The Jungle Book (25 page)

“Good hunting!” said Phao, as though Akela were still alive, and then over his bitten shoulder to the others: “Howl, dogs! A wolf has died tonight!”

But of all the pack of two hundred fighting dholes, Red Dogs of the Dekkan, whose boast is that no living thing in the jungle dare stand before them, not one returned to the Dekkan to carry that news.

CHIL’S SONG

This is the song that Chil sang as the kites dropped down one after another to the riverbed, when the great fight was finished. Chil is good friends with everybody, but he is a cold-blooded kind of creature at heart, because he knows that almost everybody in the jungle comes to him in the long run.

 THE SPRING RUNNING 

T
he second year after the great fight with Red Dog and the death of Akela, Mowgli must have been nearly seventeen years old. He looked older, for hard exercise, the best of good eating, and baths whenever he felt in the least hot or dusty had given him strength and growth far beyond his age. He could swing by one hand from a top branch for half an hour at a time, when he had occasion to look along the tree-roads. He could stop a young buck in mid-gallop and throw him sideways by the head. He could even jerk over the big blue
wild boars that lived in the marshes of the north. The Jungle-People, who used to fear him for his wits, feared him now for his mere strength, and when he moved quietly on his own affairs the whisper of his coming cleared the wood paths. And yet the look in his eyes was always gentle. Even when he fought his eyes never blazed as Bagheera’s did. They only grew more and more interested and excited, and that was one of the things that Bagheera himself did not understand.

He asked Mowgli about it, and the boy laughed and said, “When I miss the kill I am angry. When I must go empty for two days I am very angry. Do not my eyes talk then?”

“The mouth is hungry,” said Bagheera, “but the eyes say nothing. Hunting, eating, or swimming, it is all one—like a stone in wet or dry weather.” Mowgli looked at him lazily from under his long eyelashes, and, as usual, the panther’s head dropped. Bagheera knew his master.

They were lying out far up the side of a hill overlooking the Wainganga, and the morning mists lay below them in bands of white and green. As the sun rose they changed into bubbling seas of red and gold, churned off, and let the low rays stripe the dried grass on which Mowgli and Bagheera were resting. It was the end of the cold weather, the leaves and the trees looked worn and faded, and there was a dry ticking rustle when the wind blew. A little leaf tap-tap-tapped furiously
against a twig as a single leaf caught in a current will. It roused Bagheera, for he snuffed the morning air with a deep hollow cough, threw himself on his back, and struck with his forepaws at the nodding leaf above.

“The year turns,” he said. “The jungle goes forward. The Time of New Talk is near. That leaf knows. It is very good.”

“The grass is dry,” Mowgli answered, pulling up a tuft. “Even Eye-of-the-Spring (that is a little trumpet-shaped waxy red flower that runs in and out among the grasses)—even Eye-of-the-Spring is shut and … Bagheera,
is
it well for the Black Panther so to lie on his back and beat with his paws in the air as though he were the tree cat?”

“Aowh!” said Bagheera. He seemed to be thinking of other things.

“I say,
is
it well for the Black Panther so to mouth and cough and howl and roll? Remember, we be the Masters of the Jungle, thou and I.”

“Indeed, yes; I hear, man-cub.” Bagheera rolled over hurriedly and sat up, the dust on his ragged black flanks. (He was just casting his winter coat.) “We be surely the Masters of the Jungle! Who is so strong as Mowgli? Who so wise?” There was a curious drawl in the voice that made Mowgli turn to see whether by any chance the Black Panther were making fun of him, for the jungle is full of words that sound like one thing
but mean another. “I said we be beyond question the Masters of the Jungle,” Bagheera repeated. “Have I done wrong? I did not know that the man-cub no longer lay upon the ground. Does he fly, then?”

Mowgli sat with his elbows on his knees looking out across the valley at the daylight. Somewhere down in the woods below a bird was trying over in a husky, reedy voice the first few notes of his spring song. It was no more than a shadow of the full-throated tumbling call he would be crying later, but Bagheera heard it.

