The Jungle Books (44 page)

“If ye had come when I called this had never been,” said Mowgli, running much faster.

“And now what is to be?” said Grey Brother.

Mowgli was going to answer when a girl in a white cloth came down some path that led from the outskirts of the village. Grey Brother dropped out of sight at once and Mowgli backed noiselessly into a field of high-springing crops. He could almost have touched her with his hand when the warm green stalks closed before his face and he disappeared like a ghost. The girl screamed, for she thought she had seen a spirit, and then she gave a deep sigh. Mowgli parted the stalks with his hands and watched her till she was out of sight.

“And now I do not know,” he said, sighing in his turn. “
Why
did ye not come when I called?”

“We follow thee—we follow thee,” Grey Brother mumbled, licking at Mowgli’s heel. “We follow thee always except in the Time of the New Talk.”

“And would ye follow me to the man pack?” Mowgli whispered.

“Did I not follow thee on the night that our old pack cast thee out? Who waked thee lying among the crops?”

“Aye, but again?”

“Have I not followed thee to-night?”

“Aye, but again and again, and it may be again, Grey Brother?”

Grey Brother was silent. When he spoke he growled to himself: “The Black One spoke truth.”

“And he said?”

“Man goes to Man at the last. Raksha our mother said—”

“So also said Akela on the night of Red Dog,” Mowgli muttered.

“So also said Kaa, who is wiser than us all.”

“What dost thou say, Grey Brother?”

“They cast thee out once, with bad talk. They cut thy mouth with stones. They sent Buldeo to slay thee. They would have thrown thee into the Red Flower. Thou, and not I, hast said that they are evil and senseless. Thou and not I—I follow my own people—didst let in the jungle upon them. Thou and not I didst make song against them more bitter even than our song against Red Dog.”

“I ask thee what
thou
sayest?”

They were talking as they ran. Grey Brother cantered on a while without replying, and then he said between bound and bound as it were: “Man-cub—master of the jungle—son of Raksha—lair-brother to me—though I forget for a little while in the spring, thy trail is my trail, thy lair is my lair, thy kill is my kill, and thy death-fight is my death-fight. I speak for the Three. But what wilt thou say to the jungle?”

“That is well thought. Between the sight and the kill it is not good to wait. Go before and cry them all to the Council Rock, and I will tell them what is in my stomach. But they may not come—in the Time of the New Talk they may forget me.”

“Hast thou then forgotten nothing?” snapped Grey Brother over his shoulder, as he laid himself down to gallop, and Mowgli followed, thinking.

At any other season his news would have called all the jungle together with bristling necks, but now they were busy hunting and fighting and killing and singing. From one to another Grey Brother ran, crying: “The master of the jungle goes back to Man. Come to the Council Rock!” And the happy, eager people only answered: “He will return in the summer heats. The rains will drive him to lair. Run and sing with us, Grey Brother.”

“But the master of the jungle goes back to Man,” Grey Brother would repeat.

“
Eee—Yowa?
Is the Time of New Talk any less good
for that?” they would reply. So when Mowgli, heavy-hearted, came up through the well-remembered rocks to the place where he had been brought into the pack, he found only the Four, Baloo, who was nearly blind with age, and the heavy, cold-blooded Kaa, coiled round Akela’s empty seat.

“Thy trail ends here, then, manling?” said Kaa, as Mowgli threw himself down, his face in his hands. “Cry thy cry. We be of one blood, thou and I—man and snake together.”

“Why was I not torn in two by Red Dog?” the boy moaned. “My strength is gone from me, and it is not the poison. By night and by day I hear a double step upon my trail. When I turn my head it is as though one had hidden himself from me that instant. I go to look behind the trees and he is not there. I call and none cry again, but it is as though one listened and kept back the answer. I lie down, but I do not rest. I run the spring running, but I am not made still. I bathe, but I am not made cool. The kill sickens me, but I have no heart to fight except I kill. The Red Flower is in my body, my bones are water—and—I know not what I know.”

“What need of talk?” said Baloo, slowly, turning his head to where Mowgli lay. “Akela by the river said it, that Mowgli should drive Mowgli back to the man pack. I said it. But who listens now to Baloo? Bagheera—where is Bagheera this night? He knows also. It is the Law.”

“When we met at the Cold Lairs, manling, I knew it,” said Kaa, turning a little in his mighty coils. “Man goes to Man at the last, though the jungle does not cast him out.”

The Four looked at one another and at Mowgli, puzzled but obedient.

“The jungle does not cast me out, then?” Mowgli stammered.

Grey Brother and the Three growled furiously, beginning: “So long as we live none shall dare—” But Baloo checked them.

“I taught thee the Law. It is for me to speak,” he said, “and though I cannot now see the rocks before me,
I see far. Little frog, take thine own trail; make thy lair with thine own blood and pack and people; but when there is need of foot or tooth or eye or a word carried swiftly by night, remember, master of the jungle, the jungle is thine at call.”

