The Second Jungle Book
by
Rudyard Kipling
Part 1 out of 4
There are many names and expressions which were italicised in the
original. I have used roman (normal text) in each case. Where I
thought italics were used for emphasis I have used caps. Because
all the text was scanned any mistakes in spelling of the odd
names given to the animals should be rare, but e.&o.e.
The text was formatted to 32 picas, 5-3/8 in, or 13.5 cm and hard
returns were inserted. The program used was Cetus CWordPad (same
as Windows Wordpad but with a spell check which I could not get
to work).
THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK
by Rudyard Kipling
CONTENTS
How Fear Came
The Law of the Jungle
The Miracle of Purun Bhagat
A Song of Kabir
Letting in the Jungle
Mowgli's Song against People
The Undertakers
A Ripple Song
The King's Ankus
The Song of the Little Hunter
Quiquern
'Angutivaun Taina'
Red Dog
Chil's Song
The Spring Running
The Outsong
HOW FEAR CAME
The stream is shrunk--the pool is dry,
And we be comrades, thou and I;
With fevered jowl and dusty flank
Each jostling each along the bank;
And by one drouthy fear made still,
Forgoing thought of quest or kill.
Now 'neath his dam the fawn may see,
The lean Pack-wolf as cowed as he,
And the tall buck, unflinching, note
The fangs that tore his father's throat.
The pools are shrunk--the streams are dry,
And we be playmates, thou and I,
Till yonder cloud--Good Hunting!--loose
The rain that breaks our Water Truce.
The Law of the Jungle--which is by far the oldest law in the
world--has arranged for almost every kind of accident that may
befall the Jungle People, till now its code is as perfect as time
and custom can make it. You will remember that Mowgli
spent a great part of his life in the Seeonee Wolf-Pack,
learning the Law from Baloo, the Brown Bear; and it was Baloo
who told him, when the boy grew impatient at the constant
orders, that the Law was like the Giant Creeper, because it
dropped across every one's back and no one could escape.
"When thou hast lived as long as I have, Little Brother,
thou wilt see how all the Jungle obeys at least one Law.
And that will be no pleasant sight," said Baloo.
This talk went in at one ear and out at the other, for a boy
who spends his life eating and sleeping does not worry about
anything till it actually stares him in the face. But,
one year, Baloo's words came true, and Mowgli saw all the
Jungle working under the Law.
It began when the winter Rains failed almost entirely, and
Ikki, the Porcupine, meeting Mowgli in a bamboo-thicket, told
him that the wild yams were drying up. Now everybody knows that
Ikki is ridiculously fastidious in his choice of food, and will
eat nothing but the very best and ripest. So Mowgli laughed and
said, "What is that to me?"
"Not much NOW," said Ikki, rattling his quills in a stiff,
uncomfortable way, "but later we shall see. Is there any
more diving into the deep rock-pool below the Bee-Rocks,
Little Brother?"
"No. The foolish water is going all away, and I do not wish
to break my head," said Mowgii, who, in those days, was quite
sure that he knew as much as any five of the Jungle People
put together.
"That is thy loss. A small crack might let in some wisdom."
Ikki ducked quickly to prevent Mowgli from pulling his
nose-bristles, and Mowgli told Baloo what Ikki had said.
Baloo looked very grave, and mumbled half to himself:
"If I were alone I would change my hunting-grounds now,
before the others began to think. And yet--hunting among
strangers ends in fighting; and they might hurt the Man-cub.
We must wait and see how the mohwa blooms."
That spring the mohwa tree, that Baloo was so fond of, never
flowered. The greeny, cream-coloured, waxy blossoms were
heat-killed before they were born, and only a few bad-smelling
petals came down when he stood on his hind legs and shook
the tree. Then, inch by inch, the untempered heat crept into
the heart of the Jungle, turning it yellow, brown, and at
last black. The green growths in the sides of the ravines
burned up to broken wires and curled films of dead stuff;
the hidden pools sank down and caked over, keeping the last
least footmark on their edges as if it had been cast in iron;
the juicy-stemmed creepers fell away from the trees they clung
to and died at their feet; the bamboos withered, clanking when
the hot winds blew, and the moss peeled off the rocks deep in
the Jungle, till they were as bare and as hot as the quivering
blue boulders in the bed of the stream.
The birds and the monkey-people went north early in the year,
for they knew what was coming; and the deer and the wild pig
broke far away to the perished fields of the villages, dying
sometimes before the eyes of men too weak to kill them. Chil,
the Kite, stayed and grew fat, for there was a great deal of
carrion, and evening after evening he brought the news to the
beasts, too weak to force their way to fresh hunting-grounds,
that the sun was killing the Jungle for three days" flight in
every direction.
Mowgli, who had never known what real hunger meant, fell back
on stale honey, three years old, scraped out of deserted
rock-hives--honey black as a sloe, and dusty with dried sugar.
He hunted, too, for deep-boring grubs under the bark of the
trees, and robbed the wasps of their new broods. All the game
in the jungle was no more than skin and bone, and Bagheera
could kill thrice in a night, and hardly get a full meal. But
the want of water was the worst, for though the Jungle People
drink seldom they must drink deep.
And the heat went on and on, and sucked up all the moisture,
till at last the main channel of the Waingunga was the only
stream that carried a trickle of water between its dead banks;
and when Hathi, the wild elephant, who lives for a hundred
years and more, saw a long, lean blue ridge of rock show dry
in the very centre of the stream, he knew that he was looking
at the Peace Rock, and then and there he lifted up his trunk
and proclaimed the Water Truce, as his father before him had
proclaimed it fifty years ago. The deer, wild pig, and buffalo
took up the cry hoarsely; and Chil, the Kite, flew in great
circles far and wide, whistling and shrieking the warning.
By the Law of the Jungle it is death to kill at the
drinking-places when once the Water Truce has been declared.
The reason of this is that drinking comes before eating. Every
one in the Jungle can scramble along somehow when only game is
scarce; but water is water, and when there is but one source of
supply, all hunting stops while the Jungle People go there for
their needs. In good seasons, when water was plentiful, those
who came down to drink at the Waingunga--or anywhere else, for
that matter--did so at the risk of their lives, and that risk
made no small part of the fascination of the night's doings.
To move down so cunningly that never a leaf stirred; to wade
knee-deep in the roaring shallows that drown all noise from
behind; to drink, looking backward over one shoulder, every
muscle ready for the first desperate bound of keen terror;
to roll on the sandy margin, and return, wet-muzzled and
well plumped out, to the admiring herd, was a thing that all
tall-antlered young bucks took a delight in, precisely because
they knew that at any moment Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap
upon them and bear them down. But now all that life-and-death
fun was ended, and the Jungle People came up, starved and
weary, to the shrunken river,--tiger, bear, deer, buffalo,
and pig, all together,--drank the fouled waters, and hung above
them, too exhausted to move off.
The deer and the pig had tramped all day in search of something
better than dried bark and withered leaves. The buffaloes had
found no wallows to be cool in, and no green crops to steal.
The snakes had left the Jungle and come down to the river in
the hope of finding a stray frog. They curled round wet stones,
and never offered to strike when the nose of a rooting pig
dislodged them. The river-turtles had long ago been killed by
Bagheera, cleverest of hunters, and the fish had buried
themselves deep in the dry mud. Only the Peace Rock lay across
the shallows like a long snake, and the little tired ripples
hissed as they dried on its hot side.
It was here that Mowgli came nightly for the cool and the
companionship. The most hungry of his enemies would hardly have
cared for the boy then, His naked hide made him seem more lean
and wretched than any of his fellows. His hair was bleached to
tow colour by the sun; his ribs stood out like the ribs of a
basket, and the lumps on his knees and elbows, where he was used
to track on all fours, gave his shrunken limbs the look of
knotted grass-stems. But his eye, under his matted forelock,
was cool and quiet, for Bagheera was his adviser in this time
of trouble, and told him to go quietly, hunt slowly, and never,
on any account, to lose his temper.
"It is an evil time," said the Black Panther, one furnace-hot
evening, "but it will go if we can live till the end. Is thy
stomach full, Man-cub?"
"There is stuff in my stomach, but I get no good of it.
Think you, Bagheera, the Rains have forgotten us and will
never come again?"
"Not I! We shall see the mohwa in blossom yet, and the little
fawns all fat with new grass. Come down to the Peace Rock and
hear the news. On my back, Little Brother."
"This is no time to carry weight. I can still stand alone,
but--indeed we be no fatted bullocks, we two."
Bagheera looked along his ragged, dusty flank and whispered.
"Last night I killed a bullock under the yoke. So low was I
brought that I think I should not have dared to spring if he
had been loose. WOU!"
Mowgli laughed. "Yes, we be great hunters now," said he.
"I am very bold--to eat grubs," and the two came down together
through the crackling undergrowth to the river-bank and the
lace-work of shoals that ran out from it in every direction.
"The water cannot live long," said Baloo, joining them.
"Look across. Yonder are trails like the roads of Man."
On the level plain of the farther bank the stiff jungle-grass
had died standing, and, dying, had mummied. The beaten tracks
of the deer and the pig, all heading toward the river, had
striped that colourless plain with dusty gullies driven through
the ten-foot grass, and, early as it was, each long avenue was
full of first-comers hastening to the water. You could hear the
does and fawns coughing in the snuff-like dust.
Up-stream, at the bend of the sluggish pool round the Peace
Rock, and Warden of the Water Truce, stood Hathi, the wild
elephant, with his sons, gaunt and gray in the moonlight,
rocking to and fro--always rocking. Below him a little were the
vanguard of the deer; below these, again, the pig and the wild
buffalo; and on the opposite bank, where the tall trees came
down to the water's edge, was the place set apart for the
Eaters of Flesh--the tiger, the wolves, the panther, the bear,
and the others.
