The Jungle Books (39 page)

“Hear the Outlier!” said Mowgli with a laugh. “Free People, we must go north and eat lizards and rats from the bank, lest by any chance we meet the dhole. He must kill out our hunting-grounds while we lie hid in the north till it please him to give us our own again. He is a dog—and the pup of a dog—red, yellow-bellied, lairless, and haired between every toe! He counts his cubs six and eight at the litter, as though he were Chikai, the little leaping rat. Surely we must run away, Free People, and beg leave of the peoples of the north for the offal of dead cattle! Ye know the saying: ‘North are the vermin; South are the lice.
We
are the jungle.’ Choose ye, O choose. It is good hunting! For the pack—for the full
pack—for the lair and the litter; for the in-kill and the out-kill; for the mate that drives the doe and the little, little cub within the cave, it is met—it is met—it is met!”

The pack answered with one deep crashing bark that sounded in the night like a tree falling. “It is met,” they cried.

“Stay with these,” said Mowgli to his Four. “We shall need every tooth. Phao and Akela must make ready the battle. I go to count the dogs.”

“It is death!” Won-tolla cried, half rising. “What can such a hairless one do against the Red Dog. Even the Striped One, remember—”

“Thou art indeed an outlier,” Mowgli called back, “but we will speak when the dholes are dead. Good hunting all!”

He hurried off into the darkness, wild with excitement, hardly looking where he set foot, and the natural consequence was that he tripped full length over Kaa’s great coils where the python lay watching a deer-path near the river.

“
Kssha!
” said Kaa angrily. “Is this jungle work to stamp and ramp and undo a night’s hunting—when the game are moving so well, too?”

“The fault was mine,” said Mowgli, picking himself up. “Indeed I was seeking thee, Flathead, but each time we meet thou art longer and broader by the length of my arm. There is none like thee in the jungle, wise, old, strong, and most beautiful Kaa.”

“Now whither does
this
trail lead?” Kaa’s voice was gentler. “Not a moon since there was a manling with a knife threw stones at my head and called me bad little tree-cat names because I lay asleep in the open.”

“Aye, and turned every driven deer to all the winds, and Mowgli was hunting, and this same Flathead was too deaf to hear his whistle and leave the deer-roads free,” Mowgli answered composedly, sitting down among the painted coils.

“Now this same manling comes with soft, tickling words to this same Flathead, telling him that he is wise,
and strong, and beautiful, and this same old Flathead believes and coils a place, thus, for this same stone-throwing manling and…. Art thou at ease now? Could Bagheera give thee so good a resting-place?”

Kaa had, as usual, made a sort of soft half-hammock of himself under Mowgli’s weight. The boy reached out in the darkness and gathered in the supple cable-like neck till Kaa’s head rested on his shoulder, and then he told him all that had happened in the jungle that night.

“Wise I may be,” said Kaa at the end, “but deaf I surely am. Else I should have heard the
Pheeal
. Small wonder the eaters-of-grass are uneasy. How many be the dholes?”

“I have not seen yet. I came hot-foot to thee. Thou art older than Hathi. But, oh, Kaa”—here Mowgli wriggled with joy, “it will be good hunting! Few of us will see another moon.”

“Dost
thou
strike in this? Remember thou art a man, and remember what pack cast thee out. Let the wolf look to the dog.
Thou
art a man.”

“Last year’s nuts are this year’s black earth,” said Mowgli. “It is true that I am a man, but it is in my stomach that this night I have said that I am a wolf. I called the river and the trees to remember. I am of the Free People, Kaa, till the dholes have gone by.”

“Free People,” Kaa grunted. “Free thieves! And thou hast tied thyself into the death-knot for the sake of the memory of dead wolves! This is no good hunting.”

“It is my word which I have spoken. The trees know, the river knows. Till the dholes have gone by my word comes not back to me.”

“Ngssh!
That changes all trails. I had thought to take thee away with me to the northern marshes, but the word—even the word of a little, naked, hairless manling—is the word. Now I, Kaa, say—”

“Think well, Flathead, lest thou tie thyself into the death-knot also. I need no word from thee, for well I know—”

“Be it so, then,” said Kaa. “I will give no word. But what is in thy stomach to do when the dhole come?”

