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! 

page 1 of 8

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.

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‘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.

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‘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?’

page 5

‘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.

page 6

‘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.

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—
The herds are shut in byre and hut,
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
(Night-Song in the Jungle)

IT was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big grey nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. ‘Augrh!’ said Father Wolf, ‘it is time to hunt again’; and he was going to spring, downhill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: ‘Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves; and good luck and strong white teeth go with the noble children, that they may never forget the hungry in this world.’

It was the jackal—Tabaqui, the Dish-licker—and the wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps. But they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than any one else in the Jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of any one, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way. Even the tiger runs and hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature. We call it hydrophobia, but they call it dewanee—the madness—and run.

‘Enter, then, and look,’ said Father Wolf stiffly; ‘but there is no food here.’

‘For a wolf, no,’ said Tabaqui; ‘but for so mean a person as myself a dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log [the Jackal-People], to pick and choose?’ He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he found the bone of a buck with some meat on it, and sat, cracking the end merrily.

‘All thanks for this good meal,’ he said, licking his lips: ‘How beautiful are the noble children! How large are their eyes! And so young too! Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the children of Kings are men from the beginning.’

Now, Tabaqui knew as well as any one else that there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces; and it pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.

Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made: then he said spitefully:

‘Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting-grounds. He will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me.’

Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River, twenty miles away.

‘He has no right!’ Father Wolf began angrily —‘By the Law of the jungle he has no right to change his quarters without due warning. He will frighten every head of game within ten miles, and I—I have to kill for two, these days.’

‘His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for nothing,’ said Mother Wolf quietly. ‘He has been lame in one foot from his birth. That is why he has only killed cattle. Now the villagers of the Waingunga are angry with him, and he has come here to make our villagers angry. They will scour the Jungle for him when he is far away, and we and our children must run when the grass is set alight. Indeed, we are very grateful to Shere Khan!’

‘Shall I tell him of your gratitude?’ said Tabaqui.

‘Out!’ snapped Father Wolf. ‘Out and hunt with thy master. Thou hast done harm enough for one night.’

‘I go,’ said Tabaqui quietly. ‘Ye can hear Shere Khan below in the thickets. I might have saved myself the message.’

Father Wolf listened, and below in the valley that ran down to a little river, he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.

‘The fool!’ said Father Wolf. ‘To begin a night’s work with that noise! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga bullocks?’

‘H’sh! It is neither bullock nor buck he hunts to-night,’ said Mother Wolf. ‘It is Man.’ The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that seemed to come from every quarter of the compass. It was the noise that bewilders woodcutters and gipsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the tiger.

‘Man!’ said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth. ‘Faugh! Are there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must eat Man, and on our ground too?’

The Law of the jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting-grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the Jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenceless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too—and it is true—that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth.

The purr grew louder, and ended in the fullthroated ‘Aaarh!’ of the tiger’s charge.

Then there was a howl—an untigerish howl—from Shere Khan. ‘He has missed,’ said Mother Wolf. ‘What is it?’

Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan muttering and mumbling savagely, as he tumbled about in the scrub.

‘The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a woodcutter’s camp-fire, and has burned his feet,’ said Father Wolf, with a grunt. ‘Tabaqui is with him.’

‘Something is coming uphill,’ said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear. ‘Get ready.’

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The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world—the wolf checked in midspring. He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost where he left ground.

‘Man!’ he snapped. ‘A man’s cub. Look!’

Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walk—as soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolf’s cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolf’s face, and laughed.

‘Is that a man’s cub?’ said Mother Wolf. ‘I have never seen one. Bring it here.’

A wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary, mouth an egg without breaking it, and though Father Wolf’s jaws closed right on the child’s back not a tooth even scratched the skin, as he laid it down among the cubs.

‘How little! How naked, and—how bold!’ said Mother Wolf softly. The baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get close to the warm hide. ‘Ahai! He is taking his meal with the others. And so this is a man’s cub. Now, was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man’s cub among her children?’

‘I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our Pack or in my time,’ said Father Wolf. ‘He is altogether without hair, and I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he looks up and is not afraid.’

The moonlight was blocked out of the mouth of the cave, for Shere Khan’s great square head and shoulders were thrust into the entrance. Tabaqui, behind him, was squeaking: ‘My lord, my lord, it went in here!’

‘Shere Khan does us great honour,’ said Father Wolf, but his eyes were very angry. ‘What does Shere Khan need? ’

‘My quarry. A man’s cub went this way,’ said Shere Khan. ‘Its parents have run off. Give it to me.’

Shere Khan had jumped at a woodcutter’s camp-fire, as Father Wolf had said, and was furious from the pain of his burned feet. But Father Wolf knew that the mouth of the cave was too narrow for a tiger to come in by. Even where he was, Shere Khan’s shoulders and forepaws were cramped for want of room, as a man’s would be if he tried to fight in a barrel.

‘The Wolves are a free people,’ said Father Wolf. ‘They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped cattle-killer. The man’s cub is ours—to kill if we choose.’

‘Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!’

The tiger’s roar filled the cave with thunder. Mother Wolf shook herself clear of the cubs and sprang forward, her eyes, like two green moons in the darkness, facing the blazing eyes of Shere Khan.

‘And it is I, Raksha [The Demon], who answer. The man’s cub is mine, Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog-eater—fish-killer—he shall hunt thee! Now get hence, or by the Sambhur that I killed (I eat no starved cattle), back thou goest to thy mother, burned beast of the jungle, lamer than ever thou camest into the world! Go!’

Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called The Demon for compliment’s sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave-mouth growling, and when he was clear he shouted:—

‘Each dog barks in his own yard! We will see what the Pack will say to this fostering of man cubs. The cub is mine, and to my teeth he will come in the end, O bush-tailed thieves!’

Mother Wolf threw herself down panting among the cubs, and Father Wolf said to her gravely:—

‘Shere Khan speaks this much truth. The cub must be shown to the Pack. Wilt thou still keep him, Mother?’

‘Keep him!’ she gasped. ‘He came naked, by night, alone and very hungry; yet he was not afraid! Look, he has pushed one of my babes to one side already. And that lame butcher would have killed him and would have run off to the Waingunga while the villagers here hunted through all our lairs in revenge! Keep him? Assuredly I will keep him. Lie still, little frog. O thou Mowgli—for Mowgli the Frog I will call thee—the time will come when thou wilt hunt Shere Khan as he has hunted thee.’

‘But what will our Pack say?’ said Father Wolf.

The Law of the Jungle lays down very clearly that any wolf may, when he marries, withdraw from the Pack he belongs to; but as soon as his cubs are old enough to stand on their feet he must bring them to the Pack Council, which is generally held once a month at full moon, in order that the other wolves may identify them. After that inspection the cubs are free to run where they please, and until they have killed their first buck no excuse is accepted if a grown wolf of the Pack kills one of them. The punishment is death where the murderer can be found; and if you think for a minute you will see that this must be so.

Father Wolf waited till his cubs could run a little, and then on the night of the Pack Meeting took them and Mowgli and Mother Wolf to the Council Rock—a hilltop covered with stones and boulders where a hundred wolves could hide. Akela, the great grey Lone Wolf, who led all the Pack by strength and cunning, lay out at full length on his rock, and below him sat forty or more wolves of every size and colour, from badger-coloured veterans who could handle a buck alone, to young black three-year-olds who thought they could. The Lone Wolf had led them for a year now. He had fallen twice into a wolf-trap in his youth, and once he had been beaten and left for dead; so he knew the manners and customs of men. There was very little talking at the Rock. The cubs tumbled over each other in the centre of the circle where their mothers and fathers sat, and now and again a senior wolf would go quietly up to a cub, look at him carefully, and return to his place on noiseless feet. Sometimes a mother would push her cub far out into the moonlight, to be sure that he had not been overlooked. Akela from his rock would cry: ‘Ye know the Law—ye know the Law. Look well, O Wolves!’ and the anxious mothers would take up the call: ‘Look—look well, O Wolves!’

At last—and Mother Wolf’s neck-bristles lifted as the time came—Father Wolf pushed ‘Mowgli the Frog,’ as they called him, into the centre, where he sat laughing and playing with some pebbles that glistened in the moonlight.

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Akela never raised his head from his paws, but went on with the monotonous cry: ‘Look well!’ A muffled roar came up from behind the rocks—the voice of Shere Khan crying: ‘The cub is mine. Give him to me. What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?’ Akela never even twitched his ears: all he said was: ‘Look well, O Wolves! What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People? Look well!’

There was a chorus of deep growls, and a young wolf in his fourth year flung back Shere Khan’s question to Akela: ‘What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?’ Now, the Law of the jungle lays down that if there is any dispute as to the right of a cub to be accepted by the Pack, he must be spoken for by at least two members of the Pack who are not his father and mother.

‘Who speaks for this cub?’ said Akela. ‘Among the Free People who speaks?’ There was no answer, and Mother Wolf got ready for what she knew would be her last fight, if things came to fighting.

Then the only other creature who is allowed at the Pack Council—Baloo, the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolfcubs the Law of the Jungle: old Baloo, who can come and go where he pleases because he eats only nuts and roots and honey—rose up on his hindquarters and grunted.

‘The man’s cub—the man’s cub?’ he said. ‘I speak for the man’s cub. There is no harm in a man’s cub. I have no gift of words, but I speak the truth. Let him run with the Pack, and be entered with the others. I myself will teach him.’

‘We need yet another,’ said Akela. ‘Baloo has spoken, and he is our teacher for the young cubs. Who speaks besides Baloo? ’

A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.

‘O Akela, and ye the Free People,’ he purred, ‘I have no right in your assembly; but the Law of the Jungle says that if there is a doubt which is not a killing matter in regard to a new cub, the life of that cub may be bought at a price. And the Law does not say who may or may not pay that price. Am I right?’

‘Good! good!’ said the young wolves, who are always hungry. ‘Listen to Bagheera. The cub can be bought for a price. It is the Law.’

‘Knowing that I have no right to speak here, I ask your leave.’

‘Speak then,’ cried twenty voices.

‘To kill a naked cub is shame. Besides, he may make better sport for you when he is grown. Baloo has spoken in his behalf. Now to Baloo’s word I will add one bull, and a fat one, newly killed, not half a mile from here, if ye will accept the man’s cub according to the Law. Is it difficult?’

There was a clamour of scores of voices, saying: ‘What matter? He will die in the winter rains. He will scorch in the sun. What harm can a naked frog do us? Let him run with the Pack. Where is the bull, Bagheera? Let him be accepted.’ And then came Akela’s deep bay, crying: ‘Look well—look well, O Wolves!’

Mowgli was still deeply interested in the pebbles and he did not notice when the wolves came and looked at him one by one. At last they all went down the hill for the dead bull, and only Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, and Mowgli’s own wolves were left. Shere Khan roared still in the night, for he was very angry that Mowgli had not been handed over to him.

‘Ay, roar well,’ said Bagheera, under his whiskers; ‘for the time comes when this naked thing will make thee roar to another tune, or I know nothing of Man.’

‘It was well done,’ said Akela. ‘Men and their cubs are very wise. He may be a help in time.’

‘Truly, a help in time of need; for none can hope to lead the Pack for ever,’ said Bagheera.

Akela said nothing. He was thinking of the time that comes to every leader of every pack when his strength goes from him and he gets feebler and feebler, till at last he is killed by the wolves and a new leader comes up—to be killed in his turn.

‘Take him away,’ he said to Father Wolf, ‘and train him as befits one of the Free People.’

And that is how Mowgli was entered into the Seeonee Wolf-Pack at the price of a bull and on Baloo’s good word.

Now you must be content to skip ten or eleven whole years, and only guess at all the wonderful life that Mowgli led among the wolves, because if it were written out it would fill ever so many books. He grew up with the cubs, though they, of course, were grown wolves almost before he was a child, and Father Wolf taught him his business, and the meaning of things in the Jungle, till every rustle in the grass, every breath of the warm night air, every note of the owls above his head, every scratch of a bat’s claws as it roosted for a while in a tree, and every splash of every little fish jumping in a pool, meant just as much to him as the work of his office means to a business man. When he was not learning, he sat out in the sun and slept, and ate and went to sleep again; when he felt dirty or hot he swam in the forest pools; and when he wanted honey (Baloo told him that honey and nuts were just as pleasant to eat as raw meat) he climbed up for it, and that Bagheera showed him how to do. Bagheera would lie out on a branch and call, ‘Come along, Little Brother,’ and at first Mowgli would cling like the sloth, but afterward he would fling himself through the branches almost as boldly as the grey ape. He took his place at the Council Rock, too, when the Pack met, and there he discovered that if he stared hard at any wolf, the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes, and so he used to stare for fun. At other times he would pick the long thorns out of the pads of his friends, for wolves suffer terribly from thorns and burrs in their coats. He would go down the hillside into the cultivated lands by night, and look very curiously at the villagers in their huts, but he had a mistrust of men because Bagheera showed him a square box with a drop-gate so cunningly hidden in the Jungle that he nearly walked into it, and told him that it was a trap. He loved better than anything else to go with Bagheera into the dark warm heart of the forest, to sleep all through the drowsy day, and at night to see how Bagheera did his killing. Bagheera killed right and left as he felt hungry, and so did Mowgli—with one exception. As soon as he was old enough to understand things, Bagheera told him that he must never touch cattle because he had been bought into the Pack at the price of a bull’s life. ‘All the Jungle is thine,’ said Bagheera, ‘and thou canst kill everything that thou art strong enough to kill; but for the sake of the bull that bought thee thou must never kill or eat any cattle young or old. That is the Law of the Jungle.’ Mowgli obeyed faithfully.

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And he grew and grew strong as a boy must grow who does not know that he is learning any lessons, and who has nothing in the world to think of except things to eat.

Mother Wolf told him once or twice that Shere Khan was not a creature to be trusted, and that some day he must kill Shere Khan; but though a young wolf would have remembered that advice every hour, Mowgli forgot it because he was only a boy—though he would have called himself a wolf if he had been able to speak in any human tongue.

Shere Khan was always crossing his path in the Jungle, for as Akela grew older and feebler the lame tiger had come to be great friends with the younger wolves of the Pack, who followed him for scraps, a thing that Akela would never have allowed if he had dared to push his authority to the proper bounds. Then Shere Khan would flatter them and wonder that such fine young hunters were content to be led by a dying wolf and a man’s cub. ‘They tell me,’ Shere Khan would say, ‘that at Council ye dare not look him between the eyes’; and the young wolves would growl and bristle.

Bagheera, who had eyes and ears everywhere, knew something of this, and once or twice he told Mowgli in so many words that Shere Khan would kill him some day; and Mowgli would laugh and answer: ‘I have the Pack and I have thee; and Baloo, though he is so lazy, might strike a blow or two for my sake. Why should I be afraid?’

It was one very warn day that a new notion came to Bagheera—born of something that he had heard. Perhaps Ikki the Porcupine had told him; but he said to Mowgli when they were deep in the Jungle, as the boy lay with his head on Bagheera’s beautiful black skin: ‘Little Brother, how often have I told thee that Shere Khan is thy enemy?’

‘As many times as there are nuts on that palm,’ said Mowgli, who, naturally, could not count. ‘What of it? I am sleepy, Bagheera, and Shere Khan is all long tail and loud talk—like Mao, the Peacock.’

‘But this is no time for sleeping. Baloo knows it; I know it; the Pack know it; and even the foolish, foolish deer know. Tabaqui has told thee, too.’

‘Ho! ho!’ said Mowgli. ‘Tabaqui came to me not long ago with some rude talk that I was a naked man’s cub and not fit to dig pig-nuts; but I caught Tabaqui by the tail and swung him twice against a palm-tree to teach him better manners.’

‘That was foolishness; for though Tabaqui is a mischief-maker, he would have told thee of something that concerned thee closely. Open those eyes, Little Brother. Shere Khan dare not kill thee in the Jungle; but remember, Akela is very old, and soon the day comes when he cannot kill his buck, and then he will be leader no more. Many of the wolves that looked thee over when thou wast brought to the Council first are old too, and the young wolves believe, as Shere Khan has taught them, that a man-cub has no place with the Pack. In a little time thou wilt be a man.’

‘And what is a man that he should not run with his brothers?’ said Mowgli. ‘I was born in the Jungle. I have obeyed the Law of the Jungle, and there is no wolf of ours from whose paws I have not pulled a thorn. Surely they are my brothers!’

Bagheera stretched himself at full length and half shut his eyes. ‘Little Brother,’ said he, ‘feel under my jaw.’

Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera’s silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.

‘There is no one in the Jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark—the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of the King’s Palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the Jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera—the Panther—and no man’s plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the Jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?’

‘Yes,’ said Mowgli; ‘all the Jungle fear Bagheera—all except Mowgli.’

‘Oh, thou art a man’s cub,’ said the Black Panther, very tenderly; ‘and even as I returned to my Jungle, so thou must go back to men at last,—to the men who are thy brothers,—if thou art not killed in the Council.’

‘But why—but why should any wish to kill me?’ said Mowgli.

‘Look at me,’ said Bagheera; and Mowgli looked at him steadily between the eyes. The big panther turned his head away in half a minute.

‘That is why,’ he said, shifting his paw on the leaves. ‘Not even I can look thee between the eyes, and I was born among men, and I love thee, Little Brother. The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine—because thou art wise—because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man.’

‘I did not know these things,’ said Mowgli sullenly; and he frowned under his heavy black eyebrows.

‘What is the Law of the Jungle? Strike first and then give tongue. By thy very carelessness they know that thou art a man. But be wise. It is in my heart that when Akela misses his next kill,—and at each hunt it costs him more to pin the buck,—the Pack will turn against him and against thee. They will hold a Jungle Council at the Rock, and then—and then—I have it!’ said Bagheera, leaping up. ‘Go thou down quickly to the men’s huts in the valley, and take some of the Red Flower which they grow there, so that when the time comes thou mayest have even a stronger friend than I or Baloo or those of the Pack that love thee. Get the Red Flower.’

By Red Flower Bagheera meant fire, only no creature in the Jungle will call fire by its proper name. Every beast lives in deadly fear of it, and invents a hundred ways of describing it.

‘The Red Flower?’ said Mowgli. ‘That grows outside their huts in the twilight. I will get some.’

‘There speaks the man’s cub,’ said Bagheera proudly. ‘Remember that it grows in little pots. Get one swiftly, and keep it by thee for time of need.’

‘Good!’ said Mowgli. ‘I go. But art thou sure, O my Bagheera’—he slipped his arm round the splendid neck, and looked deep into the big eyes—‘art thou sure that all this is Shere Khan’s doing?’

‘By the Broken Lock that freed me, I am sure, Little Brother.’

‘Then, by the Bull that bought me, I will pay Shere Khan full tale for this, and it may be a little over,’ said Mowgli; and he bounded away.

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‘That is a man. That is all a man,’ said Bagheera to himself, lying down again. ‘Oh, Shere Khan, never was a blacker hunting than that frog-hunt of thine ten years ago!’

Mowgli was far and far through the forest, running hard, and his heart was hot in him. He came to the cave as the evening mist rose, and drew breath, and looked down the valley. The cubs were out, but Mother Wolf, at the back of the cave, knew by his breathing that something was troubling her frog.

‘What is it, Son?’ she said.

‘Some bat’s chatter of Shere Khan,’ he called back. ‘I hunt among the ploughed fields tonight,’ and he plunged downward through the bushes, to the stream at the bottom of the valley. There he checked, for he heard the yell of the Pack hunting, heard the, bellow of a hunted sambhur, and the snort as the buck turned at bay. Then there were wicked, bitter howls from the young wolves: ‘Akela! Akela! Let the Lone Wolf show his strength. Room for the leader of the Pack! Spring, Akela!’

The Lone Wolf must have sprung and missed his hold, for Mowgli heard the snap of his teeth and then a yelp as the sambhur knocked him over with his fore-foot.

He did not wait for anything more, but dashed on; and the yells grew fainter behind him as he ran into the crop-lands where the villagers lived.

‘Bagheera spoke truth,’ he panted, as he nestled down in some cattle-fodder by the window of a hut. ‘To-morrow is one day both for Akela and for me.’

Then he pressed his face close to the window and watched the fire on the hearth. He saw the husbandman’s wife get up and feed it in the night with black lumps; and when the morning came and the mists were all white and cold, he saw the man’s child pick up a wicker pot plastered inside with earth, fill it with lumps of red-hot charcoal, put it under his blanket, and go out to tend the cows in the byre.

‘Is that all?’ said Mowgli. ‘If a cub can do it, there is nothing to fear’; so he strode round the corner and met the boy, took the pot from his hand, and disappeared into the mist while the boy howled with fear.

‘They are very like me,’ said Mowgli, blowing into the pot, as he had seen the woman do. ‘This thing will die if I do not give it things to eat’; and he dropped twigs and dried bark on the red stuff. Half-way up the hill he met Bagheera with the morning dew shining like moonstones on his coat.

‘Akela has missed,’ said the Panther. ‘They would have killed him last night, but they needed thee also. They were looking for thee on the hill.’

‘I was among the ploughed lands. I am ready. See!’ Mowgli held up the fire-pot.

‘Good! Now, I have seen men thrust a dry branch into that stuff, and presently the Red Flower blossomed at the end of it. Art thou not afraid?’

‘No. Why should I fear? I remember now—if it is not a dream—how, before I was a Wolf, I lay beside the Red Flower, and it was warm and pleasant.’

All that day Mowgli sat in the cave tending his fire-pot and dipping dry branches into it to see how they looked. He found a branch that satisfied him, and in the evening when Tabaqui came to the cave and told him rudely enough that he was wanted at the Council Rock, he laughed till Tabaqui ran away. Then Mowgli went to the Council, still laughing.

Akela the Lone Wolf lay by the side of his rock as a sign that the leadership of the Pack was open, and Shere Khan with his following of scrapfed wolves walked to and fro openly, being flattered. Bagheera lay close to Mowgli, and the fire-pot was between Mowgli’s knees. When they were all gathered together, Shere Khan began to speak—a thing he would never have dared to do when Akela was in his prime.

‘He has no right,’ whispered Bagheera. ‘Say so. He is a dog’s son. He will be frightened.’

Mowgli sprang to his feet. ‘Free People,’ he cried, ‘does Shere Khan lead the Pack? What has a tiger to do with our leadership?’

‘Seeing that the leadership is yet open, and being asked to speak—’ Shere Khan began.

‘By whom?’ said Mowgli. ‘Are we all jackals, to fawn on this cattle-butcher? The leadership of the Pack is with the Pack alone.’

There were yells of ‘Silence, thou man’s cub!’ ‘Let him speak. He has kept our Law’; and at last the seniors of the Pack thundered: ‘Let the Dead Wolf speak.’ When a leader of the Pack has missed his kill, he is called the Dead Wolf as long as he lives, which is not long, as a rule.

Akela raised his old head wearily:—

‘Free People, and ye too, jackals of Shere Khan, for many seasons I have led ye to and from the kill, and in all my time not one has been trapped or maimed. Now I have missed my kill. Ye know how that plot was made. Ye know how ye brought me up to an untried buck to make my weakness known. It was cleverly done. Your right is to kill me here on the Council Rock now. Therefore, I ask, who comes to make an end of the Lone Wolf? For it is my right, by the Law of the Jungle, that ye come one by one.’

There was a long hush, for no single wolf cared to fight Akela to the death. Then Shere Khan roared: ‘Bah! what have we to do with this toothless fool? He is doomed to die! It is the man-cub who has lived too long. Free People, he was my meat from the first. Give him to me. I am weary of this man-wolf folly. He has troubled the Jungle for ten seasons. Give me the man-cub, or I will hunt here always, and not give you one bone. He is a man, a man’s child, and from the marrow of my bones I hate him!’

Then more than half the Pack yelled: ‘A man! a man! What has a man to do with us? Let him go to his own place.’

‘And turn all the people of the villages against us?’ clamoured Shere Khan. ‘No; give him to me. He is a man, and none of us can look him between the eyes.’

Akela lifted his head again, and said: ‘He has eaten our food. He has slept with us. He has driven game for us. He has broken no word of the Law of the Jungle.’

‘Also, I paid for him with a bull when he was accepted. The worth of a bull is little, but Bagheera’s honour is something that he will perhaps fight for,’ said Bagheera, in his gentlest voice.

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‘A bull paid ten years ago!’ the Pack snarled. ‘What do we care for bones ten years old?’

‘Or for a pledge?’ said Bagheera, his white teeth bared under his lip. ‘Well are ye called the Free People!’

‘No man’s cub can run with the people of the Jungle,’ howled Shere Khan. ‘Give him to me!’

‘He is our brother in all but blood,’ Akela went on; ‘and ye would kill him here! In truth, I have lived too long. Some of ye are eaters of cattle, and of others I have heard that, under Shere Khan’s teaching, ye go by dark night and snatch children from the villager’s door-step. Therefore I know ye to be cowards, and it is to cowards I speak. It is certain that I must die, and my life is of no worth, or I would offer that in the Man-cub’s place. But for the sake of the Honour of the Pack,—a little matter that by being without a leader ye have forgotten,—I promise that if ye let the Man-cub go to his own place, I will not, when my time comes to die, bare one tooth against ye. I will die without fighting. That will at least save the Pack three lives. More I cannot do; but if ye will, I can save ye the shame that comes of killing a brother against whom there is no fault,—a brother spoken for and bought into the Pack according to the Law of the Jungle.’

‘He is a man—a man—a man!’ snarled the Pack; and most of the wolves began to gather round Shere Khan, whose tail was beginning to switch.

‘Now the business is in thy hands,’ said Bagheera to Mowgli. ‘We can do no more except fight.’

Mowgli stood upright—the fire-pot in his hands. Then he stretched out his arms, and yawned in the face of the Council; but he was furious with rage and sorrow, for, wolf-like, the wolves had never told him how they hated him. ‘Listen, you!’ he cried. ‘There is no need for this dog’s jabber. Ye have told me so often tonight that I am a man (and indeed I would have been a wolf with you to my life’s end), that I feel your words are true. So I do not call ye my brothers any more, but sag [dogs], as a man should. What ye will do, and what ye will not do, is not yours to say. That matter is with me; and that we may see the matter more plainly, I, the man, have brought here a little of the Red Flower which ye, dogs, fear.’

He flung the fire-pot on the ground, and some of the red coals lit a tuft of dried moss that flared up, as all the Council drew back in terror before the leaping flames.

Mowgli thrust his dead branch into the fire till the twigs lit and crackled, and whirled it above his head among the cowering wolves.

‘Thou art the master,’ said Bagheera, in an undertone. ‘Save Akela from the death. He was ever thy friend.’

Akela, the grim old wolf who had never asked for mercy in his life, gave one piteous look at Mowgli as the boy stood all naked, his long black hair tossing over his shoulders in the light of the blazing branch that made the shadows jump and quiver.

‘Good!’ said Mowgli, staring round slowly. ‘I see that ye are dogs. I go from you to my own people—if they be my own people. The Jungle is shut to me, and I must forget your talk and your companionship; but I will be more merciful than ye are. Because I was all but your brother in blood, I promise that when I am a man among men I will not betray ye to men as ye have betrayed me.’ He kicked the fire with his foot, and the sparks flew up. ‘There shall be no war between any of us and the Pack. But here is a debt to pay before I go.’ He strode forward to where Shere Khan sat blinking stupidly at the flames, and caught him by the tuft on his chin. Bagheera followed in case of accidents. ‘Up, dog!’ Mowgli cried. ‘Up, when a man speaks, or I will set that coat ablaze!’

