[a short tale]

WILL the public be good enough to look into this business? It has sent Crewe to bed, and Mottleby is applying for home leave, and I’ve lost my faith in man altogether, and the Club gives it up. Trivey is the only man who is unaffected by the catastrophe, and he says “I told you so.” We were all proud of Trivey at the Club, and would have crowned him with wreaths of Bougainvillea had he permitted the liberty. But Trivey was an austere man. The utmost that he permitted himself to say was: “I can stretch a little bit when I’m in the humour.” We called him the Monumental Liar. Nothing that the Club oflFered was too good for Trivey. He had the soft chair opposite the thermantidote in the hot weather, and he made up his own four at whist. When visitors came in—globe-trotters for choice—Trivey used to unmuzzle himself and tell tales that sent the globe-trotter out of the Club on tiptoe looking for snakes in his hat and tigers in the compound. Whenever a man from a strange Club came in Trivey used to call for a whisky and ginger-wine and rout that man on all points—from horses upward. There was a man whose nickname was “Ananias,” who came from the Prince’s Plungers to look at Trivey; and, though Trivey was only a civilian, the Plunger man resigned his title to the nickname before eleven o’clock. He made it over to Trivey on a card, and Trivey himg up the concession in his quarters. We loved Trivey—all of us; and now we don’t love him any more.

A man from the frontier came in and began to tell tales—some very good ones, and some better than good. He was an outsider, but he had a wonderful imagination—for the frontier. He told six stories before Trivey brought up his first line, and three more before Trivey hurled his reserves into the fray.

“When I was at Anungaracharlupillay in Madras,” said Trivey quietly, “there was a rogue elephant cutting about the district. And I came upon him asleep.” All the Club stopped talking here, until Trivey had finished the story. He told us that he, in the company of another man, had found the rogue asleep, but just as they got up to the brute’s head it woke up with a scream. Then Trivey, who was careful to explain that he was a “bit powerful about the arms,” caught hold of its ears as it rose, and hung there, kicking the animal in the eyes, which so bewildered it that it stayed screaming and frightened until Trivey’s ally shot it behind the shoulder, and the villagers ran in and hamstrung it. It evidently died from loss of blood. Trivey was hanging on the ears and kicking hard for nearly fifteen minutes. When the frontier man heard the story he put his hands in front of his face and sobbed audibly. We gave him all the drinks he wanted, and he recovered sufficiently to carry away eighty rupees at whist later on; but his nerve was irretrievably shattered. He will be no use on the frontier any more. The rest of the Club were very pleased with Trivey, because these frontier men, and especially the guides, want a great deal of keeping in order. Trivey was quite modest. He was a truly great soul, and popular applause never turned his head. As I have said, we loved Trivey, till that fatal day when Crewe announced that he had been transferred for a couple of months to Animgaracharlupillay. “Oh!” said Trivey, “I dare say they’ll remember about my rogue elephant down there. You ask ’em, Crewe.” Then we felt sorry for Trivey, because we were sure that he was arriving at that stage of mental decay when a man begins to believe in his own fictions. That spoils a man’s hand. Crewe wrote up once or twice to Mottleby, saying that he would bring back a story that would make our hair curl. Good stories are scarce in Madras, and we rather scoffed at the announcement. When Crewe returned it was easy to see that he was bursting with importance. He gave a big dinner at the Club and invited nearly everybody but Trivey, who went off after dinner to teach a young subaltern to play “snooker.” At coffee and cheroots, Crewe could not restrain himself any longer. “I say, you Johnnies, it’s all true—every single word of it—and you can throw the decanter at my head and I’ll apologise. The whole village was full of it. There was a rogue elephant, and it slept, and Trivey did catch hold of its ears and kick it in the eyes, and hang on for ten minutes, at least, and all the rest of it. I neglected my regular work to sift that story, and on my honour the tale’s an absolute fact. The headsman said so, all the shikaries said so, and all the villages corroborated it. Now would a whole village volunteer a lie that would do them no good?” You might have heard a cigar-ash fall after this statement. Then Mottleby said, with deep disgust: “What can you do with a man like that? His best and brightest lie, too!” “’Tisn’t!” shrieked Crewe. “It’s a fact—a nickel-plated, teak-wood, Tantalusaction, forty-five rupee fact.’’ “That only makes it worse,” said Mottleby; and we all felt that was true. We ran into the billiard-room to talk to Trivey, but he said we had put him off his stroke; and that was all the satisfaction we got out of him. Later on he repeated that he was a “bit powerful about the arms,” and went to bed. We sat up half the night devising vengeance on Trivey. We were very angry, and there was no hope of hushing up the tale. The man had taken us in completely, and now that we’ve lost our champion Ananias, all the frontier will laugh at us, and we shall never be able to trust a word that Trivey says.

I ask with Mottleby: “What can you do with a man like that?”

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IT had been raining heavily for one whole month—raining on a camp of thirty thousand men, thousands of camels, elephants, horses, bullocks, and mules, all gathered together at a place called Rawalpindi, to be reviewed by the Viceroy of India. He was receiving a visit from the Amir of Afghanistan—a wild king of a very wild country; and the Amir had brought with him for a bodyguard eight hundred men and horses who had never seen a camp or a locomotive before in their lives—savage men and savage horses from somewhere at the back of Central Asia. Every night a mob of these horses would be sure to break their heel-ropes, and stampede up and down the camp through the mud in the dark, or the camels would break loose and run about and fall over the ropes of the tents, and you can imagine how pleasant that was for men trying to go to sleep. My tent lay far away from the camel-lines, and I thought it was safe; but one night a man popped his head in and shouted, ‘Get out, quick! They’re coming! My tent’s gone!’

I knew who ‘they’ were; so I put on my boots and waterproof and scuttled out into the slush. Little Vixen, my fox-terrier, went out through the other side; and then there was a roaring and a grunting and bubbling, and I saw the tent cave in, as the pole snapped, and begin to dance about like a mad ghost. A camel had blundered into it, and wet and angry as I was, I could not help laughing. Then I ran on, because I did not know how many camels might have got loose, and before long I was out of sight of the camp, ploughing my way through the mud.

At last I fell over the tail-end of a gun, and by that knew I was somewhere near the Artillery lines where the cannon were stacked at night. As I did not want to plowter about any more in the drizzle and the dark, I put my waterproof over the muzzle of one gun, and made a sort of wigwam with two or three rammers that I found, and lay along the tail of another gun, wondering where Vixen had got to, and where I might be.

Just as I was getting ready to sleep I heard a jingle of harness and a grunt, and a mule passed me shaking his wet ears. He belonged to a screw-gun battery, for I could hear the rattle of the straps and rings and chains and things on his saddle-pad. The screw-guns are tiny little cannon made in two pieces that are screwed together when the time comes to use them. They are taken up mountains, anywhere that a mule can find a road, and they are very useful for fighting in rocky country.

Behind the mule there was a camel, with his big soft feet squelching and slipping in the mud, and his neck bobbing to and fro like a strayed hen’s. Luckily, I knew enough of beast language—not wild-beast language, but camp-beast language, of course—from the natives to know what he was saying.

He must have been the one that flopped into my tent, for he called to the mule, ‘What shall I, do? Where shall I go? I have fought with a white thing that waved, and it took a stick and hit me on the neck.’ (That was my broken tentpole, and I was very glad to know it.) ‘Shall we run on?’

‘Oh, it was you,’ said the mule, ‘you and your friends, that have been disturbing the camp? All right. You’ll be beaten for this in the morning; but I may as well give you something on account now.’

I heard the harness jingle as the mule backed and caught the camel two kicks in the ribs that rang like a drum. ‘Another time,’ he said, ‘you’ll know better than to run through a mule-battery at night, shouting “Thieves and fire!” Sit down, and keep your silly neck quiet.’

The camel doubled up camel-fashion, like a two-foot rule, and sat down whimpering. There was a regular beat of hoofs in the darkness, and a big troop-horse cantered up as steadily as though he were on parade, jumped a gun-tail, and landed close to the mule.

‘It’s disgraceful,’ he said, blowing out his nostrils. ‘Those camels have racketed through our lines again—the third time this week. How’s a horse to keep his condition if he isn’t allowed to sleep. Who’s here?’

‘I’m the breech-piece mule of Number Two gun of the First Screw Battery,’ said the mule, ‘and the other’s one of your friends. He’s waked me up too. Who are you?’

‘Number Fifteen, E troop, Ninth Lancers—Dick Cunliffe’s horse. Stand over a little, there.’

‘Oh, beg your pardon,’ said the mule. ‘It’s too dark to see much. Aren’t these camels too sickening for anything? I walked out of my lines to get a little peace and quiet here.’

‘My lords,’ said the camel humbly, ‘we dreamed bad dreams in the night, and we were very much afraid. I am only a baggage-camel of the 39th Native Infantry, and I am not so brave as you are, my lords.’

‘Then why the pickets didn’t you stay and carry baggage for the 39th Native Infantry, instead of running all round the camp?’ said the mule.

‘They were such very bad dreams,’ said the camel. ‘I am sorry. Listen! What is that? Shall we run on again?’

‘Sit down,’ said the mule, ‘or you’ll snap your long legs between the guns.’ He cocked one ear and listened. ‘Bullocks!’ he said. ‘Gun-bullocks. On my word, you and your friends have waked the camp very thoroughly. It takes a good deal of prodding to put up a gun-bullock.’

I heard a chain dragging along the ground, and a yoke of the great sulky white bullocks that drag the heavy siege-guns when the elephants won’t go any nearer to the firing, came shouldering along together; and almost stepping on the chain was another battery-mule, calling wildly for ‘Billy.’

‘That’s one of our recruits,’ said the old mule to the troop-horse. ‘He’s calling for me. Here, youngster, stop squealing. The dark never hurt anybody yet.’

The gun-bullocks lay down together and began chewing the cud, but the young mule huddled close to Billy.

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‘Things!’ he said. ‘Fearful and horrible things, Billy! They came into our lines while we were asleep. D’you think they’ll kill us?’

‘I’ve a great mind to give you a number-one kicking,’ said Billy. ‘The idea of a fourteen-hand mule with your training disgracing the battery before this gentleman!’

‘Gently, gently!’ said the troop-horse. ‘Remember they are always like this to begin with. The first time I ever saw a man (it was in Australia when I was a three-year-old) I ran for half a day, and if I’d seen a camel I should have been running still.’

Nearly all our horses for the English cavalry are brought to India from Australia, and are broken in by the troopers themselves.

‘True enough,’ said Billy. ‘Stop shaking, youngster. The first time they put the full harness with all its chains on my back, I stood on my forelegs and kicked every bit of it off. I hadn’t learned the real science of kicking then, but the battery said they had never seen anything like it.’

‘But this wasn’t harness or anything that jingled,’ said the young mule. ‘You know I don’t mind that now, Billy. It was Things like trees, and they fell up and down the lines and bubbled; and my head-rope broke, and I couldn’t find my driver, and I couldn’t find you, Billy, so I ran off with—with these gentlemen.’

‘H’m!’ said Billy. ‘As soon as I heard the camels were loose I came away on my own account, quietly. When a battery—a screw-gun mule calls gun-bullocks gentlemen, he must be very badly shaken up. Who are you fellows on the ground there?’

The gun-bullocks rolled their suds, and answered both together: ‘The seventh yoke of the first gun of the Big Gun Battery. We were asleep when the camels came, but when we were trampled on we got up and walked away. It is better to lie quiet in the mud than to be disturbed on good bedding. We told your friend here that there was nothing to be afraid of, but he knew so much that he thought otherwise. Wah!’

They went on chewing.

‘That comes of being afraid,’ said Billy. ‘You get laughed at by gun-bullocks. I hope you like it, young un.’

The young mule’s teeth snapped, and I heard him say something about not being afraid of any beefy old bullock in the world; but the bullocks only clicked their horns together and went on chewing.

‘Now, don’t be angry after you’ve been afraid. That’s the worst kind of cowardice,’ said the troop-horse. ‘Anybody can be forgiven for being scared in the night, I think, if they see things they don’t understand. We’ve broken out of our pickets, again and again, four hundred and fifty of us, just because a new recruit got to telling tales of whip-snakes at home in Australia till we were scared to death of the loose ends of our headropes.’

‘That’s all very well in camp,’ said Billy; ‘I’m not above stampeding myself, for the fun of the thing, when I haven’t been out for a day or two; but what do you do on active service?’

‘Oh, that’s quite another set of new shoes,’ said the troop-horse. ‘Dick Cunliffe’s on my back then, and drives his knees into me, and all I have to do is to watch where I am putting my feet and to keep my hind legs well under me, and be bridle-wise.’

‘What’s bridle-wise?’ said the young mule.

‘By the Blue Gums of the Back Blocks,’ snorted the troop-horse, ‘do you mean to say that you aren’t taught to be bridle-wise in your business? How can you do anything, unless you can spin round at once when the rein is pressed on your neck? It means life or death to your man, and of course that’s life or death to you. Get round with your hind legs under you the instant you feel the rein on your neck. If you haven’t room to swing round, rear up a little and come round on your hind legs. That’s being bridlewise.’

‘We aren’t taught that way,’ said Billy the mule stiffly. ‘We’re taught to obey the man at our head: step off when he says so, and step in when he says so. I suppose it comes to the same thing. Now, with all this fine fancy business and rearing, which must be very bad for your hocks, what do you do?’

‘That depends,’ said the troop-horse. ‘Generally I have to go in among a lot of yelling, hairy men with knives,—long shiny knives, worse than the farrier’s knives,—and I have to take care that Dick’s boot is just touching the next man’s boot without crushing it. I can see Dick’s lance to the right of my right eye, and I know I am safe. I shouldn’t care to be the man or horse that stood up to Dick and me when we’re in a hurry.’

‘Don’t the knives hurt?’ said the young mule.

‘Well, I got one cut across the chest once, but that wasn’t Dick’s fault——’

‘A lot I should have cared whose fault it was, if it hurt!’ said the young mule.

‘You must,’ said the troop-horse. ‘If you don’t trust your man, you may as well run away at once. That’s what some of our horses do, and I don’t blame them. As I was saying, it wasn’t Dick’s fault. The man was lying on the ground, and I stretched myself not to tread on him, and he slashed up at me. Next time I have to go over a man lying down I shall step on him—hard.’

‘H’m!’ said Billy; ‘it sounds very foolish. Knives are dirty things at any time. The proper thing to do is to climb up a mountain with a well-balanced saddle, hang on by all four feet and your ears too, and creep and crawl and wriggle along, till you come out hundreds of feet above any one else, on a ledge where there’s just room enough for your hoofs. Then you stand still and keep quiet,—never ask a man to hold your head, young un,—keep quiet while the guns are being put together, and then you watch the little poppy shells drop down into the tree-tops ever so far below.’

‘Don’t you ever trip?’ said the troop-horse.

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‘They say that when a mule trips you can split a hen’s ear,’ said Billy. ‘Now and again per-haps a badly packed saddle will upset a mule, but it’s very seldom. I wish I could show you our business. It’s beautiful. Why, it took me three years to find out what the men were driving at. The science of the thing is never to show up against the skyline, because, if you do, you may get fired at. Remember that, young un. Always keep hidden as much as possible, even if you have to go a mile out of your way. I lead the battery when it comes to that sort of climbing.’

‘Fired at without the chance of running into the people who are firing!’ said the troop-horse, thinking hard. ‘I couldn’t stand that. I should want to charge, with Dick.’

‘Oh no, you wouldn’t; you know that as soon as the guns are in position they’ll do all the charging. That’s scientific and neat; but knives—pah!’

The baggage-camel had been bobbing his head to and fro for some time past, anxious to get a word in edgeways. Then I heard him say, as he cleared his throat, nervously:—

‘I—I—I have fought a little, but not in that climbing way or that running way.’

‘No. Now you mention it,’ said Billy, ‘you don’t look as though you were made for climbing or running-much. Well, how was it, old Haybales?’

‘The proper way,’ said the camel. ‘We all sat down——’

‘Oh, my cropper and breastplate!’ said the troop-horse under his breath. ‘Sat down?’

‘We sat down—a hundred of us,’ the camel went on, ‘in a big square, and the men piled our packs and saddles outside the square, and they fired over our backs, the men did, on all sides of the square.’

‘What sort of men? Any men that came along?’ said the troop-horse. ‘They teach us in riding-school to lie down and let our masters fire across us, but Dick Cunliffe is the only man I’d trust to do that. It tickles my girths, and, besides, I can’t see with my head on the ground.’

‘What does it matter who fires across you?’ said the camel. ‘There are plenty of men and plenty of other camels close by, and a great many clouds of smoke. I am not frightened then. I sit still and wait.’

‘And yet,’ said Billy, ‘you dream bad dreams and upset the camp at night. Well! well! Before I’d lie down, not to speak of sitting down, and let a man fire across me, my heels and his head would have something to say to each other. Did you ever hear anything so awful as that?’

There was a long silence, and then one of the gun-bullocks lifted up his big head and said, ‘This is very foolish indeed. There is only one way of fighting.’

‘Oh, go on,’ said Billy. ‘Please don’t mind me. I suppose you fellows fight standing on your tails?’

‘Only one way,’ said the two together. (They must have been twins.) ‘This is that way. To put all twenty yoke of us to the big gun as soon as Two Tails trumpets.’ (‘Two Tails’ is camp slang for the elephant.)

‘What does Two Tails trumpet for?’ said the young mule.

‘To show that he is not going any nearer to the smoke on the other side. Two Tails is a great coward. Then we tug the big gun all together—Heya—Hullah! Heeyah! Hullah! We do not climb like cats nor run like calves. We go across the level plain, twenty yoke of us, till we are unyoked again, and we graze while the big guns talk across the plain to some town with mud walls, and pieces of the wall fall out, and the dust goes up as though many cattle were coming home.’

‘Oh ! And you choose that time for grazing, do you?’ said the young mule.

‘That time or any other. Eating is always good. We eat till we are yoked up again and tug the gun back to where Two Tails is waiting for it. Sometimes there are big guns in the city that speak back, and some of us are killed, and then there is all the more grazing for those that are left. This is Fate—nothing but Fate. None the less, Two Tails is a great coward. That is the proper way to fight. We are brothers from Hapur. Our father was a sacred bull of Shiva. We have spoken.’

‘Well, I’ve certainly learned something tonight,’ said the troop-horse. ‘Do you gentlemen of the screw-gun battery feel inclined to eat when you are being fired at with big guns, and Two Tails is behind you?’

‘About as much as we feel inclined to sit down and let men sprawl all over us, or run into people with knives. I never heard such stuff. A mountain ledge, a well-balanced load, a driver you can trust to let you pick your own way, and I’m your mule; but the other things—no!’ said Billy, with a stamp of his foot.

‘Of course,’ said the troop-horse, ‘every one is not made in the same way, and I can quite see that your family, on your father’s side, would fail to understand a great many things.’