"We are under one Law, indeed," said Bagheera, wading into the
water and looking across at the lines of clicking horns and
starting eyes where the deer and the pig pushed each other to
and fro. "Good hunting, all you of my blood," he added, lying
own at full length, one flank thrust out of the shallows; and
then, between his teeth, "But for that which is the Law it
would be VERY good hunting."
The quick-spread ears of the deer caught the last sentence,
and a frightened whisper ran along the ranks. "The Truce!
Remember the Truce!"
"Peace there, peace!" gurgled Hathi, the wild elephant.
"The Truce holds, Bagheera. This is no time to talk
of hunting."
"Who should know better than I?" Bagheera answered, rolling his
yellow eyes up-stream. "I am an eater of turtles--a fisher of
frogs. Ngaayah! Would I could get good from chewing branches!"
"WE wish so, very greatly," bleated a young fawn, who had only
been born that spring, and did not at all like it. Wretched as
the Jungle People were, even Hathi could not help chuckling;
while Mowgli, lying on his elbows in the warm water, laughed
aloud, and beat up the scum with his feet.
"Well spoken, little bud-horn," Bagheera purred. "When the
Truce ends that shall be remembered in thy favour," and he
looked keenly through the darkness to make sure of recognising
the fawn again.
Gradually the talking spread up and down the drinking-places.
One could hear the scuffling, snorting pig asking for more
room; the buffaloes grunting among themselves as they lurched
out across the sand-bars, and the deer telling pitiful stories
of their long foot-sore wanderings in quest of food. Now and
again they asked some question of the Eaters of Flesh across
the river, but all the news was bad, and the roaring hot wind
of the Jungle came and went between the rocks and the rattling
branches, and scattered twigs, and dust on the water.
"The men-folk, too, they die beside their ploughs," said a
young sambhur. "I passed three between sunset and night.
They lay still, and their Bullocks with them. We also shall lie
still in a little."
"The river has fallen since last night," said Baloo. "O Hathi,
hast thou ever seen the like of this drought?"
"It will pass, it will pass," said Hathi, squirting water along
his back and sides.
"We have one here that cannot endure long," said Baloo; and he
looked toward the boy he loved.
"I?" said Mowgli indignantly, sitting up in the water. "I have
no long fur to cover my bones, but--but if THY hide were taken
off, Baloo----"
Hathi shook all over at the idea, and Baloo said severely:
"Man-cub, that is not seemly to tell a Teacher of the Law.
Never have I been seen without my hide."
"Nay, I meant no harm, Baloo; but only that thou art, as it
were, like the cocoanut in the husk, and I am the same cocoanut
all naked. Now that brown husk of thine----" Mowgli was sitting
cross-legged, and explaining things with his forefinger in his
usual way, when Bagheera put out a paddy paw and pulled him
over backward into the water.
"Worse and worse," said the Black Panther, as the boy rose
spluttering. "First Baloo is to be skinned, and now he is a
cocoanut. Be careful that he does not do what the ripe
cocoanuts do."
"And what is that?" said Mowgli, off his guard for the minute,
though that is one of the oldest catches in the Jungle.
"Break thy head," said Bagheera quietly, pulling him
under again.
"It is not good to make a jest of thy teacher," said the bear,
when Mowgli had been ducked for the third time.
"Not good! What would ye have? That naked thing running to
and fro makes a monkey-jest of those who have once been good
hunters, and pulls the best of us by the whiskers for sport."
This was Shere Khan, the Lame Tiger, limping down to the water.
He waited a little to enjoy the sensation he made among the
deer on the opposite to lap, growling: "The jungle has become a
whelping-ground for naked cubs now. Look at me, Man-cub!"
Mowgli looked--stared, rather--as insolently as he knew how,
and in a minute Shere Khan turned away uneasily. "Man-cub this,
and Man-cub that," he rumbled, going on with his drink, "the
cub is neither man nor cub, or he would have been afraid. Next
season I shall have to beg his leave for a drink. Augrh!"
"That may come, too," said Bagheera, looking him steadily
between the eyes. "That may come, too--Faugh, Shere Khan!--what
new shame hast thou brought here?"
The Lame Tiger had dipped his chin and jowl in the water, and
dark, oily streaks were floating from it down-stream.
"Man!" said Shere Khan coolly, "I killed an hour since."
He went on purring and growling to himself.
The line of beasts shook and wavered to and fro, and a whisper
went up that grew to a cry. "Man! Man! He has killed Man!"
Then all looked towards Hathi, the wild elephant, but he seemed
not to hear. Hathi never does anything till the time comes,
and that is one of the reasons why he lives so long.
"At such a season as this to kill Man! Was no other game
afoot?" said Bagheera scornfully, drawing himself out of the
tainted water, and shaking each paw, cat-fashion, as he did so.
"I killed for choice--not for food." The horrified whisper
began again, and Hathi's watchful little white eye cocked
itself in Shere Khan's direction. "For choice," Shere Khan
drawled. "Now come I to drink and make me clean again. Is
there any to forbid?"
Bagheera's back began to curve like a bamboo in a high wind,
but Hathi lifted up his trunk and spoke quietly.
"Thy kill was from choice?" he asked; and when Hathi asks a
question it is best to answer.
"Even so. It was my right and my Night. Thou knowest, O Hathi."
Shere Khan spoke almost courteously.
"Yes, I know," Hathi answered; and, after a little silence,
"Hast thou drunk thy fill?"
"For to-night, yes."
"Go, then. The river is to drink, and not to defile. None but
the Lame Tiger would so have boasted of his right at this
season when--when we suffer together--Man and Jungle People
alike." Clean or unclean, get to thy lair, Shere Khan!"
The last words rang out like silver trumpets, and Hathi's three
sons rolled forward half a pace, though there was no need.
Shere Khan slunk away, not daring to growl, for he knew--what
every one else knows--that when the last comes to the last,
Hathi is the Master of the Jungle.
"What is this right Shere Khan speaks of?" Mowgli whispered in
Bagheera's ear. "To kill Man is always, shameful. The Law says
so. And yet Hathi says----"
"Ask him. I do not know, Little Brother. Right or no right, if
Hathi had not spoken I would have taught that lame butcher his
lesson. To come to the Peace Rock fresh from a kill of Man--and
to boast of it--is a jackal's trick. Besides, he tainted the
good water."
Mowgli waited for a minute to pick up his courage, because no
one cared to address Hathi directly, and then he cried: "What
is Shere Khan's right, O Hathi?" Both banks echoed his words,
for all the People of the Jungle are intensely curious, and
they had just seen something that none except Baloo, who looked
very thoughtful, seemed to understand.
"It is an old tale," said Hathi; "a tale older than the Jungle.
Keep silence along the banks and I will tell that tale."
There was a minute or two of pushing a shouldering among the
pigs and the buffalo, and then the leaders of the herds
grunted, one after another, "We wait," and Hathi strode
forward, till he was nearly knee-deep in the pool by the Peace
Rock. Lean and wrinkled and yellow-tusked though he was,
he looked what the Jungle knew him to be--their master.
"Ye know, children," he began, "that of all things ye most fear
Man"; and there was a mutter of agreement.
"This tale touches thee, Little Brother," said Bagheera
to Mowgli.
"I? I am of the Pack--a hunter of the Free People," Mowgli
answered. "What have I to do with Man?"
"And ye do not know why ye fear Man?" Hathi went on. "This is
the reason. In the beginning of the Jungle, and none know when
that was, we of the Jungle walked together, having no fear of
one another. In those days there was no drought, and leaves and
flowers and fruit grew on the same tree, and we ate nothing at
all except leaves and flowers and grass and fruit and bark."
"I am glad I was not born in those days," said Bagheera. "Bark
is only good to sharpen claws."
"And the Lord of the Jungle was Tha, the First of the
Elephants. He drew the Jungle out of deep waters with his
trunk; and where he made furrows in the ground with his tusks,
there the rivers ran; and where he struck with his foot, there
rose ponds of good water; and when he blew through his trunk,--
thus,--the trees fell. That was the manner in which the Jungle
was made by Tha; and so the tale was told to me."
"It has not lost fat in the telling," Bagheera whispered, and
Mowgli laughed behind his hand.
"In those days there was no corn or melons or pepper or
sugar-cane, nor were there any little huts such as ye have
all seen; and the Jungle People knew nothing of Man, but lived
in the Jungle together, making one people. But presently they
began to dispute over their food, though there was grazing
enough for all. They were lazy. Each wished to eat where he
lay, as sometimes we can do now when the spring rains are good.
Tha, the First of the Elephants, was busy making new jungles
and leading the rivers in their beds. He could not walk in all
places; therefore he made the First of the Tigers the master
and the judge of the Jungle, to whom the Jungle People should
bring their disputes. In those days the First of the Tigers
ate fruit and grass with the others. He was as large as I am,
and he was very beautiful, in colour all over like the blossom
of the yellow creeper. There was never stripe nor bar upon
his hide in those good days when this the Jungle was new.
All the Jungle People came before him without fear, and his
word was the Law of all the Jungle. We were then, remember ye,
one people.
"Yet upon a night there was a dispute between two bucks--a
grazing-quarrel such as ye now settle with the horns and the
fore-feet--and it is said that as the two spoke together before
the First of the First of the Tigers lying among the flowers,
a buck pushed him with his horns, and the First of the Tigers
forgot that he was the master and judge of the Jungle, and,
leaping upon that buck, broke his neck.