Shere Khan’s ears lay flat back on his head, and he shut his eyes, for the blazing branch was very near.

‘This cattle-killer said he would kill me in the Council because he had not killed me when I was a cub. Thus and thus, then, do we beat dogs when we are men. Stir a whisker, Lungri, and I ram the Red Flower down thy gullet!’ He beat Shere Khan over the head with the branch, and the tiger whimpered and whined in an agony of fear.

‘Pah! Singed jungle-cat’go now! But remember when next I come to the Council Rock, as a man should come, it will be with Shere Khan’s hide on my, head. For the rest, Akela goes free to live as he pleases. Ye will not kill him, because that is not my will. Nor do I think that ye will sit here any longer, lolling out your tongues as though ye were somebodies, instead of dogs whom I drive out—thus! Go!,’ The fire was burning furiously at the end of the branch, and Mowgli struck right and left round the circle, and the wolves ran howling with the sparks burning their fur. At last there were only Akela, Bagheera, and perhaps ten wolves that had taken Mowgli’s part. Then something began to hurt Mowgli inside him, as he had never been hurt in his life before, and he caught his breath and sobbed, and the tears ran down his face.

‘What is it? What is it?’ he said. ‘I do not wish to leave the Jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?’

‘No, Little Brother. Those are only tears such as men use,’ said Bagheera. ‘Now I know thou art a man, and a man’s cub no longer. The Jungle is shut indeed to thee henceforward. Let them fall, Mowgli. They are only tears.’ So Mowgli sat and cried as though his heart would break; and he had never cried in all his life before.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘I will go to men. But first I must say farewell to my mother’; and he went to the cave where she lived with Father Wolf, and he cried on her coat, while the four cubs howled miserably.

‘Ye will not forget me?’ said Mowgli.

‘Never while we can follow a trail,’ said the cubs. ‘Come to the foot of the hill when thou art a man, and we will talk to thee; and we will come into the crop-lands to play with thee by night.’

‘Come soon!’ said Father Wolf. ‘Oh, wise little frog, come again soon; for we be old, thy mother and I’

‘Come soon,’ said Mother Wolf, ‘little naked son of mine; for, listen, child of man, I loved thee more than ever I loved my cubs.’

‘I will surely come,’ said Mowgli; ‘and when I come it will be to lay out Shere Khan’s hide upon the Council Rock. Do not forget me! Tell them in the Jungle never to forget me!’

The dawn was beginning to break when Mowgli went down the hillside alone, to meet those mysterious things that are called men.

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Man goes to Man! Cry the challenge through the Jungle!
He that was our Brother goes away.
Hear, now, and judge, O ye People of the Jungle,—
Answer, who shall turn him—who shall stay? 

Man goes to Man! He is weeping in the jungle:
He that was our Brother sorrows sore!
Man goes to Man! (Oh, we loved him in the jungle!)
To the Man-Trail where we may not follow more.

THE second year after the great fight with Red Dog and the death of Akela, Mowgli must have been nearly seventeen years old. He looked older, for hard exercise, the best of good eating, and baths whenever he felt in the least hot or dusty, had given him strength and growth far beyond his age. He could swing by one hand from a top branch for half an hour at a time, when he
had occasion to look along the tree-roads. He could stop a young buck in mid-gallop and throw him sideways by the head. He could even jerk over the big, blue wild boars that lived in the Marshes of the North. The Jungle People who used to fear him for his wits feared him now for his strength, and when he moved quietly on his own affairs the mere whisper of his coming cleared the wood-paths. And yet the look in his eyes was always gentle. Even when he fought, his eyes never blazed as Bagheera’s did. They only grew more and more interested and excited; and that was one of the things that Bagheera himself did not understand.

He asked Mowgli about it, and the boy laughed and said: ‘When I miss the kill I am angry. When I must go empty for two days I am very angry. Do not my eyes talk then?’

‘The mouth is hungry,’ said Bagheera, ‘but the eyes say nothing. Hunting, eating, or swimming, it is all one—like a stone in wet or dry weather.’ Mowgli looked at him lazily from under his long eyelashes, and, as usual, the panther’s head dropped. Bagheera knew his master.

They were lying out far up the side of a hill overlooking the Waingunga, and the morning mists hung below them in bands of white and green. As the sun rose it changed into bubbling seas of red gold, churned off, and let the low rays stripe the dried grass on which Mowgli and Bagheera were resting. It was the end of the cold weather, the leaves and the trees looked worn and faded, and there was a dry, ticking rustle everywhere when the wind blew. A little leaf tap-tap-tapped furiously against a twig, as a single leaf caught in a current will. It roused Bagheera, for he snuffed the morning air with a deep, hollow cough, threw himself on his back, and struck with his fore-paws at the nodding leaf above.

‘The year turns,’ he said. ‘The Jungle goes forward. The Time of New Talk is near. That leaf knows. It is very good.’

‘The grass is dry,’ Mowgli answered, pulling up a tuft. ‘Even Eye-of-the-Spring [that is a little trumpet-shaped, waxy red flower that runs in and out among the grasses]—even Eye-of-the Spring is shut, and . . . Bagheera, is it well for the Black Panther so to lie on his back and beat with his paws in the air, as though he were the tree-cat?’

‘Aowh?’ said Bagheera. He seemed to be thinking of other things.

‘I say, is it well for the Black Panther so to mouth and cough, and howl and roll? Remember, we be the Masters of the Jungle, thou and I’

‘Indeed, yes; I hear, Man-cub.’ Bagheera rolled over hurriedly and sat up, the dust on his ragged black flanks. (He was just casting his winter coat.) ‘We be surely the Masters of the Jungle! Who is so strong as Mowgli? Who so wise?’ There was a curious drawl in the voice that made Mowgli turn to see whether by any chance the Black Panther were making fun of him, for the Jungle is full of words that sound like one thing, but mean another. ‘I said we be beyond question the Masters of the Jungle,’ Bagheera repeated. ‘Have I done wrong? I did not know that the Man-cub no longer lay upon the ground. Does he fly, then?’

Mowgli sat with his elbows on his knees, looking out across the valley at the daylight. Somewhere down in the woods below a bird was trying over in a husky, reedy voice the first few notes of his spring song. It was no more than a shadow of the liquid, tumbling call he would be pouring later, but Bagheera heard it.

‘I said the Time of New Talk is near,’ growled the panther, switching his tail.

‘I hear,’ Mowgli answered. ‘Bagheera, why dost thou shake all over? The sun is warm.’

‘That is Ferao, the scarlet woodpecker,’ said Bagheera. ‘He has not forgotten. Now I, too, must remember my song,’ and he began purring and crooning to himself, harking back dissatisfied again and again.

‘There is no game afoot,’ said Mowgli.

‘Little Brother, are both thine ears stopped? That is no killing-word, but my song that I make ready against the need.’

‘I had forgotten. I shall know when the Time of New Talk is here, because then thou and the others all run away and leave me alone.’ Mowgli spoke rather savagely.

‘But, indeed, Little Brother,’ Bagheera began, ‘we do not always——’

‘I say ye do,’ said Mowgli, shooting out his forefinger angrily. ‘Ye do run away, and I, who am the Master of the Jungle, must needs walk alone. How was it last season, when I would gather sugar-cane from the fields of a Man-Pack? I sent a runner—I sent thee!—to Hathi, bidding him to come upon such a night and pluck the sweet grass for me with his trunk.’

‘He came only two nights later,’ said Bagheera, cowering a little; ‘and of that long, sweet grass that pleased thee so he gathered more than any Man-cub could eat in all the nights of the Rains. That was no fault of mine.’

‘He did not come upon the night when I sent him the word. No, he was trumpeting and running and roaring through the valleys in the moonlight. His trail was like the trail of three elephants, for he would not hide among the trees. He danced in the moonlight before the houses of the Man-Pack. I saw him, and yet he would not come to me; and I am the Master of the Jungle!’

‘It was the Time of New Talk,’ said the panther, always very humble. ‘Perhaps, Little Brother, thou didst not that time call him by a Master-word? Listen to Ferao, and be glad!’

Mowgli’s bad temper seemed to have boiled itself away. He lay back with his head on his arms, his eyes shut. ‘I do not know—nor do I care,’ he said sleepily. ‘Let us sleep, Bagheera. My stomach is heavy in me. Make me a rest for my head.’

The panther lay down again with a sigh, because he could hear Ferao practising and repractising his song against the Springtime of New Talk, as they say.

In an Indian Jungle the seasons slide one into the other almost without division. There seem to be only two—the wet and the dry; but if you look closely below the torrents of rain and the clouds of char and dust you will find all four going round in their regular ring. Spring is the most wonderful, because she has not to cover a clean, bare field with new leaves and flowers, but to drive before her and to put away the hanging-on, over-surviving raffle of half-green things which the gentle winter has suffered to live, and to make the partly-dressed stale earth feel new and young once more. And this she does so well that there is no spring in the world like the Jungle spring.

There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells, as they drift on the heavy air, are old and used. One cannot explain this, but it feels so. Then there is another day—to the eye nothing whatever has changed—when all the smells are new and delightful, and the whiskers of the Jungle People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes away from their sides in long, draggled locks. Then, perhaps, a little rain falls, and all the trees and the bushes and the bamboos and the mosses and the juicy-leaved plants wake with a noise of growing that you can almost hear, and under this noise runs, day and night, a deep hum. That is the noise of the spring—a vibrating boom which is neither bees, nor falling water, nor the wind in tree-tops, but the purring of the warm, happy world.

Up to this year Mowgli had always delighted in the turn of the seasons. It was he who generally saw the first Eye-of-the-Spring deep down among the grasses, and the first bank of spring clouds, which are like nothing else in the Jungle. His voice could be heard in all sorts of wet, star-lighted, blossoming places, helping the big frogs through their choruses, or mocking the little upside-down owls that hoot through the white nights. Like all his people, spring was the season he chose for his flittings—moving, for the mere joy of rushing through the warm air, thirty, forty, or fifty miles between twilight and the morning star, and coming back panting and laughing and wreathed with strange flowers. The Four did not follow him on these wild ringings of the Jungle, but went off to sing songs with other wolves. The Jungle People are very busy in the spring, and Mowgli could hear them grunting and screaming and whistling according to their kind. Their voices then are different from their voices at other times of the year, and that is one of the reasons why spring in the Jungle is called the Time of New Talk.

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But that spring, as he told Bagheera, his stomach was changed in him. Ever since the bamboo shoots turned spotty-brown he had been looking forward to the morning when the smells should change. But when the morning came, and Mor the Peacock, blazing in bronze and blue and gold, cried it aloud all along the misty woods, and Mowgli opened his mouth to send on the cry, the words choked between his teeth, and a feeling came over him that began at his toes and ended in his hair—a feeling of pure unhappiness, so that he looked himself over to be sure that he had not trod on a thorn. Mor cried the new smells, the other birds took it over, and from the rocks by the Waingunga he heard Bagheera’s hoarse scream—something between the scream of an eagle and the neighing of a horse. There was a yelling and scattering of Bandar-log in the new-budding branches above, and there stood Mowgli, his chest, filled to answer Mor, sinking in little gasps as the breath was driven out of it by this unhappiness.

He stared all round him, but he could see no more than the mocking Bandar-log scudding through the trees, and Mor, his tail spread in full splendour, dancing on the slopes below.

‘The smells have changed,’ screamed Mor. ‘Good hunting, Little Brother! Where is thy answer?’

‘Little Brother, good hunting.!’ whistled Chil the Kite and his mate, swooping down together. The two baffed under Mowgli’s nose so close that a pinch of downy white feathers brushed away.

A light spring rain—elephant-rain they call it—drove across the Jungle in a belt half a mile wide, left the new leaves wet and nodding behind, and died out in a double rainbow and a light roll of thunder. The spring hum broke out for a minute, and was silent, but all the Jungle Folk seemed to be giving tongue at once. All except Mowgli.

‘I have eaten good food,’ he said to himself. ‘I have drunk good water. Nor does my throat burn and grow small, as it did when I bit the blue-spotted root that Oo the Turtle said was clean food. But my stomach is heavy, and I have given very bad talk to Bagheera and others, people of the Jungle and my people. Now, too, I am hot and now I am cold, and now I am neither hot nor cold, but angry with that which I cannot see. Huhu! It is time to make a running! To-night I will cross the ranges; yes, I will make a spring running to the Marshes of the North, and back again. I have hunted too easily too long. The Four shall come with me, for they grow as fat as white grubs.’

He called, but never one of the Four answered. They were far beyond earshot, singing over the spring songs—the Moon and Sambhur Songs—with the wolves of the Pack; for in the spring-time the Jungle People make very little difference between the day and the night. He gave the sharp, barking note, but his only answer was the mocking maiou of the little spotted tree-cat winding in and out among the branches for early birds’ nests. At this he shook all over with rage and half drew his knife. Then he became very haughty, though there was no one to see him, and stalked severely down the hillside, chin up and eyebrows down. But never a single one of his people asked him a question, for they were all too busy with their own affairs.

‘Yes,’ said Mowgli to himself, though in his heart he knew that he had no reason. ‘Let the Red Dhole come from the Dekkan, or the Red Flower dance among the bamboos, and all the Jungle runs whining to Mowgli, calling him great elephant-names. But now, because Eye-of-the-Spring is red, and Mor, forsooth, must show his naked legs in some spring dance, the Jungle goes mad as Tabaqui . . … By the Bull that bought me! am I the Master of the Jungle, or am I not? Be silent! What do ye here?’

