fighting?"
     "Oh, if you're trying to back out, of course I've no more
to say," said the young seal, with an ugly chuckle.
     "Will you come with me if I win?" said Kotick; and a green
light came into his eyes, for he was very angry at having to
fight at all.
     "Very good," said the young seal, carelessly. "If you win,
I'll come."
     He had no time to change his mind, for Kotick's head darted
out and his teeth sunk in the blubber of the young seal's neck.
Then he threw himself back on his haunches and hauled his enemy
down the beach, shook him, and knocked him over. Then Kotick
roared to the seals: "I've done my best for you these five
seasons past. I've found you the island where you'll be safe,
but unless your heads are dragged off your silly necks you won't
believe. I'm going to teach you now. Look out for yourselves!"
     Limmershin told me that never in his life -- and Limmershin
sees ten thousand big seals fighting every year -- never in all
his little life did he see anything like Kotick's charge into
the nurseries. He flung himself 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, and then threw him
aside and attacked the next. You see, Kotick had
never fasted for four months as the big seals did every year,
and his deep-sea swimming-trips kept him in perfect condition,
and best of all, he had never fought before. His curly white
mane stood up with rage, and his eyes flamed, 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 old seals about as though they had been halibut,
and upsetting the young bachelors in all directions; and Sea
Catch gave one roar and shouted: "He may be a fool, but he is
the best fighter on the Beaches. Don't tackle your father, my
son. He's with you!"
     Kotick roared in answer, and old Sea Catch waddled in, his
mustache on end, blowing like a locomotive, while Matkah and the
seal that was going to marry Kotick cowered down and admired
their menfolk. It was a gorgeous fight, for the two fought as
long as there was a seal that dared lift up his head, and then
they paraded grandly up and down the beach side by side,
bellowing.
     At night, just as the Northern Lights were winking and
flashing through the fog, Kotick climbed a bare rock and looked
down on the scattered nurseries and the torn and bleeding seals.
"Now" he said, "I've taught you your lesson."
     "My wig!" said old Sea Catch, boosting himself up stiffly,
for he was fearfully mauled. "The Killer Whale himself could not
have cut them up worse. Son, I'm proud of you, and what's more,
I'll come with you to your island -- if there is such a place."
     "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.
     There was a murmur like the ripple of the tide all up and
down the beaches. "We will come," said thousands of tired
voices. "We will follow Kotick, the White Seal."
     Then Kotick dropped his head between his shoulders and shut
his eyes proudly. He was not a white seal any more, but red from
head to tail. All the same he would have scorned to look at or
touch one of his wounds.
     A week later he and his army (nearly ten thousand
holluschickie and old seals) went away north to the Sea Cow's
tunnel, Kotick leading them, and the seals that stayed at
Novastoshnah called them idiots. But next spring when they all
met off the fishing-banks of the Pacific, Kotick's seals told
such tales of the new beaches beyond Sea Cow's tunnel that more
and more seals left Novastoshnah.
     Of course it was not all done at once, for the seals need
a long time to turn things over in their minds, but year by year
more seals went away from Novastoshnah, and Lukannon, and the
other nurseries, to the quiet, sheltered beaches where Kotick
sits all the summer through, getting bigger and fatter and
stronger each year, while the holluschickie play round him, in
that sea where no man comes.


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 dropped 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 through 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 drench-
      ing all!
The platforms of our playground, all shining smooth
      and worn!
The beaches of Lukannon -- the home where we were
      born!


I meet 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, Goo-
      verooska 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!


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!)

"RIKKI-TIKKI-TAVI"