‘Never you mind my family on my father’s side,’ said Billy angrily, for every mule hates to be reminded that his father was a donkey. ‘My father was a Southern gentleman, and he could pull down and bite and kick into rags every horse he came across. Remember that, you big brown Brumby!’

Brumby means wild horse without any breeding. Imagine the feelings of Sunol if a car-horse called her a ‘skate,’ and you can imagine how the Australian horse felt. I saw the white of his eye glitter in the dark.

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‘See here, you son of an imported Malaga jackass,’ he said between his teeth. ‘I’d have you know that I’m related on my mother’s side to Carbine, winner of the Melbourne Cup; and where I come from we aren’t accustomed to being ridden over roughshod by any parrot-mouthed, pig-headed mule in a pop-gun pea-shooter battery. Are you ready?’

‘On your hind legs!’ squealed Billy. They both reared up facing each other, and I was expecting a furious fight, when a gurgly, rumbly voice called out of the darkness to the right: ‘Children, what are you fighting about there? Be quiet.’

Both beasts dropped down with a snort of disgust, for neither horse nor mule can bear to listen to an elephant’s voice.

‘It’s Two Tails!’ said the troop-horse. ‘I can’t stand him. A tail at each end isn’t fair!’

‘My feelings exactly,’ said Billy, crowding into the troop-horse for company. ‘We’re very alike in some things.’

‘I suppose we’ve inherited them from our mothers,’ said the troop-horse. ‘It’s not worth quarrelling about. Hi! Two Tails, are you tied up?’

‘Yes,’ said Two Tails, with a laugh all up his trunk. ‘I’m picketed for the night. I’ve heard what you fellows have been saying. But don’t be afraid. I’m not coming over.’

The bullocks and the camel said, half aloud: ‘Afraid of Two Tails—what nonsense!’ And the bullocks went on: ‘We are sorry that you heard, but it is true. Two Tails, why are you afraid of the guns when they fire?’

‘Well,’ said Two Tails, rubbing one hind leg against the other, exactly like a little boy saying poetry, ‘I don’t quite know whether you’d understand.’

‘We don’t, but we have to pull the guns,’ said the bullocks.

‘I know it, and I know you are a good deal braver than you think you are. But it’s different with me. My battery captain called me a Pachydermatous Anachronism the other day.’

‘That’s another way of fighting, I suppose?’ said Billy, who was recovering his spirits.

‘You don’t know what that means, of course, but I do. It means betwixt and between, and that is just where I am. I can see inside my head what will happen when a shell bursts; and you bullocks can’t.’

‘I can,’ said the troop-horse. ‘At least a little bit. I try not to think about it.’

‘I can see more than you, and I do think about it. I know there’s a great deal of me to take care of, and I know that nobody knows how to cure me when I’m sick. All they can do is to stop my driver’s pay till I get well, and I can’t trust my driver.’

‘Ah!’ said the troop-horse. ‘That explains it. I can trust Dick.’

‘You could put a whole regiment of Dicks on my back without making me feel any better. I know just enough to be uncomfortable, and not enough to go on in spite of it.’

‘We do not understand,’ said the bullocks.

‘I know you don’t. I’m not talking to you. You don’t know what blood is.’

‘We do,’ said the bullocks. ‘It is red stuff that soaks into the ground and smells.’

The troop-horse gave a kick and a bound and a snort.

‘Don’t talk of it,’ he said. ‘I can smell it now, just thinking of it. It makes me want to run—when I haven’t Dick on my back.’

‘But it is not here,’ said the camel and the bullocks. ‘Why are you so stupid?’

‘It’s vile stuff,’ said Billy. ‘I don’t want to run, but I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘There you are!’ said Two Tails, waving his tail to explain.

‘Surely. Yes, we have been here all night,’ said the bullocks.

Two Tails stamped his foot till the iron ring on it jingled. ‘Oh, I’m not talking to you. You can’t see inside your heads.’

‘No. We see out of our four eyes,’ said the bullocks. ‘We see straight in front of us.’

‘If I could do that and nothing else you wouldn’t be needed to pull the big guns at all. If I was like my captain—he can see things inside his head before the firing begins, and he shakes all over, but he knows too much to run away—if I was like him I could pull the guns. But if I were as wise as all that I should never be here. I should be a king in the forest, as I used to be, sleeping half the day and bathing when I liked. I haven’t had a good bath for a month.’

‘That’s all very fine,’ said Billy; ‘but giving a thing a long name doesn’t make it any better.’

‘H’sh!’ said the troop-horse. ‘I think I understand what Two Tails means.’

‘You’ll understand better in a minute,’ said Two Tails angrily. ‘Now, just you explain to me why you don’t like this!’

He began trumpeting furiously at the top of his trumpet.

‘Stop that!’ said Billy and the troop-horse together, and I could hear them stamp and shiver. An elephant’s trumpeting is always nasty, especially on a dark night.

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‘I shan’t stop,’ said Two Tails. ‘Won’t you explain that, please? Hhrrmph! Rrrt! Rrrmph! Rrrhha!’ Then he stopped suddenly, and I heard a little whimper in the dark, and knew that Vixen had found me at last. She knew as well as I did that if there is one thing in the world the elephant is more afraid of than another, it is a little barking dog; so she stopped to bully Two Tails in his pickets, and yapped round his big feet. Two Tails shuffled and squeaked. ‘Go away, little dog!’ he said. ‘Dont snuff at my ankles, or I’ll kick at you. Good little dog—nice little doggie, then! Go home, you yelping little beast! Oh, why doesn’t someone take her away? She’ll bite me in a minute.’

‘Seems to me,’ said Billy to the troop-horse, ‘that our friend Two Tails is afraid of most things. Now, if I had a full meal for every dog I’ve kicked across the parade-ground, I should be nearly as fat as Two Tails.’

I whistled, and Vixen ran up to me, muddy all over, and licked my nose, and told me a long tale about hunting for me all through the camp. I never let her know that I understood beast talk, or she would have taken all sorts of liberties. So I buttoned her into the breast of my overcoat, and Two Tails shuffled and stamped and growled to himself.

‘Extraordinary! Most extraordinary!’ he said. ‘It runs in our family. Now, where has that nasty little beast gone to?’

I heard him feeling about with his trunk.

‘We all seem to be affected in various ways,’ he went on, blowing his nose. ‘Now, you gentlemen were alarmed, I believe, when I trumpeted.’

‘Not alarmed, exactly,’ said the troop-horse, ‘but it made me feel as though I had hornets where my saddle ought to be. Don’t begin again.’

‘I’m frightened of a little dog, and the camel here is frightened by bad dreams in the night.’

‘It is very lucky for us that we haven’t all got to fight in the same way,’ said the troop-horse.

‘What I want to know,’ said the young mule, who had been quiet for a long time—‘what I want to know is, why we have to fight at all.’

‘Because we’re told to,’ said the troop-horse, with a snort of contempt.

‘Orders,’ said Billy the mule; and his teeth snapped.

‘Hukm hai! [It is an order],’ said the camel with a gurgle; and Two Tails and the bullocks repeated, ‘Hukm hai!’

‘Yes, but who gives the orders?’ said the recruit-mule.

‘The man who walks at your head—Or sits on your back—Or holds your nose-rope—Or twists your tail,’ said Billy and the troop-horse and the camel and the bullocks one after the other.

‘But who gives them the orders?’

‘Now you want to know too much, young un,’ said Billy, ‘and that is one way of getting kicked. All you have to do is to obey the man at your head and ask no questions.’

‘He’s quite right,’ said Two Tails. ‘I can’t always obey, because I’m betwixt and between; but Billy’s right. Obey the man next to you who gives the order, or you’ll stop all the battery, besides getting a thrashing.’

The gun-bullocks got up to go. ‘Morning is coming,’ they said. ‘We will go back to our lines. It is true that we see only out of our eyes, and we are not very clever; but still, we are the only people to-night who have not been afraid. Good night, you brave people.’

Nobody answered, and the troop-horse said, to change the conversation, ‘Where’s that little dog? A dog means a man somewhere about.’

‘Here I am,’ yapped Vixen, ‘under the guntail with my man. You big, blundering beast of a camel, you, you upset our tent. My man’s very angry.’

‘Phew!’ said the bullocks. ‘He must be white!’

‘Of course he is,’ said Vixen. ‘Do you suppose I’m looked after by a black bullock-driver?’

‘Huah! Ouach! Ugh!’ said the bullocks. ‘Let us get away quickly.’

They plunged forward in the mud, and managed somehow to run their yoke on the pole of an ammunition-wagon, where it jammed.

‘Now you have done it,’ said Billy calmly. ‘Don’t struggle. You’re hung up till daylight. What on earth’s the matter?’

The bullocks went off into the long, hissing snorts that Indian cattle give, and pushed and crowded and slued and stamped and slipped and nearly fell down in the mud, grunting savagely.

‘You’ll break your necks in a minute,’ said the troop-horse. ‘What’s the matter with white men? I live with ’em.’

‘They—eat—us! Pull!’ said the near bullock: the yoke snapped with a twang, and they lumbered off together.

I never knew before what made Indian cattle so scared of Englishmen. We eat beef—a thing that no cattle-driver touches—and of course the cattle do not like it.

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‘May I be flogged with my own pad-chains! Who’d have thought of two big lumps like those losing their heads?’ said Billy.

‘Never mind. I’m going to look at this man. Most of the white men, I know, have things in their pockets,’ said the troop-horse.

‘I’ll leave you, then. I can’t say I’m over-fond of ’em myself. Besides, white men who haven’t a place to sleep in are more than likely to be thieves, and I’ve a good deal of Government property on my back. Come along; young un, and we’ll go back to our lines. Good night, Australia! See you on parade to-morrow, I suppose. Good night old Hay-bales!—try to control your feelings, won’t you? Good night, Two Tails! If you pass us on the ground to-morrow, don’t trumpet. It spoils our formation.’

Billy the mule stumped off with the swaggering limp of an old campaigner, as the troop-horse’s head came nuzzling into my breast, and I gave him biscuits; while Vixen, who is a most conceited little dog, told him fibs about the scores of horses that she and I kept.

‘I’m coming to the parade to-morrow in my dog-cart,’ she said. ‘Where will you be?’

‘On the left hand of the second squadron. I set the time for all my troop, little lady,’ he said politely. ‘Now I must go back to Dick. My tail’s all muddy, and he’ll have two hours’ hard work dressing me for parade.’

The big parade of all the thirty thousand men was held that afternoon, and Vixen and I had a good place close to the Viceroy and the Amir of Afghanistan, with his high, big black hat of astrakhan wool and the great diamond star in the centre. The first part of the review was all sunshine, and the regiments went by in wave upon wave of legs all moving together, and guns all in a line, till our eyes grew dizzy. Then the cavalry came up, to the beautiful cavalry canter of ‘Bonnie Dundee,’ and Vixen cocked her ear where she sat on the dog-cart. The second squadron of the Lancers shot by, and there was the troop-horse, with his tail like spun silk, his head pulled into his breast, one ear forward and one back, setting the time for all his squadron, his legs going as smoothly as waltz-music. Then the big guns came by, and I saw Two Tails and two other elephants harnessed in line to a forty-pounder siege-gun, while twenty yoke of oxen walked behind. The seventh pair had a new yoke, and they looked rather stiff and tired. Last came the screw-guns, and Billy the mule carried himself as though he commanded all the troops, and his harness was oiled and polished till it winked. I gave a cheer all by myself for Billy the mule, but he never looked right or left.

The rain began to fall again, and for a while it was too misty to see what the troops were doing. They had made a big half-circle across the plain, and were spreading out into a line. That line grew and grew and grew till it was three-quarters of a mile long from wing to wing—one solid wall of men, horses, and guns. Then it came on straight toward the Viceroy and the Amir, and as it got nearer the ground began to shake, like the deck of a steamer when the engines are going fast.

Unless you have been there you cannot imagine what a frightening effect this steady come-down of troops has on the spectators, even when they know it is only a review. I looked at the Amir. Up till then he had not shown the shadow of a sign of astonishment or anything else; but now his eyes began to get bigger and bigger, and he picked up the reins on his horse’s neck and looked behind him. For a minute it seemed as though he were going to draw his sword and slash his way out through the English men and women in the carriages at the back. Then the advance stopped dead, the ground stood still, the whole line saluted, and thirty bands began to play all together. That was the end of the review, and the regiments went off to their camps in the rain; and an infantry band struck up:—

The animals went in two by two,
Hurrah!
The animals went in two by two,
The elephant and the battery mu-
1’, and they all got into the Ark
For to get out of the rain!

Then I heard an old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had come down with the Amir, asking questions of a native officer.

‘Now,’ said he, ‘in what manner was this wonderful thing done?’

And the officer answered, ‘There was an order, and they obeyed.’

‘But are the beasts as wise as the men?’ said the chief.

‘They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.’

‘Would it were so in Afghanistan!’ said the chief; ‘for there we obey only our own wills.’

‘And for that reason,’ said the native officer, twirling his moustache, ‘your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.’

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The stream is shrunk—the pool is dry,
And we be comrades, thou and I;
With fevered jowl and dusty flank
Each jostling each along the bank;
And by one drouthy fear made still,
Forgoing thought of quest or kill.
Now ’neath his dam the fawn may see,
The lean Pack-wolf as cowed as he,
And the tall buck, unflinching, note
The fangs that tore his father’s throat.
The pools are shrunk—the streams are dry,
And we be playmates, thou and I,
Till yonder cloud—Good Hunting!—loose
The rain that breaks our Water Truce.

THE Law of the Jungle—which is by far the oldest law in the world—has arranged for almost every kind of accident that may befall the Jungle People till now its code is as perfect as time and custom can make it. You will remember
that Mowgli spent a great part of his life in the Seeonee Wolf-Pack, learning the Law from Baloo, the Brown Bear; and it was Baloo who told him, when the boy grew impatient at the constant orders, that the Law was like the Giant Creeper, because it dropped across every one’s back and no one could escape. ‘When thou hast lived as long as I have, Little Brother, thou wilt see how all the Jungle obeys at least one Law. And that will be no pleasant sight,’ said Baloo.

This talk went in at one ear and out at the other, for a boy who spends his life eating and sleeping does not worry about anything till it actually stares him in the face. But, one year, Baloo’s words came true, and Mowgli saw all the Jungle working under the Law.

It began when the winter Rains failed almost entirely, and Ikki, the Porcupine, meeting Mowgli in a bamboo-thicket, told him that the wild yams were drying up. Now everybody knows that Ikki is ridiculously fastidious in his choice of food, and will eat nothing but the very best and ripest. So Mowgli laughed and said, ‘What is that to me?’

‘Not much now,’ said Ikki, rattling his quills in a stiff, uncomfortable way, ‘but later we shall see. Is there any more diving into the deep rockpool below the Bee-Rocks, Little Brother?’

‘No. The foolish water is going all away, and I do not wish to break my head,’ said Mowgli, who, in those days, was quite sure that he knew as much as any five of the Jungle People put together.

‘That is thy loss. A small crack might let in some wisdom.’ Ikki ducked quickly to prevent Mowgli from pulling his nose-bristles, and Mowgli told Baloo what Ikki had said. Baloo looked very grave, and mumbled half to himself: ‘If I were alone I would change my hunting-grounds now, before the others began to think. And yet—hunting among strangers ends in fighting; and they might hurt the Man-cub. We must wait and see how the mohwa blooms.’

That spring the mohwa tree, that Baloo was so fond of, never flowered. The greeny, cream-coloured, waxy blossoms were heat-killed before they were born, and only a few bad-smelling petals came down when he, stood on his hind legs and shook the tree. Then, inch by inch, the untempered heat crept into the heart of the Jungle, turning it yellow, brown, and at last black. The green growths in the sides of the ravines burned up to broken wires and curled films of dead stuff; the hidden pools sank down and caked over, keeping the last least footmark on their edges as if it had been cast in iron; the juicy-stemmed creepers fell away from the trees they clung to and died at their feet; the bamboos withered, clanking when the hot winds blew, and the moss peeled off the rocks deep in the jungle, till they were as bare and as hot as the quivering blue boulders in the bed of the stream.

The birds and the monkey-people went north early in the year, for they knew what was coming; and the deer and the wild pig broke far away to the perished fields of the villages, dying sometimes before the eyes of men too weak to kill them. Chil, the Kite, stayed and grew fat, for there was a great deal of carrion, and evening after evening he brought the news to the beasts, too weak to force their way to fresh hunting-grounds, that the sun was killing the Jungle for three days’ flight in every direction.

Mowgli, who had never known what real hunger meant, fell back on stale honey, three years old, scraped out of deserted rock-hives—honey black as a sloe, and dusty with dried sugar. He hunted, too, for deep-boring grubs under the bark of the trees, and robbed the wasps of their new broods. All the game in the Jungle was no more than skin and bone, and Bagheera could kill thrice in a night, and hardly get a full meal. But the want of water was the worst, for though the Jungle People drink seldom they must drink deep.

And the heat went on and on, and sucked up all the moisture, till at last the main channel of the Waingunga was the only stream that carried trickle of water between its dead banks; and when Hathi, the wild elephant, who lives for a hundred years and more, saw a long, lean blue ridge of rock show dry in the very centre of the stream, he knew that he was looking at the Peace Rock, and then and there he lifted up his trunk and proclaimed the Water Truce, as his father before him had proclaimed it fifty years ago. The deer, wild pig, and buffalo took up the cry hoarsely; and Chil, the Kite, flew in great circles far and wide, whistling and shrieking the warning.

By the Law of the Jungle it is death to kill at the drinking-places when once the Water Truce has been declared. The reason of this is that drinking comes before eating. Every one in the Jungle can scramble along somehow when only game is scarce; but water is water, and when there is but one source of supply, all hunting stops while the Jungle People go there for their needs. In good seasons, when water was plentiful, those who came down to drink at the Waingunga—or anywhere else, for that matter—did so at the risk of their lives, and that risk made no small part of the fascination of the night’s doings. To move down so cunningly that never a leaf stirred; to wade knee-deep in the roaring shallows that drown all noise from behind; to drink, looking backward over one shoulder, every muscle ready for the first desperate bound of keen terror; to roll on the sandy margin, and return, wet-muzzled and well plumped out, to the admiring herd, was a thing that all tall-antlered young bucks took a delight in, precisely because they knew that at any moment Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap upon them and bear them down. But now all that life-and-death fun was ended, and the Jungle People came up, starved and weary, to the shrunken river,—tiger, bear, deer, buffalo, and pig, all together,—drank the fouled waters, and hung above them, too exhausted to move off.

The deer and the pig had tramped all day in search of something better than dried bark and withered leaves. The buffaloes had found no wallows to be cool in, and no green crops to steal. The snakes had left the Jungle and come down to the river in the hope of finding a stray frog. They curled round wet stones, and never offered to strike when the nose of a rooting pig dislodged them. The river-turtles had long ago been killed by Bagheera, cleverest of hunters, and the fish had buried themselves deep in the dry mud. Only the Peace Rock lay across the shallows like a long snake, and the little tired ripples hissed as they dried on its hot side.

page 2

It was here that Mowgli came nightly for the cool and the companionship. The most hungry of his enemies would hardly have cared for the boy then. His naked hide made him seem more lean and wretched than any of his fellows. His hair was bleached to tow colour by the sun; his ribs stood out like the ribs of a basket, and the lumps on his knees and elbows, where, he was used to track on all fours, gave his shrunken limbs the look of knotted grass-stems. But his eye, under his matted forelock, was cool and quiet, for Bagheera was his adviser in this time of trouble, and told him to go quietly, hunt slowly, and never, on any account, to lose his temper.

‘It is an evil time,’ said the Black Panther, one furnace-hot evening, ‘but it will go if we can live till the end. Is thy stomach full, Man-cub?’

‘There is stuff in my stomach, but I get no good of it. Think you, Bagheera, the Rains have forgotten us and will never come again? ’

‘Not I! We shall see the mohwa in blossom yet, and the little fawns all fat with new grass. Come down to the Peace Rock and hear the news. On my back, Little Brother.’

‘This is no time to carry weight. I can still stand alone, but—indeed we be no fatted bullocks, we two.’

Bagheera looked along his ragged, dusty flank and whispered: ‘Last night I killed a bullock under the yoke. So low was I brought that I think I should not have dared to spring if he had been loose. Wou!’

Mowgli laughed. ‘Yes, we be great hunters now,’ said he. ‘I am very bold—to eat grubs,’ and the two came down together through the crackling undergrowth to the river-bank and the lace-work of shoals that ran out from it in every direction.

‘The water cannot live long,’ said Baloo, joining them. ‘Look across. Yonder are trails like the roads of Man.’

On the level plain of the farther bank the stiff jungle-grass had died standing, and, dying, had mummied. The beaten tracks of the deer and the pig, all heading toward the river, had striped that colourless plain with dusty gullies driven through the ten-foot grass, and, early as it was, each long avenue was full of first-comers hastening to the water. You could hear the does and fawns coughing in the snuff-like dust.

Up-stream, at the bend of the sluggish pool round the Peace Rock, and Warden of the Water Truce, stood Hathi, the wild elephant, with his sons, gaunt and gray in the moonlight, rocking to and fro—always rocking. Below him a little were the vanguard of the deer; below these, again, the pig and the wild buffalo; and on the opposite bank, where the tall trees came down to the water’s edge, was the place set apart for the Eaters of Flesh—the tiger, the wolves, the panther, the bear, and, the others.

‘We are under one Law, indeed,’ said Bagheera, wading into the water and looking across at the lines of clicking horns and starting eyes where the deer and the pig pushed each other to and fro. ‘Good hunting, all you of my blood,’ he added, lying down at full length, one flank thrust out of the shallows; and then, between his teeth, ‘But for that which is the Law it would be very good hunting.’

The quick-spread ears of the deer caught the last sentence, and a frightened whisper ran along the ranks. ‘The Truce! Remember the Truce!’

‘Peace there, peace!’ gurgled Hathi, the wild elephant. ‘The Truce holds, Bagheera. This is no time to talk of hunting.’

‘Who should know better than I?’ Bagheera answered, rolling his yellow eyes up-stream. ‘I am an eater of turtles—a fisher of frogs. Ngaayah ! Would I could get good from chewing branches!’

‘We wish so, very greatly,’ bleated a young fawn, who had only been born that spring, and did not at all like it. Wretched as the Jungle People were, even Hathi could not help chuckling; while Mowgli, lying on his elbows in the warm water, laughed aloud, and beat up the scum with his feet.

‘Well spoken, little bud-horn,’ Bagheera purred. ‘When the Truce ends that shall be remembered in thy favour,’ and he looked keenly through the darkness to make sure of recognising the fawn again.

Gradually the talking spread up and down the drinking-places. One could hear the scuffling, snorting pig asking for more room; the buffaloes grunting among themselves as they lurched out across the sand-bars, and the deer telling pitiful stories of their long foot-sore wanderings in quest of food. Now and again they asked some question of the Eaters of Flesh across the river, but all the news was bad, and the roaring hot wind of the jungle came and went between the rocks and the rattling branches, and scattered twigs and dust on the water.

‘The men-folk, too, they die beside their ploughs,’ said a young sambhur. ‘I passed three between sunset and night. They lay still, and their Bullocks with them. We also shall lie still in a little.’

‘The river has fallen since last night,’ said Baloo. ‘O Hathi, hast thou ever seen the like of this drought?’

‘It will pass, it will pass,’ said Hathi, squirting water along his back and sides.

‘We have one here that cannot endure long,’ said Baloo; and he looked toward the boy he loved.

‘I?’ said Mowgli indignantly, sitting up in the water. ‘I have no long fur to cover my bones, but—but if thy hide were taken off, Baloo——’

Hathi shook all over at the idea, and Baloo said severely:

‘Man-cub, that is not seemly to tell a Teacher of the Law. Never have I been seen without my hide.’

‘Nay, I meant no harm, Baloo; but only that thou art, as it were, like the cocoanut in the husk, and I am the same cocoanut all naked. Now that brown husk of thine——’Mowgli was sitting cross-legged, and explaining things with his forefinger in his usual way, when Bagheera put out a paddy paw and pulled him over backward into the water.

‘Worse and worse,’ said the Black Panther, as the boy rose spluttering. ‘First Baloo is to be skinned, and now he is a cocoanut. Be careful that he does not do what the ripe cocoanuts do.’

‘And what is that?’ said Mowgli, off his guard for the minute, though that is one of the oldest catches in the Jungle.

‘Break thy head,’ said Bagheera quietly, pulling him under again.

‘It is not good to make a jest of thy teacher,’ said the bear, when Mowgli had been ducked for the third time.

page 3

‘Not good! What would ye have? That naked thing running to and fro makes a monkey-jest of those who have once been good hunters, and pulls the best of us by the whiskers for sport.’ This was Shere Khan, the Lame Tiger, limping down to the water. He waited a little to enjoy the sensation he made among the deer on the opposite bank; then he dropped his square, frilled head and began to lap, growling: ‘The jungle has become a whelping-ground for naked cubs now. Look at me, Man-cub!’

Mowgli looked—stared, rather—as insolently as he knew how, and in a minute Shere Khan turned away uneasily. ‘Mancub this, and Mancub that,’ he rumbled, going on with his drink, ‘the cub is neither man nor cub, or he would have been afraid. Next season I shall have to beg his leave for a drink. Augrh!’

‘That may come, too,’ said Bagheera, looking him steadily between the eyes. ‘That may come, too—Faugh, Shere Khan!—what new shame hast thou brought here?’

The Lame Tiger had dipped his chin and jowl in the water, and dark, oily streaks were floating from it down-stream.

‘Man!’ said Shere Khan coolly, ‘I killed an hour since.’ He went on purring and growling to himself.

The line of beasts shook and wavered to and fro, and a whisper went up that grew to a cry: ‘Man! Man! He has killed Man!’ Then all looked towards Hathi, the wild elephant, but he seemed not to hear. Hathi never does anything till the time comes, and that is one of the reasons why he lives so long.

‘At such a season as this to kill Man! Was no other game afoot?’ said Bagheera scornfully, drawing himself out of the tainted water, and shaking each paw, cat-fashion, as he did so.

‘I killed for choice—not for food.’ The horrified whisper began again, and Hathi’s watchful little white eye cocked itself in Shere Khan’s direction. ‘For choice,’ Shere Khan drawled. ‘Now come I to drink and make me clean again. Is there any to forbid?’

Bagheera’s back began to curve like a bamboo in a high wind, but Hathi lifted up his trunk and spoke quietly.

‘Thy kill was from choice?’ he asked; and when Hathi asks a question it is best to answer.

‘Even so. It was my right and my Night. Thou knowest, O Hathi.’ Shere Khan spoke almost courteously.

‘Yes, I know,’ Hathi answered; and, after a little silence, ‘Hast thou drunk thy fill?’

‘For to-night, yes.’

‘Go, then. The river is to drink, and not to defile. None but the Lame Tiger would so have boasted of his right at this season when—when we suffer together—Man and Jungle People alike. Clean or unclean, get to thy lair, Shere Khan!’

The last words rang out like silver trumpets, and Hathi’s three sons rolled forward half a pace, though there was no need. Shere Khan slunk away, not daring to growl, for he knew—what every one else knows—that when the last comes to the last, Hathi is the Master of the Jungle.

‘What is this right Shere Khan speaks of?’ Mowgli whispered in Bagheera’s ear. ‘To kill Man is always shameful. The Law says so. And yet Hathi says——’

‘Ask him. I do not know, Little Brother. Right or no right, if Hathi had not spoken I would have taught that lame butcher his lesson. To come to the Peace Rock fresh from a kill of Man—and to boast of it—is a jackal’s trick. Besides, he tainted the good water.’

Mowgli waited for a minute to pick up his courage, because no one cared to address Hathi directly, and then he cried: ‘What is Shere Khan’s right, O Hathi?’ Both banks echoed his words, for all the People of the Jungle are intensely curious, and they had just seen something that none, except Baloo, who looked very thoughtful, seemed to understand.

‘It is an old tale,’ said Hathi; ‘a tale older than the Jungle. Keep silence along the banks, and I will tell that tale.’

There was a minute or two of pushing and shouldering among the pigs and the buffalo, and then the leaders of the herds grunted, one after another, ‘We wait,’ and Hathi strode forward till he was nearly knee-deep in the pool by the Peace Rock. Lean and wrinkled and yellow-tusked though he was, he looked what the Jungle knew him to be—their master.

‘Ye know, children,’ he began, ‘that of all things ye most fear Man’; and there was a mutter of agreement.

‘This tale touches thee, Little Brother,’ said Bagheera to Mowgli.

‘I? I am of the Pack—a hunter of the Free People,’ Mowgli answered. ‘What have I to do with Man?’

‘And ye do not know why ye fear Man?’ Hathi went on. ‘This is the reason. In the beginning of the Jungle, and none know when that was, we of the Jungle walked together, having no fear of one another. In those days there was no drought, and leaves and flowers and fruit grew on the same tree, and we ate nothing at all except leaves and flowers and grass and fruit and bark.’

‘I am glad I was not born in those days,’ said Bagheera. ‘Bark is only good to sharpen claws.’

‘And the Lord of the Jungle was Tha, the First of the Elephants. He drew the Jungle out of deep waters with his trunk; and where he made furrows in the ground with his tusks, there the rivers ran; and where he struck with his foot, there rose ponds of good water; and when he blew through his trunk,—thus,—the trees fell. That was the manner in which the Jungle was made by Tha; and so the tale was told to me.’

‘It has not lost fat in the telling,’ Bagheera whispered, and Mowgli laughed behind his hand.

‘In those days there was no corn or melons or pepper or sugar-cane, nor were there any little huts such as ye have all seen; and the Jungle People knew nothing of Man, but lived in the Jungle together, making one people. But presently they began to dispute over their food, though there was grazing enough for all. They were lazy. Each wished to eat where he lay, as sometimes we can do now when the spring rains are good. Tha, the First of the Elephants, was busy making new jungles and leading the rivers in their beds. He could not walk in all places; therefore he made the First of the Tigers the master and the judge of the Jungle, to whom the Jungle People should bring their disputes. In those days the First of the Tigers ate fruit and grass with the others. He was as large as I am, and he was very beautiful, in colour all over like the blossom of the yellow creeper. There was never stripe nor bar upon his hide in those good days when this the Jungle was new. All the Jungle People came before him without fear, and his word was the Law of all the Jungle. We were then, remember ye, one people.

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‘Yet upon a night there was a dispute between two bucks—a grazing-quarrel such as ye now settle with the horns and the fore-feet—and it is said that as the two spoke together before the First of the Tigers lying among the flowers, a buck pushed him with his horns, and the First of the Tigers forgot that he was the master and judge of the Jungle, and, leaping upon that buck, broke his neck.

‘Till that night never one of us had died, and the First of the Tigers, seeing what he had done, and being made foolish by the scent of the blood, ran away into the marshes of the North, and we of the Jungle, left without a judge, fell to fighting among ourselves; and Tha heard the noise of it and came back. Then some of us said this and some of us said that, but he saw the dead buck among the flowers, and asked who had killed, and we of the Jungle would not tell because the smell of the blood made us foolish. We ran to and fro in circles, capering and crying out and shaking our heads. Then Tha gave an order to the trees that hang low, and to the trailing creepers of the Jungle, that they should mark the killer of the buck so that he should know him again, and he said, “Who will now be master of the Jungle People?” Then up leaped the Gray Ape who lives in the branches, and said, “I will now be master of the Jungle.” At this Tha laughed, and said, “So be it,” and went away very angry.

‘Children, ye know the Gray Ape. He was then as he is now. At the first he made a wise face for himself, but in a little while he began to scratch and to leap up and down, and when Tha came back he found the Gray Ape hanging, head down, from a bough, mocking those who stood below; and they mocked him again. And so there was no Law in the jungle—only foolish talk and senseless words.

‘Then Tha called us all together and said “The first of your masters has brought Death into the jungle, and the second Shame. Now it is time there was a Law, and a Law that ye must not break. Now ye shall know Fear, and when ye have found him ye shall know that he is your master, and the rest shall follow.” Then we of the jungle said, “What is Fear?” And Tha said, “Seek till ye find.” So we went up and down the Jungle seeking for Fear, and presently the buffaloes——’

‘Ugh!’ said Mysa, the leader of the buffaloes, from their sand-bank.

‘Yes, Mysa, it was the buffaloes. They came back with the news that in a cave in the Jungle sat Fear, and that he had no hair, and went upon his hind legs. Then we of the Jungle followed the herd till we came to that cave, and Fear stood at the mouth of it, and he was, as the buffaloes had said, hairless, and he walked upon his hinder legs. When he saw us he cried out, and his voice filled us with the fear that we have now of that voice when we hear it, and we ran away, tramping upon and tearing each other because we were afraid. That night, so it was told to me, we of the Jungle did not lie down together as used to be our custom, but each tribe drew off by itself—the pig with the pig, the deer with the deer; horn to horn, hoof to hoof,—like keeping to like, and so lay shaking in the Jungle.

‘Only the First of the Tigers was not with us, for he was still hidden in the marshes of the North, and when word was brought to him of the Thing we had seen in the cave, he said: “I will go to this Thing and break his neck.” So he ran all the night till he came to the cave; but the trees and the creepers on his path, remembering the order that Tha had given, let down their branches and marked him as he ran, drawing their fingers across his back, his flank, his forehead, and his jowl. Wherever they touched him there was a mark and a stripe upon his yellow hide. And those stripes do his children wear to this day! When he came to the cave, Fear, the Hairless One, put out his hand and called him “The Striped One that comes by night,” and the First of the Tigers was afraid of the Hairless One, and ran back to the swamps howling.’

Mowgli chuckled quietly here, his chin in the water.

‘So loud did he howl that Tha heard him and said, “What is the sorrow?” And the First of the Tigers, lifting up his muzzle to the new-made sky, which is now so old, said: “Give me back my power, O Tha. I am made ashamed before all the Jungle, and I have run away from a Hairless One, and he has called me a shameful name.” “And why?” said Tha. “Because I am smeared with the mud of the marshes,” said the First of the Tigers. “Swim, then, and roll on the wet grass, and if it be mud it will wash away,” said Tha; and the First of the Tigers swam, and rolled and rolled upon the grass, till the Jungle ran round and round before his eyes, but not one little bar upon all his hide was changed, and Tha, watching him, laughed. Then the First of the Tigers said, “What have I done that this comes to me?” Tha said, “Thou hast killed the buck, and thou hast let Death loose in the Jungle, and with Death has come Fear, so that the people of the Jungle are afraid one of the other, as thou art afraid of the Hairless One.” The First of the Tigers said, “They will never fear me, for I knew them since the beginning.” Tha said, “Go and see.” And the First of the Tigers ran to and fro, calling aloud to the deer and the pig and the sambhur and the porcupine and all the Jungle Peoples, and they all ran away from him who had been their judge, because they were afraid.

‘Then the First of the Tigers came back, and his pride was broken in him, and, beating his head upon the ground, he tore up the earth with all his feet and said: “Remember that I was once the Master of the Jungle. Do not forget me, O Tha! Let my children remember that I was once without shame, or fear!” And Tha said: “This much I will do, because thou and I together saw the Jungle made. For one night in each year it shall be as it was before the buck was killed—for thee and for thy children. In that one night, if ye meet the Hairless One—and his name is Man—ye shall not be afraid of him, but he shall be afraid of you, as though ye were judges of the Jungle and masters of all things. Show him mercy in that night of his fear, for thou hast known what Fear is.”

‘Then the First of the Tigers answered, “I am content”; but when next he drank he saw the black stripes upon his flank and his side, and he remembered the name that the Hairless One had given him, and he was angry. For a year he lived in the marshes waiting till Tha should keep his promise. And upon a night when the Jackal of the Moon [the Evening Star] stood clear of the Jungle, he felt that his Night was upon him, and he went to that cave to meet the Hairless One. Then it happened as Tha promised, for the Hairless One fell down before him and lay along the ground, and the First of the Tigers struck him and broke his back, for he thought that there was but one such Thing in the jungle, and that he had killed Fear. Then, nosing above the kill, he heard Tha coming down from the woods of the North, and presently the voice of the First of the Elephants, which is the voice that we hear now——’

The thunder was rolling up and down the dry, scarred hills, but it brought no rain—only heat lightning that flickered along the ridges—and Hathi went on: ‘That was the voice he heard, and it said: “Is this thy mercy?” The First of the Tigers licked his lips and said: “What matter? I have killed Fear.” And Tha said “O blind and foolish! Thou hast untied the feet of Death, and he will follow thy trail till thou diest. Thou hast taught Man to kill!”

‘The First of the Tigers, standing stiffly to his kill, said: “He is as the buck was. There is no Fear. Now I will judge the Jungle Peoples once more.”

‘And Tha said: “Never again shall the Jungle Peoples come to thee. They shall never cross thy trail, nor sleep near thee, nor follow after thee, nor browse by thy lair. Only Fear shall follow thee, and with a blow that thou canst not see he shall bid thee wait his pleasure. He shall make the ground to open under thy feet, and the creeper to twist about thy neck, and the tree-trunks to grow together about thee higher than thou canst leap, and at the last he shall take thy hide to wrap his cubs when they are cold. Thou hast shown him no mercy, and none will he show thee.”

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‘The First of the Tigers was very bold, for his Night was still on him, and he said: “The Promise of Tha is the Promise of Tha. He will not take away my Night?” And Tha said: “The one Night is thine, as I have said, but there is a price to pay. Thou hast taught Man to kill, and he is no slow learner.”

‘The First of the Tigers said: “He is here under my foot, and his back is broken. Let the Jungle know I have killed Fear.”

‘Then Tha laughed, and said: “Thou hast killed one of many, but thou thyself shalt tell the jungle—for thy Night is ended.”

‘So the day came; and from the mouth of the cave went out another Hairless One, and he saw the kill in the path, and the First of the Tigers above it; and he took a pointed stick——’

‘They throw a thing that cuts now,’ said Ikki, rustling down the bank; for Ikki was considered uncommonly good eating by the Gonds—they called him Ho-Igoo—and he knew something of the wicked little Gondee axe that whirls across a clearing like a dragon-fly.

‘It was a pointed stick, such as they put in the foot of a pit-trap,’ said Hathi, ‘and throwing it, he struck the First of the Tigers deep in the flank. Thus it happened as Tha said, for the First of the Tigers ran howling up and down the jungle till he tore out the stick, and all the jungle knew that the Hairless One could strike from far off, and they feared more than before. So it came about that the First of the Tigers taught the Hairless One to kill—and ye know what harm that has since done to all our peoples—through the noose, and the pitfall, and the hidden trap, and the flying stick, and the stinging fly that comes out of white smoke [Hathi meant the rifle], and the Red Flower that drives us into the open. Yet for one night in the year the Hairless One fears the Tiger, as Tha promised, and never has the Tiger given him cause to be less afraid. Where he finds him, there he kills him, remembering how the First of the Tigers was made ashamed. For the rest, Fear walks up and down the jungle by day and by night.’

‘Ahi! Aoo!’ said the deer, thinking of what it all meant to them.

‘And only when there is one great Fear over all, as there is now, can we of the jungle lay aside our little fears, and meet together in one place as we do now.’

‘For one night only does Man fear the Tiger?’ said Mowgli.

‘For one night only,’ said Hathi.

‘But I—but we—but all the jungle knows that Shere Khan kills Man twice and thrice in a moon.’

‘Even so. Then he springs from behind and turns his head aside as he strikes, for he is full of fear. If Man looked at him he would run. But on his one Night he goes openly down to the village. He walks between the houses and thrusts his head into the doorway, and the men fall on their faces, and there he does his kill. One kill in that Night.’

‘Oh!’ said Mowgli to himself, rolling over in the water. ‘Now I see why it was Shere Khan bade me look at him! He got no good of it, for he could not hold his eyes steady, and—and I certainly did not fall down at his feet. But then I am not a man, being of the Free People.’

‘Umm!’ said Bagheera deep in his furry throat. ‘Does the Tiger know his Night?’

‘Never till the jackal of the Moon stands clear of the evening mist. Sometimes it falls in the dry summer and sometimes in the wet rains—this one Night of the Tiger. But for the First of the Tigers, this would never have been, nor would any of us have known fear.’

The deer grunted sorrowfully, and Bagheera’s lips curled in a wicked smile. ‘Do men know this—tale?’ said he.

‘None know it except the tigers, and we, the elephants—the children of Tha. Now ye by the pools have heard it, and I have spoken.’

Hathi dipped his trunk into the water as a sign that he did not wish to talk.

‘But—but—but,’ said Mowgli, turning to Baloo, ‘why did not the First of the Tigers continue to eat grass and leaves and trees? He did but break the buck’s neck. He did not eat. What led him to the hot meat?’

‘The trees and the creepers marked him, Little Brother, and made him the striped thing that we see. Never again would he eat their fruit; but from that day he revenged himself upon the deer, and the others, the Eaters of Grass,’ said Baloo.

‘Then thou knowest the tale. Heh? Why have I never heard?’

‘Because the jungle is full of such tales. If I made a beginning there would never be an end to them. Let go my ear, Little Brother.’

Veil them, cover them, wall them round—
Blossom, and creeper, and weed—
Let us forget the sight and the sound,
The smell and the touch of the breed!
Fat black ash by the altar-stone,
Here is the white-foot rain,
And the does bring forth in the fields unsown,
And none shall affright them again;
And the blind walls crumble, unknown, o’erthrown,
And none shall inhabit again! 

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YOU will remember that after Mowgli had pinned Shere Khan’s hide to the Council Rock, he told as many as were left of the Seeonee Pack that henceforward he would hunt in the Jungle alone; and the four children of Mother and Father Wolf said that they would hunt with him. But it is not easy to change one’s life all in a minute—particularly in the jungle. The first thing Mowgli did, when the disorderly Pack had slunk off, was to go to the homecave, and sleep for a day and a night. Then he told Mother Wolf and Father Wolf as much as they could understand of his adventures among men; and when he made the morning sun flicker up and down the blade of his skinning-knife,—the same he had skinned Shere Khan with,—they said he had learned something. Then Akela and Gray Brother had to explain their share of the great buffalo-drive in the ravine, and Baloo toiled up the hill to hear all about it, and Bagheera scratched himself all over with pure delight at the way in which Mowgli had managed his war.

It was long after sunrise, but no one dreamed of going to sleep, and from time to time, during the talk, Mother Wolf would throw up her head, and sniff a deep snuff of satisfaction as the wind brought her the smell of the tiger-skin on the Council Rock.

‘But for Akela and Gray Brother here,’ Mowgli said, at the end, ‘I could have done nothing. Oh, mother, mother! if thou hadst seen the black herd-bulls pour down the ravine, or hurry through the gates when the Man-Pack flung stones at me!’

‘I am glad I did not see that last,’ said Mother Wolf stiffly. ‘It is not my custom to suffer my cubs to be driven to and fro like jackals. I would have taken a price from the Man-Pack; but I would have spared the woman who gave thee the milk. Yes, I would have spared her alone.’

‘Peace, peace, Raksha!’ said Father Wolf, lazily. ‘Our Frog has come back again—so wise that his own father must lick his feet; and what is a cut, more or less, on the head? Leave Men alone.’ Baloo and Bagheera both echoed: ‘Leave Men alone.’

Mowgli, his head on Mother Wolf’s side, smiled contentedly, and said that, for his own part, he never wished to see, or hear, or smell Man again.

‘But what,’ said Akela, cocking one ear—‘but what if men do not leave thee alone, Little Brother?’

‘We be five,’ said Gray Brother, looking round at the company, and snapping his jaws on the last word.

‘We also might attend to that hunting,’ said Bagheera, with a little switch-switch of his tail, looking at Baloo. ‘But why think of men now, Akela?’

‘For this reason,’ the Lone Wolf answered ‘when that yellow thief’s hide was hung up on the rock, I went back along our trail to the village, stepping in my tracks, turning aside, and lying down, to make a mixed trail in case one should follow us. But when I had fouled the trail so that I myself hardly knew it again, Mang, the Bat, came hawking between the trees, and hung up above me. Said Mang, “The village of the Man-Pack, where they cast out the Man-cub, hums like a hornet’s nest.”’

‘It was a big stone that I threw,’ chuckled Mowgli, who had often amused himself by throwing ripe paw-paws into a hornet’s nest, and racing off to the nearest pool before the hornets caught him.

‘I asked of Mang what he had seen. He said that the Red Flower blossomed at the gate of the village, and men sat about it carrying guns. Now I know, for I have good cause,’—Akela looked down at the old dry scars on his flank and side,—‘that men do not carry guns for pleasure. Presently, Little Brother, a man with a gun follows our trail—if, indeed, he be not already on it.’

‘But why should he? Men have cast me out. What more do they need?’ said Mowgli angrily.

‘Thou art a, man, Little Brother,’ Akela returned. ‘It is not for us, the Free Hunters, to tell thee what thy brethren do, or why.’

He had just time to snatch up his paw as the skinning-knife cut deep into the ground below. Mowgli struck quicker than an average human eye could follow, but Akela was a wolf; and even a dog, who is very far removed from the wild wolf, his ancestor, can be waked out of deep sleep by a cart-wheel touching his flank, and can spring away unharmed before that wheel comes on.

‘Another time,’ Mowgli said quietly, returning the knife to its sheath, ‘speak of the Man-Pack and of Mowgli in two breaths—not one.’

‘Phff! That is a sharp tooth,’ said Akela, snuffing at the blade’s cut in the earth, ‘but living with the Man-Pack has spoiled thine eye, Little Brother. I could have killed a buck while thou wast striking.’

Bagheera sprang to his feet, thrust up his head as far as he could, sniffed, and stiffened through every curve in his body. Gray Brother followed his example quickly, keeping a little to his left to get the wind that was blowing from the right, while Akela bounded fifty yards up wind, and, half-crouching, stiffened too. Mowgli looked on enviously. He could smell things as very few human beings could, but he had never reached the hair-trigger-like sensitiveness of a Jungle nose; and his three months in the smoky village had set him back sadly. However, he dampened his finger, rubbed it on his nose, and stood erect to catch the upper scent, which, though it is the faintest, is the truest.

‘Man!’ Akela growled, dropping on his haunches.

‘Buldeo!’ said Mowgli, sitting down. ‘He follows our trail, and yonder is the sunlight on his gun. Look!’

It was no more than a splash of sunlight, for a fraction of a second, on the brass clamps of the old Tower musket, but nothing in the jungle winks with just that flash, except when the clouds race over the sky. Then a piece of mica, or a little pool, or even a highly-polished leaf will flash like a heliograph. But that day was cloudless and still.

‘I knew men would follow,’ said Akela triumphantly. ‘Not for nothing have I led the Pack.’

The four cubs said nothing, but ran down hill on their bellies, melting into the thorn and under-brush as a mole melts into a lawn.

‘Where go ye, and without word?’ Mowgli called.

‘H’sh! We roll his skull here before mid-day!’ Gray Brother answered.

‘Back! Back and wait! Man does not eat Man!’ Mowgli shrieked.

page 2

‘Who was a wolf but now? Who drove the knife at me for thinking he might be Man?’ said Akela, as the four wolves turned back sullenly and dropped to heel.

‘Am I to give reason for all I choose to do?’ said Mowgli furiously.

‘That is Man! There speaks Man!’ Bagheera muttered under his whiskers. ‘Even so did men talk round the King’s cages at Oodeypore. We of the Jungle know that Man is wisest of all. If we trusted our ears we should know that of all things he is most foolish.’ Raising his voice, he added, ‘The Man-cub is right in this. Men hunt in packs. To kill one, unless we know what the others will do, is bad hunting. Come, let us see what this Man means toward us.’

‘We will not come,’ Gray Brother growled. ‘Hunt alone, Little Brother. We know our own minds. The skull would have been ready to bring by now.’

Mowgli had been looking from one to the other of his friends, his chest heaving, and his eyes full of tears. He strode forward to the wolves, and, dropping on one knee, said: ‘Do I not know my mind? Look at me!’

They looked uneasily, and when their eyes wandered, he called them back again and again, till their hair stood up all over their bodies, and they trembled in every limb, while Mowgli stared and stared.

‘Now,’ said he, ‘of us five, which is leader?’

‘Thou art leader, Little Brother,’ said Gray Brother, and he licked Mowgli’s foot.

‘Follow, then,’ said Mowgli, and the four followed at his heels with their tails between their legs.

‘This comes of living with the Man-Pack,’ said Bagheera, slipping down after them. ‘There is more in the Jungle now than Jungle Law, Baloo.’

The old bear said nothing, but he thought many things.

Mowgli cut across noiselessly through the jungle, at right angles to Buldeo’s path, till, parting the undergrowth, he saw the old man, his musket on his shoulder, running up the trail of overnight at a dog-trot.

You will remember that Mowgli had left the village with the heavy weight of Shere Khan’s raw hide on his shoulders, while Akela and Gray Brother trotted behind, so that the triple trail was very clearly marked. Presently Buldeo came to where Akela, as you know, had gone back and mixed it all up. Then he sat down, and coughed and grunted, and made little casts round and about into the Jungle to pick it up again, and all the time he could have thrown a stone over those who were watching him: No one can be so silent as a wolf when he does not care to be heard; and Mowgli, though the wolves thought he moved very clumsily, could come and go like a shadow. They ringed the old man as a school of porpoises ring a steamer at full speed, and as they ringed him they talked unconcernedly, for their speech began below the lowest end of the scale that untrained human beings can hear. [The other end is bounded by the high squeak of Mang, the Bat, which very many people cannot catch at all. From that note all the bird and bat and insect talk takes on.]

‘This is better than any kill,’ said Gray Brother, as Buldeo stooped and peered and puffed. ‘He looks like a lost pig in the Jungles by the river. What does he say?’ Buldeo was muttering savagely.

Mowgli translated. ‘He says that packs of wolves must have danced round me. He says, that he never saw such a trail in his life. He says he is tired.’

‘He will be rested before he picks it up again,’ said Bagheera coolly, as he slipped round a treetrunk, in the game of blindman’s-buff that they were playing. ‘Now, what does the lean thing do?’

‘Eat or blow smoke out of his mouth. Men always play with their mouths,’ said Mowgli; and the silent trailers saw the old man fill and light and puff at a water-pipe, and they took good note of the smell of the tobacco, so as to be sure of Buldeo in the darkest night, if necessary.

Then a little knot of charcoal-burners came down the path, and naturally halted to speak to Buldeo, whose fame as a hunter reached for at least twenty miles round. They all sat down and smoked, and Bagheera and the others came up and watched while Buldeo began to tell the story of Mowgli, the Devil-child, from one end to another, with additions and inventions. How he himself had really killed Shere-Khan; and how Mowgli had turned himself into a wolf, and fought with him all the afternoon, and changed into a boy again and bewitched Buldeo’s rifle, so that the bullet turned the corner, when he pointed it at Mowgli, and killed one of Buldeo’s own buffaloes; and how the village, knowing him to be the bravest hunter in Seeonee, had sent him out to kill this Devil-child. But meantime the village had got hold of Messua and her husband, who were undoubtedly the father and mother of this Devil-child, and had barricaded them in their own hut, and presently would torture them to make them confess they were witch and wizard, and then they would be burned to death.

‘When?’ said the charcoal-burners, because they would very much like to be present at the ceremony.

Buldeo said that nothing would be done till he returned, because the village wished him to kill the Jungle Boy first. After that they would dispose of Messua and her husband, and divide their lands and buffaloes among the village. Messua’s husband had some remarkably fine buffaloes, too. It was an excellent thing to destroy wizards, Buldeo thought; and people who entertained Wolf-children out of the Jungle were clearly the worst kind of witches.

But, said the charcoal-burners, what would happen if the English heard of, it? The English, they had heard, were a perfectly mad people, who would not let honest farmers kill witches in peace.

Why, said Buldeo, the head-man of the village would report that Messua and her husband had died of snake-bite. That was all arranged, and the only thing now was to kill the Wolf-child. They did not happen to have seen anything of such a creature?

The charcoal-burners looked round cautiously, and thanked their stars they had not; but they had no doubt that so brave a man as Buldeo would find him if any one could. The sun was getting rather low, and they had an idea that they would push on to Buldeo’s village and see that wicked witch. Buldeo said that, though it was his duty to kill the Devil-child, he could not think of letting a party of unarmed men go through the Jungle, which might produce the Wolf-demon at any minute, without his escort. ‘He, therefore, would accompany them, and if the sorcerer’s child appeared—well, he would show them how the best hunter in Seeonee dealt with such things. The Brahmin, he said, had given him a charm against the creature that made everything perfectly safe.

page 3

‘What says he? What says he? What says he?’ the wolves repeated every few minutes; and Mowgli translated until he came to the witch part of the story, which was a little beyond him, and then he said that the man and woman who had been so kind to him were trapped.

‘Does Man trap Man?’ said Bagheera.

‘So he says. I cannot understand the talk. They are all mad together. What have Messua and her man to do with me that they should be put in a trap; and what is all this talk about the Red Flower? I must look to this. Whatever they would do to Messua they will not do till Buldeo returns. And so——’ Mowgli thought hard, with his fingers playing round the haft of the skinning-knife, while Buldeo and the charcoal-burners went off very valiantly in single file.

‘I go hot-foot back to the Man-Pack,’ Mowgli said at last.

‘And those?’ said Gray Brother, looking hungrily after the brown backs of the charcoal-burners.

‘Sing them home,’ said Mowgli, with a grin; ‘I do not wish them to be at the village gates till it is dark. Can ye hold them?’

Gray Brother bared his white teeth in contempt. ‘We can head them round and round in circles like tethered goats—if I know Man.’

‘That I do not need. Sing to them a little, lest they be lonely on the road, and, Gray Brother, the song need not be of the sweetest. Go with them, Bagheera, and help make that song. When night is shut down, meet me by the village—Gray Brother knows the place.’

‘It is no light hunting to work for a Man-cub. When shall I sleep?’ said Bagheera, yawning, though his eyes showed that he was delighted with the amusement. ‘Me to sing to naked men But let us try.’

He lowered his head so that the sound would travel, and cried a long, long, ‘Good hunting’—a midnight call in the afternoon, which was quite awful enough to begin with. Mowgli heard it rumble, and rise, and fall, and die off in a creepy sort of whine behind him, and laughed to himself as he ran through the Jungle. He could see the charcoal-burners huddled in a knot; old Buldeo’s gun-barrel waving, like a banana-leaf, to every point of the compass at once. Then Gray Brother gave the Ta-la-hi! Yalaha! call for the buck-driving, when the Pack drives the nilghai, the big blue cow, before them, and it seemed to come from, the very ends of the earth, nearer, and nearer, and nearer, till it ended in a shriek snapped off short. The other three answered, till even Mowgli could have vowed that the full Pack was in full cry, and then they all broke into the magnificent Morning-song in the Jungle, with every turn, and flourish, and grace-note that a deep-mouthed wolf of the Pack knows. This is a rough rendering of the song, but you must imagine what it sounds like when it breaks the afternoon hush of the Jungle:—

One moment past our bodies cast
No shadow on the plain;
Now clear and black they stride our track,
And we run home again.
In morning hush, each rock and bush
Stands hard, and high, and raw:
Then give the Call: ‘Good rest to all
That keep the Jungle Law!’

Now horn and pelt our peoples melt
In covert to abide;
Now, crouched and still, to cave and hill
Our Jungle Barons glide.
Now, stark and plain, Man’s oxen strain,
That draw the new-yoked plough;
Now, stripped and dread, the dawn is red
Above the lit talao.

Ho! Get to lair! The sun’s aflare
Behind the breathing grass
And cracking through the young bamboo
The warning whispers pass.
By day made strange, the woods we range
With blinking eyes we scan;
While down the skies the wild duck cries
‘The Day—the Day to Man!’

The dew is dried that drenched our hide
Or washed about our way;
And where we drank, the puddled bank
Is crisping into clay.
The traitor Dark gives up each mark
Of stretched or hooded claw;
Then hear the Call: ‘Good rest to all
That keep the Jungle Law!’

But no translation can give the effect of it, or the yelping scorn the Four threw into every word of it, as they heard the trees crash when the men hastily climbed up into the branches, and Buldeo began repeating incantations and charms. Then they lay down and slept, for, like all who live by their own exertions, they were of a methodical cast of mind; and no one can work well without sleep.

Meantime, Mowgli was putting the miles behind him, nine to the hour, swinging on, delighted to find himself so fit after all his cramped months among men. The one idea in his head was to get Messua and her husband out of the trap, whatever it was; for he had a natural mistrust of traps. Later on, he promised himself, he would pay his debts to the village at large.

It was at twilight when he saw the well-remembered grazing-grounds, and the dhâk-tree where Gray Brother had waited for him on the morning that he killed Shere Khan. Angry as he was at the whole breed and community of Man, something jumped up in his throat and made him catch his breath when he looked at the village roofs. He noticed that every one had come in from the fields unusually early, and that, instead of getting to their evening cooking, they gathered in a crowd under the village tree, and chattered, and shouted.

‘Men must always be making traps for men, or they are not content,’ said Mowgli. ‘Last night it was Mowgli—but that night seems many Rains ago. To-night it is Messua and her man. Tomorrow, and for very many nights after, it will be Mowgli’s turn again.’

page 4

He crept along outside the wall till he came to Messua’s hut, and looked through the window into the room. There lay Messua, gagged, and bound hand and foot, breathing hard, and groaning: her husband was tied to the gaily-painted bedstead. The door of the hut that opened into the street was shut fast, and three or four people were sitting with their backs to it.

Mowgli knew the manners and customs of the villagers very fairly. He argued that so long as they could eat, and talk, and smoke, they would not do anything else; but as soon as they had fed they would begin to be dangerous. Buldeo would be coming in before long, and if his escort had done its duty, Buldeo would have a very interesting tale to tell. So he went in through the window, and, stooping over the man and the woman, cut their thongs, pulling out the gags, and looked round the hut for some milk.

Messua was half wild with pain and fear (she had been beaten and stoned all the morning), and Mowgli put his hand over her mouth just in time to stop a scream. Her husband was only bewildered and angry, and sat picking dust and things out of his torn beard.

‘I knew—I knew he would come,’ Messua sobbed at last. ‘Now do I know that he is my son!’ and she hugged Mowgli to her heart. Up to that time Mowgli had been perfectly steady, but now he began to tremble all over, and that surprised him immensely.

‘Why are these thongs? Why have they tied thee?’ he asked, after a pause.

‘To be put to the death for making a son of thee—what else?’ said the man sullenly. ‘Look! I bleed.’

Messua said nothing, but it was at her wounds that Mowgli looked, and they heard him grit his teeth when he saw the blood.

‘Whose work is this?’ said he. ‘There is a price to pay.’

‘The work of all the village. I was too rich. I had too many cattle. Therefore she and I are witches, because we gave thee shelter.’

‘I do not understand. Let Messua tell the tale.’

‘I gave thee milk, Nathoo; dost thou remember?’ Messua said timidly. ‘Because thou wast my son, whom the tiger took, and because I loved thee very dearly. They said that I was thy mother, the mother of a devil, and therefore worthy of death.’

‘And what is a devil?’ said Mowgli. ‘Death I have seen.’

The man looked up gloomily, but Messua laughed. ‘See!’ she said to her husband, ‘I knew—I said that he was no sorcerer. He is my son—my son!’

‘Son or sorcerer, what good will that do us?’ the man answered. ‘We be as dead already.’

‘Yonder is the road to the jungle’—Mowgli pointed through the window. ‘Your hands and feet are free. Go now.’

‘We do not know the Jungle, my son, as—as thou knowest,’ Messua began. ‘I do not think that I could walk far.’

‘And the men and women would be upon our backs and drag us here again,’ said the husband.

‘H’m!’ said Mowgli, and he tickled the palm of his hand with the tip of his skinning-knife; ‘I have no wish to do harm to any one of this village—yet. But I do not think they will stay thee. In a little while they will have much else to think upon. Ah!’ he lifted his head and listened to shouting and trampling outside. ‘So they have let Buldeo come home at last?’

‘He was sent out this morning to kill thee,’ Messua cried. ‘Didst thou meet him?’

‘Yes—we—I met him. He has a tale to tell, and while he is telling it there is time to do much. But first I will learn what they mean. Think where ye would go, and tell me when I come back.’

He bounded through the window and ran along again outside the wall of the village till he came within ear-shot of the crowd round the peepul-tree. Buldeo was lying on the ground, coughing and groaning, and every one was asking him questions. His hair had fallen about his shoulders; his hands and legs were skinned from climbing up trees, and he could hardly speak, but he felt the importance of his position keenly. From time to time he said something about devils and singing devils, and magic enchantment, just to give the crowd a taste of what was coming. Then he called for water.

‘Bah!’ said Mowgli. ‘Chatter—chatter Talk, talk! Men are blood-brothers of the Bandar-log. Now he must wash his mouth with water; now he must blow smoke; and when all that is done he has still his story to tell. They are very wise people—men. They will leave no one to guard Messua till their ears are stuffed with Buldeo’s tales. And—I grow as lazy as they!’

He shook himself and glided back to the hut. Just as he was at the window he felt a touch on his foot.

‘Mother,’ said he, for he knew that tongue well, ‘what dost thou here?’

‘I heard my children singing through the woods, and I followed the one I loved best. Little Frog, I have a desire to see that woman who gave thee milk,’ said Mother Wolf, all wet with the dew.

‘They have bound and mean to kill her. I have cut those ties, and she goes with her man through the jungle.’

‘I also will follow. I am old, but not yet toothless.’ Mother Wolf reared herself up on end, and looked through the window into the dark of the hut.

In a minute she dropped noiselessly, and all she said was: ‘I gave thee thy first milk; but Bagheera speaks truth: Man goes to Man at the last.’

‘Maybe,’ said Mowgli, with a very unpleasant look on his face; ‘but to-night I am very far from that trail. Wait here, but do not let her see.’

‘Thou wast never afraid of me, Little Frog,’ said Mother Wolf, backing into the high grass, and blotting herself out, as she knew how.

‘And now,’ said Mowgli cheerfully, as he swung into the hut again, ‘they are all sitting round Buldeo, who is saying that which did not happen. When his talk is finished, they say they will assuredly come here with the Red—with fire and burn you both. And then?’

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‘I have spoken to my man,’ said Messua. ‘Khanhiwara is thirty miles from here, but at Khanhiwara we may find the English——’

‘And what Pack are they?’ said Mowgli.

‘I do not know. They be white, and it is said that they govern all the land, and do not suffer people to burn or beat each other without witnesses. If we can get thither to-night, we live. Otherwise we die.’

‘Live, then. No man passes the gates tonight. But what does he do?’ Messua’s husband was on his hands and knees digging up the earth in one corner of the hut.

‘It is his little money,’ said Messua. ‘We can take nothing else.’

‘Ah, yes. The stuff that passes from hand to hand and never grows warmer. Do they need it outside this place also?’ said Mowgli.

The man stared angrily. ‘He is a fool, and no devil,’ he muttered. ‘With the money I can buy a horse. We are too bruised to walk far, and the village will follow us in an hour.’

‘I say they will not follow till I choose; but a horse is well thought of, for Messua is tired.’ Her husband stood up and knotted the last of the rupees into his waist-cloth. Mowgli helped Messua through the window, and the cool night air revived her, but the Jungle in the starlight looked very dark and terrible.

‘Ye know the trail to Khanhiwara?’ Mowgli whispered.

They nodded.

‘Good. Remember, now, not to be afraid. And there is no need to go quickly. Only—only there may be some small singing in the jungle behind you and before.’

‘Think you we would have risked a night in the Jungle through anything less than the fear of burning? It is better to be killed by beasts than by men,’ said Messua’s husband; but Messua looked at Mowgli and smiled.

‘I say,’ Mowgli went on, just as though he were Baloo repeating an old Jungle Law for the hundredth time to a foolish cub—‘I say that not a tooth in the jungle is bared against you; not a foot in the jungle is lifted against you. Neither man nor beast shall stay you till you come within eye-shot of Khanhiwara. There will be a watch about you.’ He turned quickly to Messua, saying, ‘He does not believe, but thou wilt believe?’

‘Ay, surely, my son. Man, ghost, or wolf of the jungle, I believe.’

‘He will be afraid when he hears my people singing. Thou wilt know and understand. Go now, and slowly; for there is no need of any haste. The gates are shut.’

Messua flung herself sobbing at Mowgli’s feet, but he lifted her very quickly with a shiver. Then she hung about his neck and called him every name of blessing she could think of, but her husband looked enviously across his fields, and said: ‘If we reach Khanhiwara, and I get the ear of the English, I will bring such a lawsuit against the Brahmin and old Buldeo and the others as shall eat the village to the bone. They shall pay me twice over for my crops untilled and my buffaloes unfed. I will have a great justice.’

Mowgli laughed. ‘I do not know what justice is, but—come next Rains and see what is left.’

They went off toward the Jungle, and Mother Wolf leaped from her place of hiding.

‘Follow!’ said Mowgli; ‘and look to it that all the Jungle knows these two are safe. Give tongue a little. I would call Bagheera.’

The long, low howl rose and fell, and Mowgli saw Messua’s husband flinch and turn, half minded to run back to the hut.

‘Go on,’ Mowgli called cheerfully. ‘I said there might be singing. That call will follow up to Khanhiwara. It is Favour of the Jungle.’

Messua urged her husband forward, and the darkness shut down on them and Mother Wolf as Bagheera rose up almost under Mowgli’s feet, trembling with delight of the night that drives the Jungle People wild.

‘I am ashamed of thy brethren,’ he said, purring.

‘What? Did they not sing sweetly to Buldeo?’ said Mowgli.

‘Too well! Too well! They made even me forget my pride, and, by the Broken Lock that freed me, I went singing through the jungle as though I were out wooing in the spring! Didst thou not hear us?’

‘I had other game afoot. Ask Buldeo if he liked the song. But where are the Four? I do not wish one of the Man-Pack to leave the gates to-night.’

‘What need of the Four, then?’ said Bagheera, shifting from foot to foot, his eyes ablaze, and purring louder than ever. ‘I can hold them, Little Brother. Is it killing at last? The singing, and the sight of the men climbing up the trees have made me very ready. Who is Man that we should care for him—the naked brown digger, the hairless and toothless, the eater of earth? I have followed him all day—at noon—in the white sunlight. I herded him as the wolves herd buck. I am Bagheera! Bagheera! Bagheera! As I dance with my shadow, so danced I with those men. Look!’ The great panther leaped as a kitten leaps at a dead leaf whirling overhead, struck left and right into the empty air, that sang under the strokes, landed noiselessly, and leaped again and again, while the half purr, half growl gathered head as steam rumbles in a boiler. ‘I am Bagheera—in the jungle—in the night, and my strength is in me. Who shall stay my stroke? Man-cub, with one blow of my paw I could beat thy head flat as a dead frog in the summer!’

‘Strike, then!’ said Mowgli, in the dialect of the village, not the talk of the jungle, and the human words brought Bagheera to a full stop, flung back on haunches that quivered under him, his head just at the level of Mowgli’s. Once more Mowgli stared, as he had stared at the rebellious cubs, full into the beryl-green eyes till the red glare behind their green went out like the light of a lighthouse shut off twenty miles across the sea; till the eyes dropped, and the big head with them—dropped lower and lower, and the red rasp of a tongue grated on Mowgli’s instep.

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‘Brother—Brother—Brother!’ the boy whispered, stroking steadily and lightly from the neck along the heaving back: ‘Be still, be still It is the fault of the night, and no fault of thine.’

‘It was the smells of the night,’ said Bagheera penitently. ‘This air cries aloud to me. But how dost thou know?’

Of course the air round an Indian village is full of all kinds of smells, and to any creature who does nearly all his thinking through his nose, smells are as maddening as music and drugs are to human beings. Mowgli gentled the panther for a few minutes longer, and he lay down like a cat before a fire, his paws tucked under his breast, and his eyes half shut.

‘Thou art of the jungle and not of the jungle,’ he said at last. ‘And I am only a black panther. But I love thee, Little Brother.’

‘They are very long at their talk under the tree,’ Mowgli said, without noticing the last sentence. ‘Buldeo must have told many tales. They should come soon to drag the woman and her man out of the trap and put them into the Red Flower. They will find that trap sprung. Ho! ho!’

‘Nay, listen,’ said Bagheera. ‘The fever is out of my blood now. Let them find me there Few would leave their houses after meeting me. It is not the first time I have been in a cage; and I do not think they will tie me with cords.’

‘Be wise, then,’ said Mowgli, laughing; for he was beginning to feel as reckless as the panther, who had glided into the hut.

‘Pah!’ Bagheera grunted. ‘This place is rank with Man, but here is just such a bed as they gave me to lie upon in the King’s cages at Oodeypore. Now I lie down.’ Mowgli heard the strings of the cot crack under the great brute’s weight. ‘By the Broken Lock that freed me, they will think they have caught big game! Come and sit beside me, Little Brother; we will give them “good hunting” together!’

‘No; I have another thought in my stomach. The Man-Pack shall not know what share I have in the sport. Make thine own hunt. I do not wish to see them.’

‘Be it so,’ said Bagheera. ‘Ah, now they come!’

The conference under the peepul-tree had been growing noisier and noisier, at the far end of the village. It broke in wild yells, and a rush up the street of men and women, waving clubs and bamboos and sickles and knives. Buldeo and the Brahmin were at the head of it, but the mob was close at their heels, and they cried, ‘The witch and the wizard! Let us see if hot coins will make them confess! Burn the hut over their heads! We will teach them to shelter wolf-devils! Nay, beat them first! Torches! More torches! Buldeo, heat the gun-barrels!’

Here was some little difficulty with the catch of the door. It had been very firmly fastened, but the crowd tore it away bodily, and the light of the torches streamed into the room where, stretched at full length on the bed, his paws crossed and lightly hung down over one end, black as the Pit, and terrible as a demon, was Bagheera. There was one half-minute of desperate silence, as the front ranks of the crowd clawed and tore their way back from the threshold, and in that minute Bagheera raised his head and yawned—elaborately, carefully, and ostentatiously—as he would yawn when he wished to insult an equal. The fringed lips drew back and up; the red tongue curled; the lower jaw dropped and dropped till you could see half-way down the hot gullet; and the gigantic dog-teeth stood clear to the pit of the gums till they rang together, upper and under, with the snick of steel-faced wards shooting home round the edges of a safe. Next instant the street was empty; Bagheera had leaped back through the window, and stood at Mowgli’s side, while a yelling, screaming torrent scrambled and tumbled one over another in their panic haste to get to their own huts.

‘They will not stir till day comes,’ said Bagheera quietly. ‘And now?’

The silence of the afternoon sleep seemed to have overtaken the village; but, as they listened, they could hear the sound of heavy grain-boxes being dragged over earthen floors and set down against doors. Bagheera was quite right; the village would not stir till daylight. Mowgli sat still, and thought, and his face grew darker and darker.

‘What have I done?’ said Bagheera, at last coming to his feet, fawning.

‘Nothing but great good. Watch them now till the day. I sleep.’ Mowgli ran off into the Jungle, and dropped like a dead man across a rock, and slept and slept the day round, and the night back again.

When he waked, Bagheera was at his side, and there was a newly-killed buck at his feet. Bagheera watched curiously while Mowgli went to work with his skinning-knife, ate and drank, and turned over with his chin in his hands.

‘The man and the woman are come safe within eye-shot of Khanhiwara,’ Bagheera said. ‘Thy lair mother sent the word back by Chil, the Kite. They found a horse before midnight of the night they were freed, and went very quickly. Is not that well?’

‘That is well,’ said Mowgli.

‘And thy Man-Pack in the village did not stir till the sun was high this morning. Then they ate their food and ran back quickly to their houses.’

‘Did they, by chance, see thee?’

‘It may have been. I was rolling in the dust before the gate at dawn, and I may have made also some small song to myself. Now, Little Brother, there is nothing more to do. Come hunting with me and Baloo. He has new hives that he wishes to show, and we all desire thee back again as of old. Take off that look which makes even me afraid! The man and woman will not be put into the Red Flower, and all goes well in the Jungle. Is it not true? Let us forget the Man-Pack.’

‘They shall be forgotten in a little while. Where does Hathi feed to-night?’

‘Where he chooses. Who can answer for the Silent One? But why? What is there Hathi can do which we cannot?’

‘Bid him and his three sons come here to me.’

‘But, indeed, and truly, Little Brother, it is not—it is not seemly to say “Come,” and “Go,” to Hathi. Remember, he is the Master of the Jungle, and before the Man-Pack changed the look on thy face, he taught thee the Master-words of the Jungle.’

‘That is all one. I have a Master-word for him now. Bid him come to Mowgli, the Frog and if he does not hear at first, bid him come because of the Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore.’

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‘The Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore,’ Bagheera repeated two or three times to make sure. ‘I go. Hathi can but be angry at the worst, and I would give a moon’s hunting to hear a Master-word that compels the Silent One.’

He went away, leaving Mowgli stabbing furiously with his skinning-knife into the earth. Mowgli had never seen human blood in his life before till he had seen, and—what meant much more to him—smelled Messua’s blood on the thongs that bound her. And Messua had been kind to him, and, so far as he knew anything about love, he loved Messua as completely as he hated the rest of mankind. But deeply as he loathed them, their talk, their cruelty, and their cowardice, not for anything the Jungle had to offer could he bring himself to take a human life, and have that terrible scent of blood back again in his nostrils. His plan was simpler, but much more thorough; and he laughed to himself when he thought that it was one of old Buldeo’s tales told under the peepul-tree in the evening that had put the idea into his head.

‘It was a Master-word,’ Bagheera whispered in his ear. ‘They were feeding by the river, and they obeyed as though they were bullocks. Look where they come now!’

Hathi and his three sons had arrived, in their usual way, without a sound. The mud of the river was still fresh on their flanks, and Hathi was thoughtfully chewing the green stem of a young plantain-tree that he had gouged up with his tusks. But every line in his vast body showed to Bagheera, who could see things when he came across them, that it was not the Master of the Jungle speaking to a Man-cub, but one who was afraid coming before one who was not. His three sons rolled side by side, behind their father.

Mowgli hardly lifted his head as Hathi gave him ‘Good hunting.’ He kept him swinging and rocking, and shifting from one foot to another, for a long time before he spoke; and when he opened his mouth it was to Bagheera, not to the elephants.

