The Jungle Book (21 page)

“One, two, three, four tracks,” said Mowgli, stooping over
the ashes. “Four tracks of men with shod feet. They do not go so quickly as Gonds. Now, what evil had the little woodman done to them? See, they talked together, all five, standing up, before they killed him. Bagheera, let us go back. My stomach is heavy in me, and yet it dances up and down like an oriole’s nest at the end of a branch.”

“It is no good hunting to leave game afoot. Follow!” said the panther. “Those eight shod feet have not gone far.”

No more was said for fully an hour, as they took up the broad trail of the four men with shod feet.

It was clear, hot daylight now, and Bagheera said, “I smell smoke.”

“Men are always more ready to eat than to run,” Mowgli answered, trotting in and out between the low scrub bushes of the new jungle they were exploring. Bagheera, a little to his left, made an indescribable noise in his throat.

“Here is one that is done with feeding,” said he. A tumbled bundle of gay-colored clothes lay under a bush, and round it was some spilt flour.

“That was done by the bamboo again,” said Mowgli. “See! That white dust is what men eat. They have taken the kill from this one—he carried their food—and given him for a kill to Chil the Kite.”

“It is the third,” said Bagheera.

“I will go with new, big frogs to the Father of Cobras, and feed him fat,” said Mowgli to himself. “This drinker of elephant’s blood is Death himself—but still I do not understand!”

“Follow!” said Bagheera.

They had not gone half a mile farther when they heard Ko the Crow singing a death song in the top of a tamarisk under whose shade three men were lying. A half-dead fire smoked in the center of the circle, beneath an iron plate which held a blackened and burned cake of unleavened bread. Close to the fire, and blazing in the sunshine, lay the ruby-and-turquoise ankus.

“The thing works quickly; all ends here,” said Bagheera. “How did
these
die, Mowgli? There is no mark on any.”

A jungle dweller gets to learn by experience as much as many doctors know of poisonous plants and berries. Mowgli sniffed the smoke that came up from the fire, broke off a morsel of the blackened bread, tasted it, and spat it out again.

“Apple of Death,” he coughed. “The first must have made it ready in the food for these, who killed him, having first killed the Gond.”

“Good hunting, indeed! The kills follow close,” said Bagheera.

“Apple of Death” is what the Jungle-People call thorn apple or dhatura, the readiest poison in all India.

“What now?” said the panther. “Must thou and I kill each other for yonder red-eyed slayer?”

“Can it speak?” said Mowgli in a whisper. “Did I do it a wrong when I threw it away? Between us two it can do no wrong, for we do not desire what men desire. If it be left here, it will assuredly continue to kill men one after another as fast as nuts fall in a high wind. I have no love to men, but even I would not have them die six in a night.”

“What matter? They are only men. They killed one another and were well pleased,” said Bagheera. “That first little woodman hunted well.”

“They are cubs nonetheless; and a cub will drown himself to bite the moon’s light on the water. The fault was mine,” said Mowgli, who spoke as though he knew all about everything. “I will never again bring into the jungle strange things—not though they be as beautiful as flowers. This”—he handled the ankus gingerly—“goes back to the Father of Cobras. But first we must sleep, and we cannot sleep near these sleepers. Also we must bury
him
, lest he run away and kill another six. Dig me a hole under that tree.”

“But, Little Brother,” said Bagheera, moving off to the
spot, “I tell thee it is no fault of the blood-drinker. The trouble is with men.”

“All one,” said Mowgli. “Dig the hole deep. When we wake I will take him up and carry him back.”

Two nights later, as the White Cobra sat mourning in the darkness of the vault, ashamed, and robbed, and alone, the turquoise ankus whirled through the hole in the wall, and clashed on the floor of golden coins.

“Father of Cobras,” said Mowgli (he was careful to keep to the other side of the wall), “get thee a young and ripe one of thine own people to help thee guard the King’s treasure, so that no man may come away alive anymore.”

“Ah-ha! It returns, then. I said the thing was Death. How comes it that thou art still alive?” the old Cobra mumbled, twining lovingly round the ankus haft.

“By the bull that bought me, I do not know! That thing has killed six times in a night. Let him go out no more.”

THE SONG OF THE LITTLE HUNTER

 RED DOG 

I
t was after the letting in of the jungle that the pleasantest part of Mowgli’s life began. He had the good conscience that comes from paying a just debt; and all the jungle was his friend, for all the jungle was afraid of him. The things that he did and saw and heard when he was wandering from one people to another, with or without his four companions, would make many, many stories, each as long as this one. So
you will never be told how he met and escaped from the Mad Elephant of Mandla, who killed two-and-twenty bullocks drawing eleven carts of coined silver to the government treasury, and scattered the shiny rupees in the dust; how he fought Jacala the Crocodile all one long night in the marshes of the North, and broke his skinning knife on the brute’s back plates; how he found a new and longer knife round the neck of a man who had been killed by a wild boar, and how he tracked that boar and killed him as a fair price for the knife; how he was caught up in the Great Famine by the moving of the deer, and nearly crushed to death in the swaying hot herds; how he saved Hathi the Silent from being caught in a pit with a stake at the bottom, and how next day he himself fell into a very cunning leopard trap, and how Hathi broke the thick wooden bars to pieces about him; how he milked the wild buffaloes in the swamp, and how—

But we must tell one tale at a time. Father and Mother Wolf died, and Mowgli rolled a big boulder against the mouth of the cave and cried the Death Song over them, and Baloo grew very old and stiff, and even Bagheera, whose nerves were steel and whose muscles were iron, seemed slower at the kill. Akela turned from gray to milky white with pure age; his ribs stuck out, and he walked as though he had been made of wood, and Mowgli killed for him. But the young wolves, the
children of the disbanded Seeonee Pack, throve and increased, and when there were some forty of them, masterless, clean-footed five-year-olds, Akela told them that they ought to gather themselves together and follow the Law, and run under one head, as befitted the Free People.

This was not a matter in which Mowgli gave advice, for, as he said, he had eaten sour fruit, and he knew the tree it hung from; but when Phao, son of Phaona (his father was the Gray Tracker in the days of Akela’s headship), fought his way to the leadership of the pack according to the Jungle Law, and when the old calls and the old songs began to ring under the stars once more, Mowgli came to the Council Rock for memory’s sake. If he chose to speak the pack waited till he had finished, and he sat at Akela’s side on the rock above Phao. Those were the days of good hunting and good sleeping. No stranger cared to break into the jungles that belonged to Mowgli’s people, as they called the pack, and the young wolves grew fat and strong, and there were many cubs to bring to the Looking-over. Mowgli always attended a Looking-over, for he remembered the night when a black panther brought a naked brown baby into the pack, and the long call, “Look, look well, O wolves,” made his heart flutter with strange feelings. Otherwise, he would be far away in the jungle; tasting, touching, seeing, and feeling new things.

One twilight when he was trotting leisurely across the ranges to give Akela the half of a buck that he had killed, while his four wolves were jogging behind him, sparring a little and tumbling one over another for joy of being alive, he heard a cry that he had not heard since the bad days of Shere Khan. It was what they call in the jungle the
Pheeal
, a kind of shriek that the jackal gives when he is hunting behind a tiger, or when there is some big killing afoot. If you can imagine a mixture of hate, triumph, fear, and despair, with a kind of leer running through it, you will get some notion of the
Pheeal
that rose and sank and wavered and quavered far away across the Wainganga. The Four began to bristle and growl. Mowgli’s hand went to his knife and he too checked as though he had been turned into stone.

“There is no Striped One would dare kill here,” he said, at last.

“That is not the cry of the Forerunner,” said Gray Brother. “It is some great killing. Listen!”