THIS is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought
single-handed, through the bathrooms of the big bungalow in
Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird, helped him, and
Chuchundra, the muskrat, 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.
     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!"
     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."
     "No," said his mother; "let's take him in and dry him.
Perhaps he is n't really dead."
     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, and
he opened his eyes and sneezed.
     "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."
     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
does n'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."
     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 would n't think of anything so awful.
     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; and 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.
     "We are very miserable," said Darzee. "One of our babies
fell out of the nest yesterday and Nag ate him."
     "H'm!" said Rikki-tikki, "that is very sad -- but I am a
stranger here. Who is Nag?"
     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.
     "Who is Nag?" he said. "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?"
     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.
     "Let us talk," he said. "You eat eggs. Why should not I eat
birds?"
     "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; and 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.
     "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.
     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 around
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.
     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, that 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.
     But just as Teddy was stooping, something flinched 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.
     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
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.
     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 fore legs, 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 wakes a slow mongoose, and if he wanted all his
strength and quickness ready, he must keep himself thin.
     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.
     That night, at dinner, walking to and fro among the
wine-glasses on the table, he could 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 muskrat, creeping
round 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.
     "Don't kill me," said Chuchundra, almost weeping.
"Rikki-tikki, don't kill me."
     "Do you think a snake-killer kills muskrats?" said
Rikki-tikki scornfully.
     "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?"
     "There's not the least danger," said Rikki-tikki; "but Nag
is in the garden, and I know you don't go there."
     "My cousin Chua, the rat, told me --" said Chuchundra, and
then he stopped.
     "Told you what?"
     "H'sh! Nag is everywhere, Rikki-tikki. You should have
talked to Chua in the garden."
     "I did n't -- so you must tell me. Quick, Chuchundra, or
I'll bite you!"
     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 must n't
tell you anything. Can't you hear, Rikki-tikki?"
     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
brickwork.
     "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."
     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.
     "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."
     "But are you sure that there is anything to be gained by
killing the people?" said Nag.
     "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."
     "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."
     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 bath-room in the
dark, and Rikki could see his eyes glitter.
     "Now, if I kill him here, Nagaina will know; and if I fight
him on the open floor, the odds are in his favour. What am I to
do?" said Rikki-tikki-tavi.
     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."
     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.
     "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 round
in great circles; but his eyes were red, and he held on as the
body cartwhipped 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 honour 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 thunder-clap 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 shot-gun into Nag just behind the hood.
     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." 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.
     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.
     Without waiting for breakfast, Rikki-tikki ran to the
thorn-bush 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.
     "Oh, you stupid tuft of feathers!" said Rikki-tikki,
angrily. "Is this the time to sing?"
     "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."
     "All that's true enough; but where's Nagaina?" said
Rikki-tikki, looking carefully round him.
     "Nagaina came to the bath-room 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.
     "If I could get up to your nest, I'd roll all 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."
     "For the great, the beautiful Rikki-tikki's
sake I will stop," said Darzee. "What is it, O Killer of the
terrible Nag?"
     "Where is Nagaina, for the third time?"
     "On the rubbish-heap by the stables, mourning for Nag.
Great is Rikki-tikki with the white teeth."
     "Bother my white teeth! Have you ever heard where she keeps
her eggs?"
     "In the melon-bed, on the end nearest the wall, where the
sun strikes nearly all day. She had them there weeks ago."
     "And you never thought it worth while to tell me? The end
nearest the wall, you said?"
     "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."
     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 did n'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.
     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.
     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.
     "The boy broke it with a stone!" shrieked Darzee's wife.
     "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!"
     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.
     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 about 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.
     "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:
     "Rikki-tikki, I led Nagaina toward the house, and she has
gone into the veranda, and -- oh, come quickly -- she means
killing!"
     Rikk-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.
     "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!"
     Teddy's eyes were fixed on his father, and all his father
could do was to whisper, "Sit still, Teddy. You must n't move.
Teddy, keep still."
     Then Rikki-tikki came up and cried: "Turn round, Nagaina;
turn and fight!"
     "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."
     "Look at your eggs," said Rikki-tikki, "in the melon-bed
near the wall. Go and look, Nagaina." The big snake turned half
round, and saw the egg on the veranda. "Ah-h! Give it to me,"
she said.
     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 kingcobra? For the last -- the very
last of the brood? The ants are eating all the others down
by the melon-bed."
     Nagaina spun clear round, forgetting everything for the
sake of the one egg; and 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.
     "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 bath-room." 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."
     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.
     "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 the 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.
     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 whiplash flicked across a horse's neck.
     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 struck out his feet to act as brakes on the dark
slope of the hot, moist earth.
     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."
     So he sang a very mournful song that he made up all 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.
     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.
     "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.
     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.
     "He saved our lives and Teddy's life," she said to her
husband. "Just think, he saved all our lives."
     Rikki-tikki woke up with a jump, for all the mongooses are
light sleepers.
     "Oh, it's you," said he. "What are you bothering for? All
the cobras are dead; and if they were n't I'm here."
     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.


DARZEE'S CHAUNT


(SUNG IN HONOUR OF RIKKI-TIKKI-TAVI)


Singer and tailor am I --
      Doubled the joys that I know --
Proud of my lilt through 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 hath delivered us, who?
      Tell me his nest and his name.
Rikki, the valiant, the true,
      Tikki, with eyeballs of flame.
Rik-tikki-tikki, the ivory-fanged, the hunter with eye-
      balls 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.)
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 winds' untainted kiss, the waters' clean
caress:
I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket-stake.
      I will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!

