The Jungle Books (32 page)

“Marvellous! Most truly marvellous!” said the jackal. “I am become fat through merely hearing about so much good eating. And afterwards what, if it be permitted to ask, did the Protector of the Poor do?”

“I said to myself—and by the Right and Left of Ganga! I locked my jaws on that vow—I said I would never go roving any more. So I lived by the ghat, very close to my own people, and I watched over them year after year, and they loved me so much that they threw marigold wreaths at my head whenever they saw it lift. Yes, and my Fate has been very kind to me, and all the river is good enough to respect my poor and infirm presence. Only—”

“No one is all happy from his beak to his tail,” said the adjutant, sympathetically. “What does the mugger of Mugger-Ghat need more?”

“That little white child which I did not get.” said the
mugger, with a deep sigh. “He was very small, but I have not forgotten. I am aged now, but before I die it is my desire to try one new thing. It is true they are a heavy-footed, noisy, and foolish people, and the sport would be small, but I remember the old days above Benares, and, if the child lives, he will remember still. It may be he goes up and down the bank of some river telling how he once passed his hands between the teeth of the mugger of Mugger-Ghat, and lived to make a tale of it. My Fate has been very kind, but that plagues me sometimes in my dreams—the thought of the little white child in the bows of that boat.” He yawned, and closed his jaws. “And now I will rest and think. Keep silent, my children, and respect the aged.”

He turned stiffly, and shuffled to the top of the sandbar, while the jackal drew back with the adjutant to the shelter of a tree stranded on the end nearest the railway bridge.

“That was a pleasant and profitable life,” he grinned, looking up inquiringly at the bird who towered above him. “And not once, mark you, did he think fit to tell me where a morsel might have been left along the banks. Yet I have told
him
a hundred times of good things wallowing down-stream. How true is the saying: ‘All the world forgets the jackal and the barber when the news has been told!’ Now he is going to sleep!
Arrah!
”

“How can a jackal hunt with a mugger?” said the adjutant, coolly. “Big thief and little thief—it is easy to say who gets the pickings.”

The jackal turned, whining impatiently, and was going to curl himself up under the tree-trunk, when suddenly he cowered, and looked up through the draggled branches at the bridge almost above his head.

“What now?” said the adjutant, opening one wing uneasily.

“Wait till we see. The wind blows from us to them, but they are not looking for us—those two men.”

“Men, is it? My office protects me. All India knows I am holy.” The adjutant, being a first-class scavenger, is
allowed to go where he pleases, and so this one never flinched.

“I am not worth a blow from anything better than an old shoe,” said the jackal, and listened again. “Hark to that footfall!” he went on. “That was no country leather, but the shod foot of a white-face. Listen again! Iron hits iron up there! It is a gun! Friend, those heavy-footed, foolish English are coming to speak with the mugger.”

“Warn him, then. He was called Protector of the Poor by some one not unlike a starving jackal but a little time ago.”

“Let my cousin protect his own hide. He has told me again and again there is nothing to fear from the white-faces. They must be white-faces. Not a villager of Mugger-Ghat would dare to come after him. See, I said it was a gun! Now, with good luck, we shall feed before daylight. He cannot hear well out of water, and—this time it is not a woman!”

A shiny barrel glittered for a minute in the moonlight on the girders. The mugger was lying on the sandbar as still as his own shadow, his fore feet spread out a little, his head dropped between them, snoring like a—mugger.

A voice on the bridge whispered: “It’s an odd shot—straight down almost—but as safe as houses. Better try behind the neck. Golly! What a brute! The villagers will be wild if he’s shot, though. He’s the
deota
[godling] of these parts.”

“I don’t care a rap,” another voice answered. “He took about fifteen of my best coolies while the bridge was building, and it’s time he was put an end to. I’ve been after him in a boat for weeks. Stand by with the Martini as soon as I’ve given him both barrels of this.”

“Mind the kick, then. A double four-bore’s no joke.”

“That’s for him to decide. Here goes!”

There was a roar like the sound of a small cannon (the biggest sort of elephant-rifle is not very different from some artillery), and a double streak of flame, followed by the stinging crack of a Martini, whose long bullet makes nothing of a crocodile’s plates. But the explosive
bullets did the work. One of them struck just behind the mugger’s neck, a hand’s-breadth to the left of the backbone, while the other burst a little lower down, at the beginning of the tail. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a mortally wounded crocodile can scramble off for deep water and get away, but the mugger of Mugger-Ghat was literally broken into three pieces. He hardly moved his head before the life went out of him, and he lay as flat as the jackal.

