The Jungle Book
off from the nest, and left Darzee to keep the babies warm, and continue
his song about the death of Nag. Darzee was very like a man in some
ways.
She fluttered in front of Nagaina by the rubbish heap and cried out,
“Oh, my wing is broken! The boy in the house threw a stone at me and
broke it.” Then she fluttered more desperately than ever.
Nagaina lifted up her head and hissed, “You warned Rikki-tikki when I
would have killed him. Indeed and truly, you’ve chosen a bad place to
be lame in.” And she moved toward Darzee’s wife, slipping along over the
dust.
“The boy broke it with a stone!” shrieked Darzee’s wife.
“Well! It may be some consolation to you when you’re dead to know that I
shall settle accounts with the boy. My husband lies on the rubbish heap
this morning, but before night the boy in the house will lie very still.
What is the use of running away? I am sure to catch you. Little fool,
look at me!”
Darzee’s wife knew better than to do that, for a bird who looks at a
snake’s eyes gets so frightened that she cannot move. Darzee’s wife
fluttered on, piping sorrowfully, and never leaving the ground, and
Nagaina quickened her pace.
Rikki-tikki heard them going up the path from the stables, and he raced
for the end of the melon patch near the wall. There, in the warm litter
above the melons, very cunningly hidden, he found twenty-five eggs,
about the size of a bantam’s eggs, but with whitish skin instead of
shell.
“I was not a day too soon,” he said, for he could see the baby cobras
curled up inside the skin, and he knew that the minute they were hatched
they could each kill a man or a mongoose. He bit off the tops of the
eggs as fast as he could, taking care to crush the young cobras, and
turned over the litter from time to time to see whether he had missed
any. At last there were only three eggs left, and Rikki-tikki began to
chuckle to himself, when he heard Darzee’s wife screaming:
“Rikki-tikki, I led Nagaina toward the house, and she has gone into the
veranda, and--oh, come quickly--she means killing!”
Rikki-tikki smashed two eggs, and tumbled backward down the melon-bed
with the third egg in his mouth, and scuttled to the veranda as hard as
he could put foot to the ground. Teddy and his mother and father were
there at early breakfast, but Rikki-tikki saw that they were not eating
anything. They sat stone-still, and their faces were white. Nagaina was
coiled up on the matting by Teddy’s chair, within easy striking distance
of Teddy’s bare leg, and she was swaying to and fro, singing a song of
triumph.
“Son of the big man that killed Nag,” she hissed, “stay still. I am not
ready yet. Wait a little. Keep very still, all you three! If you move I
strike, and if you do not move I strike. Oh, foolish people, who killed
my Nag!”
Teddy’s eyes were fixed on his father, and all his father could do was
to whisper, “Sit still, Teddy. You mustn’t move. Teddy, keep still.”
Then Rikki-tikki came up and cried, “Turn round, Nagaina. Turn and
fight!”
“All in good time,” said she, without moving her eyes. “I will settle my
account with you presently. Look at your friends, Rikki-tikki. They are
still and white. They are afraid. They dare not move, and if you come a
step nearer I strike.”
“Look at your eggs,” said Rikki-tikki, “in the melon bed near the wall.
Go and look, Nagaina!”
The big snake turned half around, and saw the egg on the veranda. “Ah-h!
Give it to me,” she said.
Rikki-tikki put his paws one on each side of the egg, and his eyes were
blood-red. “What price for a snake’s egg? For a young cobra? For a
young king cobra? For the last--the very last of the brood? The ants are
eating all the others down by the melon bed.”
Nagaina spun clear round, forgetting everything for the sake of the one
egg. Rikki-tikki saw Teddy’s father shoot out a big hand, catch Teddy
by the shoulder, and drag him across the little table with the tea-cups,
safe and out of reach of Nagaina.
“Tricked! Tricked! Tricked! Rikk-tck-tck!” chuckled Rikki-tikki. “The
boy is safe, and it was I--I--I that caught Nag by the hood last night
in the bathroom.” Then he began to jump up and down, all four feet
together, his head close to the floor. “He threw me to and fro, but he
could not shake me off. He was dead before the big man blew him in two.
I did it! Rikki-tikki-tck-tck! Come then, Nagaina. Come and fight with
me. You shall not be a widow long.”
Nagaina saw that she had lost her chance of killing Teddy, and the egg
lay between Rikki-tikki’s paws. “Give me the egg, Rikki-tikki. Give me
the last of my eggs, and I will go away and never come back,” she said,
lowering her hood.
“Yes, you will go away, and you will never come back. For you will go
to the rubbish heap with Nag. Fight, widow! The big man has gone for his
gun! Fight!”
Rikki-tikki was bounding all round Nagaina, keeping just out of reach
of her stroke, his little eyes like hot coals. Nagaina gathered herself
together and flung out at him. Rikki-tikki jumped up and backward. Again
and again and again she struck, and each time her head came with a whack
on the matting of the veranda and she gathered herself together like a
watch spring. Then Rikki-tikki danced in a circle to get behind her, and
Nagaina spun round to keep her head to his head, so that the rustle of
her tail on the matting sounded like dry leaves blown along by the wind.
