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… It was a twenty-four-foot crocodile, cased in what looked like treble-riveted boiler-plate, studded and keeled and crested; the yellow points of his upper teeth just overhanging his beautifully fluted lower jaw. It was the blunt-nosed Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, older than any man in the village, who had given his name to the village; the demon of the ford before the railway bridge came—murderer, man-eater, and local fetish in one… |
This is from “The Undertakers” in The Second Jungle Book. One night three scavengers, an Adjutant-crane, a jackal, and a huge old man-eating mugger (crocodile) are gossiping on a river bank below a new railway bridge. The mugger remembers the villagers he used to catch and devour in the old days, when they had to wade across through a ford, and the time of the sepoy rebellion, when many dead English floated down the stream. Later in the tale the mugger is shot by two white men with guns. One of them, as a child, had narrowly escaped death from that same great beast. |
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