"Till that night never one of us had died, and the First of
the Tigers, seeing what he had done, and being made foolish by
the scent of the blood, ran away into the marshes of the North,
and we of the Jungle, left without a judge, fell to fighting
among ourselves; and Tha heard the noise of it and came back.
Then some of us said this and some of us said that, but he saw
the dead buck among the flowers, and asked who had killed,
and we of the Jungle would not tell because the smell of the
blood made us foolish. We ran to and fro in circles, capering
and crying out and shaking our heads. Then Tha gave an order
to the trees that hang low, and to the trailing creepers of
the Jungle, that they should mark the killer of the buck so
that he should know him again, and he said, "Who will now be
master of the Jungle People?" Then up leaped the Gray Ape
who lives in the branches, and said, "I will now be master of
the Jungle."
At this Tha laughed, and said, "So be it," and went away
very angry.
"Children, ye know the Gray Ape. He was then as he is now.
At the first he made a wise face for himself, but in a little
while he began to scratch and to leap up and down, and when Tha
came back he found the Gray Ape hanging, head down, from a
bough, mocking those who stood below; and they mocked him
again. And so there was no Law in the Jungle--only foolish
talk and senseless words.
"Then Tha called us all together and said: 'The first of your
masters has brought Death into the Jungle, and the second
Shame. Now it is time there was a Law, and a Law that ye must
not break. Now ye shall know Fear, and when ye have found him
ye shall know that he is your master, and the rest shall
follow.' Then we of the jungle said, 'What is Fear?' And Tha
said, 'Seek till ye find.' So we went up and down the Jungle
seeking for Fear, and presently the buffaloes----"
"Ugh!" said Mysa, the leader of the buffaloes, from their
sand-bank.
"Yes, Mysa, it was the buffaloes. They came back with the news
that in a cave in the Jungle sat Fear, and that he had no hair,
and went upon his hind legs. Then we of the Jungle followed the
herd till we came to that cave, and Fear stood at the mouth of
it, and he was, as the buffaloes had said, hairless, and he
walked upon his hinder legs. When he saw us he cried out, and
his voice filled us with the fear that we have now of that
voice when we hear it, and we ran away, tramping upon and
tearing each other because we were afraid. That night, so it
was told to me, we of the Jungle did not lie down together as
used to be our custom, but each tribe drew off by itself--the
pig with the pig, the deer with the deer; horn to horn, hoof to
hoof,--like keeping to like, and so lay shaking in the Jungle.
"Only the First of the Tigers was not with us, for he was still
hidden in the marshes of the North, and when word was brought
to him of the Thing we had seen in the cave, he said. 'I will
go to this Thing and break his neck.' So he ran all the night
till he came to the cave; but the trees and the creepers on his
path, remembering the order that Tha had given, let down their
branches and marked him as he ran, drawing their fingers across
his back, his flank, his forehead, and his jowl. Wherever they
touched him there was a mark and a stripe upon his yellow hide.
AND THOSE STRIPES DO THIS CHILDREN WEAR TO THIS DAY! When he
came to the cave, Fear, the Hairless One, put out his hand and
called him 'The Striped One that comes by night,' and the First
of the Tigers was afraid of the Hairless One, and ran back to
the swamps howling."
Mowgli chuckled quietly here, his chin in the water.
"So loud did he howl that Tha heard him and said, 'What is the
sorrow?' And the First of the Tigers, lifting up his muzzle to
the new-made sky, which is now so old, said: 'Give me back my
power, O Tha. I am made ashamed before all the Jungle, and I
have run away from a Hairless One, and he has called me a
shameful name.' 'And why?' said Tha. 'Because I am smeared with
the mud of the marshes,' said the First of the Tigers. 'Swim,
then, and roll on the wet grass, and if it be mud it will wash
away,' said Tha; and the First of the Tigers swam, and rolled
and rolled upon the grass, till the Jungle ran round and round
before his eyes, but not one little bar upon all his hide was
changed, and Tha, watching him, laughed. Then the First of the
Tigers said: 'What have I done that this comes to me?'
Tha said, 'Thou hast killed the buck, and thou hast let Death
loose in the Jungle, and with Death has come Fear, so that the
people of the Jungle are afraid one of the other, as thou art
afraid of the Hairless One.' The First of the Tigers said,
'They will never fear me, for I knew them since the beginning.'
Tha said, 'Go and see.' And the First of the Tigers ran to and
fro, calling aloud to the deer and the pig and the sambhur and
the porcupine and all the Jungle Peoples, and they all ran away
from him who had been their judge, because they were afraid.
"Then the First of the Tigers came back, and his pride was
broken in him, and, beating his head upon the ground, he tore up
the earth with all his feet and said: 'Remember that I was once
the Master of the Jungle. Do not forget me, O Tha! Let my
children remember that I was once without shame or fear!'
And Tha said: 'This much I will do, because thou and I together
saw the Jungle made. For one night in each year it shall be as
it was before the buck was killed--for thee and for thy
children. In that one night, if ye meet the Hairless One--and
his name is Man--ye shall not be afraid of him, but he shall he
afraid of you, as though ye were judges of the Jungle and
masters of all things. Show him mercy in that night of his
fear, for thou hast known what Fear is.'
"Then the First of the Tigers answered, 'I am content';
but when next he drank he saw the black stripes upon his flank
and his side, and he remembered the name that the Hairless One
had given him, and he was angry. For a year he lived in the
marshes waiting till Tha should keep his promise. And upon a
night when the jackal of the Moon [the Evening Star] stood
clear of the Jungle, he felt that his Night was upon him,
and he went to that cave to meet the Hairless One. Then it
happened as Tha promised, for the Hairless One fell down before
him and lay along the ground, and the First of the Tigers
struck him and broke his back, for he thought that there was
but one such Thing in the Jungle, and that he had killed Fear.
Then, nosing above the kill, he heard Tha coming down from the
woods of the North, and presently the voice of the First of the
Elephants, which is the voice that we hear now----"
The thunder was rolling up and down the dry, scarred hills, but
it brought no rain--only heat--lightning that flickered along
the ridges--and Hathi went on: "THAT was the voice he heard,
and it said: 'Is this thy mercy?' The First of the Tigers
licked his lips and said: 'What matter? I have killed Fear.'
And Tha said: 'O blind and foolish! Thou hast untied the feet
of Death, and he will follow thy trail till thou diest.
Thou hast taught Man to kill!'
"The First of the Tigers, standing stiffly to his kill, said.
'He is as the buck was. There is no Fear. Now I will judge the
Jungle Peoples once more.'
"And Tha said: 'Never again shall the Jungle Peoples come to
thee. They shall never cross thy trail, nor sleep near thee,
nor follow after thee, nor browse by thy lair. Only Fear shall
follow thee, and with a blow that thou canst not see he shall
bid thee wait his pleasure. He shall make the ground to open
under thy feet, and the creeper to twist about thy neck,
and the tree-trunks to grow together about thee higher than
thou canst leap, and at the last he shall take thy hide to wrap
his cubs when they are cold. Thou hast shown him no mercy,
and none will he show thee.'
"The First of the Tigers was very bold, for his Night was still
on him, and he said: 'The Promise of Tha is the Promise of Tha.
He will not take away my Night?' And Tha said: 'The one Night is
thine, as I have said, but there is a price to pay.
Thou hast taught Man to kill, and he is no slow learner.'
"The First of the Tigers said: 'He is here under my foot, and
his back is broken. Let the Jungle know I have killed Fear.'
"Then Tha laughed, and said: 'Thou hast killed one of many, but
thou thyself shalt tell the Jungle--for thy Night is ended.'
"So the day came; and from the mouth of the cave went out
another Hairless One, and he saw the kill in the path, and the
First of the Tigers above it, and he took a pointed stick----"
"They throw a thing that cuts now," said Ikki, rustling down
the bank; for Ikki was considered uncommonly good eating by
the Gonds--they called him Ho-Igoo--and he knew something of
the wicked little Gondee axe that whirls across a clearing
like a dragon-fly.
"It was a pointed stick, such as they put in the foot of a
pit-trap," said Hathi, "and throwing it, he struck the First
of the Tigers deep in the flank. Thus it happened as Tha said,
for the First of the Tigers ran howling up and down the Jungle
till he tore out the stick, and all the Jungle knew that the
Hairless One could strike from far off, and they feared more
than before. So it came about that the First of the Tigers
taught the Hairless One to kill--and ye know what harm that has
since done to all our peoples--through the noose, and the
pitfall, and the hidden trap, and the flying stick and the
stinging fly that comes out of white smoke [Hathi meant the
rifle], and the Red Flower that drives us into the open.
Yet for one night in the year the Hairless One fears the Tiger,
as Tha promised, and never has the Tiger given him cause to be
less afraid. Where he finds him, there he kills him,
remembering how the First of the Tigers was made ashamed.
For the rest, Fear walks up and down the Jungle by day
and by night."
"Ahi! Aoo!" said the deer, thinking of what it all meant
to them.
"And only when there is one great Fear over all, as there is
now, can we of the Jungle lay aside our little fears, and meet
together in one place as we do now."
"For one night only does Man fear the Tiger?" said Mowgli.
"For one night only," said Hathi.
"But I--but we--but all the Jungle knows that Shere Khan kills
Man twice and thrice in a moon."
"Even so. THEN he springs from behind and turns his head aside
as he strikes, for he is full of fear. If Man looked at him he
would run. But on his one Night he goes openly down to the
village. He walks between the houses and thrusts his head into
the doorway, and the men fall on their faces, and there he does
his kill. One kill in that Night."
"Oh!" said Mowgli to himself, rolling over in the water. "NOW I
see why it was Shere Khan bade me look at him! He got no good
of it, for he could not hold his eyes steady, and--and I
certainly did not fall down at his feet. But then I am not a
man, being of the Free People."
"Umm!" said Bagheera deep in his furry throat. "Does the Tiger
know his Night?"
"Never till the Jackal of the Moon stands clear of the evening
mist. Sometimes it falls in the dry summer and sometimes in the
wet rains--this one Night of the Tiger. But for the First of
the Tigers, this would never have been, nor would any of us
have known fear."
The deer grunted sorrowfully and Bagheera's lips curled in a
wicked smile. "Do men know this--tale?" said he.
"None know it except the tigers, and we, the elephants--the
children of Tha. Now ye by the pools have heard it, and I
have spoken."
Hathi dipped his trunk into the water as a sign that he did not
wish to talk.
"But--but--but," said Mowgli, turning to Baloo, "why did not the
First of the Tigers continue to eat grass and leaves and trees?
He did but break the buck's neck. He did not EAT. What led him
to the hot meat?"
"The trees and the creepers marked him, Little Brother, and made
him the striped thing that we see. Never again would he eat
their fruit; but from that day he revenged himself upon the
deer, and the others, the Eaters of Grass," said Baloo.
"Then THOU knowest the tale. Heh? Why have I never heard?"
"Because the Jungle is full of such tales. If I made a
beginning there would never be an end to them. Let go my ear,
Little Brother."
THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE
Just to give you an idea of the immense variety of the Jungle
Law, I have translated into verse (Baloo always recited them in
a sort of sing-song) a few of the laws that apply to the wolves.
There are, of course, hundreds and hundreds more, but these will
do for specimens of the simpler rulings.
Now this is the Law of the Jungle--as old and as true as
the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf
that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth
forward and back--
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength
of the Wolf is the Pack.
Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink deeply, but
never too deep;
And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not
the day is for sleep.
The jackal may follow the Tiger, but, Cub, when thy
whiskers are grown,
Remember the Wolf is a hunter--go forth and get food
of thine own.
Keep peace with the Lords of the Jungle--the Tiger, the
Panther, the Bear;
And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the Boar
in his lair.
When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither
will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken--it may be fair
words shall prevail.
When ye fight with a Wolf of the Pack, ye must
fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the quarrel, and the Pack be
diminished by war.
The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, and where he has
made him his home,
Not even the Head Wolf may enter, not even the Council
may come.
The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, but where he has
digged it too plain,
The Council shall send him a message, and so he shall
change it again.
If ye kill before midnight, be silent, and wake not the
woods with your bay,
Lest ye frighten the deer from the crops, and the brothers
go empty away.
Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs
as they need, and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and SEVEN TIMES NEVER
KILL MAN.
If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker, devour not all in
thy pride;
Pack-Right is the right of the meanest; so leave him the
head and the hide.
The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack. Ye must
eat where it lies;
And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair, or
he dies.
The Kill of the Wolf is the meat of the Wolf. He may
do what he will,
But, till he has given permission, the Pack may not eat
of that Kill.
Cub-Right is the right of the Yearling. From all of his
Pack he may claim
Full-gorge when the killer has eaten; and none may
refuse him the same.
Lair-Right is the right of the Mother. From all of her
year she may claim
One haunch of each kill for her litter, and none may
deny her the same.
Cave-Right is the right of the Father--to hunt by himself
for his own.
He is freed of all calls to the Pack; he is judged by the
Council alone.
Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe
and his paw,
In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of the Head
Wolf is Law.
Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and
mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch
and the hump is--Obey!
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT
The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.
And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!
Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!
Dirge of the Langurs.
There was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of
the semi-independent native States in the north-western part of
the country. He was a Brahmin, so high-caste that caste ceased
to have any particular meaning for him; and his father had been
an important official in the gay-coloured tag-rag and bobtail of
an old-fashioned Hindu Court. But as Purun Dass grew up he felt
that the old order of things was changing, and that if any one
wished to get on in the world he must stand well with the
English, and imitate all that the English believed to be good.
At the same time a native official must keep his own master's
favour. This was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed
young Brahmin, helped by a good English education at a Bombay
University, played it coolly, and rose, step by step, to be
Prime Minister of the kingdom. That is to say, he held more real
power than his master the Maharajah.
When the old king--who was suspicious of the English, their
railways and telegraphs--died, Purun Dass stood high with his
young successor, who had been tutored by an Englishman; and
between them, though he always took care that his master should
have the credit, they established schools for little girls,
made roads, and started State dispensaries and shows of
agricultural implements, and published a yearly blue-book on
the "Moral and Material Progress of the State," and the Foreign
Office and the Government of India were delighted. Very few
native States take up English progress altogether, for they will
not believe, as Purun Dass showed he did, that what was good for
the Englishman must be twice as good for the Asiatic. The Prime
Minister became the honoured friend of Viceroys, and Governors,
and Lieutenant-Governors, and medical missionaries, and common
missionaries, and hard-riding English officers who came to shoot
in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts of tourists
who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showing how
things ought to be managed. In his spare time he would endow
scholarships for the study of medicine and manufactures on
strictly English lines, and write letters to the "Pioneer",
the greatest Indian daily paper, explaining his master's aims
and objects.
At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous
sums to the priests when he came back; for even so high-caste a
Brahmin as Purun Dass lost caste by crossing the black sea.
In London he met and talked with every one worth knowing--
men whose names go all over the world--and saw a great deal
more than he said. He was given honorary degrees by learned
universities, and he made speeches and talked of Hindu social
reform to English ladies in evening dress, till all London
cried, "This is the most fascinating man we have ever met at
dinner since cloths were first laid."
When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for
the Viceroy himself made a special visit to confer upon the
Maharajah the Grand Cross of the Star of India--all diamonds
and ribbons and enamel; and at the same ceremony, while the
cannon boomed, Purun Dass was made a Knight Commander of the
Order of the Indian Empire; so that his name stood Sir Purun
Dass, K.C.I.E.
That evening, at dinner in the big Viceregal tent, he stood up
with the badge and the collar of the Order on his breast,
and replying to the toast of his master's health, made a speech
few Englishmen could have bettered.
Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet,
he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing;
for, so far as the world's affairs went, he died. The jewelled
order of his knighthood went back to the Indian Government,
and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs,
and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate
appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the people
guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can
do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan
Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and
power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of
a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary.
He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth,
twenty years a fighter,--though he had never carried a weapon in
his life,--and twenty years head of a household. He had used his
wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had
taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities
far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him.
Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no
longer needs.
Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope
skin and brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl
of polished brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with
eyes cast on the ground--behind him they were firing salutes
from the bastions in honour of his happy successor. Purun Dass
nodded. All that life was ended; and he bore it no more ill-will
or good-will than a man bears to a colourless dream of the
night. He was a Sunnyasi--a houseless, wandering mendicant,
depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so long as
there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar
starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom
eaten even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his
personal expenses for food through any one of the many years in
which he had been absolute master of millions of money. Even
when he was being lionised in London he had held before him his
dream of peace and quiet--the long, white, dusty Indian road,
printed all over with bare feet, the incessant, slow-moving
traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under
the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their
evening meal.
When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister
took the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily
have found a bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas,
than Purun Dass among the roving, gathering, separating millions
of India.
At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness
overtook him--sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside;
sometimes by a mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis,
who are another misty division of holy men, would receive him as
they do those who know what castes and divisions are worth;
sometimes on the outskirts of a little Hindu village, where
the children would steal up with the food their parents had
prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare grazing-
grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsy
camels. It was all one to Purun Dass--or Purun Bhagat, as he
called himself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But
unconsciously his feet drew him away northward and eastward;
from the south to Rohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool
to ruined Samanah, and then up-stream along the dried bed of the
Gugger river that fills only when the rain falls in the hills,
till one day he saw the far line of the great Himalayas.
Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was
of Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way--a Hill-woman, always
home-sick for the snows--and that the least touch of Hill blood
draws a man in the end back to where he belongs.
"Yonder," said Purun Bhagat, breasting the lower slopes of
the Sewaliks, where the cacti stand up like seven-branched
candlesticks-"yonder I shall sit down and get knowledge";
and the cool wind of the Himalayas whistled about his ears
as he trod the road that led to Simla.
The last time he had come that way it had been in state, with
a clattering cavalry escort, to visit the gentlest and most
affable of Viceroys; and the two had talked for an hour together
about mutual friends in London, and what the Indian common folk
really thought of things. This time Purun Bhagat paid no calls,
but leaned on the rail of the Mall, watching that glorious view
of the Plains spread out forty miles below, till a native
Mohammedan policeman told him he was obstructing traffic; and
Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law, because he knew the
value of it, and was seeking for a Law of his own. Then he moved
on, and slept that night in an empty hut at Chota Simla, which
looks like the very last end of the earth, but it was only the
beginning of his journey. He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road,
the little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock,
or strutted out on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep;
that dips into warm, wet, shut-in valleys, and climbs out
across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where the sun strikes like
a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, dark forests where
the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and the
pheasant calls to his mate. And he met Thibetan herdsmen with
their dogs and flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of
borax on his back, and wandering wood-cutters, and cloaked and
blanketed Lamas from Thibet, coming into India on pilgrimage,
and envoys of little solitary Hill-states, posting furiously on
ring-streaked and piebald ponies, or the cavalcade of a Rajah
paying a visit; or else for a long, clear day he would see
nothing more than a black bear grunting and rooting below in the
valley. When he first started, the roar of the world he had left
still rang in his ears, as the roar of a tunnel rings long after
the train has passed through; but when he had put the Mutteeanee
Pass behind him that was all done, and Purun Bhagat was alone
with himself, walking, wondering, and thinking, his eyes on the
ground, and his thoughts with the clouds.
