The Jungle Book
taken him. So she said, “Nathoo, O Nathoo!” Mowgli did not show that he
knew the name. “Dost thou not remember the day when I gave thee thy new
shoes?” She touched his foot, and it was almost as hard as horn. “No,”
she said sorrowfully, “those feet have never worn shoes, but thou art
very like my Nathoo, and thou shalt be my son.”
Mowgli was uneasy, because he had never been under a roof before. But as
he looked at the thatch, he saw that he could tear it out any time if he
wanted to get away, and that the window had no fastenings. “What is the
good of a man,” he said to himself at last, “if he does not understand
man’s talk? Now I am as silly and dumb as a man would be with us in the
jungle. I must speak their talk.”
It was not for fun that he had learned while he was with the wolves to
imitate the challenge of bucks in the jungle and the grunt of the little
wild pig. So, as soon as Messua pronounced a word Mowgli would imitate
it almost perfectly, and before dark he had learned the names of many
things in the hut.
There was a difficulty at bedtime, because Mowgli would not sleep under
anything that looked so like a panther trap as that hut, and when they
shut the door he went through the window. “Give him his will,” said
Messua’s husband. “Remember he can never till now have slept on a bed.
If he is indeed sent in the place of our son he will not run away.”
So Mowgli stretched himself in some long, clean grass at the edge of
the field, but before he had closed his eyes a soft gray nose poked him
under the chin.
“Phew!” said Gray Brother (he was the eldest of Mother Wolf’s cubs).
“This is a poor reward for following thee twenty miles. Thou smellest
of wood smoke and cattle--altogether like a man already. Wake, Little
Brother; I bring news.”
“Are all well in the jungle?” said Mowgli, hugging him.
“All except the wolves that were burned with the Red Flower. Now,
listen. Shere Khan has gone away to hunt far off till his coat grows
again, for he is badly singed. When he returns he swears that he will
lay thy bones in the Waingunga.”
“There are two words to that. I also have made a little promise. But
news is always good. I am tired to-night,--very tired with new things,
Gray Brother,--but bring me the news always.”
“Thou wilt not forget that thou art a wolf? Men will not make thee
forget?” said Gray Brother anxiously.
“Never. I will always remember that I love thee and all in our cave. But
also I will always remember that I have been cast out of the Pack.”
“And that thou mayest be cast out of another pack. Men are only men,
Little Brother, and their talk is like the talk of frogs in a pond. When
I come down here again, I will wait for thee in the bamboos at the edge
of the grazing-ground.”
For three months after that night Mowgli hardly ever left the village
gate, he was so busy learning the ways and customs of men. First he had
to wear a cloth round him, which annoyed him horribly; and then he had
to learn about money, which he did not in the least understand, and
about plowing, of which he did not see the use. Then the little children
in the village made him very angry. Luckily, the Law of the Jungle had
taught him to keep his temper, for in the jungle life and food depend on
keeping your temper; but when they made fun of him because he would not
play games or fly kites, or because he mispronounced some word, only the
knowledge that it was unsportsmanlike to kill little naked cubs kept him
from picking them up and breaking them in two.
He did not know his own strength in the least. In the jungle he knew he
was weak compared with the beasts, but in the village people said that
he was as strong as a bull.
And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes
between man and man. When the potter’s donkey slipped in the clay pit,
Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for their
journey to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for
the potter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest
scolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey too, and the
priest told Messua’s husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as
soon as possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli that he would
have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they
grazed. No one was more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he
had been appointed a servant of the village, as it were, he went off
to a circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great
fig-tree. It was the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and
the barber, who knew all the gossip of the village, and old Buldeo, the
village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and smoked. The monkeys
sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a hole under the
platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk
every night because he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree
and talked, and pulled at the big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into
the night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and
Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in the
jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the circle bulged
out of their heads. Most of the tales were about animals, for the jungle
was always at their door. The deer and the wild pig grubbed up their
crops, and now and again the tiger carried off a man at twilight, within
sight of the village gates.
Mowgli, who naturally knew something about what they were talking of,
had to cover his face not to show that he was laughing, while Buldeo,
the Tower musket across his knees, climbed on from one wonderful story
to another, and Mowgli’s shoulders shook.
Buldeo was explaining how the tiger that had carried away Messua’s son
was a ghost-tiger, and his body was inhabited by the ghost of a wicked,
old money-lender, who had died some years ago. “And I know that this is
true,” he said, “because Purun Dass always limped from the blow that he
got in a riot when his account books were burned, and the tiger that I
speak of he limps, too, for the tracks of his pads are unequal.”
“True, true, that must be the truth,” said the gray-beards, nodding
together.