“The Middle Jungle is thine also,” said Kaa. “I speak for no small people.”

“
Hai mai
, my brothers,” cried Mowgli, throwing up his arms with a sob. “I know not what I know, I would not go, but I am drawn by both feet. How shall I leave these nights?”

“Nay, look up, Little Brother,” Baloo repeated. “There is no shame in this hunting. When the honey is eaten we leave the empty hive.”

“Having cast the skin,” said Kaa, “we may not creep into it afresh. It is the Law.”

“Listen, dearest of all to me,” said Baloo. “There is neither word nor will here to hold thee back. Look up! Who may question the master of the jungle? I saw thee playing among the white pebbles yonder when thou wast a little frog; and Bagheera, that bought thee for the price of a young bull newly killed, saw thee also. Of that looking-over we two only remain, for Raksha, thy lair-mother, is dead with thy lair-father; the old wolf pack is long since dead; thou knowest whither Shere Khan went, and Akela died among the dholes, where but for thy wisdom and strength the second Seeonee Pack would also have died. There remain nothing but old bones. It is no longer the man-cub that asks leave of his pack, but the master of the jungle that changes his trail. Who shall question man in his ways?”

“But Bagheera and the bull that bought me,” said Mowgli. “I would not—”

His words were cut short by a roar and a crash in the thicket below, and Bagheera, light, strong, and terrible as always.

“
Therefore
,” he said, stretching out a dripping right paw, “I did not come. It was a long hunt, but he lies dead in the bushes now—a bull in his second year—the
bull that frees thee, Little Brother. All debts are paid now. For the rest, my word is Baloo’s word.” He licked Mowgli’s foot. “Remember Bagheera loved thee,” he cried and bounded away. At the foot of the hill he cried again long and loud: “Good hunting on a new trail, master of the jungle! Remember Bagheera loved thee.”

“Thou hast heard,” said Baloo. “There is no more. Go now, but first come to me. O wise little frog, come to me!”

“It is hard to cast the skin,” said Kaa, as Mowgli sobbed and sobbed with his head on the blind bear’s side and his arms round his neck, while Baloo tried feebly to lick his feet.

“The stars are thin,” said Grey Brother, snuffing at the dawn-wind. “Where shall we lair to-day? For, from now, we follow new trails.”

And this is the last of the Mowgli stories.

This is the song that Mowgli heard behind him in the jungle till he came to Messua’s door again.

In the early morning, the rangers and gendarmes surrounded us, asking questions of everyone—even the children. No one could satisfy their queries. “Senay! Senay!” their voices echoed as they advanced through the forest with their dogs. “Senaaaay! Senaaaaaay!” Their calling was as haunting as the wolves’ the night before. Senay was nowhere to be found.

She and I had floated paper boats down a mountain stream just the previous afternoon. We had picked black-berries and been stung by yellow jackets. For this outing on Mount Yamannar, we were staying in bungalows. During the night the exasperated adults had piled tables and chairs against the door, to protect us from the wolves coming ever so close with each breath. None of us slept, feeling a tenuous separation between ourselves and the wolves, lying still, listening to the drawn-out howling.

We returned to the city but I was unsettled. My parents had told me that the wolves had stolen my friend.

“What will they do to her?” I asked.

“They will adopt her and she will live with them.”

I tried to convince myself that this was true, even with a tinge of envy that I was not the one kidnapped, the one privileged to live with the pack, but I also knew the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Somewhere inside. I feared that the wolves had eaten my friend Senay.

A couple of years later,
The Jungle Books
found its way into my hands and I would read these wild stories again and again. Little did I realize that these books would bring solace to my heart about my friend’s disappearance
and my fear of the wolf would turn into great affection for this noble beast.

It is strange how the wolf has come to mean different things to different cultures. Revered as a deity or reviled as a devil, the poor beast has often paid with its life for crimes it did not commit. Stories and fables have depicted the wolf as a symbol of evil, a monster, a werewolf, the Antichrist—in short, the epitome of wickedness. Fortunately, counter legends portray it as a noble creature who enriches the human spirit, an ally as in
Dances with Wolves
; or a guide who leads humans out of darkness into light, as in the Ergenekon legends of Central Asia; or a soul mate as in
Women Who Run with the Wolves
; or a nurturer, as in the story of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, who were raised by a she-wolf.

When I reread
The Jungle Books
now, I realize that they are essentially a collection of related stories, not a novel. Kipling’s syntax jumps without giving us the usual progressions but asserting them as separate stories unified by their setting: the jungle in the highlands of India. Each story opens with a poem that seems to set the tone of the story.

They center around a foundling named Mowgli, whose parents have been killed by the tiger Shere Khan. Mowgli is raised by the wolves with the help of two other kind animals, Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, who teach Mowgli the “Law of the Jungle,” the boundaries of ecological as well as moral equilibrium: