The Jungle Books (30 page)

“Flattery is worse than an empty tin can in the belly. But that which we have just heard is wisdom,” said the adjutant, bringing down one foot.

“Consider, though, their ingratitude to this excellent one,” began the jackal, tenderly.

“Nay, nay, not ingratitude!” the mugger said. “They do not think for others, that is all. But I have noticed, lying at my station below the ford, that the stairs of the new bridge are cruelly hard to climb, both for old people
and young children. The old, indeed, are not so worthy of consideration, but I am grieved—I am truly grieved—on account of the small fat children. Still, I think, in a little while, when the newness of the bridge has worn away, we shall see my people’s bare brown legs bravely splashing through the ford as before. Then the old mugger will be honoured again.”

“But surely I saw marigold wreaths floating off the edge of the ghat only this noon,” said the adjutant. Marigold wreaths are a sign of reverence all India over.

“An error—an error. It was the wife of the sweetmeat-seller. She loses her eyesight year by year, and cannot tell a log from me—the mugger of the ghat! I saw the mistake when she threw the garland, for I was lying at the very foot of the ghat, and had she taken another step I might have shown her some little difference. Yet she meant well, and we must consider the spirit of the offering.”

“What profit are marigold wreaths when one is on the rubbish-heap?” said the jackal, hunting for fleas, but keeping one wary eye on his Protector of the Poor.

“True, but they have not yet begun to make the rubbish-heap that shall carry me. Five times have I seen the river draw back from the village and make new land at the foot of the street. Five times have I seen the village rebuilt on the banks, and I shall see it built yet five times more. I am no faithless, fish-hunting gavial, I, at Kasi to-day and Prayag to-morrow, as the saying is, but the true and constant watcher of the ford. It is not for nothing, child, that the village bears my name, and he who watches long,’ as the saying is, ‘shall at last have his reward.’ ”

“
I
have watched long—very long—nearly all my life, and my reward has been bites and blows,” said the jackal.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” roared the adjutant.

There is one very unpleasant peculiarity about the adjutant. At uncertain times he suffers from acute attacks of the fidgets or cramp in his legs, and though he is more virtuous to behold than any of the cranes, who are all immensely respectable, he flies off into wild, cripple-stilt war-dances, half opening his wings and bobbing his bald head up and down, while for reasons best known to himself he is very careful to time his worst attacks with his nastiest remarks. At the last word of his song he came to attention again, ten times adjutaunter than before.

The jackal winced, though he was full three seasons old, but one cannot resent an insult from a person with a beak a yard long, and the power of driving it like a javelin. The adjutant was a most notorious coward, but the jackal was worse.

“We must live before we can learn,” said the mugger, “and there is this to say: Little jackals are very common, child, but such a mugger as I am is not common. For all that I am not proud, since pride is destruction; but take notice, it is Fate, and against his Fate no one who swims or walks or runs should say anything at all. I am well contented with Fate. With good luck, a keen eye, and the custom of considering whether a creek or a backwater has an outlet to it ere you ascend, much may be done.”

“Once I heard that even the Protector of the Poor made a mistake,” said the jackal viciously.

“True, but there my Fate helped me. It was before I had come to my full growth—before the last famine but three (by the Right and Left of Ganga—how full the streams used to be in those days!). Yes, I was young and unthinking, and when the flood came, who was so pleased as I? A little made me very happy then. The village was deep in flood, and I swam above the ghat and went far inland, up to the rice-fields, and they were deep in good mud. I remember also a pair of bracelets
(glass they were, and troubled me not a little) that I found that evening. Yes, glass bracelets, and, if my memory serves me well, a shoe. I should have shaken off both shoes, but I was hungry. I learned better later. Yes. And so I fed and rested me, but when I was ready to go to the river again the flood had fallen, and I walked through the mud of the main street. Who but I? Came out all my people, priests and women and children, and I looked upon them with benevolence. The mud is not a good place to fight in. Said a boatman: ‘Get axes and kill him, for he is the mugger of the ford.’ ‘Not so,’ said the Brahmin. ‘Look, he is driving the flood before him! He is the godling of the village.’ Then they threw many flowers at me, and by happy thought one led a goat across the road.”