A couple of young wolves of the Pack were cantering down a path, looking for open ground in which to fight. (You will remember that the Law of the Jungle forbids fighting where the Pack can see.) Their neck-bristles were as stiff as wire, and they bayed furiously, crouching for the first grapple. Mowgli leaped forward, caught one outstretched throat in either hand, expecting to fling the creatures backward as he had often done in games or Pack hunts. But he had never before interfered with a spring fight. The two leaped forward and dashed him aside, and without word to waste rolled over and over close locked.

Mowgli was on his feet almost before he fell, his knife and his white teeth were bared, and at that minute he would have killed both for no reason but that they were fighting when he wished them to be quiet, although every wolf has full right under the Law to fight. He danced round them with lowered shoulders and quivering hand, ready to send in a double blow when the first flurry of the scuffle should be over; but while he waited the strength seemed to ebb from his body, the knife-point lowered, and he sheathed the knife and watched.

‘I have surely eaten poison,’ he sighed at last. ‘Since I broke up the Council with the Red Flower—since I killed Shere Khan—none of the Pack could fling me aside. And these be only tail-wolves in the Pack, little hunters! My strength is gone from me, and presently I shall die. Oh, Mowgli, why dost thou not kill them both?’

The fight went on till one wolf ran away, and Mowgli was left alone on the torn and bloody ground, looking now at his knife, and now at his legs and arms, while the feeling of unhappiness he had never known before covered him as water covers a log.

He killed early that evening and ate but little, so as to be in good fettle for his spring running, and he ate alone because all the Jungle People were away singing or fighting. It was a perfect white night, as they call it. All green things seemed to have made a month’s growth since the morning. The branch that was yellow-leaved the day before dripped sap when Mowgli broke it. The mosses curled deep and warm over his feet, the young grass had no cutting edges, and all the voices of the Jungle boomed like one deep harpstring touched by the moon—the Moon of New Talk, who splashed her light full on rock and pool, slipped it between trunk and creeper, and sifted it through a million leaves. Forgetting his unhappiness, Mowgli sang aloud with pure delight as he settled into his stride. It was more like flying than anything else, for he had chosen the long downward slope that leads to the Northern Marshes through the heart of the main Jungle, where the springy ground deadened the fall of his feet. A man-taught man would have picked his way with many stumbles through the cheating moonlight, but Mowgli’s muscles, trained by years of experience, bore him up as though he were a feather. When a rotten log or a hidden stone turned under his foot he saved himself, never checking his pace, without effort and without thought. When he tired of ground-going he threw up his hands monkey-fashion to the nearest creeper, and seemed to float rather than to climb up into the thin branches, whence he would follow a tree-road till his mood changed, and he shot downward in a long, leafy curve to the levels again. There were still, hot hollows surrounded by wet rocks where he could hardly breathe for the heavy scents of the night flowers and the bloom along the creeper buds; dark avenues where the moonlight lay in belts as regular as checkered marbles in a church aisle; thickets where the wet young growth stood breast-high about him and threw its arms round his waist; and hilltops crowned with broken rock, where he leaped from stone to stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes. He would hear, very faint and far off, the chug-drug of a boar sharpening his tusks on a bole; and would come across the great gray brute all alone, scribing and rending the bark of a tall tree, his mouth dripping with foam, and his eyes blazing like fire. Or he would turn aside to the sound of clashing horns and hissing grunts, and dash past a couple of furious sambhur, staggering to and fro with lowered heads, striped with blood that showed black in the moonlight. Or at some rushing ford he would hear Jacala the Crocodile bellowing like a bull, or disturb a twined knot of the Poison People, but before they could strike he would be away and across the glistening shingle, and deep in the Jungle again.

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So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes singing to himself, the happiest thing in all the jungle that night, till the smell of the flowers warned him that he was near the marshes, and those lay far beyond his farthest hunting-grounds.

Here, again, a man-trained man would have sunk overhead in three strides, but Mowgli’s feet had eyes in them, and they passed him from tussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without asking help from the eyes in his head. He ran out to the middle of the swamp, disturbing the duck as he ran, and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk lapped in the black water. The marsh was awake all round him, for in the spring the Bird People sleep very lightly; and companies of them were coming or going the night through. But no one took any notice of Mowgli sitting among the tall reeds humming songs without words, and looking at the soles of his hard brown feet in case of neglected thorns. All his unhappiness seemed to have been left behind in his own jungle, and he was just beginning a full-throat song when it came back again—ten times worse than before.

This time Mowgli was frightened. ‘It is here also!’ he said half aloud. ‘It has followed me,’ and he looked over his shoulder to see whether the It were not standing behind him. ‘There is no one here.’ The night noises of the marsh went on, but never a bird or beast spoke to him, and the new feeling of misery grew.

‘I have surely eaten poison,’ he said in an awestricken voice. ‘It must be that carelessly I have eaten poison, and my strength is going from me. I was afraid—and yet it was not I that was afraid—Mowgli was afraid when the two wolves fought. Akela, or even Phao, would have silenced them; yet Mowgli was afraid. That is true sign I have eaten poison . . . . But what do they care in the jungle? They sing and howl and fight, and run in companies under the moon, and I—Hai-mai!—I am dying in the marshes, of that poison which I have eaten.’ He was so sorry for himself that he nearly wept. ‘And after,’ he went on, ‘they will find me lying in the black water. Nay, I will go back to my own Jungle, and I will die upon the Council Rock, and Bagheera, whom I love, if he is not screaming in the valley—Bagheera, perhaps, may watch by what is left for a little, lest Chil use me as he used Akela.’

A large, warm tear splashed down on his knee, and, miserable as he was, Mowgli felt happy that he was so miserable, if you can understand that upside-down sort of happiness. ‘As Chil the Kite used Akela,’ he repeated, ‘on the night I saved the Pack from Red Dog.’ He was quiet for a little, thinking of the last words of the Lone Wolf, which you, of course, remember. ‘Now Akela said to me many foolish things before he died, for when we die our stomachs change. He said . . . None the less, I am of the Jungle!’

In his excitement, as he remembered the fight on Waingunga bank, he shouted the last words aloud, and a wild buffalocow among the reeds sprang to her knees, snorting, ‘Man!’

‘Uhh!’ said Mysa the Wild Buffalo (Mowgli could hear him turn in his wallow), ‘that is no man. It is only the hairless wolf of the Seeonee Pack. On such nights runs he to and fro.’

‘Uhh!’ said the cow, dropping her head again to graze, ‘I thought it was Man.’

‘I say no. Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?’ lowed Mysa.

‘Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?’ the boy called back mockingly. ‘That is all Mysa thinks for: Is it danger? But for Mowgli, who goes to and fro in the Jungle by night, watching, what do ye care?’

‘How loud he cries!’ said the cow.

‘Thus do they cry,’ Mysa answered contemptuously, ‘who, having torn up the grass, know not how to eat it.’

‘For less than this,’ Mowgli groaned to himself,—‘for less than this even last Rains I had pricked Mysa out of his wallow, and ridden him through the swamp on a rush halter.’ He stretched a hand to break one of the feathery reeds, but drew it back with a sigh. Mysa went on steadily chewing the cud, and the long grass ripped where the cow grazed. ‘I will not die here,’ he said angrily. ‘Mysa, who is of one blood with Jacala and the pig, would see me. Let us go beyond the swamp and see what comes. Never have I run such a spring running—hot and cold together. Up, Mowgli!’

He could not resist the temptation of stealing across the reeds to Mysa and pricking him with the point of his knife. The great dripping bull broke out of his wallow like a shell exploding, while Mowgli laughed till he sat down.

‘Say now that the hairless wolf of the Seeonee Pack once herded thee, Mysa,’ he called.

‘Wolf! Thou?’ the bull snorted, stamping in the mud. ‘All the Jungle knows thou wast a herder of tame cattle—such a man’s brat as shouts in the dust by the crops yonder. Thou of the Jungle! What hunter would have crawled like a snake among the leeches, and for a muddy jest—a jackal’s jest—have shamed me before my cow? Come to firm ground, and I will—I will . . .’ Mysa frothed at the mouth, for Mysa has nearly the worst temper of any one in the Jungle.

Mowgli watched him puff and blow with eyes that never changed. When he could make himself heard through the pattering mud, he said
‘What Man-Pack lair here by the marshes, Mysa? This is new Jungle to me.’

‘Go north, then,’ roared the angry bull, for Mowgli had pricked him rather sharply. ‘It was a naked cow-herd’s jest. Go and tell them at the village at the foot of the marsh.’

‘The Man-Pack do not love jungle-tales, nor do I think, Mysa, that a scratch more or less on thy hide is any matter for a council. But I will go and look at this village. Yes, I will go. Softly now. It is not every night that the Master of the Jungle comes to herd thee.’

He stepped out to the shivering ground on the edge of the marsh, well knowing that Mysa would never charge over it, and laughed, as he ran, to think of the bull’s anger.

‘My strength is not altogether gone,’ he said. ‘It may be that the poison is not to the bone. There is a star sitting low yonder.’ He looked at it between his half-shut hands. ‘By the Bull that bought me, it is the Red Flower—the Red Flower that I lay beside before—before I came even to the first Seeonee Pack! Now that I have seen, I will finish the running.’

The marsh ended in a broad plain where a light twinkled. It was a long time since Mowgli had concerned himself with the doings of men, but this night the glimmer of the Red Flower drew him forward.

‘I will look,’ said he, ‘as I did in the old days, and I will see how far the Man-Pack has changed.’

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Forgetting that he was no longer in his own jungle, where he could do what he pleased, he trod carelessly through the dew-loaded grasses till he came to the hut where the light stood. Three or four yelping dogs gave tongue, for he was on the outskirts of a village.

‘Ho!’ said Mowgli, sitting down noiselessly, after sending back a deep wolf-growl that silenced the curs. ‘What comes will come. Mowgli, what hast thou to do any more with the lairs of the Man-Pack?’ He rubbed his mouth, remembering where a stone had struck it years ago when the other Man-Pack had cast him out.

The door of the hut opened; and a woman stood peering out into the darkness. A child cried, and the woman said over her shoulder, ‘Sleep. It was but a jackal that waked the dogs. In a little time morning comes.’

Mowgli in the grass began to shake as though he had fever. He knew that voice well, but to make sure he cried softly, surprised to find how man’s talk came back, ‘Messua! O Messua!’

‘Who calls?’ said the woman, a quiver in her voice.

‘Hast thou forgotten?’ said Mowgli. His throat was dry as he spoke.

‘If it be thou, what name did I give thee? Say!’ She had half shut the door, and her hand was clutching at her breast.

‘Nathoo! Ohé, Nathoo!’ said Mowgli, for, as you remember, that was the name Messua gave him when he first came to the Man-Pack.

‘Come, my son,’ she called, and Mowgli stepped into the light, and looked full at Messua, the woman who had been good to him, and whose life he had saved from the Man-Pack so long before. She was older, and her hair was gray, but her eyes and her voice had not changed. Woman-like, she expected to find Mowgli where she had left him, and her eyes travelled upward in a puzzled way from his chest to his head, that touched the top of the door.

‘My son,’ she stammered; and then, sinking to his feet: ‘But it is no longer my son. It is a Godling of the Woods! Ahai!’

As he stood in the red light of the oil-lamp, strong, tall, and beautiful, his long black hair sweeping over his shoulders, the knife swinging at his neck, and his head crowned with a wreath of white jasmine, he might easily have been mistaken for some wild god of a jungle legend. The child half asleep on a cot sprang up and shrieked aloud with terror. Messua turned to soothe him, while Mowgli stood still, looking in at the water jars and the cooking-pots, the grain-bin, and all the other human belongings that he found himself remembering so well.

‘What wilt thou eat or drink?’ Messua murmured. ‘This is all thine. We owe our lives to thee. But art thou him I called Nathoo, or a Godling, indeed?’

‘I am Nathoo,’ said Mowgli, ‘I am very far from my own place. I saw this light, and came hither. I did not know thou wast here.’

‘After we came to Khanhiwara,’ Messua said timidly, ‘the English would have helped us against those villagers that sought to burn us. Rememberest thou?’

‘Indeed, I have not forgotten.’

‘But when the English Law was made ready, we went to the village of those evil people, and it was no more to be found.’

‘That also I remember,’ said Mowgli, with a quiver of his nostril.

‘My man, therefore, took service in the fields, and at last—for, indeed, he was a strong man—we held a little land here. It is not so rich as the old village, but we do not need much—we two.’

‘Where is he—the man that dug in the dirt when he was afraid on that night?’

‘He is dead-a year.’

` And he ? ‘ Mowgli pointed to the child.

‘My son that was born two Rains ago. If thou art a Godling, give him the Favour of the Jungle, that he may be safe among thy—thy people, as we were safe on that night.’

She lifted up the child, who, forgetting his fright, reached out to play with the knife that hung on Mowgli’s chest, and Mowgli put the little fingers aside very carefully.

‘And if thou art Nathoo whom the tiger carried away,’ Messua went on, choking, ‘he is then thy younger brother. Give him an elder brother’s blessing.’

‘Hai-mai! What do I know of the thing called a blessing? I am neither a Godling nor his brother, and—O mother, mother, my heart is heavy in me.’ He shivered fits he set down the child.

‘Like enough,’ said Messua, bustling among the cooking-pots. ‘This comes of running about the marshes by night. Beyond question, the fever had soaked thee to the marrow.’ Mowgli smiled a little at the idea of anything in the Jungle hurting him. ‘I will make a fire, and thou shalt drink warm milk. Put away the jasmine wreath: the smell is heavy in so small a place.’

Mowgli sat down, muttering, with his face in his hands: All manner of strange feelings that he had never felt before were running over him, exactly as though he had been poisoned, and he felt dizzy and a little sick. He drank the warm milk in long gulps; Messua patting him on the shoulder from time to time, not quite sure whether he were her son Nathoo of the long ago days, or some wonderful Jungle being, but glad to feel that he was at least flesh and blood.

‘Son,’ she said at last,—her eyes were full of pride,—’have any told thee that thou art beautiful beyond all men?’

‘Hah?’ said Mowgli, for naturally he had never heard anything of the kind. Messua laughed softly and happily. The look in his face was enough for her.

‘I am the first, then? It is right, though it comes seldom, that a mother should tell her son these good things. Thou art very beautiful. Never have I looked upon such a man.’

Mowgli twisted his head and tried to see over his own hard shoulder, and Messua laughed again so long that Mowgli, not knowing why, was forced to laugh with her, and the child ran from one to the other, laughing too.

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‘Nay, thou must not mock thy brother,’ said Messua, catching him to her breast. ‘When thou art one-half as fair we will marry thee to the youngest daughter of a king, and thou shalt ride great elephants.’

Mowgli could not understand one word in three of the talk here; the warm milk was taking effect on him after his long run, so he curled up and in a minute was deep asleep, and Messua put the hair back from his eyes, threw a cloth over him, and was happy. Jungle-fashion, he slept out the rest of that night and all the next day; for his instincts, which never wholly slept, warned him there was nothing to fear. He waked at last with a bound that shook the hut, for the cloth over his face made him dream of traps; and there he stood, his hand on his knife, the sleep all heavy in his rolling eyes, ready for any fight.

Messua laughed, and set the evening meal before him. There were only a few coarse cakes baked over the smoky fire, some rice, and a lump of sour, preserved tamarinds just enough to go on with till he could get to his evening kill. The smell of the dew in the marshes made him hungry and restless. He wanted to finish his spring running, but the child insisted on sitting in his arms, and Messua would have it that his long, blue-black hair must be combed out. So she sang, as she combed, foolish little baby-songs, now calling Mowgli her son, and now begging him to give some of his jungle power to the child. The hut door was closed, but Mowgli heard a sound he knew well, and saw Messua’s jaw drop with horror as a great gray paw came under the bottom of the door, and Gray Brother outside whined a muffled and penitent whine of anxiety and fear.

‘Out and wait! Ye would not come when I called,’ said Mowgli in Jungle-talk, without turning his head, and the great gray paw disappeared.

‘Do not—do not bring thy—thy servants with thee,’ said Messua. ‘I—we have always lived at peace with the Jungle.’

‘It is peace,’ said Mowgli, rising. ‘Think of that night on the road to Khanhiwara. There were scores of such folk before thee and behind thee. But I see that even in springtime the Jungle People do not always forget. Mother, I go.’

Messua drew aside humbly—he was indeed a wood-god, she thought; but as his hand was on the door the mother in her made her throw her arms round Mowgli’s neck again and again.

‘Come back!’ she whispered. ‘Son or no son, come back, for I love thee—Look, he too grieves.’

The child was crying because the man with the shiny knife was going away.

‘Come back again,’ Messua repeated. ‘By night or by day this door is never shut to thee.’

Mowgli’s throat worked as though the cords in it were being pulled, and his voice seemed to be dragged from it as he answered, ‘I will surely come back.’

‘And now,’ he said, as he put by the head of the fawning wolf on the threshold, ‘I have a little cry against thee, Gray Brother. Why came ye not all four when I called so long ago?’

‘So long ago? It was but last night. I—we—were singing in the Jungle the new songs, for this is the Time of New Talk. Rememberest thou?’

‘Truly, truly.’

‘And as soon as the songs were sung,’ Gray Brother went on earnestly, ‘I followed thy trail. I ran from all the others and followed hot-foot. But, O Little Brother, what hast thou done, eating and sleeping with the Man-Pack?’

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

‘And now what is to be?’ said Gray Brother.

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

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

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

‘And would ye follow me to the Man-Pack?’ Mowgli whispered.

‘Did I not follow thee on the night our old Pack cast thee out? Who waked thee lying among the crops?’

‘Ay, but again?’

‘Have I not followed thee to-night?’

‘Ay, but again and again, and it may be again, Gray Brother?’

Gray Brother was silent. When he spoke he growled to himself, ‘The Black One spoke truth.’

‘And he said?’

‘Man goes to Man at the last. Raksha, our mother, said——’

‘So also said Akela on the night of Red Dog,’ Mowgli muttered.

‘So also says Kaa, who is wiser than us all.’

‘What dost thou say, Gray Brother?’

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

‘I ask thee what thou sagest?’

They were talking as they ran. Gray Brother cantered on a while without replying, and then he said,—between bound and bound as it were,—‘Man-cub—Master of the Jungle—Son of Raksha, Lair-brother to me—though I forget for a little while in the spring, thy trail is my trail, thy lair is my lair, thy kill is my kill, and thy deathfight is my death-fight. I speak for the Three. But what wilt thou say to the Jungle?’

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

‘Hast thou, then, forgotten nothing?’ snapped Gray Brother over his shoulder, as he laid him self down to gallop, and Mowgli followed, thinking.

At any other season the news would have called all the Jungle together with bristling necks, but now they were busy hunting and fighting and killing and singing. From one to another Gray Brother ran, crying, ‘The Master of the Jungle goes back to Man! Come to the Council Rock.’ And the happy, eager People only answered, ‘He will return in the summer heats. The Rains will drive him to lair. Run and sing with us, Gray Brother.’

‘But the Master of the jungle goes back to Man,’ Gray Brother would repeat.

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

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

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

‘What need of talk?’ said Baloo slowly, turning his head to where Mowgli lay. ‘Akela by the river said it, that Mowgli should drive Mowgli back to the Man-Pack. I said it. But who listens now to Baloo? Bagheera—where is Bagheera this night?—he knows also. It is the Law.’

‘When we met at Cold Lairs, Manling, I knew it,’ said Kaa, turning a little in his mighty coils. ‘Man goes to Man at the last, though the Jungle does not cast him out.’

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

‘The Jungle does not cast me out, then?’ Mowgli stammered.

Gray Brother and the Three growled furiously, beginning, ‘So long as we live none shall dare——’ But Baloo checked them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But Bagheera and the Bull that bought me,’ said Mowgli. ‘I would not—’

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

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

‘Thou hast heard,’ said Baloo. ‘There is no more. Go now; but first come to me. O wise Little Frog, come to me!’

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

‘The stars are thin,’ said Gray Brother, snuffing at the dawn wind. ‘Where shall we lair to-day? for, from now, we follow new trails.’

And this is the last of the Mowgli stories.

THE MOST IMPORTANT thing about Tegumai Bopsulai and his dear daughter, Taffimai Metallumai, were the Tabus of Tegumai, which were all Bopsulai.

Listen and attend, and remember, O Best Beloved; because we know about Tabus, you and I.

When Taffimai Metallumai (but you can still call her Taffy) went out into the woods hunting with Tegumai, she never kept still. She kept very unstill. She danced among dead leaves, she did. She snapped dry branches off, she did. She slid down banks and pits, she did quarries and pits of sand, she did. She splashed through swamps and bogs, she did; and she made a horrible noise! So all the animals that they hunted – squirrels, beavers, otters, badgers, and deer, and the rabbits – knew when Taffy and her Daddy were coming, and ran away.

Then Taffy said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, Daddy, dear.’ Then Tegumai said, ‘What’s the use of being sorry? The squirrels have gone, and the beavers have dived, the deer have jumped, and the rabbits are deep in their buries. You ought to be beaten, O Daughter of Tegumai, and I would, too, if I didn’t happen to love you.’ Just then he saw a squirrel kinking and prinking round the trunk of an ash-tree, and he said, ‘H’sh! There’s our lunch, Taffy, if you’ll only keep quiet.’

Taffy said, ‘Where? Where? Show me! Show!’ She said it in a raspy-gaspy whisper that would have frightened a steam-cow, and she skittered about in the bracken, being a ‘citable child; and the squirrel flicked his tail and went off in large, free, loopy-legs to about the middle of Sussex before he ever stopped.

Tegumai was severely angry. He stood quite still, making up his mind whether it would be better to boil Taffy, or skin Taffy, or tattoo Taffy, or cut her hair, or send her to bed for one night without being kissed; and while he was thinking, the Head Chief of the Tribe of Tegumai came through the woods all in his eagle-feathers.

He was the Head Chief of the High and the Low and the Middle Medicine for the whole Tribe of Tegumai, and he and Taffy were rather friends.

He said to Tegumai, ‘What is the matter, O Chiefest of Bopsulai? You look angry.’

‘I am angry,’ said Tegumai, and he told the Head Chief all about Taffy’s very unstillness in the woods; and about the way she frightened the game; and about her falling into swamps because she would look behind her when she ran; and about her falling out of trees because she wouldn’t take good hold on both sides of her; and about her getting her legs all greeny with duckweed from ponds and places, and bringing it sploshing into the Cave. The Head Chief shook his head till the eagle-feathers and the little shells on his forehead rattled, and then he said, ‘Well, well! I’ll see about it later. I wanted to talk to you, O Tegumai, on serious business.’

‘Talk away, O Head Chief,’ said Tegumai, and they both sat down politely.

‘Observe and take notice, O Tegumai,’ said the Head Chief. ‘The Tribe of Tegumai have been fishing the Wagai river ever so long and ever so much too much. Consequence is, there’s hardly any carp of any size left in it, and even the little carps are going away. What do you think of putting the big Tribal Tabu on it, so as to stop every one fishing there for six months?’

‘That’s a good plan, O Head Chief,’ said Tegumai. ‘But what will the consequence be if any of our people break tabu?’

‘Consequence will be, O Tegumai,’ said the Head Chief, ‘that we will make them understand it with sticks and stinging-nettles and dobs of mud; and if that doesn’t teach them, we’ll draw fine, freehand Tribal patterns on their backs with the cutty edges of mussel-shells. Come along with me, O Tegumai, and we will proclaim the Tribal Tabu on the Wagai river.’

Then they went up to the Head Chief’s head house, where all the Tribal Magic of Tegumai belonged; and they brought out the Big Tribal Tabu-pole, made of wood, with the image of the Tribal Beaver of Tegumai and the other animals carved on top, and all the Tribal Tabu–marks carved underneath.

Then they called up the Tribe of Tegumai with the Big Tribal Horn that roars and blores, and the Middle Tribal Conch that squeaks and squawks, and the Little Tribal Drum that taps and raps.

They made a lovely noise, and Taffy was allowed to beat the Little Tribal Drum, because she was rather friends with the Head Chief.

When all the Tribe had come together in front of the Head Chief’s house, the Head Chief stood up and said and sang: ‘O Tribe of Tegumai! The Wagai river has been fished too much, and the carp-fish are getting frightened. Nobody must fish in the Wagai river for six months. It is tabu both sides and the middle; on all islands and mud-banks. It is tabu to bring a fishing-spear nearer than ten man-strides to the bank of the river. It is tabu, it is tabu, it is most specially tabu, O Tribe of Tegumai! It is tabu for this month and next month and next month and next month and next month and next month. Now go and put up the Tabu-pole by the river, ‘and don’t let anybody pretend that they haven’t understood!’

Then the Tribe of Tegumai shouted, and put up the Tabu-pole by the banks of the Wagai river, and swiftly they ran down both banks (half the Tribe on one side and half on the other), and chased away all the small boys who hadn’t attended the meeting because they were looking for crayfish in the river; and then they all praised the Head Chief and Tegumai Bopsulai.

Tegumai went home after this, but Taffy stayed with the Head Chief, because they were rather friends. She was very much surprised. She had never seen a tabu put on anything before, and she said to the Head Chief, ‘What does Tabu mean azactly?’

The Head Chief said, ‘Tabu doesn’t mean anything till you break it, O Only Daughter of Tegumai; but when you break it, it means sticks and stinging-nettles and fine, freehand Tribal patterns drawn on your back with the cutty edges of mussel-shells.’

Then Taffy said, ‘Could I have a tabu of my own – a little small tabu to play with?’

Then the Head Chief said, ‘I’ll give you a little tabu of your own, just because you made up that picture-writing, which will one day grow into the ABC.’ (You remember how Taffy and Tegumai made up the Alphabet? That was why she and the Head Chief were rather friends.)

He took off one of his magic necklaces – he had twenty-two of them – and it was made of bits of pink coral, and he said, ‘If you put this necklace on anything that belongs to you your own self, no one can touch that thing until you take the necklace off. It will only work inside your own Cave; and if you have left anything of yours lying about where you shouldn’t, the tabu won’t work till you have put that thing back in its proper place.’

‘Thank you very much indeed,’ said Taffy. ‘Now, what d’you truly s’pose it will do to my Daddy?’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ said the Head Chief. ‘He may throw himself down on the floor and shout, or he may have cramps, or he may just flop, or he may take Three Sorrowful Steps and say sorrowful words, and then you can pull his hair three times if you like.’ ‘And what will it do to my Mummy?’ said Taffy. ‘There aren’t any tabus on people’s Mummies,’ said the Head Chief.

‘Why not?’ said Taffy.

‘Because if there were tabus on people’s Mummies, people’s Mummies could put tabus on breakfasts, and dinners, and teas, and that would be very bad for the Tribe. Long and long ago the Tribe decided not to have tabus on people’s Mummies – anywhere – for anything.’

‘Well,’ said Taffy, ‘do you know if my Daddy has any tabus of his own that will work on me – s’posin’ I broke a tabu by accident?’ ‘You don’t mean to say,’ said the Head Chief, ‘that your Daddy has never put any tabus on you yet?’

‘No,’ said Taffy; ‘he only says “Don’t!” and gets angry.’ ‘Ah! I suppose he thought you were a kiddy,’ said the Head Chief. ‘Now, if you show him that you’ve a real tabu of your own, I shouldn’t be surprised if he put several real tabus on you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Taffy; ‘but I have a little garden of my own outside the Cave, and if you don’t mind I should like you to make this tabu-necklace work so that if I hang it up on the wild roses in front of the garden, and people go inside, they won’t be able to come out until they have said they are sorry.’