One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then--it
had been a two-day's climb--and came out on a line of snow-peaks
that banded all the horizon--mountains from fifteen to twenty
thousand feet high, looking almost near enough to hit with a
stone, though they were fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was
crowned with dense, dark forest--deodar, walnut, wild cherry,
wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the
Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a
deserted shrine to Kali--who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is
sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.
Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, smiled at the grinning
statue, made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the
shrine, spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles,
tucked his bairagi--his brass-handled crutch--under his armpit,
and sat down to rest.
Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared
for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled
houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt.
All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of
patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than
beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the
threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was
deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise
that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-
flank, was in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat
saw an eagle swoop across the gigantic hollow, but the great
bird dwindled to a dot ere it was half-way over. A few bands of
scattered clouds strung up and down the valley, catching on a
shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying out when they were
level with the head of the pass. And "Here shall I find peace,"
said Purun Bhagat.
Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down,
and as soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted
shrine, the village priest climbed up the terraced hillside to
welcome the stranger.
When he met Purun Bhagat's eyes--the eyes of a man used to
control thousands--he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl
without a word, and returned to the village, saying, "We have at
last a holy man. Never have I seen such a man. He is of the
Plains--but pale-coloured--a Brahmin of the Brahmins." Then all
the housewives of the village said, "Think you he will stay with
us?" and each did her best to cook the most savoury meal for the
Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with buckwheat and Indian
corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out of the stream
in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in the
stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger,
and bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and
it was a full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was
he going to stay? asked the priest. Would he need a chela--
a disciple--to beg for him? Had he a blanket against the cold
weather? Was the food good?
Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to
stay. That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl
be placed outside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two
twisted roots, and daily should the Bhagat be fed; for the
village felt honoured that such a man--he looked timidly into
the Bhagat's face--should tarry among them.
That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat's wanderings. He had come
to the place appointed for him--the silence and the space. After
this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine,
could not tell whether he were alive or dead; a man with control
of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the
shifting rain and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to
himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he
seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the
doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the door was
opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt
he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.
Every morning the filled begging-bowl was laid silently in the
crutch of the roots outside the shrine. Sometimes the priest
brought it; sometimes a Ladakhi trader, lodging in the village,
and anxious to get merit, trudged up the path; but, more often,
it was the woman who had cooked the meal overnight; and she
would murmur, hardly above her breath. "Speak for me before the
gods, Bhagat. Speak for such a one, the wife of so-and-so!"
Now and then some bold child would be allowed the honour, and
Purun Bhagat would hear him drop the bowl and run as fast as his
little legs could carry him, but the Bhagat never came down to
the village. It was laid out like a map at his feet. He could
see the evening gatherings, held on the circle of the threshing-
floors, because that was the only level ground; could see the
wonderful unnamed green of the young rice, the indigo blues of
the Indian corn, the dock-like patches of buckwheat, and, in its
season, the red bloom of the amaranth, whose tiny seeds, being
neither grain nor pulse, make a food that can be lawfully eaten
by Hindus in time of fasts.
When the year turned, the roofs of the huts were all little
squares of purest gold, for it was on the roofs that they
laid out their cobs of the corn to dry. Hiving and harvest,
rice-sowing and husking, passed before his eyes, all embroidered
down there on the many-sided plots of fields, and he thought of
them all, and wondered what they all led to at the long last.
Even in populated India a man cannot a day sit still before the
wild things run over him as though he were a rock; and in that
wilderness very soon the wild things, who knew Kali's Shrine
well, came back to look at the intruder. The langurs, the big
gray-whiskered monkeys of the Himalayas, were, naturally, the
first, for they are alive with curiosity; and when they had
upset the begging-bowl, and rolled it round the floor, and
tried their teeth on the brass-handled crutch, and made faces
at the antelope skin, they decided that the human being who
sat so still was harmless. At evening, they would leap down
from the pines, and beg with their hands for things to eat,
and then swing off in graceful curves. They liked the warmth
of the fire, too, and huddled round it till Purun Bhagat had
to push them aside to throw on more fuel; and in the morning,
as often as not, he would find a furry ape sharing his blanket.
All day long, one or other of the tribe would sit by his side,
staring out at the snows, crooning and looking unspeakably wise
and sorrowful.
After the monkeys came the barasingh, that big deer which is
like our red deer, but stronger. He wished to rub off the velvet
of his horns against the cold stones of Kali's statue, and
stamped his feet when he saw the man at the shrine. But Purun
Bhagat never moved, and, little by little, the royal stag edged
up and nuzzled his shoulder. Purun Bhagat slid one cool hand
along the hot antlers, and the touch soothed the fretted beast,
who bowed his head, and Purun Bhagat very softly rubbed and
ravelled off the velvet. Afterward, the barasingh brought his
doe and fawn--gentle things that mumbled on the holy man's
blanket--or would come alone at night, his eyes green in the
fire-flicker, to take his share of fresh walnuts. At last, the
musk-deer, the shyest and almost the smallest of the deerlets,
came, too, her big rabbity ears erect; even brindled, silent
mushick-nabha must needs find out what the light in the shrine
meant, and drop out her moose-like nose into Purun Bhagat's lap,
coming and going with the shadows of the fire. Purun Bhagat
called them all "my brothers," and his low call of "Bhai! Bhai!"
would draw them from the forest at noon if they were within ear
shot. The Himalayan black bear, moody and suspicious--Sona, who
has the V-shaped white mark under his chin--passed that way more
than once; and since the Bhagat showed no fear, Sona showed no
anger, but watched him, and came closer, and begged a share of
the caresses, and a dole of bread or wild berries. Often, in the
still dawns, when the Bhagat would climb to the very crest of
the pass to watch the red day walking along the peaks of the
snows, he would find Sona shuffling and grunting at his heels,
thrusting, a curious fore-paw under fallen trunks, and bringing
it away with a WHOOF of impatience; or his early steps would
wake Sona where he lay curled up, and the great brute, rising
erect, would think to fight, till he heard the Bhagat's voice
and knew his best friend.
Nearly all hermits and holy men who live apart from the big
cities have the reputation of being able to work miracles with
the wild things, but all the miracle lies in keeping still, in
never making a hasty movement, and, for a long time, at least,
in never looking directly at a visitor. The villagers saw the
outline of the barasingh stalking like a shadow through the
dark forest behind the shrine; saw the minaul, the Himalayan
pheasant, blazing in her best colours before Kali's statue;
and the langurs on their haunches, inside, playing with the
walnut shells. Some of the children, too, had heard Sona singing
to himself, bear-fashion, behind the fallen rocks, and the
Bhagat's reputation as miracle-worker stood firm.
Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed
that all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that
much he knows something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that
there was nothing great and nothing little in this world: and
day and night he strove to think out his way into the heart of
things, back to the place whence his soul had come.
So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders,
the stone slab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into
a little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the
place between the tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day
after day, sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the
brown shell itself; and each beast knew his exact place at the
fire. The fields changed their colours with the seasons; the
threshing-floors filled and emptied, and filled again and again;
and again and again, when winter came, the langurs frisked among
the branches feathered with light snow, till the mother-monkeys
brought their sad-eyed little babies up from the warmer valleys
with the spring. There were few changes in the village. The
priest was older, and many of the little children who used to
come with the begging-dish sent their own children now; and when
you asked of the villagers how long their holy man had lived in
Kali's Shrine at the head of the pass, they answered, "Always."
Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the Hills
for many seasons. Through three good months the valley was
wrapped in cloud and soaking mist--steady, unrelenting downfall,
breaking off into thunder-shower after thunder-shower. Kali's
Shrine stood above the clouds, for the most part, and there was
a whole month in which the Bhagat never caught a glimpse of his
village. It was packed away under a white floor of cloud that
swayed and shifted and rolled on itself and bulged upward, but
never broke from its piers--the streaming flanks of the valley.
All that time he heard nothing but the sound of a million little
waters, overhead from the trees, and underfoot along the ground,
soaking through the pine-needles, dripping from the tongues of
draggled fern, and spouting in newly-torn muddy channels down
the slopes. Then the sun came out, and drew forth the good
incense of the deodars and the rhododendrons, and that far-off,
clean smell which the Hill people call "the smell of the snows."
The hot sunshine lasted for a week, and then the rains gathered
together for their last downpour, and the water fell in sheets
that flayed off the skin of the ground and leaped back in mud.
Purun Bhagat heaped his fire high that night, for he was sure
his brothers would need warmth; but never a beast came to the
shrine, though he called and called till he dropped asleep,
wondering what had happened in the woods.
It was in the black heart of the night, the rain drumming like a
thousand drums, that he was roused by a plucking at his blanket,
and, stretching out, felt the little hand of a langur. "It is
better here than in the trees," he said sleepily, loosening a
fold of blanket; "take it and be warm." The monkey caught his
hand and pulled hard. "Is it food, then?" said Purun Bhagat.
"Wait awhile, and I will prepare some." As he kneeled to throw
fuel on the fire the langur ran to the door of the shrine,
crooned and ran back again, plucking at the man's knee.
"What is it? What is thy trouble, Brother?" said Purun Bhagat,
for the langur's eyes were full of things that he could not
tell. "Unless one of thy caste be in a trap--and none set traps
here--I will not go into that weather. Look, Brother, even the
barasingh comes for shelter!"
The deer's antlers clashed as he strode into the shrine, clashed
against the grinning statue of Kali. He lowered them in Purun
Bhagat's direction and stamped uneasily, hissing through his
half-shut nostrils.
"Hai! Hai! Hai!" said the Bhagat, snapping his fingers, "Is THIS
payment for a night's lodging?" But the deer pushed him toward
the door, and as he did so Purun Bhagat heard the sound of
something opening with a sigh, and saw two slabs of the floor
draw away from each other, while the sticky earth below smacked
its lips.
"Now I see," said Purun Bhagat. "No blame to my brothers that
they did not sit by the fire to-night. The mountain is falling.
And yet-- why should I go?" His eye fell on the empty begging-
bowl, and his face changed. "They have given me good food daily
since--since I came, and, if I am not swift, to-morrow there
will not be one mouth in the valley. Indeed, I must go and warn
them below. Back there, Brother! Let me get to the fire."
The barasingh backed unwillingly as Purun Bhagat drove a pine
torch deep into the flame, twirling it till it was well lit.
"Ah! ye came to warn me," he said, rising. "Better than that we
shall do; better than that. Out, now, and lend me thy neck,
Brother, for I have but two feet."
He clutched the bristling withers of the barasingh with his
right hand, held the torch away with his left, and stepped out
of the shrine into the desperate night. There was no breath of
wind, but the rain nearly drowned the flare as the great deer
hurried down the slope, sliding on his haunches. As soon as they
were clear of the forest more of the Bhagat's brothers joined
them. He heard, though he could not see, the langurs pressing
about him, and behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. The rain
matted his long white hair into ropes; the water splashed
beneath his bare feet, and his yellow robe clung to his frail
old body, but he stepped down steadily, leaning against the
barasingh. He was no longer a holy man, but Sir Purun Dass,
K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small State, a man accustomed
to command, going out to save life. Down the steep, plashy path
they poured all together, the Bhagat and his brothers, down and
down till the deer's feet clicked and stumbled on the wall of a
threshing-floor, and he snorted because he smelt Man. Now they
were at the head of the one crooked village street, and the
Bhagat beat with his crutch on the barred windows of the
blacksmith's house, as his torch blazed up in the shelter of
the eaves. "Up and out!" cried Purun Bhagat; and he did not
know his own voice, for it was years since he had spoken aloud
to a man. "The hill falls! The hill is falling! Up and out, oh,
you within!"
"It is our Bhagat," said the blacksmith's wife. He stands among
his beasts. Gather the little ones and give the call."
It ran from house to house, while the beasts, cramped in the
narrow way, surged and huddled round the Bhagat, and Sona
puffed impatiently.
The people hurried into the street--they were no more than
seventy souls all told--and in the glare of the torches they
saw their Bhagat holding back the terrified barasingh, while
the monkeys plucked piteously at his skirts, and Sona sat on
his haunches and roared.
"Across the valley and up the next hill!" shouted Purun Bhagat.
"Leave none behind! We follow!"
Then the people ran as only Hill folk can run, for they knew
that in a landslip you must climb for the highest ground across
the valley. They fled, splashing through the little river at
the bottom, and panted up the terraced fields on the far side,
while the Bhagat and his brethren followed. Up and up the
opposite mountain they climbed, calling to each other by name--
the roll-call of the village--and at their heels toiled the big
barasingh, weighted by the failing strength of Purun Bhagat.
At last the deer stopped in the shadow of a deep pinewood, five
hundred feet up the hillside. His instinct, that had warned him
of the coming slide, told him he would he safe here.
Purun Bhagat dropped fainting by his side, for the chill of the
rain and that fierce climb were killing him; but first he called
to the scattered torches ahead, "Stay and count your numbers";
then, whispering to the deer as he saw the lights gather in a
cluster: "Stay with me, Brother. Stay--till--I--go!"
There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter
that grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of
hearing, and the hillside on which the villagers stood was hit
in the darkness, and rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady,
deep, and true as the deep C of the organ drowned everything for
perhaps five minutes, while the very roots of the pines quivered
to it. It died away, and the sound of the rain falling on miles
of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled drum of water on
soft earth. That told its own tale.
Never a villager--not even the priest--was bold enough to speak
to the Bhagat who had saved their lives. They crouched under the
pines and waited till the day. When it came they looked across
the valley and saw that what had been forest, and terraced
field, and track-threaded grazing-ground was one raw, red,
fan-shaped smear, with a few trees flung head-down on the scarp.
That red ran high up the hill of their refuge, damming back the
little river, which had begun to spread into a brick-coloured
lake. Of the village, of the road to the shrine, of the shrine
itself, and the forest behind, there was no trace. For one mile
in width and two thousand feet in sheer depth the mountain-side
had come away bodily, planed clean from head to heel.
And the villagers, one by one, crept through the wood to pray
before their Bhagat. They saw the barasingh standing over him,
who fled when they came near, and they heard the langurs wailing
in the branches, and Sona moaning up the hill; but their Bhagat
was dead, sitting cross-legged, his back against a tree, his
crutch under his armpit, and his face turned to the north-east.
The priest said: "Behold a miracle after a miracle, for in this
very attitude must all Sunnyasis be buried! Therefore where he
now is we will build the temple to our holy man."
They built the temple before a year was ended--a little stone-
and-earth shrine--and they called the hill the Bhagat's hill,
and they worship there with lights and flowers and offerings to
this day. But they do not know that the saint of their worship
is the late Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., D.C.L., Ph.D., etc., once
Prime Minister of the progressive and enlightened State of
Mohiniwala, and honorary or corresponding member of more learned
and scientific societies than will ever do any good in this
world or the next.
A SONG OF KABIR
Oh, light was the world that he weighed in his hands!
Oh, heavy the tale of his fiefs and his lands!
He has gone from the guddee and put on the shroud,
And departed in guise of bairagi avowed!
Now the white road to Delhi is mat for his feet,
The sal and the kikar must guard him from heat;
His home is the camp, and the waste, and the crowd--
He is seeking the Way as bairagi avowed!
He has looked upon Man, and his eyeballs are clear
(There was One; there is One, and but One, saith Kabir);
The Red Mist of Doing has thinned to a cloud--
He has taken the Path for bairagi avowed!
To learn and discern of his brother the clod,
Of his brother the brute, and his brother the God.
He has gone from the council and put on the shroud
("Can ye hear?" saith Kabir), a bairagi avowed!
LETTING IN THE JUNGLE
Veil them, cover them, wall them round--
Blossom, and creeper, and weed--
Let us forget the sight and the sound,
The smell and the touch of the breed!
Fat black ash by the altar-stone,
Here is the white-foot rain,
And the does bring forth in the fields unsown,
And none shall affright them again;
And the blind walls crumble, unknown, o'erthrown
And none shall inhabit again!
You will remember that after Mowgli had pinned Shere Khan's hide
to the Council Rock, he told as many as were left of the Seeonee
Pack that henceforward he would hunt in the Jungle alone; and
the four children of Mother and Father Wolf said that they would
hunt with him. But it is not easy to change one's life all in
a minute--particularly in the Jungle. The first thing Mowgli
did, when the disorderly Pack had slunk off, was to go to the
home-cave, and sleep for a day and a night. Then he told Mother
Wolf and Father Wolf as much as they could understand of his
adventures among men; and when he made the morning sun flicker
up and down the blade of his skinning-knife,--the same he had
skinned Shere Khan with,--they said he had learned something.
Then Akela and Gray Brother had to explain their share of the
great buffalo-drive in the ravine, and Baloo toiled up the
hill to hear all about it, and Bagheera scratched himself all
over with pure delight at the way in which Mowgli had managed
his war.
It was long after sunrise, but no one dreamed of going to sleep,
and from time to time, during the talk, Mother Wolf would throw
up her head, and sniff a deep snuff of satisfaction as the wind
brought her the smell of the tiger-skin on the Council Rock.
"But for Akela and Gray Brother here," Mowgli said, at the end,
"I could have done nothing. Oh, mother, mother! if thou hadst
seen the black herd-bulls pour down the ravine, or hurry through
the gates when the Man-Pack flung stones at me!"
"I am glad I did not see that last," said Mother Wolf stiffly.
"It is not MY custom to suffer my cubs to be driven to and fro
like jackals. _I_ would have taken a price from the Man-Pack;
but I would have spared the woman who gave thee the milk. Yes,
I would have spared her alone."
"Peace, peace, Raksha!" said Father Wolf, lazily. "Our Frog has
come back again--so wise that his own father must lick his feet;
and what is a cut, more or less, on the head? Leave Men alone.
"Baloo and Bagheera both echoed: "Leave Men alone."
Mowgli, his head on Mother Wolf's side, smiled contentedly, and
said that, for his own part, he never wished to see, or hear, or
smell Man again.
"But what," said Akela, cocking one ear--"but what if men do not
leave thee alone, Little Brother?"
"We be FIVE," said Gray Brother, looking round at the company,
and snapping his jaws on the last word.
"We also might attend to that hunting," said Bagheera, with a
little switch-switch of his tail, looking at Baloo. "But why
think of men now, Akela?"
"For this reason," the Lone Wolf answered: "when that yellow
chief's hide was hung up on the rock, I went back along our
trail to the village, stepping in my tracks, turning aside, and
lying down, to make a mixed trail in case one should follow us.
But when I had fouled the trail so that I myself hardly knew it
again, Mang, the Bat, came hawking between the trees, and hung
up above me. Said Mang, "The village of the Man-Pack, where they
cast out the Man-cub, hums like a hornet's nest."