“Are all these tales such cobwebs and moontalk?” said Mowgli. “That
tiger limps because he was born lame, as everyone knows. To talk of the
soul of a money-lender in a beast that never had the courage of a jackal
is child’s talk.”
Buldeo was speechless with surprise for a moment, and the head-man
stared.
“Oho! It is the jungle brat, is it?” said Buldeo. “If thou art so
wise, better bring his hide to Khanhiwara, for the Government has set
a hundred rupees on his life. Better still, talk not when thy elders
speak.”
Mowgli rose to go. “All the evening I have lain here listening,” he
called back over his shoulder, “and, except once or twice, Buldeo has
not said one word of truth concerning the jungle, which is at his very
doors. How, then, shall I believe the tales of ghosts and gods and
goblins which he says he has seen?”
“It is full time that boy went to herding,” said the head-man, while
Buldeo puffed and snorted at Mowgli’s impertinence.
The custom of most Indian villages is for a few boys to take the cattle
and buffaloes out to graze in the early morning, and bring them back
at night. The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow
themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that
hardly come up to their noses. So long as the boys keep with the herds
they are safe, for not even the tiger will charge a mob of cattle. But
if they straggle to pick flowers or hunt lizards, they are sometimes
carried off. Mowgli went through the village street in the dawn, sitting
on the back of Rama, the great herd bull. The slaty-blue buffaloes,
with their long, backward-sweeping horns and savage eyes, rose out their
byres, one by one, and followed him, and Mowgli made it very clear to
the children with him that he was the master. He beat the buffaloes with
a long, polished bamboo, and told Kamya, one of the boys, to graze the
cattle by themselves, while he went on with the buffaloes, and to be
very careful not to stray away from the herd.
An Indian grazing ground is all rocks and scrub and tussocks and little
ravines, among which the herds scatter and disappear. The buffaloes
generally keep to the pools and muddy places, where they lie wallowing
or basking in the warm mud for hours. Mowgli drove them on to the edge
of the plain where the Waingunga came out of the jungle; then he dropped
from Rama’s neck, trotted off to a bamboo clump, and found Gray Brother.
“Ah,” said Gray Brother, “I have waited here very many days. What is the
meaning of this cattle-herding work?”
“It is an order,” said Mowgli. “I am a village herd for a while. What
news of Shere Khan?”
“He has come back to this country, and has waited here a long time for
thee. Now he has gone off again, for the game is scarce. But he means to
kill thee.”
“Very good,” said Mowgli. “So long as he is away do thou or one of the
four brothers sit on that rock, so that I can see thee as I come out of
the village. When he comes back wait for me in the ravine by the _dhâk_
tree in the center of the plain. We need not walk into Shere Khan’s
mouth.”
Then Mowgli picked out a shady place, and lay down and slept while
the buffaloes grazed round him. Herding in India is one of the laziest
things in the world. The cattle move and crunch, and lie down, and move
on again, and they do not even low. They only grunt, and the buffaloes
very seldom say anything, but get down into the muddy pools one after
another, and work their way into the mud till only their noses and
staring china-blue eyes show above the surface, and then they lie like
logs. The sun makes the rocks dance in the heat, and the herd children
hear one kite (never any more) whistling almost out of sight overhead,
and they know that if they died, or a cow died, that kite would sweep
down, and the next kite miles away would see him drop and follow, and
the next, and the next, and almost before they were dead there would be
a score of hungry kites come out of nowhere. Then they sleep and
wake and sleep again, and weave little baskets of dried grass and put
grasshoppers in them; or catch two praying mantises and make them fight;
or string a necklace of red and black jungle nuts; or watch a lizard
basking on a rock, or a snake hunting a frog near the wallows. Then they
sing long, long songs with odd native quavers at the end of them, and
the day seems longer than most people’s whole lives, and perhaps they
make a mud castle with mud figures of men and horses and buffaloes, and
put reeds into the men’s hands, and pretend that they are kings and the
figures are their armies, or that they are gods to be worshiped. Then
evening comes and the children call, and the buffaloes lumber up out of
the sticky mud with noises like gunshots going off one after the other,
and they all string across the gray plain back to the twinkling village
lights.
Day after day Mowgli would lead the buffaloes out to their wallows, and
day after day he would see Gray Brother’s back a mile and a half away
across the plain (so he knew that Shere Khan had not come back), and day
after day he would lie on the grass listening to the noises round him,
and dreaming of old days in the jungle. If Shere Khan had made a false
step with his lame paw up in the jungles by the Waingunga, Mowgli would
have heard him in those long, still mornings.
At last a day came when he did not see Gray Brother at the signal place,
and he laughed and headed the buffaloes for the ravine by the dhk tree,
which was all covered with golden-red flowers. There sat Gray Brother,