He had forgotten the egg. It still lay on the veranda, and Nagaina came
nearer and nearer to it, till at last, while Rikki-tikki was drawing
breath, she caught it in her mouth, turned to the veranda steps, and
flew like an arrow down the path, with Rikki-tikki behind her. When
the cobra runs for her life, she goes like a whip-lash flicked across a
horse’s neck.
Rikki-tikki knew that he must catch her, or all the trouble would begin
again. She headed straight for the long grass by the thorn-bush, and as
he was running Rikki-tikki heard Darzee still singing his foolish little
song of triumph. But Darzee’s wife was wiser. She flew off her nest
as Nagaina came along, and flapped her wings about Nagaina’s head. If
Darzee had helped they might have turned her, but Nagaina only lowered
her hood and went on. Still, the instant’s delay brought Rikki-tikki up
to her, and as she plunged into the rat-hole where she and Nag used to
live, his little white teeth were clenched on her tail, and he went down
with her--and very few mongooses, however wise and old they may be,
care to follow a cobra into its hole. It was dark in the hole; and
Rikki-tikki never knew when it might open out and give Nagaina room to
turn and strike at him. He held on savagely, and stuck out his feet to
act as brakes on the dark slope of the hot, moist earth.
Then the grass by the mouth of the hole stopped waving, and Darzee said,
“It is all over with Rikki-tikki! We must sing his death song. Valiant
Rikki-tikki is dead! For Nagaina will surely kill him underground.”
So he sang a very mournful song that he made up on the spur of the
minute, and just as he got to the most touching part, the grass quivered
again, and Rikki-tikki, covered with dirt, dragged himself out of the
hole leg by leg, licking his whiskers. Darzee stopped with a little
shout. Rikki-tikki shook some of the dust out of his fur and sneezed.
“It is all over,” he said. “The widow will never come out again.” And
the red ants that live between the grass stems heard him, and began to
troop down one after another to see if he had spoken the truth.
Rikki-tikki curled himself up in the grass and slept where he was--slept
and slept till it was late in the afternoon, for he had done a hard
day’s work.
“Now,” he said, when he awoke, “I will go back to the house. Tell the
Coppersmith, Darzee, and he will tell the garden that Nagaina is dead.”
The Coppersmith is a bird who makes a noise exactly like the beating of
a little hammer on a copper pot; and the reason he is always making it
is because he is the town crier to every Indian garden, and tells all
the news to everybody who cares to listen. As Rikki-tikki went up the
path, he heard his “attention” notes like a tiny dinner gong, and
then the steady “Ding-dong-tock! Nag is dead--dong! Nagaina is dead!
Ding-dong-tock!” That set all the birds in the garden singing, and the
frogs croaking, for Nag and Nagaina used to eat frogs as well as little
birds.
When Rikki got to the house, Teddy and Teddy’s mother (she looked very
white still, for she had been fainting) and Teddy’s father came out and
almost cried over him; and that night he ate all that was given him till
he could eat no more, and went to bed on Teddy’s shoulder, where Teddy’s
mother saw him when she came to look late at night.
“He saved our lives and Teddy’s life,” she said to her husband. “Just
think, he saved all our lives.”
Rikki-tikki woke up with a jump, for the mongooses are light sleepers.
“Oh, it’s you,” said he. “What are you bothering for? All the cobras are
dead. And if they weren’t, I’m here.”
Rikki-tikki had a right to be proud of himself. But he did not grow too
proud, and he kept that garden as a mongoose should keep it, with tooth
and jump and spring and bite, till never a cobra dared show its head
inside the walls.
Darzee’s Chant
(Sung in honor of Rikki-tikki-tavi)
Singer and tailor am I--
Doubled the joys that I know--
Proud of my lilt to the sky,
Proud of the house that I sew--
Over and under, so weave I my music--so weave I the house that I
sew.
Sing to your fledglings again,
Mother, oh lift up your head!
Evil that plagued us is slain,
Death in the garden lies dead.
Terror that hid in the roses is impotent--flung on the dung-hill
and dead!
Who has delivered us, who?
Tell me his nest and his name.
Rikki, the valiant, the true,
Tikki, with eyeballs of flame,
Rikk-tikki-tikki, the ivory-fanged, the hunter with eyeballs of
flame!
Give him the Thanks of the Birds,
Bowing with tail feathers spread!
Praise him with nightingale words--
Nay, I will praise him instead.
Hear! I will sing you the praise of the bottle-tailed Rikki, with
eyeballs of red!
(_Here Rikki-tikki interrupted, and the rest of the song is lost._)
Toomai of the Elephants
I will remember what I was, I am sick of rope and chain--
I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs.
I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar-cane:
I will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their lairs.
I will go out until the day, until the morning break--
Out to the wind’s untainted kiss, the water’s clean caress;
I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket stake.
I will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!
Kala Nag, which means Black Snake, had served the Indian Government in
every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and as
he was fully twenty years old when he was caught, that makes him nearly
seventy--a ripe age for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a big
leather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was
before the Afghan War of 1842, and he had not then come to his full
strength.
His mother Radha Pyari,--Radha the darling,--who had been caught in the
same drive with Kala Nag, told him, before his little milk tusks had
dropped out, that elephants who were afraid always got hurt. Kala Nag
knew that that advice was good, for the first time that he saw a shell
burst he backed, screaming, into a stand of piled rifles, and the
bayonets pricked him in all his softest places. So, before he was