"It was a big stone that I threw," chuckled Mowgli, who had often
amused himself by throwing ripe paw-paws into a hornet's
nest, and racing off to the nearest pool before the hornets
caught him.
"I asked of Mang what he had seen. He said that the Red Flower
blossomed at the gate of the village, and men sat about it
carrying guns. Now _I_ know, for I have good cause,"--Akela
looked down at the old dry scars on his flank and side,--"that
men do not carry guns for pleasure. Presently, Little Brother,
a man with a gun follows our trail--if, indeed, he be not
already on it."
"But why should he? Men have cast me out. What more do they
need?" said Mowgli angrily.
"Thou art a man, Little Brother," Akela returned. "It is not
for US, the Free Hunters, to tell thee what thy brethren do,
or why."
He had just time to snatch up his paw as the skinning-knife cut
deep into the ground below. Mowgli struck quicker than an
average human eye could follow but Akela was a wolf; and even a
dog, who is very far removed from the wild wolf, his ancestor,
can be waked out of deep sleep by a cart-wheel touching his
flank, and can spring away unharmed before that wheel comes on.
"Another time," Mowgli said quietly, returning the knife to its
sheath, "speak of the Man-Pack and of Mowgli in TWO breaths--
not one."
"Phff! That is a sharp tooth," said Akela, snuffing at the
blade's cut in the earth, "but living with the Man-Pack has
spoiled thine eye, Little Brother. I could have killed a buck
while thou wast striking."
Bagheera sprang to his feet, thrust up his head as far as he
could, sniffed, and stiffened through every curve in his body.
Gray Brother followed his example quickly, keeping a little
to his left to get the wind that was blowing from the right,
while Akela bounded fifty yards up wind, and, half-crouching,
stiffened too. Mowgli looked on enviously. He could smell things
as very few human beings could, but he had never reached the
hair-trigger-like sensitiveness of a Jungle nose; and his three
months in the smoky village had set him back sadly. However,
he dampened his finger, rubbed it on his nose, and stood erect
to catch the upper scent, which, though it is the faintest,
is the truest.
"Man!" Akela growled, dropping on his haunches.
"Buldeo!" said Mowgli, sitting down. "He follows our trail, and
yonder is the sunlight on his gun. Look!"
It was no more than a splash of sunlight, for a fraction of a
second, on the brass clamps of the old Tower musket, but nothing
in the Jungle winks with just that flash, except when the clouds
race over the sky. Then a piece of mica, or a little pool, or
even a highly-polished leaf will flash like a heliograph. But
that day was cloudless and still.
"I knew men would follow," said Akela triumphantly. "Not for
nothing have I led the Pack."
The four cubs said nothing, but ran down hill on their
bellies, melting into the thorn and under-brush as a mole
melts into a lawn.
"Where go ye, and without word?" Mowgli called.
"H'sh! We roll his skull here before mid-day!" Gray Brother
answered.
"Back! Back and wait! Man does not eat Man!" Mowgli shrieked.
"Who was a wolf but now? Who drove the knife at me for thinking
he might be Man?" said Akela, as the four wolves turned back
sullenly and dropped to heel.
"Am I to give reason for all I choose to, do?" said Mowgli
furiously.
"That is Man! There speaks Man!" Bagheera muttered under his
whiskers. "Even so did men talk round the King's cages at
Oodeypore. We of the Jungle know that Man is wisest of all.
If we trusted our ears we should know that of all things he
is most foolish." Raising his voice, he added, "The Man-cub is
right in this. Men hunt in packs. To kill one, unless we know
what the others will do, is bad hunting. Come, let us see what
this Man means toward us."
"We will not come," Gray Brother growled. "Hunt alone, Little
Brother. WE know our own minds. The skull would have been ready
to bring by now."
Mowgli had been looking from one to the other of his friends,
his chest heaving and his eyes full of tears. He strode forward
to the wolves, and, dropping on one knee, said: "Do I not know
my mind? Look at me!"
They looked uneasily, and when their eyes wandered, he called
them back again and again, till their hair stood up all over
their bodies, and they trembled in every limb, while Mowgli
stared and stared.
"Now," said he, "of us five, which is leader?"
"Thou art leader, Little Brother," said Gray Brother, and he
licked Mowgli's foot.
"Follow, then," said Mowgli, and the four followed at his heels
with their tails between their legs.
"This comes of living with the Man-Pack," said Bagheera,
slipping down after them. "There is more in the Jungle now
than Jungle Law, Baloo."
The old bear said nothing, but he thought many things.
Mowgli cut across noiselessly through the Jungle, at right
angles to Buldeo's path, till, parting the undergrowth, he saw
the old man, his musket on his shoulder, running up the trail
of overnight at a dog-trot.
You will remember that Mowgli had left the village with the
heavy weight of Shere Khan's raw hide on his shoulders, while
Akela and Gray Brother trotted behind, so that the triple trail
was very clearly marked. Presently Buldeo came to where Akela,
as you know, had gone back and mixed it all up. Then he sat
down, and coughed and grunted, and made little casts round and
about into the Jungle to pick it up again, and, all the time he
could have thrown a stone over those who were watching him.
No one can be so silent as a wolf when he does not care to be
heard; and Mowgli, though the wolves thought he moved very
clumsily, could come and go like a shadow. They ringed the old
man as a school of porpoises ring a steamer at full speed, and
as they ringed him they talked unconcernedly, for their speech
began below the lowest end of the scale that untrained human
beings can hear. [The other end is bounded by the high squeak of
Mang, the Bat, which very many people cannot catch at all. From
that note all the bird and bat and insect talk takes on.]
"This is better than any kill," said Gray Brother, as Buldeo
stooped and peered and puffed. "He looks like a lost pig in
the Jungles by the river. What does he say?" Buldeo was
muttering savagely.
Mowgli translated. "He says that packs of wolves must have
danced round me. He says that he never saw such a trail in
his life. He says he is tired."
"He will be rested before he picks it up again," said Bagheera
coolly, as he slipped round a tree-trunk, in the game of
blindman's-buff that they were playing. "NOW, what does the
lean thing do?"
"Eat or blow smoke out of his mouth. Men always play with their
mouths," said Mowgli; and the silent trailers saw the old man
fill and light and puff at a water-pipe, and they took good note
of the smell of the tobacco, so as to be sure of Buldeo in the
darkest night, if necessary.
Then a little knot of charcoal-burners came down the path, and
naturally halted to speak to Buldeo, whose fame as a hunter
reached for at least twenty miles round. They all sat down and
smoked, and Bagheera and the others came up and watched while
Buldeo began to tell the story of Mowgli, the Devil-child,
from one end to another, with additions and inventions. How he
himself had really killed Shere Khan; and how Mowgli had turned
himself into a wolf, and fought with him all the afternoon, and
changed into a boy again and bewitched Buldeo's rifle, so that
the bullet turned the corner, when he pointed it at Mowgli,
and killed one of Buldeo's own buffaloes; and how the village,
knowing him to be the bravest hunter in Seeonee, had sent him
out to kill this Devil-child. But meantime the village had got
hold of Messua and her husband, who were undoubtedly the father
and mother of this Devil-child, and had barricaded them in
their own hut, and presently would torture them to make them
confess they were witch and wizard, and then they would be
burned to death.
"When?" said the charcoal-burners, because they would very much
like to be present at the ceremony.
Buldeo said that nothing would be done till he returned,
because the village wished him to kill the Jungle Boy first.
After that they would dispose of Messua and her husband, and
divide their lands and buffaloes among the village. Messua's
husband had some remarkably fine buffaloes, too. It was an
excellent thing to destroy wizards, Buldeo thought; and people
who entertained Wolf-children out of the Jungle were clearly
the worst kind of witches.
But, said the charcoal-burners, what would happen if the English
heard of it? The English, they had heard, were a perfectly mad
people, who would not let honest farmers kill witches in peace.
Why, said Buldeo, the head-man of the village would report that
Messua and her husband had died of snake-bite. THAT was all
arranged, and the only thing now was to kill the Wolf-child.
They did not happen to have seen anything of such a creature?
The charcoal-burners looked round cautiously, and thanked their
stars they had not; but they had no doubt that so brave a man as
Buldeo would find him if any one could. The sun was getting
rather low, and they had an idea that they would push on to
Buldeo's village and see that wicked witch. Buldeo said that,
though it was his duty to kill the Devil-child, he could not
think of letting a party of unarmed men go through the Jungle,
which might produce the Wolf-demon at any minute, without his
escort. He, therefore, would accompany them, and if the
sorcerer's child appeared--well, he would show them how the best
hunter in Seeonee dealt with such things. The Brahmin, he said,
had given him a charm against the creature that made everything
perfectly safe.
"What says he? What says he? What says he?" the wolves repeated
every few minutes; and Mowgli translated until he came to the
witch part of the story, which was a little beyond him, and
then he said that the man and woman who had been so kind to him
were trapped.
"Does Man trap Man?" said Bagheera.
"So he says. I cannot understand the talk. They are all mad
together. What have Messua and her man to do with me that they
should be put in a trap; and what is all this talk about the
Red Flower? I must look to this. Whatever they would do to
Messua they will not do till Buldeo returns. And so----" Mowgli
thought hard, with his fingers playing round the haft of the
skinning-knife, while Buldeo and the charcoal-burners went off
very valiantly in single file.
"I go hot-foot back to the Man-Pack," Mowgli said at last.
"And those?" said Gray Brother, looking hungrily after the brown
backs of the charcoal-burners.
"Sing them home," said Mowgli, with a grin; I do not wish them
to be at the village gates till it is dark. Can ye hold them?"
