The Second Jungle Book
in the Jungle, but shadows with glaring eyes watched them, and rolled
before them even at mid-day; 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 caves; 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.
MOWGLI’S SONG AGAINST PEOPLE
I will let loose against you the fleet-footed vines--
I will call in the Jungle to stamp out your lines!
The roofs shall fade before it,
The house-beams shall fall,
And the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall cover it all!
In the gates of these your councils my people shall sing,
In the doors of these your garners the Bat-folk shall cling;
And the snake shall be your watchman,
By a hearthstone unswept;
For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall fruit where ye slept!
Ye shall not see my strikers; ye shall hear them and guess;
By night, before the moon-rise, I will send for my cess,
And the wolf shall be your herdsman
By a landmark removed,
For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall seed where ye loved!
I will reap your fields before you at the hands of a host;
Ye shall glean behind my reapers, for the bread that is lost,
And the deer shall be your oxen
By a headland untilled,
For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall leaf where ye build!
I have untied against you the club-footed vines,
I have sent in the Jungle to swamp out your lines.
The trees--the trees are on you!
The house-beams shall fall,
And the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall cover you all!
THE UNDERTAKERS
When ye say to Tabaqui, “My Brother!” when ye call the
Hyena to meat,
Ye may cry the Full Truce with Jacala--the Belly that runs
on four feet.
Jungle Law
“Respect the aged!”
“It was a thick voice--a muddy voice that would have made you shudder--a
voice like something soft breaking in two. There was a quaver in it, a
croak and a whine.
“Respect the aged! O Companions of the River--respect the aged!”
Nothing could be seen on the broad reach of the river except a
little fleet of square-sailed, wooden-pinned barges, loaded with
building-stone, that had just come under the railway bridge, and were
driving down-stream. They put their clumsy helms over to avoid the
sand-bar made by the scour of the bridge-piers, and as they passed,
three abreast, the horrible voice began again:
“O Brahmins of the River--respect the aged and infirm!”
A boatman turned where he sat on the gunwale, lifted up his hand, said
something that was not a blessing, and the boats creaked on through
the twilight. The broad Indian river, that looked more like a chain
of little lakes than a stream, was as smooth as glass, reflecting the
sandy-red sky in mid-channel, but splashed with patches of yellow and
dusky purple near and under the low banks. Little creeks ran into the
river in the wet season, but now their dry mouths hung clear above
water-line. On the left shore, and almost under the railway bridge,
stood a mud-and-brick and thatch-and-stick village, whose main street,
full of cattle going back to their byres, ran straight to the river, and
ended in a sort of rude brick pier-head, where people who wanted to
wash could wade in step by step. That was the Ghaut of the village of
Mugger-Ghaut.
Night was falling fast over the fields of lentils and rice and cotton
in the low-lying ground yearly flooded by the river; over the reeds
that fringed the elbow of the bend, and the tangled jungle of the
grazing-grounds behind the still reeds. The parrots and crows, who had
been chattering and shouting over their evening drink, had flown inland
to roost, crossing the out-going battalions of the flying-foxes; and
cloud upon cloud of water-birds came whistling and “honking” to
the cover of the reed-beds. There were geese, barrel-headed and
black-backed, teal, widgeon, mallard, and sheldrake, with curlews, and
here and there a flamingo.
A lumbering Adjutant-crane brought up the rear, flying as though each
slow stroke would be his last.
“Respect the aged! Brahmins of the River--respect the aged!”
The Adjutant half turned his head, sheered a little in the direction of
the voice, and landed stiffly on the sand-bar below the bridge. Then you
saw what a ruffianly brute he really was. His back view was immensely
respectable, for he stood nearly six feet high, and looked rather like a
very proper bald-headed parson. In front it was different, for his Ally
Sloper-like head and neck had not a feather to them, and there was a
horrible raw-skin pouch on his neck under his chin--a hold-all for the
things his pick-axe beak might steal. His legs were long and thin and
skinny, but he moved them delicately, and looked at them with pride as
he preened down his ashy-gray tail-feathers, glanced over the smooth of
his shoulder, and stiffened into “Stand at attention.”
A mangy little Jackal, who had been yapping hungrily on a low bluff,
cocked up his ears and tail, and scuttered across the shallows to join
the Adjutant.
He was the lowest of his caste--not that the best of jackals are good
for much, but this one was peculiarly low, being half a beggar, half a
criminal--a cleaner-up of village rubbish-heaps, desperately timid or
wildly bold, everlastingly hungry, and full of cunning that never did
him any good.
“Ugh!” he said, shaking himself dolefully as he landed. “May the red
mange destroy the dogs of this village! I have three bites for each flea
upon me, and all because I looked--only looked, mark you--at an old shoe
in a cow-byre. Can I eat mud?” He scratched himself under his left ear.
“I heard,” said the Adjutant, in a voice like a blunt saw going through
a thick board--“I HEARD there was a new-born puppy in that same shoe.”
“To hear is one thing; to know is another,” said the Jackal, who had a
very fair knowledge of proverbs, picked up by listening to men round the
village fires of an evening.
“Quite true. So, to make sure, I took care of that puppy while the dogs
were busy elsewhere.”
“They were VERY busy,” said the Jackal. “Well, I must not go to the
village hunting for scraps yet awhile. And so there truly was a blind
puppy in that shoe?”
“It is here,” said the Adjutant, squinting over his beak at his full
pouch. “A small thing, but acceptable now that charity is dead in the
world.”
“Ahai! The world is iron in these days,” wailed the Jackal. Then his
restless eye caught the least possible ripple on the water, and he went
on quickly: “Life is hard for us all, and I doubt not that even our
excellent master, the Pride of the Ghaut and the Envy of the River----”
“A liar, a flatterer, and a Jackal were all hatched out of the same
egg,” said the Adjutant to nobody in particular; for he was rather a
fine sort of a liar on his own account when he took the trouble.
“Yes, the Envy of the River,” the Jackal repeated, raising his voice.
“Even he, I doubt not, finds that since the bridge has been built good
food is more scarce. But on the other hand, though I would by no means
say this to his noble face, he is so wise and so virtuous--as I, alas I
am not----”
“When the Jackal owns he is gray, how black must the Jackal be!”
muttered the Adjutant. He could not see what was coming.
“That his food never fails, and in consequence----”
There was a soft grating sound, as though a boat had just touched in
shoal water. The Jackal spun round quickly and faced (it is always
best to face) the creature he had been talking about. It was a
twenty-four-foot crocodile, cased in what looked like treble-riveted
boiler-plate, studded and keeled and crested; the yellow points of his
upper teeth just overhanging his beautifully fluted lower jaw. It
was the blunt-nosed Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, older than any man in the
village, who had given his name to the village; the demon of the ford
before the railway bridge, came--murderer, man-eater, and local fetish
in one. He lay with his chin in the shallows, keeping his place by an
almost invisible rippling of his tail, and well the Jackal knew that one
stroke of that same tail in the water would carry the Mugger up the bank