‘Oh, certainly, certainly,’ said the Head Chief. ‘Of course you can tabu your very own garden.’

‘Thank you,’ said Taffy; ‘and now I will go home and see if this tabu truly works.’

When she got back to the Cave, it was nearly time for dinner; and when she came to the door, Teshumai Tewindrow, her dear Mummy, instead of saying, ‘Where have you been, Taffy?’ said, ‘O Daughter of Tegumai, come in and eat,’ same as if she had been a grown-up person. That was because she saw a tabu-necklace on Taffy’s neck.

Her Daddy was sitting in front of the fire waiting for dinner, and he said the very same thing, and Taffy felt most important.

She looked all round the Cave, to see that her own things (her private mendy-bag of otter-skin, with the shark’s teeth and the bone needles and the deer-sinew thread; her mud-shoes of birch-bark; her spear and her throwing-stick and her lunch-basket) were all in their proper places, and then she slipped off her tabu-necklace quite quickly and hung it over the handle of the little wooden water-bucket that she used to draw water with.

Then her Mummy said to Tegumai, her Daddy, quite accidental, ‘O Tegumai! Won’t you get us some fresh drinking-water for dinner?’

‘Certainly,’ said Tegumai, and he jumped up and lifted Taffy’s bucket with the tabu-necklace on it. Next minute he fell down flat on the floor and shouted; then he curled himself up and rolled round the cave; then he stood up and flopped several times.

‘My dear,’ said Teshumai Tewindrow, ‘it looks to me as if you had rather broken somebody’s tabu somehow. Does it hurt?’

‘Horribly,’ said Tegumai. He took Three Sorrowful Steps and put his head on one side, and shouted, ‘I broke tabu! I broke tabu! I broke tabu!’

‘Taffy, dear, that must be your tabu,’ said Teshumai Tewindrow. ‘You’d better pull his hair three times, or he will have to go on shouting till evening; and you know what Daddy is like when he once begins.’

Tegumai stooped down, and Taffy pulled his hair three times; and he wiped his face, and said, ‘My Tribal Word! That’s a dreadful strong tabu of yours, Taffy. Where did you get it from?’

‘The Head Chief gave it me. He told me you’d have cramps and flops if you broke it,’ said Taffy.

‘He was quite right. But he didn’t tell you anything about Sign Tabus, did he?’

‘No,’ said Taffy. ‘He said that if I showed you I had a real tabu of my own, you’d most likely put some real tabus on me.’

‘Quite right, my only daughter dear,’ said Tegumai. ‘I’ll give you some tabus that will simply amaze you – Stinging-Nettle Tabus, Sign Tabus, Black and White Tabus – dozens of tabus. Now attend to me. Do you know what this means?’

Tegumai skiffled his forefinger in the air snakyfashion. ‘That’s tabu on wriggling when you’re eating your dinner. It is an important tabu, and if you break it, you’ll have cramps – same as I did – or else I’ll have to tattoo you all over.’

Taffy sat quite still through dinner, and then Tegumai held up his right hand in front of him, the fingers close together. ‘That’s the Still Tabu, Taffy. Whenever I do that, you must stop as you are, whatever you are doing. If you are sewing, you must stop with the needle halfway through the deer-skin. If you’re walking, you stop on one foot. If you’re climbing, you stop on one branch. You don’t move until you see me go like this.’

Tegumai put up his right hand, and waved it in front of his face two or three times. ‘That’s the sign for Carry On. You can go on with whatever you are doing when you see me make that.’

‘Aren’t there any necklaces for that tabu?’ said Taffy.

‘Yes. There is a red-and-black necklace, of course, but how can I come tramping through the fern to give you a Still Tabu necklace every time I see a deer or a rabbit, and want you to be quiet?’ said Tegumai. ‘I thought you were a better hunter than that. Why, I might have to shoot an arrow over your head the minute after I had put Still Tabu on you.’

‘But how would I know what you were shooting at?’ said Taffy.

‘Watch my hand,’ said Tegumai. ‘You know the three little jumps a deer gives before he starts to run off – like this?’ He looped his finger three times in the air, and Taffy nodded. ‘When you see me do that, you’ll know we’ve found a deer. A little jiggle of the forefinger means a rabbit.’

‘Yes. Rabbits run like that,’ said Taffy, and jiggled her forefinger the same way.

‘Squirrel’s a long, climby-up twist in the air. Like this!’

‘Same as squirrels kinking round trees. I see,’ said Taffy.

‘Otter’s a long, smooth, straight wave in the air – like this.’

‘Same as otters swimming in a pool. I see,’ said Taffy.

‘And beaver’s just as if I was smacking somebody with my open hand.’

‘Same as beavers’ tails smacking on the water when they are frightened. I see.’

‘Those aren’t tabus. Those are just signs to show you what I am hunting. The Still Tabu is the thing you must watch, because it’s a big tabu.’

‘I can put the Still Tabu on, too,’ said Teshumai Tewindrow, who was sewing deer-skins together. ‘I can put it on you, Taffy, when you get too rowdy going to bed.’

‘What happens if I break it?’ said Taffy. ‘You can’t break a tabu except by accident.’ ‘But s’pose I did,’ said Taffy.

‘You’d lose your own tabu-necklace. You’d have to take it back to the Head Chief, and you’d just be called Taffy again, not Daughter of Tegumai. Or perhaps we’d change your name to Tabumai Skellumzulai – the Bad Thing who can’t keep a Tabu – and very likely you wouldn’t be kissed for a day and a night.’

‘Umm!’ said Taffy. ‘I don’t think tabus are fun at all.’ ‘Well, take your tabu-necklace back to the Head Chief, and say you want to be a kiddy again, O Only Daughter of Tegumai!’ said her Daddy. ‘No,’ said Taffy. ‘Tell me more about tabus. Can’t I have some more of my very own – my very own – strong tabus that give people Tribal Fits?’

‘No,’ said her Daddy. ‘You aren’t old enough to be allowed to give people Tribal Fits. That pink necklace will do quite well for you.’

‘Then tell me more about tabus,’ said Taffy.

‘But I am sleepy, daughter dear. I’ll just put tabu on anyone talking to me till the sun gets behind that hill, and we’ll go out in the evening and see if we can catch rabbits.

Ask Mummy about the other tabus. It’s a great comfort that you are a tabu-girl, because now I shan’t have to tell you anything more than once.’

Taffy talked quietly to her Mummy till the sun was in the right place. Then she waked Tegumai, and they both got their hunting things ready and went out into the woods. But just as she passed her little garden outside the Cave, Taffy took off her tabu-necklace and hung it on a rose-bush. Her garden-border was only marked with white stones, but she called the Rose the real gate into it, and all the Tribe knew it.

‘Who do you s’pose you’ll catch?’ said Tegumai. ‘Wait and see till we come back,’ said Taffy. ‘The Head Chief said that anyone who breaks that tabu will have to stay in my garden till I let him out.’ They went along through the woods, and crossed the Wagai river on a fallen tree, and they climbed up to the top of a big bare hill where there were plenty of rabbits in the fern.

‘Remember you’re a tabu-girl now,’ said Tegumai, when Taffy began to skitter about and ask questions instead of hunting for rabbits; and he made the Still Tabu sign, and Taffy stopped as if she had been all turned into one solid stone. She was stooping to tie up a shoestring, and she stayed still with her hand on the string (We know that kind of tabu, don’t we, Best Beloved?) only she looked hard at her Daddy, which you always must do when the Still Tabu is on. Presently, when he had walked a long way off, he turned round and made the Carry On sign. So she walked forward quietly through the bracken, always looking at her Daddy, and a rabbit jumped up in front of her. She was just going to throw her stick, when she saw Tegumai make the Still Tabu sign, and she stopped with her mouth half open and her throwing-stick in her hand. The rabbit ran towards Tegumai, and Tegumai caught it. Then he came across the fern and kissed his daughter and said, ‘That is what I call a superior girldaughter. It’s some pleasure to hunt with you now, Taffy.’

A little while afterwards, a rabbit jumped up where Tegumai couldn’t see it, but Taffy could, and she knew it was coming towards her if Tegumai did not frighten it; so she held up her hand, made the Rabbit Sign (so as he should know she wasn’t in fun), and she put the Still Tabu on her own Daddy! She did – indeed she did, Best Beloved!

Tegumai stopped with one foot half lifted to climb over an old tree-trunk. The rabbit ran past Taffy, and Taffy killed it with her throwing-stick; but she was so excited that she forgot to take off the Still Tabu for quite two minutes, and all that time Tegumai stood on one leg, not daring to put his other foot down. Then he came and kissed her and threw her up in the air, and put her on his shoulder and danced and said, ‘My Tribal Word and Testimony! This is what I call having a daughter that is a daughter, O Only Daughter of Tegumai!’ And Taffy was most tremenenssly and wonderhugely pleased.

It was almost dark when they went home. They had five rabbits and two squirrels, as well as a water-rat. Taffy wanted the water-rat’s skin for a purse. (People had to kill water-rats in those days because they couldn’t buy purses, but we know that water-rats are just as much tabu, these particular days, for you and me as anything else that is alive.)

‘I think I’ve kept you out a little too late,’ said Tegumai, when they were near home, ‘and Mummy won’t be pleased with us. Run home, Taffy! You can see the Cave-fire from here.’

Taffy ran along, and that very minute Tegumai heard something crackle in the bushes, and a big, lean, grey wolf jumped out and began to trot quietly after Taffy.

Now, all the Tegumai people hated wolves and killed them whenever they could, and Tegumai had never seen one so close to his Cave before.

He hurried after Taffy, but the wolf heard him, and jumped back into the bushes. Those wolves were afraid of grown-ups, but they used to try and catch the children of the Tribe. Taffy was swinging the water-rat and singing to herself – her Daddy had taken off all tabus – so she didn’t notice anything.

There was a little meadow close to the Cave, and by the mouth of the Cave Taffy saw a tall man standing in her rose-garden, but it was too dark to make out properly.

‘I do believe my tabu-necklace has truly caught somebody,’ she said, and she was just running up to look when she heard her Daddy say, ‘Still, Taffy! Still Tabu till I take it off!’ She stopped where she was – the water-rat in one hand and the throwing-stick in the other – only turning her head towards her Daddy to be ready for the Carry On sign.

It was the longest Still Tabu she had had put upon her all that day. Tegumai had stepped back close to the wood and was holding his stone throwing-hatchet in one hand, and with the other he was making the Still Tabu sign.

Then she thought she saw something black creeping sideways at her across the grass. It came nearer and nearer, then it moved back a little and then it crawled closer.

Then she heard her Daddy’s stone throwing-hatchet whirr past her shoulder just like a partridge, and at the same time another hatchet whirred out from her rose garden; and there was a howl, and a big grey wolf lay kicking on the grass, quite dead.

Then Tegumai picked her up and kissed her seven times and said, ‘My Tribal Word and Tegumai Testimony, Taffy, but you are a daughter to be proud of. Did you know what it was?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Taffy. ‘But I think I guessed it was a wolf. I knew you wouldn’t let it hurt me.’

‘Good girl,’ said Tegumai, and he stooped over the wolf and picked up both hatchets. ‘Why, here’s the Head Chief’s hatchet!’ he said, and he held up the Head Chief’s magic throwing-hatchet, with the big greenstone head.

‘Yes,’ said the Head Chief from inside Taffy’s rosegarden, ‘and I’d be very much obliged if you would bring it back to me. I came to call on you this afternoon, and accidentally I stepped into Taffy’s garden before I saw her tabu-necklace on the rose-tree. So, of course, I had to wait, till Taffy came back to let me out.’

Then the Head Chief all in his feathers and shells took the Three Sorrowful Steps with his head on one side, and said, ‘I broke tabu! I broke tabu! I broke tabu!’ and bowed solemnly and statelily before Taffy, till his tall eagle-feathers nearly touched the ground, and he said and he sang, ‘O Daughter of Tegumai, I saw everything that happened. You are a true tabu-girl. I am very pleased at you. At first I wasn’t pleased, because I had to wait in your garden since six o’clock, and I know you only put tabu on your garden for fun.’

‘No, not fun,’ said Taffy. ‘I truly wanted to see if my tabu would catch anybody; but I didn’t know that a little tabu like mine would work on a big Head Chief like you, O Head Chief.’

‘I told you it worked. I gave it to you myself,’ said the Head Chief. ‘Of course it would work. But I don’t mind. I want to tell you, Taffy, my dear, that I wouldn’t have minded staying in your garden from twelve o’clock instead of only six o’clock to see how beautifully you kept that last Still Tabu that your Daddy put on you. I give you my Chiefly Word, Taffy, that a great many men in the Tribe wouldn’t have kept that tabu as you kept it, with that wolf crawling up to you across the grass.’

‘What are you going to do with the wolf-skin, O Head Chief?’ said Tegumai, because any animal that the Head Chief threw his hatchet at belonged to the Head Chief by the Tribal Custom of Tegumai.

‘I am going to give it to Taffy, of course, for a winter cloak, and I’ll make her a magic necklace of her very own out of the teeth and claws,’ said the Head Chief; ‘and I am going to have the story of Taffy and the Still Tabu painted on wood on the Tribal Tabu-Count, so that all the girl-daughters of the Tribe can see and know and remember and understand.’

Then they all three went into the Cave, and Teshumai Tewindrow gave them a most beautiful supper, and the Head Chief took off his eagle-feathers and all his necklaces; and when it was time for Taffy to go to bed in her own little cave, Tegumai and the Head Chief came in to say good-night, and they romped all round the cave, and dragged Taffy over the floor on a deer-skin (same as some people are dragged about on a hearth-rug), and they finished by throwing the otter-skin cushions about and knocking down a lot of old spears and fishing-rods that were hung on the walls. At last things grew so rowdy that Teshumai Tewindrow came in, and said, ‘Still! Still Tabu on every one of you! How do you ever expect that child to go to sleep?’ And they said the really good-night, and Taffy went to sleep.