“They must swim the Wainganga. I thought to meet them with my knife in the shallows, the pack behind me, and so stabbing and thrusting we might turn them down-stream, or cool their throats a little.”

“The dhole do not turn and their throats are hot,” said Kaa. “There will be neither manling nor wolf-cub when that hunting is done, but only dry bones.”

“
Alala!
If we die we die. It will be most good hunting. But my stomach is young, and I have not seen many rains. I am not wise nor strong. Hast thou a better plan, Kaa?”

“I have seen a hundred and a hundred rains. Ere Hathi cast his milk-tushes my trail was big in the dust. By the First Egg, I am older than many trees, and I have seen all that the jungle has done.”

“But
this
is new hunting,” said Mowgli. “Never before have the dhole crossed our trail.”

“What is has been. What will be is no more than a forgotten year striking backwards. Be still while I count those my years.”

For a long hour Mowgli lay back among the coils, playing with his knife, while Kaa, his head motionless on the ground, thought of all that he had seen and known since the day he came from the egg. The light seemed to go out of his eyes and leave them like stale opals, and now and again he made little stiff passes with his head to right and left, as though he were hunting in his sleep. Mowgli dozed quietly, for he knew that there is nothing like sleep before hunting, and he was trained to take it at any hour of the day or night.

Then he felt Kaa grow bigger and broader below him as the huge python puffed himself out, hissing with the noise of a sword drawn from a steel scabbard.

“I have seen all the dead seasons,” Kaa said at last, “and the great trees and the old elephants and the rocks that were bare and sharp-pointed ere the moss grew. Art
thou
still alive, manling?”

“It is only a little after moonrise,” said Mowgli. “I do not understand—”

“
Hssh!
I am again Kaa. I knew it was but a little time. Now we will go to the river, and I will show thee what is to be done against the dhole.”

He turned, straight as an arrow, for the main stream of the Wainganga, plunging in a little above the pool that hid the Peace Rock, Mowgli at his side.

“Nay, do not swim. I go swiftly. My back, Little Brother.”

Mowgli tucked his left arm round Kaa’s neck, dropped his right close to his body, and straightened his feet. Then Kaa breasted the current as he alone could, and the ripple of the checked water stood up in a frill round Mowgli’s neck and his feet were waved to and fro in the eddy under the python’s lashing sides. A mile or so above the Peace Rock the Wainganga narrows between a gorge of marble rocks from eighty to a hundred feet high, and the current runs like a mill-race between and over all manner of ugly stones. But Mowgli did not trouble his head about the water: no water in the world could have given him a moment’s fear. He was looking at the gorge on either side and sniffing uneasily, for there was a sweetish-sourish smell in the air, very like the smell of a big ant-hill on a hot day. Instinctively he lowered himself in the water, only raising his head to breathe, and Kaa came to anchor with a double twist of his tail round a sunken rock, holding Mowgli in the hollow of a coil, while the water raced by.

“This is the Place of Death,” said the boy. “Why do we come here?”

“They sleep,” said Kaa. “Hathi will not turn aside for the Striped One. Yet Hathi and the Striped One together turn aside for the dhole, and the dhole, they say, turn aside for nothing. And yet for whom do the Little People of the Rocks turn aside? Tell me, master of the jungle, who is the master of the jungle?”

“These,” Mowgli whispered. “It is the Place of Death. Let us go.”

“Nay, look well, for they are asleep. It is as it was when I was not the length of thy arm.”

The split and weather-worn rocks of the gorge of the Wainganga had been used since the beginning of the jungle by the Little People of the Rocks—the busy, furious, black, wild bees of India. And, as Mowgli knew well, all trails turned off half a mile away from their country. For centuries the Little People had hived and swarmed from cleft to cleft and swarmed again, staining the white marble with stale honey, and made their combs tall and deep and black in the dark of the inner caves, and neither man nor beast nor fire nor water had ever touched them. The length of the gorge on both sides was hung as it were with black shimmery velvet curtains, and Mowgli sank as he looked, for those were the clotted millions of the sleeping bees. There were other lumps and festoons and things like decayed tree-trunks studded on the face of the rock—the old comb of past years, or new cities built in the shadow of the windless gorge—and huge masses of spongy, rotten trash had rolled down and stuck among the trees and creepers that clung to the rock-face. As he listened he heard more than once the rustle and slide of a honey-loaded comb turning over or falling away somewhere in the dark galleries. Then a booming of angry wings and the sullen drip, drip, drip, of the wasted honey, guttering along till it lipped over some ledge in the open and sluggishly trickled down on the twigs. There was a tiny little beach, not five feet broad, on one side of the river, and that was piled high with the rubbish of uncounted years. There lay dead bees, drones, sweepings, stale combs, and wings of marauding moths and beetles that had strayed in after honey, all tumbled in smooth piles of the finest black dust. The mere sharp smell of it was enough to frighten anything that had no wings, and knew what the Little People were.

Kaa moved up-stream again till he came to a sandbar at the head of the gorge.

“Here is this season’s kill,” said he. “Look!”

On the bank lay the skeletons of a couple of young deer and a buffalo. Mowgli could see that no wolf nor jackal had touched the bones, which were laid out naturally.

“They came beyond the line, they did not know,” murmured Mowgli, “and the Little People killed them. Let us go ere they awake.”

“They do not wake till the dawn,” said Kaa. “Now I will tell thee. A hunted buck from the south, many, many rains ago, came hither from the south, not knowing the jungle, a pack on his trail. Being made blind by fear he leaped from above, the pack running by sight, for they were hot and blind on the trail. The sun was high, and the Little People were many and very angry. Many, too, were those of the pack who leaped into the Wainganga, but they were dead ere they took water. Those who did not leap died also in the rocks above. But the buck lived.”

“How?”

“Because he came first, running for his life, leaping ere the Little People were aware, and was in the river when they gathered to kill. The pack, following, was altogether lost under the weight of the Little People, who had been roused by the feet of that buck.”

“The buck lived?” Mowgli repeated slowly.

“At least he did not die
then
, though none waited his coming down with a strong body to hold him safe against the water, as a certain old fat, deaf, yellow Flathead would wait for a manling—yea, though there were all the dhole of the Dekkan on his trail. What is in thy stomach?”

Kaa’s head lay on Mowgli’s wet shoulder, and his tongue quivered by the boy’s ear. There was a long silence before Mowgli whispered:

“It is to pull the very whiskers of Death, but—Kaa, thou art, indeed, the wisest of all the jungle.”

“So many have said. Look now, if the dhole follow thee—”

“As surely they will follow. Ho! Ho! I have many little thorns under my tongue to prick into their hides.”

“If they follow thee hot and blind, looking only at thy shoulders, those who do not die up above will take water either here or lower down, for the Little People will rise up and cover them. Now the Wainganga is hungry water, and they will have no Kaa to hold them, but will go down, such as live, to the shallows by the Seeonee lairs, and there thy pack may meet them by the throat.”

“
Ahai! Eowawa!
Better could not be till the rains fall in the dry season. There is now only the little matter of the run and the leap. I will make me known to the dholes, so that they shall follow me very closely.”

“Hast thou seen the rocks above thee? From the landward side?”

“Indeed no. That I had forgotten.”

“Go look. It is all rotten ground, cut and full of holes. One of thy clumsy feet set down without seeing would end the hunt. See, I leave thee here, and for thy sake only I will carry word to the pack that they may know where to look for the dholes. For myself, I am not of one skin with
any
wolf.”

When Kaa disliked an acquaintance he could be more unpleasant than any of the Jungle-People, except perhaps Bagheera. He swam down-stream, and opposite the rock he came on Phao and Akela listening to the night noises.

“
Hssh!
dogs,” he said cheerfully. “The dholes will come down-stream. If ye be not afraid ye can kill them in the shallows.”

“When come they?” said Phao. “And where is my man-cub?” said Akela.

“They come when they come,” said Kaa. “Wait and see. As for
thy
man-cub, from whom thou hast taken his word and so laid him open to Death,
thy
man-cub is with
me
, and if he be not already dead the fault is none of thine, bleached dog! Wait here for the dhole, and be glad that the man-cub and I strike on thy side.”

Kaa flashed up-stream again and moored himself in the middle of the gorge, looking upwards at the line of the cliff. Presently he saw Mowgli’s head move against the stars. Then there was a whizz in the air, the keen clean
schloop
of a body falling feet first. Next minute the body was at rest again in the loop of Kaa’s body.