TOOMAI OF THE ELEPHANTS

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. 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; and 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 baulks of teak in the
timber-yards at Moulmein. There he had half killed an
insubordinate young elephant who was shirking his fair share of
the 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.
     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.
     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.
     "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."
     "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.
     "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.
     "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."
     "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."
     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.
     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 hullaballoo 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.
     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. "Mail, mail, 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.
     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.
     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.
     "What -- what will happen?" said Little Toomai.
     "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!"
     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!"
     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 from 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.
     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 back 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.
     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 moult in
the plains."
     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."
     "This is not a man, but a boy. He went into the Keddah at
the last drive, and threw Barmac there the rope, when we were
trying to get that young calf with the blotch on his shoulder
away from his mother."
     Machua Appa pointed at Little Toomai, and Petersen Sahib
looked, and Little Toomai bowed to the earth.
     "He throw a rope? He is smaller than a picket-pin. Little
one, what is thy name?" said Petersen Sahib.
     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.
     "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.
     "He is Toomai, my son, Sahib," said Big Toomai, scowling.
"He is a very bad boy, and he will end in a jail, Sahib."
     "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.
     "Must I never go there, Sahib?" asked Little Toomai, with
a big gasp.
     "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."
     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' ballrooms, but even these are found only 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?"
     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 who needed
coaxing or beating every other minute.
     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.
     "What did Petersen Sahib mean by the elephant-dance?" he
said, at last, softly to his mother.
     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?"
     An Assamese driver, two or three elephants ahead, turned
round angrily, crying: "Bring up Kala Nag and knock this
youngster of mine into good behaviour. 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?"
     "Hear him!" said the other driver. "We have swept the
hills! Ho! ho! You are very wise, you plains-people. Any one but
a mudhead who never saw the jungle would know that they know
that the drivers are ended for the season. Therefore all the
wild elephants to-night will -- but why should I waste wisdom on
a river-turtle?"
     "What will they do?" Little Toomai called out.
     "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."
     "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."
     "Yes; but a plains-man who lives in a hut knows only the
four walls of his hut. Well, leave thy elephants unshackled
to-night 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."
     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.
     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.
     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 burst. 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 honour 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.
     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.
     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.
     "Look 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,
bare-footed, 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.
     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
up-hill, but though Little Toomai watched the stars in the rifts of
the trees, he could not tell in what direction.
     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.
     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 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 up-stream and down -- great grunts and angry
snortings, and all the mist about him seemed to be full of
rolling wavy shadows.
     "Ai!" he said, half aloud, his teeth chattering. "The
elephant-folk are out to-night. It is the dance, then."
     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 trumpeting
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.
     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 count only 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.
     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.
     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.
     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.
     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 torch-light and shouting, but here he was all alone in
the dark, and once a trunk came up and touched him on the knee.
     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 fore foot and then the other, and brought them down on the
ground -- one-two, one-two, as steadily as triphammers. The elephants
were stamping altogether 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.
     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.
     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.
     "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."
     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.
     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 foot-sore, 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.
     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:
     "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!"
     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.
     "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."
     They looked at each other, and up and down, and they
wondered; for the ways of elephants are beyond the wit of any
man, black or white, to fathom.
     "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.
     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 hot-foot 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 camp-fires 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.
     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 favour 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 that 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 honour, 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. 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!


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;
Cattle 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!



HER MAJESTY'S SERVANTS

IT HAD been raining heavily for one whole month -- raining on a
camp of thirty thousand men, 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; and 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!"
     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.
     Just as I was getting ready 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 tidy 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.
     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.
     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?"
     "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."
     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."
     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.
     "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 is n't
allowed to sleep? Who's here?"
     "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?"
     "Number Fifteen, E troop, Ninth Lancers --
Dick Cunliffe's horse. Stand over a little, there."
     "Oh, beg your pardon," said the mule. "It's too dark to see
much. Are n't these camels too sickening for anything? I walked
out of my lines to get a little peace and quiet here."
     "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 so brave
as you are, my lords."
     "Then why the pickets did n't you stay and carry baggage
for the 39th Native Infantry, instead of running all round the
camp?" said the mule.
     "They were such very bad dreams," said the camel. "I am
sorry. Listen! What is that? Shall we run on again?"
     "Sit down," said the mule, "or you'll snap your long 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."
     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."
     "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."
     The gun-bullocks lay down together and began chewing the
cud, but the young mule huddled close to Billy.
     "Things!" he said; "fearful and horrible things, Billy!
They came into our lines while we were asleep. D'you think
they'll kill us?"
     "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!"
     "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."
     Nearly all our horses for the English cavalry are brought
to India from Australia, and are broken in by the troopers
themselves.
     "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 fore legs and kicked every bit of it off. I
had n't learned the real science of kicking then, but the
battery said they had never seen anything like it."
     "But this was n'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 could n't find my driver
and I could n't find you, Billy, so I ran off with -- with these
gentlemen. "
     "H'm!" said Billy. "As soon as I heard the camels were
loose I came away on my own account, quietly. When a battery --
a screw-gun mule calls gun-bullock gentlemen, he must be very
badly shaken up. Who are you fellows on the ground there?"
     The gun-bullock 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!"
     They went on chewing.
     "That comes of being afraid," said Billy. "You get laughed
at by gun-bullocks. I hope you like it, young 'un."
     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 bullock 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 troophorse. "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."
     "That's all very well in camp," said Billy; "I'm not above
stampeding myself, for the fun of the thing, when I have n't
been out for a day or two; but what do you do on active
service?"
     "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."
     "What's bridle-wise?" said the young mule.
     "By the Blue Gums of the Black Blocks," snorted the
troop-horse, "do you mean to say that you are n'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 or death to you. Get round with your hind legs under you
the instant you feel the rein on your neck. If you have n't room
to swing round, rear up a little and come round on your hind
legs. That's being bridle-wise."
     "We are n'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?"
     "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 should n't care to be the man or
horse that stood up to Dick and me when we're in a hurry"
     "Don't the knives hurt?" said the young mule.
     "Well, I got one cut across the chest once, but that was
n't Dick's fault --"
     "A lot I should have cared whose fault it was, if it hurt!"
said the young mule.
     "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 was n'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 any one 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."
     "Don't you ever trip?" said the troop-horse.
     "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."
     "Fired at without the chance of running into the people who
are firing!" said the troop-horse, thinking hard. "I could n't
stand that. I should want to charge, with Dick."
     "Oh no, you would n'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!"
     The baggage-camel had been bobbing his head to and fro for
some time past, anxious to get a word in edgeways. Then I heard
him say, as he cleared his throat, nervously:
     "I -- I -- I have fought a little, but not in that climbing
way or that running way."
     "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?"
     "The proper way," said the camel. "We all sat down --"
     "Oh, my crupper and breastplate!" said the troop-horse
under his breath. "Sat down?"
     "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."
     "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."
     "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."
     "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?"
     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."
     "Oh, go on," said Billy. "Please don't mind me. I suppose
you fellows fight standing on your tails?"
     "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.)
     "What does Two Tails trumpet for?" said the young mule.
     "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."
     "Oh! And you choose that time for grazing, do you?" said
the young mule.
     "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 -- nothing
but 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."
     "Well, I've certainly learned something to-night," 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?"
     "About as much as we feel inclined to sit down 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.
     "Of course," said the troop-horse, "every one 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."
     "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!"
     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.
     "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 are n't accustomed to being ridden over
roughshod by any parrot-mouthed, pig-headed mule in a pop-gun
pea-shooter battery. Are you ready?"
     "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."
     Both beasts dropped down with a snort of disgust, for
neither horse nor mule can bear to listen to an elephant's
voice.
     "It's Two Tails!" said the troop-horse. "I can't stand him.
A tail at each end is n't fair!"
     "My feelings exactly," said Billy, crowding into the
troop-horse for company. "We're very alike in some things."
     "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?"
     "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."
     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?"
     "Well," said Two Tails, rubbing one hind leg against the
other, exactly like a little boy saying a piece, "I don't quite
know whether you'd understand."
     "We don't, but we have to pull the guns," said the
bullocks.
     "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."
     "That's another way of fighting, I suppose?" said Billy,
who was recovering his spirits.
     "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."
     "I can," said the troop-horse. "At least a little bit. I
try not to think about it."
     "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."
     "Ah!" said the troop-horse. "That explains it. I can trust
Dick."
     "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."
     "We do not understand," said the bullocks.
     "I know you don't. I'm not talking to you. You don't know
what blood is."
     "We do," said the bullocks. "It is red stuff that soaks
into the ground and smells."
     The troop-horse gave a kick and a bound and a snort.
     "Don't talk of it," he said. "I can smell it, now, just
thinking of it. It makes me want to run -- when I have n't Dick
on my back."
     "But it is not here," said the camel and the bullocks. "Why
are you so stupid?"
     "It's vile stuff," said Billy. "I don't want to run, but I
don't want to talk about it."
     "There you are!" said Two Tails, waving his tail to
explain.
     "Surely. Yes, we have been here all night," said the
bullocks.
     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."
     "No. We see out of our four eyes," said the bullocks. "We
see straight in front of us."
     "If I could do that and nothing else you would n'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 have n't had a good bath for a month."
     "That's all very fine," said Billy; "but giving a thing a
long name does n't make it any better"
     "H'sh!" said the troop-horse. "I think I understand what
Two Tails means."
     "You'll understand better in a minute," said Two Tails
angrily. "Now, just you explain to me why you don't like this!"
     He began trumpeting furiously at the top of his trumpet.
     "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.
     "I sha'n'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 does n't some one take her away? She'll bite me in a
minute."
     "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." 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.
     "Extraordinary! Most extraordinary!" he said. "It runs in
our family. Now, where has that nasty little beast gone to?"
     I heard him feeling about with his trunk.
     "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."
     "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."
     "I'm frightened of a little dog, and the camel here is
frightened by bad dreams in the night."
     "It is very lucky for us that we have n't all got to fight
in the same, way" said the troop-horse.
     "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."
     "Because we are told to," said the troop-horse, with a
snort of contempt.
     "Orders," said Billy the mule; and his teeth snapped.
     "Hukm hai!" (It is an order) said the camel with a gurgle;
and Two Tails and the bullocks repeated, "Hukm hai!"
     "Yes, but who gives the orders?" said the recruit-mule.
     "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.
     "But who gives them the orders?"
     "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."
     "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."
     The gun-bullocks got up to go. "Morning is coming," they
said. "We will go back to our lines. It is true that we see only
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."
     Nobody answered, and the troop-horse said, to change the
conversation, "Where's that little dog? A dog means a man
somewhere near."
     "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."
     "Phew!" said the bullocks. "He must be white?"
     "Of course he is," said Vixen. "Do you suppose I'm looked
after by a black bullock-driver?"
     "Huah! Ouach! Ugh!" said the bullocks. "Let us get away
quickly."
     They plunged forward in the mud, and managed somehow to run
their yoke on the pole of an ammunition-wagon, where it jammed.
     "Now you have done it," said Billy calmly. "Don't struggle.
You're hung up till daylight. What on earth's the matter?"
     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.
     "You'll break your necks in a minute," said the
troop-horse. "What's the matter with white men? I live with
'em."
     "They -- eat -- us! Pull!" said the near bullock: the yoke
snapped with a twang, and they lumbered off together.
     I never knew before what made Indian cattle so afraid of
Englishmen. We eat beef -- a thing that no cattle-driver touches
-- and of course the cattle do not like it.
     "May I be flogged with my own pad-chains! Who'd have
thought of two big lumps like those losing their heads?" said
Billy.
     "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.
     "I'll leave you, then. I can't say I'm over-fond of 'em
myself. Besides, white men who have n'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 to-morrow, don't trumpet. It spoils our
formation."
     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.
     "I'm coming to the parade to-morrow in my dogcart," she
said. "Where will you be?"
     "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 the parade."
     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 his 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.
     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.
     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 mu-
         l', 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.
     "Now," said he, "in what manner was this wonderful thing
done?"
     And the officer answered, "There was an order and they
obeyed."
     "But are the beasts as wise as the men?" said the chief.
     "They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or
bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and
the sergeant his lieutenants, 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 his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant
of the Empress. Thus it is done."
     "Would it were so in Afghanistan!" said the chief; "for
there we obey only our own wills."
     "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."


PARADE-SONG OF THE CAMP ANIMALS


ELEPHANTS OF THE GUN-TEAM


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 withers, 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 squadrons 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 for-
      ward still;
For we can wriggle and climb, my lads, and turn up
      everywhere,
And 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,
And it's our delight on a mountain height with a leg or
      two to spare!


COMMISSARIAT CAMELS


We have n't a camelty tune of our own
To help us trollop along,
But every neck is a hairy trombone
(Rtt-ta-ta-ta! is a hairy trombone!)
And this is our marching song:
Can't! Don't! Sha'n'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!
Somehody'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.


[End.]