After that, what happened? Oh, Taffy learned all the tabus just like some people we know. She learned the White Shark Tabu, which made her eat up her dinner instead of playing with it (and that goes with a green-and-white necklace, you know); she learned the Grown-Up Tabu, which prevented her from talking when Neolithic ladies came to call (and, you know, a blue-and-white necklace goes with that); she learned the Owl Tabu, which prevented her staring at strangers (and a black-and-blue necklace goes with that); she learned the Open Hand Tabu (and we know a pure white necklace goes with that), which prevented her snapping and snarling when people borrowed things that belonged to her; and she learned five other tabus.

But the chief thing she learned, and the one that she never broke, not even by accident, was the Still Tabu. That was why she was taken everywhere that her Daddy went.

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THE next day happened to be what they called a Wild Afternoon. Father and Mother went out to pay calls; Miss Blake went for a ride on her bicycle, and they were left all alone till eight o’clock. When they had seen their dear parents and their dear preceptress politely off the premises they got a cabbage-leaf full of raspberries from the gardener, and a Wild Tea from Ellen. They ate the raspberries to prevent their squashing, and they meant to divide the cabbage-leaf with Three Cows down at the Theatre, but they came across a dead hedgehog which they simply had to bury, and the leaf was too useful to waste.

Then they went on to the Forge and found old Hobden the hedger at home with his son, the Bee Boy who is not quite right in his head, but who can pick up swarms of bees in his naked hands; and the Bee Boy told them the rhyme about the slow-worm:—

They all had tea together by the hives, and Hobden said the loaf-cake which Ellen had given them was almost as good as what his wife used to make, and he showed them how to set a wire at the right height for hares. They knew about rabbits already.

Then they climbed up Long Ditch into the lower end of Far Wood. This is sadder and darker than the Volaterrae end because of an old marlpit full of black water, where weepy, hairy moss hangs round the stumps of the willows and alders. But the birds come to perch on the dead branches, and Hobden says that the bitter willow-water is a sort of medicine for sick animals.

They sat down on a felled oak-trunk in the shadows of the beech undergrowth, and were looping the wires Hobden had given them, when they saw Parnesius.

‘How quietly you came!’ said Una, moving up to make room. ‘Where’s Puck?’

‘The Faun and I have disputed whether it is better that I should tell you all my tale, or leave it untold,’ he replied.

‘I only said that if he told it as it happened you wouldn’t understand it,’ said Puck, jumping up like a squirrel from behind the log.

‘I don’t understand all of it,’ said Una, ‘but I like hearing about the little Picts.’

‘What I can’t understand,’ said Dan, ‘is how Maximus knew all about the Picts when he was over in Gaul.’

‘He who makes himself Emperor anywhere must know everything, everywhere,’ said Parnesius. ‘We had this much from Maximus’s mouth after the Games.’

‘Games? What games?’ said Dan.

Parnesius stretched his arm out stiffly, thumb pointed to the ground. ‘Gladiators! That sort of game,’ he said. ‘There were two days’ Games in his honour when he landed all unexpected at Segedunum on the East end of the Wall. Yes, the day after we had met him we held two days’ games; but I think the greatest risk was run, not by the poor wretches on the sand, but by Maximus. In the old days the Legions kept silence before their Emperor. So did not we! You could hear the solid roar run West along the Wall as his chair was carried rocking through. the crowds. The garrison beat round him—clamouring, clowning, asking for pay, for change of quarters, for anything that came into their wild heads. That chair was like a little boat among waves, dipping and falling, but always rising again after one had shut the eyes.’ Parnesius shivered.

‘Were they angry with him?’ said Dan.

‘No more angry than wolves in a cage when their trainer walks among them. If he had turned his back an instant, or for an instant had ceased to hold their eyes, there would have been another Emperor made on the Wall that hour. Was it not so, Faun?’

‘So it was. So it always will be,’ said Puck.

‘Late in the evening his messenger came for us, and we followed to the Temple of Victory, where he lodged with Rutilianus, the General of the Wall. I had hardly seen the General before, but he always gave me leave when I wished to take Heather. He was a great glutton, and kept five Asian cooks, and he came of a family that believed in oracles. We could smell his good dinner when we entered, but the tables were empty. He lay snorting on a couch. Maximus sat apart among long rolls of accounts. Then the doors were shut.

‘“These are your men,” said Maximus to the General, who propped his eye-corners open with his gouty fingers, and stared at us like a fish.

‘“I shall know them again, Cæsar,” said Rutilianus.

‘“Very good,” said Maximus. “Now hear! You are not to move man or shield on the Wall except as these boys shall tell you. You will do nothing, except eat, without their permission. They are the head and arms. You are the belly!”

‘“As Cæsar pleases,” the old man grunted. “If my pay and profits are not cut, you may make my Ancestors’ Oracle my master. Rome has been! Rome has been!” Then he turned on his side to sleep.

‘“He has it,” said Maximus. “We will get to what I need.”

‘He unrolled full copies of the number of men and supplies on the Wall—down to the sick that very day in Hunno Hospital. Oh, but I groaned when his pen marked off detachment after detachment of our best—of our least worthless men! He took two towers of our Scythians, two of our North British auxiliaries, two Numidian cohorts, the Dacians all, and half the Belgians. It was like an eagle pecking a carcass.

1 ‘“And now, how many catapults have you?” He turned up a new list, but Pertinax laid his open hand there.

‘“No, Cæsar,” said he. “Do not tempt the Gods too far. Take men, or engines, but not both; else we refuse.”’

‘Engines?’ said Una.

‘The catapults of the Wall—huge things forty feet high to the head—firing nets of raw stone or forged bolts. Nothing can stand against them. He left us our catapults at last, but he took a Cæsar’s half of our men without pity. We were a shell when he rolled up the lists!

‘“Hail, Cæsar! We, about to die, salute you!” said Pertinax, laughing. “If any enemy even leans against the Wall now, it will tumble.”

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‘“Give me the three years Allo spoke of,” he answered, “and you shall have twenty thousand men of your own choosing up here. But now it is a gamble—a game played against the Gods, and the stakes are Britain, Gaul, and perhaps, Rome. You play on my side?”

‘“We will play, Cæsar,” I said, for I had never met a man like this man.

‘“Good. To-morrow,” said he, “I proclaim you Captains of the Wall before the troops.”

‘So we went into the moonlight, where they were cleaning the ground after the Games. We saw great Roma Dea atop of the Wall, the frost on her helmet, and her spear pointed towards the North Star. We saw the twinkle of night-fires all along the guard towers, and the line of the black catapults growing smaller and smaller in the distance. All these things we knew till we were weary; but that night they seemed very strange to us, because the next day we knew we were to be their masters.

‘The men took the news well; but when Maximus went away with half our strength, and we had to spread ourselves into the emptied towers, and the townspeople complained that trade would be ruined, and the Autumn gales blew—it was dark days for us two. Here Pertinax was more than my right hand. Being born and bred among the great country-houses in Gaul, he knew the proper words to address to all—from Roman-born Centurions to those dogs of the Third—the Libyans. And he spoke to each as though that man were as high-minded as himself. Now I saw so strongly what things were needed to be done, that I forgot things are only accomplished by means of men. That was a mistake.

‘I feared nothing from the Picts, at least for that year, but Allo warned me that the Winged Hats would soon come in from the sea at each end of the Wall to prove to the Picts how weak we were. So I made ready in haste, and none too soon. I shifted our best men to the ends of the Wall, and set up screened catapults by the beach. The Winged Hats would drive in before the snow-squalls—ten or twenty boats at a time—on Segedunum or Ituna, according as the wind blew.

‘Now a ship coming in to land men must furl her sail. If you wait till you see her men gather up the sail’s foot, your catapults can jerk a net of loose stones (bolts only cut through the cloth) into the bag of it. Then she turns over, and the sea makes everything clean again. A few men may come ashore, but very few . . . . It was not hard work, except the waiting on the beach in blowing sand and snow. And that was how we dealt with the Winged Hats that winter.

‘Early in the Spring, when the East winds blow like skinning-knives, they gathered again off Segedunum with many ships. Allo told me they would never rest till they had taken a tower in open fight. Certainly they fought in the open. We dealt with them thoroughly through a long day: and when all was finished, one man dived clear of the wreckage of his ship, and swam towards shore. I waited, and a wave tumbled him at my feet.

‘As I stooped, I saw he wore such a medal as I wear.’ Parnesius raised his hand to his neck. ‘Therefore, when he could speak, I addressed him a certain Question which can only be answered in a certain manner. He answered with the necessary Word—the Word that belongs to the Degree of Gryphons in the science of Mithras my God. I put my shield over him till he could stand up. You see I am not short, but he was a head taller than I. He said: “What now?” I said: “At your pleasure, my brother, to stay or go.”

‘He looked out across the surf. There remained one ship unhurt, beyond range of our catapults. I checked the catapults and he waved her in. She came as a hound comes to a master. When she was yet a hundred paces from the beach, he flung back his hair, and swam out. They hauled him in, and went away. I knew that those
who worship Mithras are many and of all races, so I did not think much more upon the matter.

‘A month later I saw Allo with his horses by the Temple of Pan, O Faun—and he gave me a great necklace of gold studded with coral.

‘At first I thought it was a bribe from some tradesman in the town—meant for old Rutilianus. “Nay,” said Allo. “This is a gift from Amal, that Winged Hat whom you saved on the beach. He says you are a Man.”’

‘“He is a Man, too. Tell him I can wear his gift,” I answered.

‘“Oh, Amal is a young fool; but, speaking as sensible men, your Emperor is doing such great things in Gaul that the Winged Hats are anxious to be his friends, or, better still, the friends of his servants. They think you and Pertinax could lead them to victories.” Allo looked at me like a one-eyed raven.

‘“Allo,” I said, “you are the corn between the two millstones. Be content if they grind evenly, and don’t thrust your hand between them.”

‘“I?” said Allo. “I hate Rome and the Winged Hats equally; but if the Winged Hats thought that some day you and Pertinax might join them against Maximus, they would leave you in peace while you considered. Time is what we need—you and I and Maximus. Let me carry a pleasant message back to the Winged Hats—something for them to make a council over. We barbarians are all alike. We sit up half the night to discuss anything a Roman says. Eh?”

‘“We have no men. We must fight with words,” said Pertinax. “Leave it to Allo and me.”

‘So Allo carried word back to the Winged Hats that we would not fight them if they did not fight us; and they (I think they were a little tired of losing men in the sea) agreed to a sort of truce. I believe Allo, who being a horse-dealer loved lies, also told them we might some day rise against Maximus as Maximus had risen against Rome.

‘Indeed, they permitted the corn-ships which I sent to the Picts to pass North that season without harm. Therefore the Picts were well fed that winter, and since they were in some sort my children, I was glad of it. We had only two thousand men on the Wall, and I wrote many times to Maximus and begged—prayed—him to send me only one cohort of my old North British troops. He could not spare them. He needed them to win more victories in Gaul.

‘Then came news that he had defeated and slain the Emperor Gratian, and thinking he must now be secure, I wrote again for men. He answered: “You will learn that I have at last settled accounts with the pup Gratian. There was no need that he should have died, but he became confused and lost his head, which is a bad thing to befall any Emperor. Tell your Father I am content to drive two mules only; for unless my old General’s son thinks himself destined to destroy me, I shall rest Emperor of Gaul and Britain, and then you, my two children, will presently get all the men you need. Just now I can spare none.”’

‘What did he mean by his General’s son?’ said Dan.

‘He meant Theodosius Emperor of Rome, who was the son of Theodosius the General under whom Maximus had fought in the old Pict War. The two men never loved each other, and when Gratian made the younger Theodosius Emperor of the East (at least, so I’ve heard), Maximus carried on the war to the second generation. It was his fate, and it was his fall. But Theodosius the Emperor is a good man. As I know.’ Parnesius was silent for a moment and then continued.

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‘I wrote back to Maximus that, though we had peace on the Wall, I should be happier with a few more men and some new catapults. He answered: “You must live a little longer under the shadow of my victories, till I can see what young Theodosius intends. He may welcome me as a brother-Emperor, or he may be preparing an army. In either case I cannot spare men just now.”’

‘But he was always saying that,’ cried Una.

‘It was true. He did not make excuses; but thanks, as he said, to the news of his victories, we had no trouble on the Wall for a long, long time. The Picts grew fat as their own sheep among the heather, and as many of my men as lived were well exercised in their weapons. Yes, the Wall looked strong. For myself, I knew how weak we were. I knew that if even a false rumour of any defeat to Maximus broke loose among the Winged Hats, they might come down in earnest, and then—the Wall must go! For the Picts I never cared, but in those years I learned something of the strength of the Winged Hats. They increased their strength every day, but I could not increase my men. Maximus had emptied Britain behind us, and I felt myself to be a man with a rotten stick standing before a broken fence to turn bulls.

‘Thus, my friends, we lived on the Wall, waiting—waiting—waiting for the men that Maximus never sent.

‘Presently he wrote that he was preparing an army against Theodosius. He wrote—and Pertinax read it over my shoulder in our quarters: “Tell your Father that my destiny orders me to drive three mules or be torn in pieces by them. I hope within a year to finish with Theodosius, son of Theodosius, once and for all. Then you shall have Britain to rule, and Pertinax, if he chooses, Gaul. To-day I wish strongly you were with me to beat my Auxiliaries into shape. Do not, I pray you, believe any rumour of my sickness. I have a little evil in my old body which I shall cure by riding swiftly into Rome.”