“I said the Time of New Talk was near,” growled the Panther, switching his tail.

“I hear,” Mowgli answered. “Bagheera, why dost thou shake all over? The sun is warm.”

“That is Ferao, the scarlet woodpecker,” said Bagheera. “
He
has not forgotten. Now I too must remember my song,” and he began purring and crooning to himself, harking back dissatisfied again and again.

“There is no game afoot,” said Mowgli, lazily.

“Little Brother, are
both
thine ears stopped? That is no killing-word but my song that I make ready against the need.”

“I had forgotten. I shall know when the Time of New Talk is here, because then thou and the others run away and leave me single-foot.” Mowgli spoke rather savagely.

“But, indeed, Little Brother,” Bagheera began, “we do not always—”

“I say ye do,” said Mowgli, shooting out his forefinger angrily. “Ye
do
run away, and I, who am the Master of the Jungle, must needs walk single-foot. How was it last season, when I would gather sugarcane from the fields of a man pack? I sent a runner—I sent thee!—to Hathi bidding him to come upon such a night and pluck the sweet grass for me with his trunk.”

“He came only two nights later,” said Bagheera, cowering a little, “and of that long sweet grass that pleased thee so, he gathered more than any man-cub could eat in all the nights of the rains. His was no fault of mine.”

“He did not come upon the night when I sent him the word. No, he was trumpeting and running and roaring through valleys in the moonlight. His trail was like the trail of three elephants, for he would not hide among the trees. He danced in the moonlight before the houses of the man pack. I saw him, and yet he would not come to me; and
I
am the Master of the Jungle!”

“It was the Time of New Talk,” said the Panther, always very humble. “Perhaps, Little Brother, thou didst not that time call him by a Master Word? Listen to Ferao!”

Mowgli’s bad temper seemed to have boiled itself away. He lay back with his head on his arms, his eyes shut. “I do not
know—nor do I care,” he said sleepily. “Let us sleep, Bagheera. My stomach is heavy in me. Make me a rest for my head.”

The Panther lay down again with a sigh, because he could hear Ferao practicing and repracticing his song against the springtime of New Talk, as they say.

In an Indian jungle the seasons slide one into the other almost without division. There seem to be only two—the wet and the dry, but if you look closely below the torrents of rain and the clouds of char and dust you will find all four going round in their regular order. Spring is the most wonderful, because she has not to cover a clean bare field with new leaves and flowers, but to drive before her and to put away the hanging-on, oversurviving raffle of half-green things which the gentle winter has suffered to live, and to make the partly dressed, stale earth feel new and young once more. And this she does so well that there is no spring in the world like the jungle spring.

There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells as they drift on the heavy air are old and used. One cannot explain, but it feels so. Then there is another day—to the eye nothing whatever has changed—when all the smells are new and delightful and the whiskers of the Jungle-People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes away from their sides in long draggled locks. Then, perhaps, a little rain
falls, and all the trees and the bushes and the bamboos and the mosses and the juicy-leaved plants wake with a noise of growing that you can almost hear, and under this noise runs, day and night, a deep hum.
That
is the noise of the spring—a vibrating boom which is neither bees nor falling water nor the wind in the treetops, but the purring of the warm, happy world.

Up to this year Mowgli had always delighted in the turn of the seasons. It was he who generally saw the first Eye-of-the-Spring deep down among the grasses, and the first bank of spring clouds which are like nothing else in the jungle. His voice could be heard in all sorts of wet, star-lighted, blossoming places, helping the big frogs through their choruses, or mocking the little upside-down owls that hoot through the white nights. Like all his people, spring was the season he chose for his flittings—moving for the mere joy of rushing through the warm air, thirty, forty, or fifty miles between twilight and the morning star, and coming back panting and laughing and wreathed with strange flowers. The Four did not follow him on these wild ringings of the jungle, but went off to sing songs with other wolves. The Jungle-People are very busy in the spring, and Mowgli could hear them grunting and screaming and whistling according to their kind. Their voices then are different from their voices at other times of the year,
and that is one of the reasons why spring is called the Time of New Talk.