The Jungle Book (15 page)

“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 Man alone.” Baloo and Bagheera both echoed: “Leave Man 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 Man now, Akela?”

“For this reason,” the Lone Wolf answered. “When that yellow thief’s hide was hung up on the rock, I went back along our trail to the village, stepping in my tracks, turning aside, and lying down, to make a mixed trail in case any 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 pawpaws into a hornet’s nest, and racing 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 here 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 upwind, 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 put him back sadly. However, he dampened his finger, rubbed it on his nose, and stood erect to catch the upper scent, which, though 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!”

Mowgli’s four wolves said nothing, but ran downhill on their bellies, melting into the thorn and underbrush.

“Whither go ye, and without word?” Mowgli called.

“H’sh! We roll his skull here before midday!” 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 a man?” said Akela, as the Four 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 towards 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, 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 two-days-old trail at a dogtrot.

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 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 untaught 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 land 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 been told, were a perfectly mad people, who would not let honest farmers kill witches in peace.

Why, said Buldeo, the headman of the village would report that Messua and her husband had died of snakebite. 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 anyone could. The sun was getting rather low, and they had an idea that they would push on to Buldeo’s village and see the 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 reveal 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.

“Do men trap men?” said Gray Brother.

“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 his skinning knife, while Buldeo and the charcoal-burners went off very valiantly in single file.

“I go hotfoot 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 gate 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 laid down, meet me by the village—Gray Brother knows the place.”

“It is no light hunting to track for a man-cub. When shall I sleep?” said Bagheera, yawning, though his eyes showed 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: