The Jungle Books (41 page)

“Art thou there, man-cub?” said Won-tolla, from the bank.

“Ask of the dead, Outlier,” Mowgli replied. “Have none come down-stream? I have filled these dogs’ mouths with dirt. I have tricked them in the broad daylight, and their leader lacks his tail, but here be some few for thee still. Whither shall I drive them?”

“I will wait,” said Won-tolla. “The long night is before me, and I shall see well.”

Nearer and nearer came the bay of the Seeonee wolves. “For the pack, for the full pack it is met!” And a bend in the river drove the dholes forward among the sands and shoals opposite the Seeonee lairs.

Then they saw their mistake. They should have landed half a mile higher up and rushed the wolves on dry ground. Now it was too late. The bank was lined with burning eyes, and except for the horrible
Pheeal
cry that had never stopped since sundown there was no sound in the jungle. It seemed as though Won-tolla was fawning on them to come ashore; and “Turn and take hold!” said the leader of the dholes. The entire pack flung
themselves at the shore, threshing and squattering through the shoal water till the face of the Wainganga was all white and torn, and the great ripples went from side to side like bow-waves from a boat. Mowgli followed the rush, stabbing and slicing as the dholes, huddled together, rushed up the river-beach in a wave.

Then the long fight began, heaving and straining and splitting and scattering and narrowing and broadening along the red wet sands, and over and between the tangled tree-roots, and through and among the bushes, and in and out of the grass clumps, for even now the dholes were two to one. But they met wolves fighting for all that made the pack, and not only the short, deep-chested white-tusked hunters of the pack, but the wild-eyed
lahinis
—the she-wolves of the lair, as the saying is—fighting for their litters, with here and there a yearling wolf, his first coat still half woolly, tugging and grappling by their sides. A wolf, you must know, flies at the throat or snaps at the flank, while a dhole by preference bites low, so when the dholes were struggling out of the water and had to raise their heads the odds were with the wolves; on dry land the wolves suffered, but in the water or on land Mowgli’s knife came and went the same. The Four had worked their way to his aid. Grey Brother, crouched between the boy’s knees, protected his stomach, while the others guarded his back and either side, or stood over him when the shock of a leaping, yelling dhole who had thrown himself on the steady blade bore him down. For the rest, it was one tangled confusion—a locked and swaying mob that moved from right to left and from left to right along the bank, and also ground round and round slowly on its own centre. Here would be a heaving mound, like a water-blister in a whirlpool, which would break like a water-blister, and throw up four or five mangled dogs, each striving to get back to the centre; here would be a single wolf borne down by two or three dholes dragging them forward, and sinking the while; here a yearling cub would be held up by the
pressure round him, though he had been killed early in the fight, while his mother, crazed with dumb rage, rolled over snapping and passing on; and in the middle of the thickest fight, perhaps, one wolf and one dhole, forgetting everything else, would be manoeuvring for first hold till they were swept away by a rush of yelling fighters. Once Mowgli passed Akela, a dhole on either flank, and his all but toothless jaws closed over the loins of a third; and once he saw Phaon, his teeth set in the throat of a dhole, tugging the unwilling beast forward till the yearlings could finish him. But the bulk of the fight was blind flurry and smother in the dark; hit, trip, and tumble, yelp, groan, and worry-worry-worry round him and behind him and above him.

As the night wore on the quick giddy-go-round motion increased. The dholes were wearied and afraid to attack the stronger wolves, though they did not yet dare to run away, but Mowgli felt that the end was coming soon, and contented himself with striking to cripple. The yearlings were growing bolder; there was time to breathe; and now the mere flicker of the knife would sometimes turn a dhole aside.

“The meat is very near the bone,” Grey Brother gasped. He was bleeding from a score of flesh-wounds.

“But the bone is yet to be cracked,” said Mowgli. “
Aowawa! Thus
do we do in the jungle!” The red blade ran like a flame along the side of a dhole whose hind quarters were hidden by the weight of a clinging wolf.

“My kill!” snorted the wolf through his wrinkled nostrils. “Leave him to me!”