“Thunder and lightning! Lightning and thunder!” said that miserable little beast. “Has the thing that pulls the covered carts over the bridge tumbled at last?”

“It is no more than a gun,” said the adjutant, though his very tail-feathers quivered. “Nothing more than a gun. He is certainly dead. Here come the white-faces.”

The two Englishmen had hurried down from the bridge and across to the sandbar, where they stood admiring the length of the mugger. Then a native with an axe cut off the big head, and four men dragged it across the spit.

“The last time that I had my hand in a mugger’s mouth,” said one of the Englishmen, stooping down (he was the man who had built the bridge), “it was when I was about five years old—coming down the river by boat to Monghyr. I was a Mutiny baby, as they call it. Poor Mother was in the boat, too, and she often told me how she fired Dad’s old pistol at the beast’s head.”

“Well, you’ve certainly had your revenge on the chief of the clan—even if the gun has made your nose bleed. Hi, you boatmen! Haul that head up the bank, and we’ll boil it for the skull. The skin’s too knocked about to keep. Come along to bed now. This was worth sitting up all night for, wasn’t it?”

Curiously enough, the jackal and the adjutant made the very same remark not three minutes after the men had left.

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 the 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 any more, 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 treebole 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 arm-chair.

“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.”

“Aye, 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.”

“I wash, and
also
I take off my skin. How looks the new coat?”

Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense back. “The turtle is harder-backed, but not so gay,” he said judgmatically. “The frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very beautiful to see—like the mottling in the mouth of a lily.”

“It needs water. A new skin never comes to full colour before the first bath. Let us go bathe.”

“I will carry thee,” said Mowgli, and he stooped down, laughing, to lift the middle section of Kaa’s great body, just where the barrel was thickest. A man might just as well have tried to heave up a two-foot water-main, and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amusement. Then their regular evening game began—the boy in the flush of his great strength, and the python in his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against the other for a wrestling match—a trial of eye and strength. Of course, Kaa could have crushed a dozen Mowglis had he let himself go, but he played carefully, and never loosed one-tenth of his power. Ever since Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling, Kaa had taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing else could. Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa’s shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him by the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as it flung backwards feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful, statue-like group melted in a
whirl of black-and-yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. “Now! Now! Now!” said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli’s quick hand could not turn aside. “Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here, and here! Are thy hands numb? Here again!”

The game always ended in one way—with a straight, driving blow of the head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn the guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the least use in trying.

“Good hunting!” Kaa grunted at last, and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake’s pet bathing-place—a deep, pitch-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by sunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped in, jungle fashion, without a sound, and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back, his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks, and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa’s diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest on Mowgli’s shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool water.

“It is
very
good,” said Mowgli at last, sleepily. “Now, in the man pack, at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon hard pieces of wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having carefully shut out all the clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heavy heads, and made evil songs through their noses. It is better in the jungle.”

A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them “Good hunting!” and went away.

“
Sssh!
” said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered something. “So the jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?”

“Not all,” said Mowgli, laughing, “else there would be a new and strong Shere Khan to kill once a moon.
Now
, I could kill with my own hands, asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished the sun to shine in
the middle of the rains, and the rains to cover the sun in the deep of summer; and also I have never gone empty but I wished that I had killed a goat; and also I have never killed a goat but I wished it had been buck; nor buck but I wished it had been nilghai. But thus do we feel, all of us.”

“Thou hast no other desire?” the big snake demanded.

“What more can I wish? I have the jungle, and the favour of the jungle! Is there more between sunrise and sunset?”

“Now, the cobra said—” Kaa began.

“What cobra? He that went away just now said nothing. He was hunting.”

“It was another.”

“Hast thou many dealings with the Poison-People? I give them their own path. They carry death in the fore tooth, and that is not good—for they are so small. But what hood is this thou hast spoken with?”

Kaa rolled slowly in the water like a steamer in a beam sea. “Three or four moons since,” said he, “I hunted in the Cold Lairs, which place, may be, thou hast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled shrieking past the tanks and to that house whose side I once broke for thy sake, and ran into the ground.”