‘I will tell a tale that was told to me by the hunter ye hunted to-day,’ said Mowgli. ‘It concerns an elephant, old and wise, who fell into a trap, and the sharpened stake in the pit scarred him from a little above his heel to the crest of his shoulder, leaving a white mark.’ Mowgli threw out his hand, and as Hathi wheeled the moonlight showed a long white scar on his slaty side, as though he had been struck with a red-hot whip. ‘Men came to take him from the trap,’ Mowgli continued, ‘but he broke his ropes, for he was strong, and went away till his wound was healed. Then came he, angry, by night to the fields of those hunters. And I remember now that he had three sons. These things happened many, many Rains ago, and very far away—among the fields of Bhurtpore. What came to those fields at the next reaping, Hathi?’

‘They were reaped by me and by my three sons,’ said Hathi.

‘And to the ploughing that follows the reaping?’ said Mowgli.

‘There was no ploughing,’ said Hathi.

‘And to the men that live by the green crops on the ground?’ said Mowgli.

‘They went away.’

‘And to the huts in which the men slept?’ said Mowgli.

‘We tore the roofs to pieces, and the jungle swallowed up the walls,’ said Hathi.

‘And what more?’ said Mowgli.

‘As much good ground as I can walk over in two nights from the east to the west, and from the north to the south as much as I can walk over in three nights, the Jungle took. We let in the jungle upon five villages; and in those villages, and in their lands, the grazing-ground and the soft crop-grounds, there is not one man to-day who takes his food from the ground. That was the Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore, which I and my three sons did; and now I ask, Man-cub, how the news of it came to thee?’ said Hathi.

‘A man told me, and now I see even Buldeo can speak truth. It was well done, Hathi with the white mark; but the second time it shall be done better, for the reason that there is a man to direct. Thou knowest the village of the Man-Pack that cast me out? They are idle, senseless, and cruel; they play with their mouths, and they do not kill the weaker for food, but for sport. When they are full-fed they would throw their own breed into the Red Flower. This I have seen. It is not well that they should live here any more. I hate them!’

‘Kill, then,’ said the youngest of Hathi’s three sons, picking up a tuft of grass, dusting it against his fore-legs, and throwing it away, while his little red eyes glanced furtively from side to side.

‘What good are white bones to me?’ Mowgli answered angrily. ‘Am I the cub of a wolf to play in the sun with a raw head? I have killed Shere Khan, and his hide rots on the Council Rock; but—but I do not know whither Shere Khan is gone, and my stomach is still empty. Now I will take that which I can see and touch. Let in the Jungle upon that village, Hathi!’

Bagheera shivered, and cowered down. He could understand, if the worst came to the worst, a quick rush down the village street, and a right and left blow into a crowd, or a crafty killing of men as they ploughed in the twilight; but this scheme for deliberately blotting out an entire village from the eyes of man and beast frightened him. Now he saw why Mowgli had sent for Hathi. No one but the long-lived elephant could plan and carry through such a war.

‘Let them run as the men ran from the fields of Bhurtpore, till we have the rain-water for the only plough, and the noise of the rain on the thick leaves for the pattering of their spindles—till Bagheera and I lair in the house of the Brahmin, and the buck drink at the tank behind the temple! Let in the Jungle, Hathi!’

‘But I—but we have no quarrel with them, and it needs the red rage of great pain ere we tear down the places where men sleep,’ said Hathi doubtfully.

‘Are ye the only eaters of grass in the Jungle; Drive in your peoples. Let the deer and the pig and the nilghai look to it. Ye need never show a hand’s-breadth of hide till the fields are naked. Let in the Jungle, Hathi!’

‘There will be no killing? My tusks were red at the Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore, and I would not wake that smell again.’

‘Nor I. I do not wish even their bones to lie on the clean earth. Let them go and find a fresh lair. They cannot stay here. I have seen and smelled the blood of the woman that gave me food—the woman whom they would have killed but for me. Only the smell of the new grass on their door-steps can take away that smell. It burns in my mouth. Let in the Jungle, Hathi!’

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‘Ah!’ said Hathi. ‘So did the scar of the stake burn on my hide till we watched the villages die under in the spring growth. Now I see. Thy war shall be our war. We will let in the jungle!’

Mowgli had hardly time to catch his breath—he was shaking all over with rage and hate—before the place where the elephants had stood was empty, and Bagheera was looking at him with terror.

‘By the Broken Lock that freed me!’ said the Black Panther at last. ‘Art thou the naked thing I spoke for in the Pack when all was young? Master of the jungle, when my strength goes, speak for me—speak for Baloo—speak for us all! We are cubs before thee! Snapped twigs under foot! Fawns that have lost their doe!’

The idea of Bagheera being a stray fawn upset Mowgli altogether, and he laughed and caught his breath, and sobbed and laughed again, till he had to jump into a pool to make himself stop. Then he swam round and round, ducking in and out of the bars of the moonlight like the frog, his namesake.

By this time Hathi and his three sons had turned, each to one point of the compass, and were striding silently down the valleys a mile away. They went on and on for two days’ march—that is to say, a long sixty miles—through the Jungle; and every step they took, and every wave of their trunks, was known and noted and talked over by Mang and Chil and the Monkey People and all the birds. Then they began to feed, and fed quietly for a week or so. Hathi and his sons are like Kaa, the Rock Python. They never hurry till they have to.

At the end of that time—and none knew who had started it—a rumour went through the Jungle that there was better food and water to be found in such and such a valley. The pig—who, of course, will go to the ends of the earth for a full meal—moved first by companies, scuffling over the rocks, and the deer followed, with the small wild foxes that live on the dead and dying of the herds; and the heavy-shouldered nilghai moved parallel with the deer, and the wild buffaloes of the swamps came after the nilghai. The least little thing would have turned the scattered, straggling droves that grazed and sauntered and drank and grazed again; but whenever there was an alarm some one would rise up and soothe them. At one time it would be Ikki the Porcupine, full of news of good feed just a little farther on; at another Mang would cry cheerily and flap down a glade to show it was all empty; or Baloo, his mouth full of roots, would shamble alongside a wavering line and half frighten, half romp it clumsily back to the proper road. Very many creatures broke back or ran away or lost interest, but very many were left to go forward. At the end of another ten days or so the situation was this. The deer and the pig and the nilghai were milling round and round in a circle of eight or ten miles radius, while the Eaters of Flesh, skirmished round its edge. And the centre of that circle was the village, and round the village the crops were ripening, and in the crops sat men on what they call machans—platforms like pigeon-perches, made of sticks at the top of four poles—to scare away birds and other stealers. Then the deer were coaxed no more. The Eaters of Flesh were close behind them, and forced them forward and inward.

It was a dark night when Hathi and his three sons slipped down from the Jungle, and broke off the poles of the machans with their trunks; they fell as a snapped stalk of hemlock in bloom falls, and the men that tumbled from them heard the deep gurgling of the elephants in their ears. Then the vanguard of the bewildered armies of the deer broke down and flooded into the village grazing-grounds and the ploughed fields; and the sharp-hoofed, rooting wild pig came with them, and what the deer left the pig spoiled, and from time to time an alarm of wolves would shake the herds, and they would rush to and fro desperately, treading down the young barley, and cutting flat the banks of the irrigating channels. Before the dawn broke the pressure on the outside of the circle gave way at one point. The Eaters of Flesh had fallen back and left an open path to the south, and drove upon drove of buck fled along it. Others, who were bolder, lay up in the thickets to finish their meal next night.

But the work was practically done. When the villagers looked in the morning they saw their crops were lost. And that meant death if they did not get away, for they lived year in and year out as near to starvation as the Jungle was near to them. When the buffaloes were sent to graze the hungry brutes found that the deer had cleared the grazing-grounds, and so wandered into the Jungle and drifted off with their wild mates; and when twilight fell the three or four ponies that belonged to the village lay in their stables with their heads beaten in. Only Bagheera could have given those strokes, and only Bagheera would have thought of insolently dragging the last carcass, to the open street.

The villagers had no heart to make fires in the fields that night, so Hathi and his three sons went gleaning among what was left; and where Hathi gleans there is no need to follow. The men decided to live on their stored seed-corn until the rains had fallen, and then to take work as servants till they could catch up with the lost year; but as the grain-dealer was thinking of his well-filled crates of corn, and the prices he would levy at the sale of it, Hathi’s sharp tusks were picking out the corner of his mud-house, and smashing open the big wicker chest, leeped with cow-dung, where the precious stuff lay.

When that last loss was discovered, it was the Brahmin’s turn to speak. He had prayed to his own Gods without answer. It might be, he said, that, unconsciously, the village had offended some one of the Gods of the Jungle, for, beyond doubt, the Jungle was against them. So they sent for the head-man of the nearest tribe of wandering Gonds—little, wise, and very black hunters, living in the deep Jungle, whose fathers came of the oldest race in India—the aboriginal owners of the land. They made the Gond welcome with what they had, and he stood on one leg, his bow in his hand, and two or three poisoned arrows stuck through his top-knot, looking half afraid and half contemptuously at the anxious villagers and their ruined fields. They wished to know whether his Gods—the Old Gods—were angry with them, and what sacrifices should be offered. The Gond said nothing, but picked up a trail of the Karela, the vine that bears the bitter wild gourd, and laced it to and fro across the temple door in the face of the staring red Hindu image. Then he pushed, with his hand in the open air along the road to Khanhiwara, and went back to his Jungle, and watched the Jungle People drifting through it. He knew that when the Jungle moves only white men can hope to turn it aside.

There was no need to ask his meaning. The wild gourd would grow where they had worshipped their God, and the sooner they saved themselves the better.

But it is hard to tear a village from its moorings. They stayed on as long as any summer food was left to them, and they tried to gather nuts in the Jungle, but shadows with glaring eyes watched them, and rolled before them even at midday; and when they ran back afraid to their walls, on the tree-trunks they had passed not five minutes before the bark would be stripped and chiselled with the stroke of some great taloned paw. The more they kept to their village, the bolder grew the wild things that gambolled and bellowed on the grazing-grounds by the Waingunga. They had no time to patch and plaster the rear walls of the empty byres that backed on to the Jungle; the wild pig trampled them down, and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbows over the new-won ground, and the coarse grass bristled behind the vines like the lances of a goblin army following a retreat. The unmarried men ran away first, and carried the news far and near that the village was doomed. Who could fight, they said, against the Jungle, or the Gods of the Jungle, when the very village cobra had left his hole in the platform under the peepul-tree? So their little commerce with the outside world shrunk as the trodden paths across the open grew fewer and fainter. At last the nightly trumpetings of Hathi and his three sons ceased to trouble them; for they had no more to be robbed of. The crop on the ground and the seed in the ground had been taken. The outlying-fields were already losing their shape, and it was time to throw themselves on the charity of the English at Khanhiwara.

Native fashion, they delayed their departure from one day to another till the first Rains caught them and the unmended roofs let in a flood, and the grazing-ground stood ankle deep, and all life came on with a rush after the heat of the summer. Then they waded out—men, women, and children—through the blinding hot rain of the morning, but turned naturally for one farewell look at their homes.

They heard, as the last burdened family filed through the gate, a crash of falling beams and thatch behind the walls. They saw a shiny, snaky black trunk lifted for an instant, scattering sodden thatch. It disappeared, and there was another crash, followed by a squeal. Hathi had been plucking off the roofs of the huts as you pluck water-lilies, and a rebounding beam had pricked him. He needed only this to unchain his full strength, for of all things in the Jungle the wild elephant enraged is the most wantonly destructive. He kicked backward at a mud wall that crumbled at the stroke, and, crumbling, melted to yellow mud under the torrent of rain. Then he wheeled and squealed, and tore through the narrow streets, leaning against the huts right and left, shivering the crazy doors, and crumpling up the eaves; while his three sons raged behind as they had raged at the Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore.

‘The Jungle will swallow these shells,’ said a quiet voice in the wreckage. ‘It is the outer wall that must lie down,’ and Mowgli, with the rain sluicing over his bare shoulders and arms, leaped back from a wall that was settling like a tired buffalo.

‘All in good time,’ panted Hathi. ‘Oh, but my tusks were red at Bhurtpore; To the outer wall, children! With the head! Together! Now!

The four pushed side by side; the outer wall bulged, split, and fell, and the villagers, dumb with horror, saw the savage, clay-streaked heads of the wreckers in the ragged gap. Then they fled, houseless and foodless, down the valley, as their village, shredded and tossed and trampled, melted behind them.

A month later the place was a dimpled mound, covered with soft, green young stuff; and by the end of the Rains there was the roaring Jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before.

ONCE upon a time there was a coffee-planter in India who wished to clear some forest land for coffee-planting. When he had cut down all the trees and burned the underwood, the stumps still remained. Dynamite is expensive and slow fire slow. The happy medium for stump-clearing is the lord of all beasts, who is the elephant. He will either push the stump out of the ground with his tusks, if he has any, or drag it out with ropes. The planter, therefore, hired elephants by ones and twos and threes, and fell to work. The very best of all the elephants belonged to the very worst of all the drivers or mahouts; and this superior beast’s name was Moti Guj. He was the absolute property of his mahout, which would never have been the case under native rule; for Moti Guj was a creature to be desired by kings, and his name, being translated, meant the Pearl Elephant. Because the British government was in the land, Deesa, the mahout, enjoyed his property undisturbed. He was dissipated. When he had made much money through the strength of his elephant, he would get extremely drunk and give Moti Guj a beating with a tent-peg over the tender nails of the forefeet. Moti Guj never trampled the life out of Deesa on these occasions, for he knew that after the beating was over, Deesa would embrace his trunk and weep and call him his love and his life and the liver of his soul, and give him some liquor. Moti Guj was very fond of liquor—arrack for choice, though he would drink palm-tree toddy if nothing better offered. Then Deesa would go to sleep between Moti Guj’s forefeet, and as Deesa generally chose the middle of the public road, and as Moti Guj mounted guard over him, and would not permit horse, foot, or cart to pass by, traffic was congested till Deesa saw fit to wake up.

There was no sleeping in the daytime on the planter’s clearing: the wages were too high to risk. Deesa sat on Moti Guj’s neck and gave him orders, while Moti Guj rooted up the stumps—for he owned a magnificent pair of tusks; or pulled at the end of a rope—for he had a magnificent pair of shoulders—while Deesa kicked him behind the ears and said he was the king of elephants. At evening time Moti Guj would wash down his three hundred pounds’ weight of green food with a quart of arrack, and Deesa would take a share, and sing songs between Moti Guj’s legs till it was time to go to bed. Once a week Deesa led Moti Guj down to the river, and Moti Gui lay on his side luxuriously in the shallows, while Deesa went over him with a coir swab and a brick. Moti Guj never mistook the pounding blow of the latter for the smack of the former that warned him to get up and turn over on the other side. Then Deesa would look at his feet and examine his eyes, and turn up the fringes of his mighty ears in case of sores or budding ophthalmia. After inspection the two would “come up with a song from the sea,” Moti Guj, all black and shining, waving a torn tree branch twelve feet long in his trunk, and Deesa knotting up his own long wet hair.

It was a peaceful, well-paid life till Deesa felt the return of the desire to drink deep. He wished for an orgy. The little draughts that led nowhere were taking the manhood out of him.

He went to the planter, and “My mother’s dead,” said he, weeping.

“She died on the last plantation two months ago, and she died once before that when you were working for me last year,” said the planter, who knew something of the ways of nativedom.

“Then it’s my aunt, and she was just the same as a mother to me,” said Deesa, weeping more than ever. “She has left eighteen small children entirely without bread, and it is I who must fill their little stomachs,” said Deesa, beating his head on the floor.

“Who brought the news?” said the planter.

“The post,” said Deesa.

“There hasn’t been a post here for the past week. Get back to your lines!’

“A devastating sickness has fallen on my village, and all my wives are dying,” yelled Deesa, really in tears this time.

“Call Chihun, who comes from Deesa’s village,” said the planter. “Chihun, has this man got a wife?”

“He?” said Chihun. “No. Not a woman of our village would look at him, They’d sooner marry the elephant,”

Chihun snorted. Deesa wept and bellowed.

“You will get into a difficulty in a minute,” said the planter. “Go back to your work!”

“Now I will speak Heaven’s truth” gulped Deesa, with an inspiration. “I haven’t been drunk for two months. I desire to depart in order to get properly drunk afar off and distant from this heavenly plantation. Thus I shall cause no trouble.”

A flickering smile crossed the planter’s face. “Deesa,” said he, “you’ve spoken the truth, and I’d give you leave on the spot if anything could be done with Moti Guj while you’re away. You know that he will only obey your orders.”

“May the light of the heavens live forty thousand years. I shall be absent but ten little days. After that, upon my faith and honor and soul, I return. As to the inconsiderable interval, have I the gracious permission of the heaven-born to call up Moti Guj?”

Permission was granted, and in answer of Deesa’s shrill yell, the mighty tusker swung out of the shade of a clump of trees where he had been squirting dust over himself till his master should return.

“Light of my heart, protector of the drunken, mountain of might, give ear!” said Deesa, standing in front of him.

Moti Guj gave ear, and saluted with his trunk. “I am going away.” said Deesa.

Moti Guj’s eyes twinkled. He liked jaunts as well as his master. One could snatch all manner of nice things from the roadside then.

“But you, you fussy old pig, must stay behind and work.”

The twinkle died out as Moti Guj tried to look delighted. He hated stump-hauling on the plantation. It hurt his teeth.

“I shall be gone for ten days, oh, delectable one! Hold up your near fore-foot and I’ll impress the fact upon it, warty toad of a dried mud-puddle.” Deesa took a tent-peg and banged Moti Guj ten times on the nails. Moti Guj grunted and shuffled from foot to foot.

“Ten days,” said Deesa, “you will work and haul and root the trees as Chihun here shall order you. Take up Chihun and set him on your neck!” Moti Guj curled the tip of his trunk, Chihun put his foot there, and was swung on to the neck. Deesa handed Chihun the heavy ankus—the iron elephant goad.

Chihun thumped Moti Guj’s bald head as a paver thumps a curbstone.

Moti Guj trumpeted.

“Be still, hog of the backwoods! Chibun’s your mahout for ten days. And now bid me good-bye, beast after mine own heart. Oh, my lord, my king! Jewel of all created elephants, lily of the herd, preserve your honored health; be virtuous. Adieu!”

Moti Guj lapped his trunk round Deesa and swung him into the air twice. That was his way of bidding him good-bye.

“He’ll work now,” said Deesa to the planter. “Have I leave to go?”

The planter nodded, and Deesa dived into the woods. Moti Guj went back to haul stumps.

Chihun was very kind to him, but he felt unhappy and forlorn for all that. Chihun gave him a ball of spices, and tickled him under the chin, and Chihun’s little baby cooed to him after work was over. and Chihun’s wife called him a darling; but Moti Guj was a bachelor by instinct, as Deesa was. He did not understand the domestic emotions. He wanted the light of his universe back again—the drink and the drunken slumber, the savage beatings and the savage caresses.

None the less he worked well, and the planter wondered. Deesa had wandered along the roads till he met a marriage procession of his own caste, and, drinking, dancing, and tippling, had drifted with it past all knowledge of the lapse of time.

The morning of the eleventh day dawned, and there returned no Deesa, Moti Guj was loosed from his ropes for the daily stint. He swung clear, looked round, shrugged his shoulders, and began to walk away, as one having business elsewhere.

“Hi! ho! Come back you!” shouted Chihun. “Come back and put me on your neck, misborn mountain! Return, splendor of the hillsides! Adornment of all India, heave to, or I’ll bang every toe off your forefoot!”

Moti Guj gurgled gently, but did not obey. Chihun ran after him with a rope and caught him up. Moti Guj put his ears forward, and Chihun knew what that meant, though he tried to carry it off with high words.

“None of your nonsense with me,” said he. “To your pickets, devil-son!”

“Hrrump!” said Moti Guj, and that was all—that and the forebent ears.

Moti Guj put his hands in his pockets, chewed a branch for a toothpick, and strolled about the clearing, making fun of the other elephants who had just set to work.

Chihun reported the state of affairs to the planter, who came out with a dog-whip and cracked it furiously. Moti Guj paid the white man the compliment of charging him nearly a quarter of a mile across the clearing and “Hrrumphing” him into his veranda. Then he stood outside the house, chuckling to himself and shaking all over with the fun of it, as an elephant will.

“We’ll thrash him,” said the planter. “He shall have the finest thrashing ever elephant received. Give Kala Nag and Nazim twelve foot of chain apiece, and tell them to lay on twenty.”

Kala Nag—which means Black Snake—and Nazim were two of the biggest elephants in the lines, and one of their duties was to administer the graver punishment, since no man can beat an elephant properly.

They took the whipping-chains and rattled them in their trunks as they sidled up to Moti Guj, meaning to hustle him between them. Moti Guj had never, in all his life of thirty-nine years, been whipped, and he did not intend to begin a new experience. So he waited, waving his head from right to left, and measuring the precise spot in Kala Nag’s fat side where a blunt tusk could sink deepest. Kala Nag had no tusks; the chain was the badge of his authority; but for all that, he swung wide of Moti Guj at the last minute, and tried to appear as if he had brought the chain out for amusement. Nazim turned round and went home early. He did not feel fighting fit that morning, and so Moti Guj was left standing alone with his ears cocked.

That decided the planter to argue no more, and Moti Guj rolled back to his amateur inspection of the clearing. An elephant who will not work and is not tied up is about as manageable as an eightyone-ton gun loose in a heavy seaway. He slapped old friends on the back and asked them if the stumps were coming away easily; he talked nonsense concerning labor and the inalienable rights of elephants to a long “nooning”; and, wandering to and fro, he thoroughly demoralized the garden till sundown, when he returned to his picket for food.

“If you won’t work, you sha’n’t eat,” said Chihun, angrily. “You’re a wild elephant, and no educated animal at all. Go back to your jungle.”

Chihun’s little brown baby was rolling on the floor of the hut, and stretching out its fat arms to the huge shadow in the doorway. Moti Guj knew well that it was the dearest thing on earth to Chihun. He swung out his trunk with a fascinating crook at the end, and the brown baby threw itself, shouting, upon it. Moti Guj made fast and pulled up till the brown baby was crowing in the air twelve feet above his father’s head.

“Great Lord!” said Chihun. “Flour cakes of the best, twelve in number, two feet across and soaked in rum, shall be yours on the instant, and two hundred pounds weight of fresh-cut young sugar-cane therewith. Deign only to put down safely that insignificant brat who is my heart and my life to me!”

Moti Guj tucked the brown baby comfortably between his forefeet, that could have knocked into toothpicks all Chihun’s hut, and waited for his food. He ate it, and the brown baby crawled away. Moti Guj dozed and thought of Deesa. One of many mysteries connected with the elephant is that his huge body needs less sleep than anything else that lives. Four or five hours in the night suffice-two just before midnight, lying down on one side; two just after one o’clock, lying down on the other. The rest of the silent hours are filled with eating and fidgeting, and long grumbling soliloquies.

At midnight, therefore, Moti Guj strode out of his pickets, for a thought had come to him that Deesa might be lying drunk somewhere in the dark forest with none to look after him. So all that night he chased through the undergrowth, blowing and trumpeting and shaking his ears. He went down to the river and blared across the shallows where Deesa used to wash him, hut there was no answer. He could not find Deesa, but he disturbed all the other elephants in the lines, and nearly frightened to death some gypsies in the woods.

At dawn Deesa returned to the plantation. He had been very drunk in deed, and he expected to get into trouble for outstaying his leave. He drew a long breath when he saw that the bungalow and the plantation were still uninjured, for he knew something of Moti Guj’s temper, and reported himself with many lies and salaams. Moti Guj had gone to his pickets for breakfast. The night exercise had made him hungry.

“Call up your beast,” said the planter; and Deesa shouted in the mysterious elephant language that some mahouts believe came from China at the birth of the world, when elephants and not men were masters. Moti Guj heard and came. Elephants do not gallop They move from places of varying rates of speed. If an elephant wished to catch an express train he could not gallop, but he could catch the train. So Moti Guj was at the planter’s door almost before Chihun noticed that he had left his pickets. He fell into Deesa’s arms trumpeting with joy, and the man and beast wept and slobbered over each other, and handled each other from head to heel to see that no harm had befallen

“Now we will get to work,” saod Dessa. “Lift me up, my son and my joy!”

Moti Guj swang him up, and the two went to the coffee-clearing to look for difficult stumps.

The planter was too astonished to be very angry.

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I will remember what I was. I am sick of rope and chain.
I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs.
I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar-cane,
I will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their lairs.
I will go out until the day, until the morning break,
Out to the winds’ untainted kiss, the waters’ clean caress:
I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket-stake.
I will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!

KALA NAG, which means Black Snake, had served the Indian Government in every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and as he was fully twenty years old when he was caught, that makes him nearly seventy—a ripe age for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a big leather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was before the Afghan War of 1842, and he had not then come to his full strength. His mother, Radha Pyari,—Radha the darling,—who had been caught in the same drive with Kala Nag, told him, before his little milk-tusks had dropped out, that elephants who were afraid always got hurt; and Kala Nag knew that that advice was good, for the first time that he saw a shell burst he backed, screaming, into a stand of piled rifles, and the bayonets pricked him in all his softest places. So before he was twenty-five he gave up being afraid, and so he was the best-loved and the best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of India. He had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds’ weight of tents, on the march in Upper India; he had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam-crane and taken for days across the water, and made to carry a mortar on his back in a strange and rocky country very far from India, and had seen the Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala, and had come back again in the steamer, entitled, so the soldiers said, to the Abyssinian War medal. He had seen his fellow-elephants die of cold and epilepsy and starvation and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid, ten years later; and afterwards he had been sent down thousands of miles south to haul and pile big baulks of teak in the timber-yards at Moulmein. There he had half killed an insubordinate young elephant who was shirking his fair share of the work.

After that he was taken off timber-hauling, and employed, with a few score other elephants who were trained to the business, in helping to catch wild elephants among the Garo hills. Elephants are very strictly preserved by the Indian Government. There is one whole department which does nothing else but hunt them, and catch them, and break them in, and send them up and down the country as they are needed for work.

Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the shoulders, and his tusks had been cut off short at five feet, and bound round the ends, to prevent them splitting, with bands of copper; but he could do more with those stumps than any untrained elephant could do with the real sharpened ones.

When, after weeks and weeks of cautious driving of scattered elephants across the hills, the forty or fifty wild monsters were driven into the last stockade, and the big drop-gate, made of tree-trunks lashed together, jarred down behind them, Kala Nag, at the word of command, would go into that flaring, trumpeting pandemonium (generally at night, when the flicker of the torches made it difficult to judge distances), and, picking out the biggest and wildest tusker of the mob, would hammer him and hustle him into quiet while the men on the backs of the other elephants roped and tied the smaller ones.

There was nothing in the way of fighting that Kala Nag, the old wise Black Snake, did not know, for he had stood up more than once in his time to the charge of the wounded tiger, and, curling up his soft trunk to be out of harm’s way, had knocked the springing brute sideways in mid-air with a quick sickle-cut of his head, that he had invented all by himself; had knocked him over, and kneeled upon him with his huge knees till the life went out with a gasp and a howl, and there was only a fluffy striped thing on the ground for Kala Nag to pull by the tail.

‘Yes,’ said Big Toomai, his driver, the son of Black Toomai who had taken him to Abyssinia, and grandson of Toomai of the Elephants who had seen him caught, ‘there is nothing that the Black Snake fears except me. He has seen three generations of us feed him and groom him, and he will live to see four.’

‘He is afraid of me also,’ said Little Toomai, standing up to his full height of four feet, with only one rag upon him. He was ten years old, the eldest son of Big Toomai, and, according to custom, he would take his father’s place on Kala Nag’s neck when he grew up, and would handle the heavy iron ankus, the elephant-goad that had been worn smooth by his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. He knew what he was talking of; for he had been born under Kala Nag’s shadow, had played with the end of his trunk before he could walk, had taken him down to water as soon as he could walk, and Kala Nag would no more have dreamed of disobeying his shrill little orders than he would have dreamed of killing him on that day when Big Toomai carried the little brown baby under Kala Nag’s tusks, and told him to salute his master that was to be.

‘Yes,’ said Little Toomai, ‘he is afraid of me,’ and he took long strides up to Kala Nag, called him a fat old pig, and made him lift up his feet one after the other.

‘Wah!’ said Little Toomai, ‘thou art a big elephant,’ and he wagged his fluffy head, quoting his father. ‘The Government may pay for elephants, but they belong to us mahouts. When thou art old, Kala Nag, there will come some rich Rajah, and he will buy thee from the Government, on account of thy size and thy manners, and then thou wilt have nothing to do but to carry gold earrings in thy ears, and a gold howdah on thy back, and a red cloth covered with gold on thy sides, and walk at the head of the processions of the King. Then I shall sit on thy neck, O Kala Nag, with a silver ankus, and men will run before us with golden sticks, crying, “Room for the King’s elephant!” That will be good, Kala Nag, but not so good as this hunting in the jungles.’

‘Umph!’ said Big Toomai. ‘Thou art a boy, and as wild as a buffalo-calf. This running up and down among the hills is not the best Government service. I am getting old, and I do not love wild elephants. Give me brick elephant-lines, one stall to each elephant, and big stumps to tie them to safely, and flat, broad roads to exercise upon, instead of this come-and-go camping. Aha, the Cawnpore barracks were good. There was a bazar close by, and only three hours’ work a day.’

Little Toomai remembered the Cawnpore elephant-lines and said nothing. He very much preferred the camp life, and hated those broad, flat roads, with the daily grubbing for grass in the forage-reserve, and the long hours when there was nothing to do except to watch Kala Nag fidgeting in hispickets.

What Little Toomai liked was the scramble up bridle-paths that only an elephant could take; the dip into the valley below; the glimpses of the wild elephants browsing miles away; the rush of the frightened pig and peacock under Kala Nag’s feet; the blinding warm rains, when all the hills and valleys smoked; the beautiful misty mornings when nobody knew where they would camp that night; the steady, cautious drive of the wild elephants, and the mad rush and blaze and hullabaloo of the last night’s drive, when the elephants poured into the stockade like boulders in a landslide, found that they could not get out, and flung themselves at the heavy posts only to be driven back by yells and flaring torches and volleys of blank cartridge.

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Even a little boy could be of use there, and Toomai was as useful as three boys. He would get his torch and wave it, and yell with the best. But the really good time came when the driving out began, and the Keddah—that is, the stockade—looked like a picture of the end of the world, and men had to make signs to one another, because they could not hear themselves speak. Then Little Toomai would climb up to the top of one of the quivering stockade-posts, his sun-bleached brown hair flying loose all over his shoulders, and he looking like a goblin in the torch-light; and as soon as there was a lull you could hear his high-pitched yells of encouragement to Kala Nag, above the trumpeting and crashing, and snapping of ropes, and groans of the tethered elephants. ‘Maîl, maîl, Kala Nag! [Go on, go on, Black Snake!] Dant do! [Give him the tusk!] Somalo! Somalo! [Careful, careful!] Maro! Mar! [Hit him, hit him!] Mind the post! Arré! Arré! Hai! Yai! Kya-a-ah!’ he would shout, and the big fight between Kala Nag and the wild elephant would sway to and fro across the Keddah, and the old elephant-catchers would wipe the sweat out of their eyes, and find time to nod to Little Toomai wriggling with joy on the top of the posts.

He did more than wriggle. One night he slid down from the post and slipped in between the elephants, and threw up the loose end of a rope, which had dropped, to a driver who was trying to get a purchase on the leg of a kicking young calf (calves always give more trouble than full-grown animals). Kala Nag saw him, caught him in his trunk, and handed him up to Big Toomai, who slapped him then and there, and put him back on the post.

Next morning he gave him a scolding, and said: ‘Are not good brick elephant-lines and a little tent-carrying enough, that thou must needs go elephant-catching on thy own account, little worthless? Now those foolish hunters, whose pay is less than my pay, have spoken to Petersen Sahib of the matter.’ Little Toomai was frightened. He did not know much of white men, but Petersen Sahib was the greatest white man in the world to him. He was the head of all the Keddah operations—the man who caught all the elephants for the Government of India, and who knew more about the ways of elephants than any living man.

‘What—what will happen?’ said Little Toomai.

‘Happen! the worst that can happen. Petersen Sahib is a madman. Else why should he go hunting these wild devils? He may even require thee to be an elephant-catcher, to sleep anywhere in these fever-filled jungles, and at last to be trampled to death in the Keddah. It is well that this nonsense ends safely. Next week the catching is over, and we of the plains are sent back to our stations. Then we will march on smooth roads, and forget all this hunting. But, son, I am angry that thou shouldst meddle in the business that belongs to these dirty Assamese jungle-folk. Kala Nag will obey none but me, so I must go with him into the Keddah; but he is only a fighting elephant, and he does not help to rope them. So I sit at my ease, as befits a mahout,—not a mere hunter,—a mahout, I say, and a man who gets a pension at the end of his service. Is the family of Toomai of the Elephants to be trodden underfoot in the dirt of a Keddah? Bad one! Wicked one! Worthless son! Go and wash Kala Nag and attend to his ears, and see that there are no thorns in his feet; or else Petersen Sahib will surely catch thee and make thee a wild hunter—a follower of elephants’ foot-tracks, a jungle-bear. Bah! Shame! Go!’

Little Toomai went off without saying a word, but he told Kala Nag all his grievances while he was examining his feet. ‘No matter,’ said Little Toomai, turning up the fringe of Kala Nag’s huge right ear. ‘They have said my name to Petersen Sahib, and perhaps—and perhaps—and perhaps—who knows? Hai! That is a big thorn that I have pulled out!’

The next few days were spent in getting the elephants together, in walking the newly caught wild elephants up and down between a couple of tame ones, to prevent them from giving too much trouble on the downward march to the plains, and in taking stock of the blankets and ropes and things that had been worn out or lost in the forest.

Petersen Sahib came in on his clever she-elephant Pudmini. He had been paying off other camps among the hills, for the season was coming to an end, and there was a native clerk sitting at a table under a tree to pay the drivers their wages. As each man was paid he went back to his elephant, and joined the line that stood ready to start. The catchers, and hunters, and beaters, the men of the regular Keddah, who stayed in the jungle year in and year out, sat on the backs of the elephants. that belonged to Petersen Sahib’s permanent force, or leaned against the trees with their guns across their arms, and made fun of the drivers who were going away, and laughed when the newly caught elephants broke the line and ran about.

Big Toomai went up to the clerk with Little Toomai behind him, and Machua Appa, the headtracker, said in an undertone to a friend of his, ‘There goes one piece of good elephant-stuff at least. ’Tis a pity to send that young jungle-cock to moult in the plains.’

Now Petersen Sahib had ears all over him, as a man must have who listens to the most silent of all living things—the wild elephant. He turned where he was lying all along on Pudmini’s back, and said, ‘What is that? I did not know of a man among the plains-drivers who had wit enough to rope even a dead elephant.’

‘This is not a man, but a boy. He went into the Keddah at the last drive, and threw Barmao there the rope when we were trying to get that young calf with the blotch on his shoulder away from his mother.’

Machua Appa pointed at Little Toomai, and Petersen Sahib looked, and Little Toomai bowed to the earth.

‘He throw a rope? He is smaller than a picket pin. Little one, what is thy name?’ said Petersen. Sahib.

Little Toomai was too frightened to speak, but Kala Nag was behind him, and Toomai made a sign with his hand, and the elephant caught him up in his trunk and held him level with Pudmini’s forehead, in front of the great Petersen Sahib. Then Little Toomai covered his face with his hands, for he was only a child, and except where elephants were concerned, he was just as bashful as a child could be.

‘Oho!’ said Petersen Sahib, smiling underneath his moustache, ‘and why didst thou teach thy elephant that trick? Was it to help thee steal green corn from the roofs of the houses when the ears are put out to dry?’

‘Not green corn, Protector of the Poor,—melons,’ said Little Toomai, and all the men sitting about broke into a roar of laughter. Most of them had taught their elephants that trick when they were boys. Little Toomai was hanging eight feet up in the air, and he wished very much that he were eight feet under ground.

‘He is Toomai, my son, Sahib,’ said Big Toomai, scowling. ‘He is a very bad boy, and he will end in a jail, Sahib.’

‘Of that I have my doubts,’ said Petersen Sahib. ‘A boy who can face a full Keddah at his age does not end in jails. See, little one, here are four annas to spend in sweetmeats because thou hast a little head under that great thatch of hair. In time thou mayest become a hunter too.’ Big Toomai scowled more than ever. ‘Remember, though, that Keddahs are not good for children to play in,’ Petersen Sahib went on.

‘Must I never go there, Sahib?’ asked Little Toomai, with a big gasp.

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‘Yes.’ Petersen Sahib smiled again. ‘When thou hast seen the elephants dance. That is the proper time. Come to me when thou hast seen the elephants dance, and then I will let thee go into all the Keddahs.’

There was another roar of laughter, for that is an old joke among elephant-catchers, and it means just never. There are great cleared flat places hidden away in the forests that are called elephants’ ball-rooms, but even these are only found by accident, and no man has ever seen the elephants dance. When a driver boasts of his skill and bravery the other drivers say, ‘And when didst thou see the elephants dance?’

Kala Nag put Little Toomai down, and he bowed to the earth again and went away with his father, and gave the silver four-anna piece to his mother, who was nursing his baby brother, and they all were put up on Kala Nag’s back, and the line of grunting, squealing elephants rolled down the hill-path to the plains. It was a very lively march on account of the new elephants, who gave trouble at every ford, and who needed coaxing or beating every other minute.

Big Toomai prodded Kala Nag spitefully, for he was very angry, but Little Toomai was too happy to speak. Petersen Sahib had noticed him, and given him money, so he felt as a private soldier would feel if he had been called out of the ranks and praised by his commander-in-chief.

‘What did Petersen Sahib mean by the elephant-dance?’ he said, at last, softly to his mother.

Big Toomai heard him and grunted. ‘That thou shouldst never be one of these hill-buffaloes of trackers. That was what he meant. Oh, you in front, what is blocking the way?’

An Assamese driver, two or three elephants ahead, turned round angrily, crying: ‘Bring up Kala Nag, and knock this youngster of mine into good behaviour. Why should Petersen Sahib have chosen me to go down with you donkeys of the rice-fields? Lay your beast alongside, Toomai, and let him prod with his tusks. By all the gods of the Hills, these new elephants are possessed, or else they can smell their companions in the jungle.’

Kala Nag hit the new elephant in the ribs and knocked the wind out of him, as Big Toomai said, ‘We have swept the hills of wild elephants at the last catch. It is only your carelessness in driving. Must I keep order along the whole line?’

‘Hear him!’ said the other driver. ‘We have swept the hills! Ho! ho ! You are very wise, you plains-people. Anyone but a mud-head who never saw the jungle would know that they know that the drives are ended for the season. Therefore all the wild elephants to-night will——but why should I waste wisdom on a river-turtle?’

‘What will they do?’ Little Toomai called out.

‘Ohé, little one. Art thou there? Well, I will tell thee, for thou hast a cool head. They will dance, and it behoves thy father, who has swept all the hills of all the elephants, to double-chain his pickets to-night.’

‘What talk is this?’ said Big Toomai. ‘For forty years, father and son, we have tended elephants, and we have never heard such moonshine about dances.’

‘Yes; but a plains-man who lives in a but knows only the four walls of his hut. Well, leave thy elephants unshackled tonight and see what comes; as for their dancing, I have seen the place where——Bapree-Bap! how many windings has the Dihang River? Here is another ford, and we must swim the calves. Stop still, you behind there.’

And in this way, talking and wrangling and splashing through the rivers, they made their first march to a sort of receiving-camp for the new elephants; but they lost their tempers long before they got there.

Then the elephants were chained by their hind legs to their big stumps of pickets, and extra ropes were fitted to the new elephants, and the fodder was piled before them, and the hill-drivers went back to Petersen Sahib through the afternoon light, telling the plains-drivers to be extra careful that night, and laughing when the plains-drivers asked the reason.

Little Toomai attended to Kala Nag’s supper, and as evening fell wandered through the camp, unspeakably happy, in search of a tom-tom. When an Indian child’s heart is full, he does not run about and make a noise in an irregular fashion. He sits down to a sort of revel all by himself. And Little Toomai had been spoken to by Petersen Sahib! If he had not found what he wanted, I believe he would have burst. But the sweetmeat-seller in the camp lent him a little tom-tom—a drum beaten with the flat of the hand—and he sat down, crosslegged, before Kala Nag as the stars began to come out, the tom-tom in his lap, and he thumped and he thumped and he thumped, and the more he thought of the great honour that had been done to him, the more he thumped, all alone among the elephant-fodder. There was no tune and no words, but the thumping made him happy.

The new elephants strained at their ropes, and squealed and trumpeted from time to time, and he could hear his mother in the camp but putting his small brother to sleep with an old, old song about the great God Shiv, who once told all the animals what they should eat. It is a very soothing lullaby, and the first verse says:—

Shiv, who poured the harvest and made the winds to blow,
Sitting at the doorways of a day of long ago,
Gave to each his portion, food and toil and fate,
From the King upon the guddee to the Beggar at the gate.
All things made he—Shiva the Preserver.
Mahadeo ! Mahadeo ! He made all,—
Thorn for the camel, fodder for the kine,
And mother’s heart for sleepy head, O little son of mine!

Little Toomai came in with a joyous tunk-a-tunk at the end of each verse, till he felt sleepy and stretched himself on the fodder at Kala Nag’s side.

At last the elephants began to lie down one after another, as is their custom, till only Kala Nag at the right of the line was left standing up; and he rocked slowly from side to side, his ears put forward to listen to the night wind as it blew very slowly across the hills. The air was full of all the night noises that, taken together, make one big silence—the click of one bamboo-stem against the other, the rustle of something alive in the undergrowth, the scratch and squawk of a half-waked bird (birds are awake in the night much more often than we imagine), and the fall of water ever so far away. Little Toomai slept for some time, and when he waked it was brilliant moonlight, and Kala Nag was still standing up with his ears cocked. Little Toomai turned, rustling in the fodder, and watched the curve of his big back against half the stars in heaven; and while he watched he heard, so far away that it sounded no more than a pinhole of noise pricked through the stillness, the ‘hoot-toot’ of a wild elephant.

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All the elephants in the lines jumped up as if they had been shot, and their grunts at last waked the sleeping mahouts, and they came out and drove in the picket-pegs with big mallets, and tightened this rope and knotted that till all was quiet. One new elephant had nearly grubbed up his picket, and Big Toomai took off Kala Nag’s leg-chain and shackled that elephant fore-foot to hind-foot, but slipped a loop of grass-string round Kala Nag’s leg, and told him to remember that he was tied fast. He knew that he and his father and his grandfather had done the very same thing hundreds of times before. Kala Nag did not answer to the order by gurgling, as he usually did. He stood still, looking out across the moonlight, his head a little raised, and his ears spread like fans, up to the great folds of the Garo hills.

‘Look to him if he grows restless in the night,’ said Big Toomai to Little Toomai, and he went into the hut and slept. Little Toomai was just going to sleep, too, when he heard the coir string snap with a little ‘tang,’ and Kala Nag rolled out of his pickets as slowly and as silently as a cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley. Little Toomai pattered after him, barefooted, down the road in the moonlight, calling under his breath, ‘Kala Nag! Kala Nag! Take me with you, O Kala Nag!’ The elephant turned without a sound, took three strides back to the boy in the moonlight, put down his trunk, swung him up to his neck, and almost before Little Toomai had settled his knees slipped into the forest.

There was one blast of furious trumpeting from the lines, and then the silence shut down on everything, and Kala Nag began to move. Sometimes a tuft of high grass washed along his sides as a wave washes along the sides of a ship, and sometimes a cluster of wild-pepper vines would scrape along his back, or a bamboo would creak where his shoulder touched it; but between those times he moved absolutely without any sound, drifting through the thick Garo forest as though it had been smoke. He was going uphill, but though Little Toomai watched the stars in the rifts of the trees, he could not tell in what direction.

Then Kala Nag reached the crest of the ascent and stopped for a minute, and Little Toomai could see the tops of the trees lying all speckled and furry under the moonlight for miles and miles, and the blue-white mist over the river in the hollow. Toomai leaned forward and looked, and he felt that the forest was awake below him—awake and alive and crowded. A big brown fruit-eating bat brushed past his ear; a porcupine’s quills rattled in the thicket; and in the darkness between the tree-stems he heard a hog-bear digging hard in the moist, warm earth, and snuffing as it digged.

Then the branches closed over his head again, and Kala Nag began to go slowly down into the valley—not quietly this time, but as a runaway gun goes down a steep bank—in one rush. The huge limbs moved as steadily as pistons, eight feet to each stride, and the wrinkled skin of the elbow-points rustled. The undergrowth on either side of him ripped with a noise like torn canvas, and the saplings that he heaved away right and left with his shoulders sprang back again, and banged him on the flank, and great trails of creepers, all matted together, hung from his tusks as he threw his head from side to side and ploughed out his pathway. Then Little Toomai laid himself down close to the great neck, lest a swinging bough should sweep him to the ground, and he wished that he were back in the lines again.

The grass began to get squashy, and Kala Nag’s feet sucked and squelched as he put them down, and the night mist at the bottom of the valley chilled Little Toomai. There was a splash and a trample, and the rush of running water, and Kala Nag strode through the bed of a river, feeling his way at each step. Above the noise of the water, as it swirled round the elephant’s legs, Little Toomai could hear more splashing and some trumpeting both up stream and down—great grunts and angry snortings, and all the mist about him seemed to be full of rolling, wavy shadows.

‘Ai!’ he said, half aloud, his teeth chattering. ‘The elephant-folk are out to-night. It is the dance, then.’

Kala Nag swashed out of the water, blew his trunk clear, and began another climb; but this time he was not alone, and he had not to make his path. That was made already, six feet wide, in front of him, where the bent jungle-grass was trying to recover itself and stand up. Many elephants must have gone that way only a few minutes before. Little Toomai looked back, and behind him a great wild tusker, with his little pig’s eyes glowing like hot coals, was just lifting himself out of the misty river. Then the trees closed up again, and they went on and up, with trumpetings and crashings, and the sound of breaking branches on every side of them.

At last Kala Nag stood still between two treetrunks at the very top of the hill. They were part of a circle of trees that grew round an irregular space of some three or four acres, and in all that space, as Little Toomai could see, the ground had been trampled down as hard as a brick floor. Some trees grew in the centre of the clearing, but their bark was rubbed away, and the white wood beneath showed all shiny and polished in the patches of moonlight. There were creepers hanging from the upper branches, and the bells of the flowers of the creepers, great waxy white things like convolvuluses, hung down fast asleep; but within the limits of the clearing there was not a
single blade of green—nothing but the trampled earth.

The moonlight showed it all iron-grey, except where some elephants stood upon it, and their shadows were inky black. Little Toomai looked, holding his breath, with his eyes starting out of his head, and as he looked, more and more and more elephants swung out into the open from between the tree-trunks. Little Toomai could count only up to ten, and he counted again and again on his fingers till he lost count of the tens, and his head began to swim. Outside the clearing he could hear them crashing in the undergrowth as they worked their way up the hillside; but as soon as they were within the circle of the tree-trunks they moved like ghosts.

There were white-tusked wild males, with fallen leaves and nuts and twigs lying in the wrinkles of their necks and the folds of their ears; fat, slow-footed she-elephants, with restless little pinky-black calves only three or four feet high running under their stomachs; young elephants with their tusks just beginning to show, and very proud of them; lanky, scraggy old-maid elephants, with their hollow, anxious faces, and trunks like rough bark; savage old bull-elephants, scarred from shoulder to flank with great weals and cuts of bygone fights, and the caked dirt of their solitary mud-baths dropping from their shoulders; and there was one with a broken tusk and the marks of the full-stroke, the terrible drawing scrape, of a tiger’s claws on his side.

They were standing head to head, or walking to and fro across the ground in couples, or rocking and swaying all by themselves—scores and scores of elephants.

Toomai knew that, so long as he lay still on Kala Nag’s neck, nothing would happen to him; for even in the rush and scramble of a Keddah-drive a wild elephant does not reach up with his trunk and drag a man off the neck of a tame elephant; and these elephants were not thinking of men that night. Once they started and put their ears forward when they heard the chinking of a leg-iron in the forest, but it was Pudmini, Petersen Sahib’s pet elephant, her chain snapped short off, grunting, snuffling up the hillside. She must have broken her pickets, and come straight from Petersen Sahib’s camp; and Little Toomai saw another elephant, one that he did not know, with deep rope-galls on his back and breast. He, too, must have run away from some camp in the hills about.

At last there was no sound of any more elephants moving in the forest, and Kala Nag rolled out from his station between the trees and went into the middle of the crowd, clucking and gurgling, and all the elephants began to talk in their own tongue, and to move about.

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Still lying down, Little Toomai looked down upon scores and scores of broad backs, and wagging ears, and tossing trunks, and little rolling eyes. He heard the click of tusks as they crossed other tusks by accident, and the dry rustle of trunks twined together, and the chafing of enormous sides and shoulders in the crowd, and the incessant flick and hissh of the great tails. Then a cloud came over the moon, and he sat in black darkness; but the quiet, steady hustling and pushing and gurgling went on just the same. He knew that there were elephants all round Kala Nag, and that there was no chance of backing him out of the assembly; so he set his teeth and shivered. In a Keddah at least there was torchlight and shouting, but here he was all alone in the dark, and once a trunk came up and touched him on the knee.

Then an elephant trumpeted, and they all took it up for five or ten terrible seconds. The dew from the trees above spattered down like rain on the unseen backs, and a dull booming noise began, not very loud at first, and Little Toomai could not tell what it was; but it grew and grew, and Kala Nag lifted up one fore-foot and then the other, and brought them down on the ground—one-two, one-two, as steadily as trip-hammers. The elephants were stamping all together now, and it sounded like a war-drum beaten at the mouth of a cave. The dew fell from the trees till there was no more left to fall, and the booming went on, and the ground rocked and shivered, and Little Toomai put his hands up to his ears to shut out the sound. But it was all one gigantic jar that ran through him—this stamp of hundreds of heavy feet on the raw earth. Once or twice he could feel Kala Nag and all the others surge forward a few strides, and the thumping would change to the crushing sound -of juicy green things being bruised, but in a minute or two the boom of feet on hard earth began again. A tree was creaking and groaning somewhere near him. He put out his arm and felt the bark, but Kala Nag moved forward, still tramping, and he could not tell where he was in the clearing. There was no sound from the elephants, except once, when two or three little calves squeaked together. Then he heard a thump and a shuffle, and the booming went on. It must have lasted fully two hours, and Little Toomai ached in every nerve; but he knew by the smell of the night air that the dawn was coming.

The morning broke in one sheet of pale yellow behind the green hills, and the booming stopped with the first ray, as though the light had been an order. Before Little Toomai had got the ringing out of his head, before even he had shifted his position, there was not an elephant in sight except Kala Nag, Pudmini, and the elephant with the rope-galls, and there was neither sign nor rustle nor whisper down the hillsides to show where the others had gone.

Little Toomai stared again and again. The clearing, as he remembered it, had grown in the night. More trees stood in the middle of it, but the undergrowth and the jungle-grass at the sides had been rolled back. Little Toomai stared once more. Now he understood the trampling. The elephants had stamped out more room—had stamped the thick grass and juicy cane to trash, the trash into slivers, the slivers into tiny fibres, and the fibres into hard earth.

‘Wah!’ said Little Toomai, and his eyes were very heavy. ‘Kala Nag, my lord, let us keep by Pudmim and go to Petersen Sahib’s camp, or I shall drop from thy neck.’

The third elephant watched the two go away, snorted, wheeled round, and took his own path. He may have belonged to some little native king’s establishment, fifty or, sixty or a hundred miles away.

Two hours later, as Petersen Sahib was eating early breakfast, the elephants, who had been double-chained that night, began to trumpet, and Pudmini, mired to the shoulders, with Kala Nag, very foot-sore, shambled into the camp.

Little Toomai’s face was grey and pinched, and his hair was full of leaves and drenched with dew; but he tried to salute Petersen Sahib, and cried faintly: ‘The dance—the elephant-dance! I have seen it, and—I die!’ As Kala Nag sat down, he slid off his neck in a dead faint.

But, since native children have no nerves worth speaking of, in two hours he was lying very contentedly in Petersen Sahib’s hammock with Petersen Sahib’s shooting-coat under his head, and a glass of warm milk, a little brandy, with a dash of quinine inside of him; and while the old hairy, scarred hunters of the jungles sat three-deep before him, looking at him as though he were a spirit, he told his tale in short words, as a child will, and wound up with:—

‘Now, if I lie in one word, send men to see, and they will find that the elephant-folk have trampled down more room in their dance-room, and they will find ten and ten, and many times ten, tracks leading to that dance-room. They made more room with their feet, I have seen it. Kala Nag took me, and I saw. Also Kala Nag is very leg-weary!’

Little Toomai lay back and slept all through the long afternoon and into the twilight, and while he slept Petersen Sahib and Machua Appa followed the track of the two elephants for fifteen miles across the hills. Petersen Sahib had spent eighteen years in catching elephants, and he had only once before found such a dance-place. Machua Appa had no need to look twice at the clearing to see what had been done there, or to scratch with his toe in the packed, rammed earth.

‘The child speaks truth,’ said he. ‘All this was done last night, and I have counted seventy tracks crossing the river. See, Sahib, where Pudmini’s leg-iron cut the bark off that tree! Yes; she was there too.’

They looked at each other, and up and down, and they wondered; for the ways of elephants are beyond the wit of any man, black or white, to fathom.

‘Forty years and five,’ said Machua Appa, ‘have I followed my lord the elephant, but never have I heard that any child of man had seen what this child has seen. By all the Gods of the Hills, it is—what can we say?’ and he shook his head.

When they got back to camp it was time for the evening meal. Petersen Sahib ate alone in his tent, but he gave orders that the camp should have two sheep and some fowls, as well as a double ration of flour and rice and salt, for he knew that there would be a feast.

Big Toomai had come up hot-foot from the camp in the plains to search for his son and his elephant, and now that he had found them he looked at them as though he were afraid of them both. And there was a feast by the blazing campfires in front of the lines of picketed elephants, and Little Toomai was the hero of it all; and the big brown elephant-catchers, the trackers and drivers and ropers, and the men who know all the secrets of breaking the wildest elephants, passed him from one to the other, and they marked his forehead with blood from the breast of a newly killed jungle-cock, to show that he was a forester, initiated and free of all the jungles.

And at last, when the flames died down, and the red light of the logs made the elephants look as though they had been dipped in blood too, Machua Appa, the head of all the drivers of all the Keddahs,—Machua Appa, Petersen Sahib’s other self, who had never seen a made road in forty years: Machua Appa, who was so great that he had no other name than Machua Appa leaped to his feet, with Little Toomai held high in the air above his head, and shouted: ‘Listen, my brothers. Listen, too, you my lords in the lines there, for I, Machua Appa, am speaking! This little one shall no more be called Little Toomai, but Toomai of the Elephants, as his great-grandfather was called before him. What never man has seen he has seen through the long night, and the favour of the elephant-folk and of the Gods of the Jungles is with him. He shall become a great tracker; he shall become greater than I, even I—Machua Appa! He shall follow the new trail, and the stale trail, and the mixed trail, with a clear eye! He shall take no harm in the Keddah when he runs under their bellies to rope the wild tuskers; and if he slips before the feet of the charging bull-elephant, that bull-elephant shall know who he is and shall not crush him. Ahai! my lords in the chains,’—he whirled up the line of pickets,—‘here is the little one that has seen your dances in your hidden places—the sight that never man saw! Give him honour, my lords! Salaam karo, my children! Make your salute to Toomai of the Elephants Gunga Pershad, ahaa ! Hira Guj, Birchi Guj, Kuttar Guj, ahaa ! Pudmini,—thou hast seen him at the dance, and thou too, Kala Nag, my pearl among elephants!—ahaa! Together! To Toomai of the Elephants. Barrao!’

And at that last wild yell the whole line flung up their trunks till the tips touched their foreheads, and broke out into the full salute, the crashing trumpet-peal that only the Viceroy of India hears—the Salaam-ut of the Keddah.

But it was all for the sake of Little Toomai, who had seen what never man had seen before—the dance of the elephants at night and alone in the heart of the Garo hills!