“Is thy stomach
still
empty, Outlier?” said Mowgli. Won-tolla was fearfully punished, but his grip had paralysed the dhole, who could not turn round and reach him.

“By the bull that bought me,” Mowgli cried, with a bitter laugh, “it is the tailless one!” And indeed it was the big bay-coloured leader.

“It is not wise to kill cubs and
lahinis
,” Mowgli went
on philosophically, wiping the blood out of his eyes, “unless one also kills the lair-father, and it is in my stomach that this lair-father kills thee.”

A dhole leaped to his leader’s aid, but before his teeth had found Won-tolla’s flank, Mowgli’s knife was in his chest, and Grey Brother took what was left.

“And thus do we do in the jungle,” said Mowgli.

Won-tolla said not a word, only his jaws were closing and closing on the backbone as life ebbed. The dhole shuddered, his head dropped and he lay still, and Won-tolla dropped above him.

“
Huh!
The blood-debt is paid,” said Mowgli. “Sing the song, Won-tolla.”

“He hunts no more,” said Grey Brother, “and Akela too is silent, this long time.”

“The bone is cracked!” thundered Phao, son of Phaon. “They go! Kill, kill out, O hunters of the Free People!”

Dhole after dhole was slinking away from those dark and bloody sands to the river, to the thick jungle, up-stream or down-stream as he saw the road clear.

“The debt! The debt!” shouted Mowgli. “Pay the debt! They have slain the Lone Wolf! Let not a dog go!”

He was flying to the river, knife in hand, to check any dhole who dared to take water, when, from under a mound of nine dead, rose Akela’s head and fore quarters, and Mowgli dropped on his knees beside the Lone Wolf.

“Said I not it would be my last fight?” Akela gasped. “It is good hunting. And thou, Little Brother?”

“I live, having killed many.”

“Even so. I die, and I would—I would die by thee, Little Brother.”

Mowgli took the terrible scarred head on his knees, and put his arms round the torn neck.

“It is long since the old days of Shere Khan and a man-cub that rolled naked in the dust,” coughed Akela.

“Nay, nay, I am a wolf. I am of one skin with the Free People,” Mowgli cried. “It is no will of mine that I am a man.”

“Thou art a man, Little Brother, wolfling of my watching. Thou art all a man, or else the pack had fled before the dhole. My life I owe to thee, and to-day thou hast saved the pack even as once I saved thee. Hast thou forgotten? All debts are paid now. Go to thine own people. I tell thee again, eye of my eye, this hunting is ended. Go to thine own people.”

“I will never go. I will hunt alone in the jungle. I have said it.”

“After the summer come the rains, and after the rains come the spring. Go back before thou art driven.”

“Who will drive me?”

“Mowgli will drive Mowgli. Go back to thy people. Go to Man.”

“When Mowgli drives Mowgli I will go,” Mowgli answered.

“There is no more for thee,” said Akela. “Now I would speak to my kind. Little Brother, canst thou raise me to my feet? I also am a leader of the Free People.”

Very carefully and gently Mowgli raised Akela to his feet, both arms round him, and the Lone Wolf drew a deep breath and began the Death-Song that a leader of the pack should sing when he dies. It gathered strength as he went on, lifting and lifting and ringing far across the river, till it came to the last “Good hunting!” and Akela shook himself clear of Mowgli for an instant, and leaping into the air, fell backwards dead upon his last and most terrible kill.

Mowgli sat with his head on his knees, careless of anything else, while the last of the dying dholes were being overtaken and run down by the merciless
lahinis
. Little by little the cries died away, and the wolves came back limping as their wounds stiffened to take stock of the dead. Fifteen of the pack, as well as half a dozen
lahinis
, were dead by the river, and of the others not one was unmarked. Mowgli sat through it all till the cold daybreak, when Phao’s wet red muzzle was dropped in his hand, and Mowgli drew back to show the gaunt body of Akela.

“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 to-night!”

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.

This is the song that Chil sang as the kites dropped down one after another to the river-bed, 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.

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-path. And yet the look in his eyes was always gentle. Even when he fought his eyes never glazed 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 fore paws 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?”