“How good—how very good is goat!” said the jackal.

“Hairy—too hairy, and when found in the water more than likely to hide a cross-shaped hook. But that goat I accepted, and went down to the ghat in great honour. Later, my Fate sent me the boatman who had desired to cut off my tail with an axe. His boat grounded upon an old shoal which you would not remember.”

“We are not
all
jackals here,” said the adjutant. “Was it the shoal made where the stone-boats sank in the year of the great drouth—a long shoal that lasted three floods?”

“There were two,” said the mugger. “An upper and a lower shoal.”

“Aye, I forgot. A channel divided them, and later dried up again,” said the adjutant, who prided himself on his memory.

“On the lower shoal, children, my well-wisher’s craft grounded. He was sleeping in the bows, and, half awake, leaped over to his waist—no, it was no more than to his knees—to push off. Hs empty boat went on and touched again below the next reach, as the river ran then. I followed, because I knew men would come out to drag it ashore.”

“And did they do so?” said the jackal, a little awe-stricken. This was hunting on a scale that impressed him.

“There and lower down they did. I went no farther, but that gave me three in one day—well-fed
manjis
[boatmen] all, and, except in the case of the last (then I was careless), never a cry to warn those on the bank.”

“Ah, noble sport! But what cleverness and great judgment it requires!” said the jackal.

“Not cleverness, child, but thought. A little thought in life is like salt upon rice, as the boatmen say, and I have thought deeply always. The gavial, my cousin, the fish-eater, has told me how hard it is for him to follow his fish, and how one fish differs from the other, and how he must know them all, both together and apart. I say that is wisdom, but, on the other hand, my cousin, the gavial, lives among his people.
My
people do not swim in companies, with their mouths out of the water, as Rewa does; nor do they constantly rise to the surface of the water, and turn over on their sides, like Mohoo and little Chapta; nor do they gather in shoals after flood, like Batchua and Chilwa.”

“All are very good eating,” said the adjutant, clattering his beak.

“So my cousin says, and makes a great to-do over hunting them, but they do not climb the banks to escape his sharp nose.
My
people are otherwise. Their life is on the land, in the houses, among the cattle. I must know what they do, and what they are about to do, and, adding the tail to the trunk, as the saying is, I make up the whole elephant. Is there a green branch and an iron ring hanging over a doorway? The old mugger knows that a boy has been born in that house, and must some day come down to the ghat to play. Is a maiden to be married? The old mugger knows, for he sees the men carry gifts back and forth; and she, too, comes down to the ghat to bathe before her wedding, and—he is there. Has the river changed its channel, and made new land where there was only sand before? The mugger knows.”

“Now, of what use is that knowledge?” said the jackal. “The river has shifted even in my little life.” Indian rivers are nearly always moving about in their beds, and will shift, sometimes, as much as two or three miles in a season, drowning the fields on one bank, and spreading good silt on the other.

