The Jungle Book (18 page)

It was a dark night when Hathi and his three sons slipped down from the jungle, and broke off the poles of the
machans
with their trunks, and they fell as a snapped stalk of hemlock in bloom falls, and the men that tumbled from them heard the deep gurgling of the elephants in their ears. Then the vanguard of the bewildered armies of the deer broke down and flooded into the village grazing grounds and the plowed fields; and the sharp-hoofed, rooting wild pig came with them, and what the deer left the pig spoiled, and from time to time an alarm of wolves would shake the herds, and they would rush to and fro desperately, treading down the young barley, and cutting flat the banks of the irrigating channels. Before the dawn broke the pressure on the outside of the circle gave way at one point. The eaters of flesh had fallen back and left an open path to the south, and drove upon drove of buck fled along it. Others, who were bolder, lay up in the thickets to finish their meal next night.

But the work was practically done. When the villagers looked in the morning they saw their crops were lost. That
meant death if they did not get away, for they lived year in and year out as near to starvation as the jungle was near to them. When the buffaloes were sent to graze the hungry brutes found that the deer had cleared the grazing grounds, and so wandered into the jungle and drifted off with their wild mates; and when twilight fell the three or four ponies that belonged to the village lay in their stables with their heads beaten in. Only Bagheera could have given those strokes, and only Bagheera would have thought of insolently dragging the last carcass to the open street.

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

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

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

But it is hard to tear a village from its moorings. They stayed on as long as any summer food was left to them, and
they tried to gather nuts in the jungle, but shadows with glaring eyes watched them, and rolled before them even at midday, and when they ran back afraid to their walls, on the tree trunks they had passed not five minutes before the bark would be striped and chiseled with the stroke of some great taloned paw. The more they kept to their village, the bolder grew the wild things that gamboled and bellowed on the grazing grounds by the Wainganga. They had no heart to patch and plaster the rear walls of the empty byres that backed onto the jungle; the wild pig trampled them down, and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbows over the new-won ground, and the coarse grass bristled behind the vines. The unmarried men ran away first, and carried the news far and near that the village was doomed. Who could fight, they said, against the jungle, or the Gods of the Jungle, when the very village cobra had left his hole in the platform under the peepul? So their little commerce with the outside world shrank as the trodden paths across the open grew fewer and fainter. And the nightly trumpetings of Hathi and his three sons ceased to trouble them; they had no more to go. The crop on the ground and the seed in the ground had been taken. The outlying fields were already losing their shape, and it was time to throw themselves on the charity of the English at Khanhiwara.

Native-fashion, they delayed their departure from one day to another till the first rains caught them and the unmended roofs let in a flood, and the grazing ground stood ankle deep, and all green things came on with a rush after the heat of the summer. Then they waded out—men, women, and children—through the blinding hot rain of the morning, but turned naturally for one farewell look at their homes.

They heard, as the last burdened family filed through the gate, a crash of falling beams and thatch behind the walls. They saw a shiny, snaky black trunk lifted for an instant, scattering sodden thatch. It disappeared, and there was another crash, followed by a squeal. Hathi had been plucking off the roofs of the huts as you pluck water lilies, and a rebounding beam had pricked him. He needed only this to unchain his full strength, for of all things in the jungle the wild elephant enraged is the most wantonly destructive. He kicked backward at a mud wall that crumbled at the stroke, and, crumbling, melted to yellow mud under the torrents of rain. Then he wheeled and squealed, and tore through the narrow streets, leaning against the huts right and left, shivering the crazy doors, and crumpling up the eaves; while his three sons raged behind as they had raged at the Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore.

“The jungle will swallow these shells,” said a quiet voice
in the wreckage. “It is the outer walls that must lie down,” and Mowgli, with the rain sluicing over his bare shoulders and arms, leaped back from a wall that was settling like a tired buffalo.

“All in good time,” panted Hathi. “Oh, but my tusks were red at Bhurtpore! To the outer wall, children! With the head! Together! Now!”

The four pushed side by side; the outer wall bulged, split, and fell, and the villagers, dumb with horror, saw the savage, clay-streaked heads of the wreckers in the ragged gap. Then they fled, houseless and foodless, down the valley, as their village, shredded and tossed and trampled, melted behind them.

A month later the place was a dimpled mound, covered with soft, green young stuff; and by the end of the rains there was the roaring jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plow not six months before.

MOWGLI’S SONG AGAINST PEOPLE

 THE KING’S ANKUS 

K
aa, the big rock python, had changed his skin for perhaps the two hundredth time since his birth; and Mowgli, who never forgot that he owed his life to Kaa for a night’s work at Cold Lairs, which you may perhaps remember, went to congratulate him. Skin changing always makes a snake moody and depressed till the new skin begins to shine and look beautiful. Kaa never made sport of Mowgli anymore, but accepted him, as the other Jungle-People did, for the Master of the
Jungle, and brought him all the news that a python of his size would naturally hear. What Kaa did not know about the middle jungle, as they call it—the life that runs close to the earth or under it, the boulder, burrow, and the tree-bole life—might have been written upon the smallest of his scales.

That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa’s great coils, fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all looped and twisted among the rocks just as Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed himself under Mowgli’s broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really resting in a living armchair.

“Even to the scales of the eyes it is perfect,” said Mowgli, under his breath, playing with the old skin. “Strange to see the covering of one’s own head at one’s own feet.”

“Ay, but I lack feet,” said Kaa. “And since this is the custom of all my people, I do not find it strange. Does thy skin never feel old and harsh?”

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