‘Said Pertinax: “It is finished with Maximus. He writes as a man without hope. I, a man without hope, can see this. What does he add at the bottom of the roll? ‘Tell Pertinax I have met his late Uncle, the Duumvir of Divio, and that he accounted to me quite truthfully for all his Mother’s monies. I have sent her with a fitting escort, for she is the mother of a hero, to Nicaea, where the climate is warm.’

‘“That is proof,” said Pertinax. “Nicaea is not far by sea from Rome. A woman there could take ship and fly to Rome in time of war. Yes, Maximus foresees his death, and is fulfilling his promises one by one. But I am glad my Uncle met him.”’

‘“You think blackly to-day?’ I asked.

‘“I think truth. The Gods weary of the play we have played against them. Theodosius will destroy Maximus. It is finished!’

‘“Will you write him that?” I said.

‘“See what I shall write,” he answered, and he took pen and wrote a letter cheerful as the light of day, tender as a woman’s and full of jests. Even I, reading over his shoulder, took comfort from it till—I saw his face!

‘“And now,” he said, sealing it, “we be two dead men, my brother. Let us go to the Temple.”

‘We prayed awhile to Mithras, where we had many times prayed before. After that, we lived day by day among evil rumours till winter came again.

‘It happened one morning that we rode to the East shore, and found on the beach a fair-haired man, half frozen, bound to some broken planks. Turning him over, we saw by his belt-buckle that he was a Goth of an Eastern Legion. Suddenly he opened his eyes and cried loudly, “He is dead! The letters were with me, but the Winged Hats sank the ship.” So saying, he died between our hands.

‘We asked not who was dead. We knew! We raced before the driving snow to Hunno, thinking perhaps Allo might be there. We found him already at our stables, and he saw by our faces what we had heard.

‘“It was in a tent by the sea,” he stammered. “He was beheaded by Theodosius. He sent a letter to you, written while he waited to be slain. The Winged Hats met the ship and took it. The news is running through the heather like fire. Blame me not! I cannot hold back my young men any more.”

‘“I would we could say as much for our men,” said Pertinax, laughing. “But, Gods be praised, they cannot run away.”

‘“What do you do?” said Allo. “I bring an order—a message—from the Winged Hats that you join them with your men, and march South to plunder Britain.”

‘“It grieves me,” said Pertinax, “but we are stationed here to stop that thing.”

‘“If I carry back such an answer they will kill me,” said Allo. “I always promised the Winged Hats that you would rise when Maximus fell. I—I did not think he could fall.”

‘“Alas! my poor barbarian,” said Pertinax, still laughing. “Well, you have sold us too many good ponies to be thrown back to your friends. We will make you a prisoner, although you are an ambassador.’

‘“Yes, that will be best,” said Allo, holding out a halter. We bound him lightly, for he was an old man.

‘“Presently the Winged Hats may come to look for you, and that will give us more time. See how the habit of playing for time sticks to a man!” said Pertinax, as he tied the rope.

‘“No,” I said. “Time may help. If Maximus wrote us a letter while he was a prisoner, Theodosius must have sent the ship that brought it. If he can send ships, he can send men.”

‘“How will that profit us?” said Pertinax. “We serve Maximus, not Theodosius. Even if by some miracle of the Gods Theodosius down South sent and saved the Wall, we could not expect more than the death Maximus died.”

‘“It concerns us to defend the Wall, no matter what Emperor dies, or makes die,” I said.

‘“That is worthy of your brother the philosopher,” said Pertinax. “Myself I am without hope, so I do not say solemn and stupid things! Rouse the Wall!”

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‘We armed the Wall from end to end; we told the officers that there was a rumour of Maximus’s death which might bring down the Winged Hats, but we were sure, even if it were true, that Theodosius, for the sake of Britain, would send us help. Therefore, we must stand fast . . . . My friends, it is above all things strange to see how men bear ill news! Often the strongest till then become the weakest, while the weakest, as it were, reach up and steal strength from the Gods. So it was with us. Yet my Pertinax by his jests and his courtesy and his labours had put heart and training into our poor numbers during the past years—more than I should have thought possible. Even our Libyan cohort—the Thirds—stood up in their padded cuirasses and did not whimper.

‘In three days came seven chiefs and elders of the Winged Hats. Among them was that tall young man, Amal, whom I had met on the beach, and he smiled when he saw my necklace. We made them welcome, for they were ambassadors. We showed them Allo, alive but bound. They thought we had killed him, and I saw it would not have vexed them if we had. Allo saw it too, and it vexed him. Then in our quarters at Hunno we came to council.

‘They said that Rome was falling, and that we must join them. They offered me all South Britain to govern after they had taken a tribute, out of it.

‘I answered, “Patience. This Wall is not weighed off like plunder. Give me proof that my General is dead.”

‘“Nay,” said one elder, “prove to us that he lives”; and another said, cunningly, “What will you give us if we read you his last words?”

‘“We are not merchants to bargain,” cried Amal. “Moreover, I owe this man my life. He shall have his proof.” He threw across to me a letter (well I knew the seal) from Maximus.

“We took this out of the ship we sank,” he cried. “I cannot read, but I know one sign, at least, which makes me believe.” He showed me a dark stain on the outer roll that my heavy heart perceived was the valiant blood of
Maximus.

‘“Read!” said Amal. “Read, and then let us hear whose servants you are!”

‘Said Pertinax, very softly, after he had looked through it: “I will read it all. Listen, barbarians!” He read that which I have carried next my heart ever since.’

Parnesius drew from his neck a folded and spotted piece of parchment, and began in a hushed voice:—

‘To Parnesius and Pertinax, the not unworthy Captains of the Wall; from Maximus, once Emperor of Gaul and Britain, now prisoner waiting death by the sea in the camp of Theodosius—Greeting and Good-bye!”

‘“Enough,” said young Amal; “there is your proof! You must join us now!”

‘Pertinax looked long and silently at him, till that fair man blushed like a girl. Then read Pertinax:—

‘“I have joyfully done much evil in my life to those who have wished me evil, but if ever I did any evil to you two I repent, and I ask your forgiveness. The three mules which I strove to drive have torn me in pieces as your Father prophesied. The naked swords wait at the tent door to give me the death I gave to Gratian. Therefore I, your General and your Emperor, send you free and honourable dimissal from my service, which you entered, not for money or office, but, as it makes me warm to believe, because you loved me!”

‘“By the Light of the Sun,” Amal broke in. “This was in some sort a Man! We may have been mistaken in his servants!”

‘And Pertinax read on: “You gave me the time for which I asked. If I have failed to use it, do not lament. We have gambled very splendidly against the Gods, but they hold weighted dice, and I must pay the forfeit. Remember, I have been; but Rome is; and Rome will be. Tell Pertinax his Mother is in safety at Nicaea, and her monies are in charge of the Prefect at Antipolis. Make my remembrances to your Father and to your Mother, whose friendship was great gain to me. Give also to my little Picts and to the Winged Hats such messages as their thick heads can understand. I would have sent you three Legions this very day if all had gone aright. Do not forget me. We have worked together. Farewell!   Farewell!   Farewell!”

‘Now, that was my Emperor’s last letter.’ (The children heard the parchment crackle as Parnesius returned it to its place.)

‘“I was mistaken,” said Amal. “The servants of such a man will sell nothing except over the sword. I am glad of it.” He held out his hand to me.

‘“But Maximus has given you your dismissal,” said an elder. “You are certainly free to serve—or to rule—whom you please. Join—do not follow—join us!”

‘“We thank you,” said Pertinax. “But Maximus tells us to give you such messages as—pardon me, but I use his words—your thick heads can understand.” He pointed through the door to the foot of a catapult wound up.

‘“We understand,” said an elder. “The Wall must be won at a price?”

‘“It grieves me,” said Pertinax, laughing, “but so it must be won,” and he gave them of our best Southern wine.

‘They drank, and wiped their yellow beards in silence till they rose to go.

‘Said Amal, stretching himself (for they were barbarians), “We be a goodly company; I wonder what the ravens and the dogfish will make of some of us before this snow melts.”

‘“Think rather what Theodosius may send,” I answered; and though they laughed, I saw that my chance shot troubled them.

‘Only old Allo lingered behind a little.

‘“You see,” he said, winking and blinking, “I am no more than their dog. When I have shown their men the secret short ways across our bogs, they will kick me like one.”

‘“Then I should not be in haste to show them those ways,” said Pertinax, “till I was sure that Rome could not save the Wall.”

‘“You think so? Woe is me!” said the old man. “I only wanted peace for my people,” and he went out stumbling through the snow behind the tall Winged Hats.

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‘In this fashion then, slowly, a day at a time, which is very bad for doubting troops, the War came upon us. At first the Winged Hats swept in from the sea as they had done before, and there we met them as before—with the catapults; and they sickened of it. Yet for a long time they would not trust their duck-legs on land, and I think when it came to revealing the secrets of the tribe, the little Picts were afraid or ashamed to show them all the roads across the heather. I had this from a Pict prisoner. They were as much our spies as our enemies, for the Winged Hats oppressed them, and took their winter stores. Ah, foolish Little People!

‘Then the Winged Hats began to roll us up from each end of the Wall. I sent runners Southward to see what the news might be in Britain, but the wolves were very bold that winter, among the deserted stations where the troops had once been, and none came back. We had trouble too with the forage for the ponies along the Wall. I kept ten, and so did Pertinax. We lived and slept in the saddle, riding east or west, and we ate our worn-out ponies. The people of the town also made us some trouble till I gathered them all in one quarter behind Hunno. We broke down the Wall on either side of it to make as it were a citadel. Our men fought better in close order.

‘By the end of the second month we were deep in the War as a man is deep in a snowdrift or in a dream. I think we fought in our sleep. At least I know I have gone on the Wall and come off again, remembering nothing between, though my throat was harsh with giving orders, and my sword, I could see, had been used.

‘The Winged Hats fought like wolves—all in a pack. Where they had suffered most, there they charged in most hotly. This was hard for the defenders, but it held them from sweeping on into Britain.

‘In those days Pertinax and I wrote on the plaster of the bricked archway into Valentia the names of the towers, and the days on which they fell one by one. We wished for some record.

‘And the fighting? The fight was always hottest to left and right of the great statue of Roma Dea, near to Rutilianus’s house. By the Light of the Sun, that old fat man, whom we had not considered at all, grew young again among the trumpets! I remember he said his sword was an oracle! “Let us consult the Oracle,” he would say, and put the handle against his ear, and shake his head wisely. “And this day is allowed Rutilianus to live,” he would say, and, tucking up his cloak, he would puff and pant and fight well. Oh, there were jests in plenty on the Wall to take the place of food!

‘We endured for two months and seventeen days—always being pressed from three sides into a smaller space. Several times Allo sent in word that help was at hand. We did not believe it, but it cheered our men.

‘The end came not with shoutings of joy, but, like the rest, as in a dream. The Winged Hats suddenly left us in peace for one night, and the next day; which is too long for spent men. We slept at first lightly, expecting to be roused, and then like logs, each, where he lay. May you never need such sleep! When I waked our towers were full of strange, armed men, who watched us snoring. I roused Pertinax, and we leaped up together.

‘“What?” said a young man in clean armour. “Do you fight against Theodosius? Look!”

‘North we looked over the red snow. No Winged Hats were there. South we looked over the white snow, and behold there were the Eagles of two strong Legions encamped. East and west we saw flame and fighting, but by Hunno all was still.

‘“Trouble no more,” said the young man. “Rome’s arm is long. Where are the Captains of the Wall?’

‘We said we were those men.

‘“But you are old and grey-haired,” he cried. “Maximus said that they were boys.”

‘“Yes, that was true some years ago,” said Pertinax. “What is our fate to be, you fine and well-fed child?”

‘“I am called Ambrosius, a secretary of the Emperor,” he answered. “Show me a certain letter which Maximus wrote from a tent at Aquileia, and perhaps I will believe.”

‘I took it from my breast, and when he had read it he saluted us, saying: “Your fate is in your own hands. If you choose to serve Theodosius, he will give you a Legion. If it suits you to go to your homes, we will give you a Triumph.”

‘“I would like better a bath, wine, food, razors, soaps, oils, and scents,” said Pertinax, laughing.

‘“Oh, I see you are a boy,” said Ambrosius. “And you?” turning to me.

‘“We bear no ill-will against Theodosius, but in War——” I began.

‘“In War it is as it is in Love,” said Pertinax. “Whether she be good or bad, one gives one’s best once, to one only. That given, there remains no second worth giving or taking.”

‘“That is true,” said Ambrosius. “I was with Maximus before he died. He warned Theodosius that you would never serve him, and frankly I say I am sorry for my Emperor.”

‘“He has Rome to console him,” said Pertinax. “I ask you of your kindness to let us go to our homes and get this smell out of our nostrils.”

‘None the less they gave us a Triumph!’

‘It was well earned,’ said Puck, throwing some leaves into the still water of the marlpit. The black, oily circles spread dizzily as the children watched them.

‘I want to know, oh, ever so many things,’ said Dan. ‘What happened to old Allo? Did the Winged Hats ever come back? And what did Amal do?’

‘And what happened to the fat old General with the five cooks?’ said Una. ‘And what did your Mother say when you came home? . . .’

‘She’d say you’re settin’ too long over this old pit, so late as ’tis already,’ said old Hobden’s voice behind them. ‘Hst!’ he whispered.

He stood still, for not twenty paces away a magnificent dog-fox sat on his haunches and looked at the children as though he were an old friend of theirs.

‘Oh, Mus’ Reynolds, Mus’ Reynolds!’ said Hobden, under his breath. ‘If I knowed all was inside your head, I’d know something wuth knowin’. Mus’ Dan an’ Miss Una, come along o’ me while I lock up my liddle hen-house.’