“There is no knowledge so useful,” said the mugger, “for new land means new quarrels. The mugger knows. Oho! The mugger knows. As soon as the water has drained off, he creeps up the little creeks that men think would not hide a dog, and there he waits. Presently comes a farmer saying he will plant cucumbers here, and melons there, in the new land that the river has given him. He feels the good mud with his bare toes. Anon comes another, saying he will put onions, and carrots, and sugar-cane in such and such places. They meet as boats adrift meet, and each rolls his eye at the other under the big blue turban. The old mugger sees and hears. Each calls the other ‘Brother,’ and they go to mark out the boundaries of the new land. The mugger hurries with them from point to point, shuffling very low through the mud. Now they begin to quarrel! Now they say hot words! Now they pull turbans! Now they lift up their
lathis
[clubs], and at last one falls backwards into the mud, and the other runs away. When he comes back the dispute is settled as the iron-bound bamboo of the loser witnesses. Yet they are not grateful to the mugger. No, they cry ‘Murder!’ And their families fight with sticks, twenty a-side. My people are good people—upland Jats—Malwais of the Bet. They do not give blows for sport, and, when the fight is done, the old mugger waits far down the river, out of sight of the village, behind the
kikar
-scrub yonder. Then come they down, my broad-shouldered Jats—eight or nine together under the stars, bearing the dead man upon a bed. They are old men with grey beards, and voices as deep as mine. They light a little fire—ah! how well I know that fire!—and they drink tobacco, and they nod their heads together forward in a ring, or sideways towards the dead man
upon the bank. They say the English Law will come with a rope for this matter, and that such a man’s family will be ashamed, because such a man must be hanged in the great square of the jail. Then say the friends of the dead: ‘Let him hang!’ And the talk is all to do over again—once, twice, twenty times in the long night. Then says one, at last: ‘The fight was a fair fight. Let us take blood-money, a little more than is offered by the slayer, and we will say no more about it.’ Then do they haggle over the blood-money, for the dead was a strong man, leaving many sons. Yet before
amratvela
[sunrise] they put the fire to him a little, as the custom is, and the dead man comes to me, and
he
says no more about it. Aha! My children, the mugger knows—the mugger knows—and my Malwai Jats are a good people!”

“They are too close—too narrow in the hand for my crop,” croaked the adjutant. “They waste not the polish on the cow’s horn, as the saying is, and, again, who can glean after a Malwai?”

“Ah, I—glean—
them,”
said the mugger.

“Now, in Calcutta of the South, in the old days,” the adjutant went on, “everything was thrown into the streets, and we picked and chose. Those were dainty seasons. But to-day they keep their streets as clean as the outside of an egg, and my people fly away. To be clean is one thing; to dust, sweep, and sprinkle seven times a day wearies the very gods themselves.”

“There was a down-country jackal had it from a brother, who told me, that in Calcutta of the South all the jackals were as fat as otters in the rains,” said the jackal, his mouth watering at the bare thought of it.

“Ah, but the white-faces are there—the English—and they bring dogs from somewhere down the river, in boats—big fat dogs—to keep these same jackals lean,” said the adjutant.

“They are, then, as hard-hearted as these people? I might have known. Neither earth, sky, nor water shows charity to a jackal. I saw the tents of a white-face last season, after the rains, and also I took a new yellow
bridle to eat. The white-faces do not dress their leather in the proper way. It made me very sick.”

“That was better than my case,” said the adjutant. “When I was in my third season, a young and a bold bird. I went down to the river where the big boats come in. The boats of the English are thrice as big as this village.”

“He has been as far as Delhi, and says all the people there walk on their heads,” muttered the jackal. The mugger opened his left eye, and looked keenly at the adjutant.

“It is true,” the big bird insisted. “A liar only lies when he hopes to be believed. No one who had not seen those boats
could
believe this truth.”

“
That
is more reasonable,” said the mugger. “And then?”

“From the insides of this boat they were taking out great pieces of white stuff, which, in a little while, turned to water. Much split off, and fell about on the shore, and the rest they swiftly put into a house with thick walls. But a boatman, who laughed, took a piece no larger than a small dog, and threw it to me. I—all my people—swallow without reflection, and that piece I swallowed as is our custom. Immediately I was afflicted with an excessive cold, which, beginning in my crop, ran down to the extreme end of my toes, and deprived me even of speech, while the boatmen laughed at me. Never have I felt such cold. I danced in my grief and amazement till I could recover my breath, and then I danced and cried out against the falseness of this world, and the boatmen derided me till they fell down. The chief wonder of the matter, setting aside that marvellous coldness, was that there was nothing at all in my crop when I had finished my lamentings!”

The adjutant had done his very best to describe his feelings after swallowing a seven-pound lump of Wenham Lake ice, off an American ice-ship, in the days before Calcutta made her ice by machinery. But as he did
not know what ice was, and as the mugger and the jackal knew rather less, the tale missed fire.

“Anything,” said the mugger, shutting his left eye again, “
anything
is possible that comes out of a boat thrice the size of Mugger-Ghat. My village is not a small one.”