Gray Brother bared his white teeth in contempt. We can head them
round and round in circles like tethered goats--if I know Man."
"That I do not need. Sing to them a little, lest they be lonely
on the road, and, Gray Brother, the song need not be of the
sweetest. Go with them, Bagheera, and help make that song.
When night is shut down, meet me by the village--Gray Brother
knows the place."
"It is no light hunting to work for a Man-cub. When shall I
sleep?" said Bagheera, yawning, though his eyes showed that he
was delighted with the amusement. "Me to sing to naked men!
But let us try."
He lowered his head so that the sound would travel, and cried a
long, long, "Good hunting"--a midnight call in the afternoon,
which was quite awful enough to begin with. Mowgli heard it
rumble, and rise, and fall, and die off in a creepy sort of
whine behind him, and laughed to himself as he ran through the
Jungle. He could see the charcoal-burners huddled in a knot; old
Buldeo's gun-barrel waving, like a banana-leaf, to every point
of the compass at once. Then Gray Brother gave the Ya-la-hi!
Yalaha! call for the buck-driving, when the Pack drives the
nilghai, the big blue cow, before them, and it seemed to come
from the very ends of the earth, nearer, and nearer, and nearer,
till it ended in a shriek snapped off short. The other three
answered, till even Mowgli could have vowed that the full Pack
was in full cry, and then they all broke into the magnificent
Morning-song in the Jungle, with every turn, and flourish, and
grace-note that a deep-mouthed wolf of the Pack knows. This is a
rough rendering of the song, but you must imagine what it sounds
like when it breaks the afternoon hush of the Jungle:--
One moment past our bodies cast
No shadow on the plain;
Now clear and black they stride our track,
And we run home again.
In morning hush, each rock and bush
Stands hard, and high, and raw:
Then give the Call: "Good rest to all
That keep The Jungle Law!"
Now horn and pelt our peoples melt
In covert to abide;
Now, crouched and still, to cave and hill
Our Jungle Barons glide.
Now, stark and plain, Man's oxen strain,
That draw the new-yoked plough;
Now, stripped and dread, the dawn is red
Above the lit talao.
Ho! Get to lair! The sun's aflare
Behind the breathing grass:
And cracking through the young bamboo
The warning whispers pass.
By day made strange, the woods we range
With blinking eyes we scan;
While down the skies the wild duck cries
"The Day--the Day to Man!"
The dew is dried that drenched our hide
Or washed about our way;
And where we drank, the puddled bank
Is crisping into clay.
The traitor Dark gives up each mark
Of stretched or hooded claw;
Then hear the Call: "Good rest to all
That keep the Jungle Law!"
But no translation can give the effect of it, or the yelping
scorn the Four threw into every word of it, as they heard the
trees crash when the men hastily climbed up into the branches,
and Buldeo began repeating incantations and charms. Then they
lay down and slept, for, like all who live by their own
exertions, they were of a methodical cast of mind; and no one
can work well without sleep.
Meantime, Mowgli was putting the miles behind him, nine to the
hour, swinging on, delighted to find himself so fit after all
his cramped months among men. The one idea in his head was to
get Messua and her husband out of the trap, whatever it was;
for he had a natural mistrust of traps. Later on, he promised
himself, he would pay his debts to the village at large.
It was at twilight when he saw the well-remembered grazing-
grounds, and the dhak-tree where Gray Brother had waited for him
on the morning that he killed Shere Khan. Angry as he was at the
whole breed and community of Man, something jumped up in his
throat and made him catch his breath when he looked at the
village roofs. He noticed that every one had come in from the
fields unusually early, and that, instead of getting to their
evening cooking, they gathered in a crowd under the village
tree, and chattered, and shouted.
"Men must always he making traps for men, or they are not
content," said Mowgli. "Last night it was Mowgli--but that
night seems many Rains ago. To-night it is Messua and her man.
To-morrow, and for very many nights after, it will be Mowgli's
turn again."
He crept along outside the wall till he came to Messua's hut,
and looked through the window into the room. There lay Messua,
gagged, and bound hand and foot, breathing hard, and groaning:
her husband was tied to the gaily-painted bedstead. The door of
the hut that opened into the street was shut fast, and three or
four people were sitting with their backs to it.
Mowgli knew the manners and customs of the villagers very
fairly. He argued that so long as they could eat, and talk,
and smoke, they would not do anything else; but as soon as
they had fed they would begin to be dangerous. Buldeo would be
coming in before long, and if his escort had done its duty,
Buldeo would have a very interesting tale to tell. So he went
in through the window, and, stooping over the man and the woman,
cut their thongs, pulling out the gags, and looked round the hut
for some milk.
Messua was half wild with pain and fear (she had been beaten
and stoned all the morning), and Mowgli put his hand over
her mouth just in time to stop a scream. Her husband was only
bewildered and angry, and sat picking dust and things out of
his torn beard.
"I knew--I knew he would come," Messua sobbed at last. "Now do
I KNOW that he is my son!" and she hugged Mowgli to her heart.
Up to that time Mowgli had been perfectly steady, but now he
began to tremble all over, and that surprised him immensely.
"Why are these thongs? Why have they tied thee?" he asked,
after a pause.
"To be put to the death for making a son of thee--what else?"
said the man sullenly. "Look! I bleed."
Messua said nothing, but it was at her wounds that Mowgli
looked, and they heard him grit his teeth when he saw the blood.
"Whose work is this?" said he. "There is a price to pay."
"The work of all the village. I was too rich. I had too many
cattle. THEREFORE she and I are witches, because we gave
thee shelter."
"I do not understand. Let Messua tell the tale."
"I gave thee milk, Nathoo; dost thou remember?" Messua said
timidly. "Because thou wast my son, whom the tiger took, and
because I loved thee very dearly. They said that I was thy
mother, the mother of a devil, and therefore worthy of death."
"And what is a devil?" said Mowgli. "Death I have seen."
The man looked up gloomily, but Messua laughed. "See!" she said
to her husband, "I knew--I said that he was no sorcerer. He is
my son--my son!"
"Son or sorcerer, what good will that do us?" the man answered.
"We be as dead already."
"Yonder is the road to the Jungle"--Mowgli pointed through the
window. "Your hands and feet are free. Go now."
"We do not know the Jungle, my son, as--as thou knowest," Messua
began. "I do not think that I could walk far."
"And the men and women would he upon our backs and drag us here
again," said the husband.
"H'm!" said Mowgli, and he tickled the palm of his hand with the
tip of his skinning-knife; "I have no wish to do harm to any one
of this village--YET. But I do not think they will stay thee.
In a little while they will have much else to think upon. Ah!"
he lifted his head and listened to shouting and trampling
outside. "So they have let Buldeo come home at last?"
"He was sent out this morning to kill thee," Messua cried.
"Didst thou meet him?"
"Yes--we--I met him. He has a tale to tell and while he is
telling it there is time to do much. But first I will learn
what they mean. Think where ye would go, and tell me when
I come back."
He bounded through the window and ran along again outside the
wall of the village till he came within ear-shot of the crowd
round the peepul-tree. Buldeo was lying on the ground, coughing
and groaning, and every one was asking him questions. His hair
had fallen about his shoulders; his hands and legs were skinned
from climbing up trees, and he could hardly speak, but he felt
the importance of his position keenly. From time to time he
said something about devils and singing devils, and magic
enchantment, just to give the crowd a taste of what was coming.
Then he called for water.
"Bah!" said Mowgli. "Chatter--chatter! Talk, talk! Men are
blood-brothers of the Bandar-log. Now he must wash his mouth
with water; now he must blow smoke; and when all that is done
he has still his story to tell. They are very wise people--men.
They will leave no one to guard Messua till their ears are
stuffed with Buldeo's tales. And--I grow as lazy as they!"
He shook himself and glided back to the hut. Just as he was at
the window he felt a touch on his foot.
"Mother," said he, for he knew that tongue well, what dost
THOU here?"
"I heard my children singing through the woods, and I followed
the one I loved best. Little Frog, I have a desire to see
that woman who gave thee milk," said Mother Wolf, all wet
with the dew.
"They have bound and mean to kill her. I have cut those ties,
and she goes with her man through the Jungle."
"I also will follow. I am old, but not yet toothless." Mother
Wolf reared herself up on end, and looked through the window
into the dark of the hut.
In a minute she dropped noiselessly, and all she said was:
"I gave thee thy first milk; but Bagheera speaks truth:
Man goes to Man at the last."
"Maybe," said Mowgli, with a very unpleasant look on his face;
"but to-night I am very far from that trail. Wait here, but do
not let her see."
"THOU wast never afraid of ME, Little Frog," said Mother Wolf,
backing into the high grass, and blotting herself out, as she
knew how.
"And now," said Mowgli cheerfully, as he swung into the hut
again, "they are all sitting round Buldeo, who is saying that
which did not happen. When his talk is finished, they say they
will assuredly come here with the Red--with fire and burn you
both. And then?"
"I have spoken to my man," said Messua. Khanhiwara is thirty
miles from here, but at Khanhiwara we may find the English--"
"And what Pack are they?" said Mowgli.
"I do not know. They be white, and it is said that they govern
all the land, and do not suffer people to burn or beat each
other without witnesses. If we can get thither to-night, we
live. Otherwise we die."
"Live, then. No man passes the gates to-night. But what does HE
do?" Messua's husband was on his hands and knees digging up the
earth in one corner of the hut.
"It is his little money," said Messua. "We can take
nothing else."
"Ah, yes. The stuff that passes from hand to hand and never
grows warmer. Do they need it outside this place also?"
said Mowgli.
The man stared angrily. "He is a fool, and no devil," he
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