The Second Jungle Book
the iron-bound bamboo of the loser witnesses. Yet they are not grateful
to the Mugger. No, they cry ‘Murder!’ and their families fight with
sticks, twenty a-side. My people are good people--upland Jats--Malwais
of the Bet. They do not give blows for sport, and, when the fight is
done, the old Mugger waits far down the river, out of sight of the
village, behind the kikar-scrub yonder. Then come they down, my
broad-shouldered Jats--eight or nine together under the stars, bearing
the dead man upon a bed. They are old men with gray beards, and voices
as deep as mine. They light a little fire--ah! how well I know that
fire!--and they drink tobacco, and they nod their heads together forward
in a ring, or sideways toward the dead man upon the bank. They say the
English Law will come with a rope for this matter, and that such a man’s
family will be ashamed, because such a man must be hanged in the great
square of the Jail. Then say the friends of the dead, ‘Let him hang!’
and the talk is all to do over again--once, twice, twenty times in the
long night. Then says one, at last, ‘The fight was a fair fight. Let us
take blood-money, a little more than is offered by the slayer, and we
will say no more about it.’ Then do they haggle over the blood-money,
for the dead was a strong man, leaving many sons. Yet before amratvela
(sunrise) they put the fire to him a little, as the custom is, and the
dead man comes to me, and HE says no more about it. Aha! my children,
the Mugger knows--the Mugger knows--and my Malwah Jats are a good
people!”
“They are too close--too narrow in the hand for my crop,” croaked the
Adjutant. “They waste not the polish on the cow’s horn, as the saying
is; and, again, who can glean after a Malwai?”
“Ah, I--glean--THEM,” said the Mugger.
“Now, in Calcutta of the South, in the old days,” the Adjutant went on,
“everything was thrown into the streets, and we picked and chose. Those
wore dainty seasons. But to-day they keep their streets as clean as the
outside of an egg, and my people fly away. To be clean is one thing;
to dust, sweep, and sprinkle seven times a day wearies the very Gods
themselves.”
“There was a down-country jackal had it from a brother, who told me,
that in Calcutta of the South all the jackals were as fat as otters in
the Rains,” said the Jackal, his mouth watering at the bare thought of
it.
“Ah, but the white-faces are there--the English, and they bring dogs
from somewhere down the river in boats--big fat dogs--to keep those same
jackals lean,” said the Adjutant.
“They are, then, as hard-hearted as these people? I might have known.
Neither earth, sky, nor water shows charity to a jackal. I saw the tents
of a white-face last season, after the Rains, and I also took a new
yellow bridle to eat. The white-faces do not dress their leather in the
proper way. It made me very sick.”
“That was better than my case,” said the Adjutant. “When I was in my
third season, a young and a bold bird, I went down to the river where
the big boats come in. The boats of the English are thrice as big as
this village.”
“He has been as far as Delhi, and says all the people there walk on
their heads,” muttered the Jackal. The Mugger opened his left eye, and
looked keenly at the Adjutant.
“It is true,” the big bird insisted. “A liar only lies when he hopes
to be believed. No one who had not seen those boats COULD believe this
truth.”
“THAT is more reasonable,” said the Mugger. “And then?”
“From the insides of this boat they were taking out great pieces of
white stuff, which, in a little while, turned to water. Much split off,
and fell about on the shore, and the rest they swiftly put into a house
with thick walls. But a boatman, who laughed, took a piece no larger
than a small dog, and threw it to me. I--all my people--swallow without
reflection, and that piece I swallowed as is our custom. Immediately I
was afflicted with an excessive cold which, beginning in my crop, ran
down to the extreme end of my toes, and deprived me even of speech,
while the boatmen laughed at me. Never have I felt such cold. I danced
in my grief and amazement till I could recover my breath and then
I danced and cried out against the falseness of this world; and the
boatmen derided me till they fell down. The chief wonder of the matter,
setting aside that marvellous coldness, was that there was nothing at
all in my crop when I had finished my lamentings!”
The Adjutant had done his very best to describe his feelings after
swallowing a seven-pound lump of Wenham Lake ice, off an American
ice-ship, in the days before Calcutta made her ice by machinery; but
as he did not know what ice was, and as the Mugger and the Jackal knew
rather less, the tale missed fire.
“Anything,” said the Mugger, shutting his left eye again--“ANYTHING is
possible that comes out of a boat thrice the size of Mugger-Ghaut. My
village is not a small one.”
There was a whistle overhead on the bridge, and the Delhi Mail
slid across, all the carriages gleaming with light, and the shadows
faithfully following along the river. It clanked away into the dark
again; but the Mugger and the Jackal were so well used to it that they
never turned their heads.
“Is that anything less wonderful than a boat thrice the size of
Mugger-Ghaut?” said the bird, looking up.
“I saw that built, child. Stone by stone I saw the bridge-piers rise,
and when the men fell off (they were wondrous sure-footed for the most
part--but WHEN they fell) I was ready. After the first pier was made
they never thought to look down the stream for the body to burn. There,
again, I saved much trouble. There was nothing strange in the building
of the bridge,” said the Mugger.
“But that which goes across, pulling the roofed carts! That is strange,”
the Adjutant repeated. “It is, past any doubt, a new breed of bullock.
Some day it will not be able to keep its foothold up yonder, and will
fall as the men did. The old Mugger will then be ready.”
The Jackal looked at the Adjutant and the Adjutant looked at the Jackal.
If there was one thing they were more certain of than another, it was
that the engine was everything in the wide world except a bullock. The
Jackal had watched it time and again from the aloe hedges by the side of
the line, and the Adjutant had seen engines since the first locomotive
ran in India. But the Mugger had only looked up at the thing from below,
where the brass dome seemed rather like a bullock’s hump.
“M--yes, a new kind of bullock,” the Mugger repeated ponderously,
to make himself quite sure in his own mind; and “Certainly it is a
bullock,” said the Jackal.
“And again it might be----” began the Mugger pettishly.
“Certainly--most certainly,” said the Jackal, without waiting for the
other to finish.
“What?” said the Mugger angrily, for he could feel that the others knew
more than he did. “What might it be? _I_ never finished my words. You
said it was a bullock.”
“It is anything the Protector of the Poor pleases. I am HIS servant--not
the servant of the thing that crosses the river.”
“Whatever it is, it is white-face work,” said the Adjutant; “and for my
own part, I would not lie out upon a place so near to it as this bar.”
“You do not know the English as I do,” said the Mugger. “There was a
white-face here when the bridge was built, and he would take a boat
in the evenings and shuffle with his feet on the bottom-boards, and
whisper: ‘Is he here? Is he there? Bring me my gun.’ I could hear him
before I could see him--each sound that he made--creaking and puffing
and rattling his gun, up and down the river. As surely as I had picked
up one of his workmen, and thus saved great expense in wood for the
burning, so surely would he come down to the Ghaut, and shout in a loud
voice that he would hunt me, and rid the river of me--the Mugger of
Mugger-Ghaut! ME! Children, I have swum under the bottom of his boat for
hour after hour, and heard him fire his gun at logs; and when I was well
sure he was wearied, I have risen by his side and snapped my jaws in his
face. When the bridge was finished he went away. All the English hunt in
that fashion, except when they are hunted.”
“Who hunts the white-faces?” yapped the Jackal excitedly.
“No one now, but I have hunted them in my time.”
“I remember a little of that Hunting. I was young then,” said the
Adjutant, clattering his beak significantly.
“I was well established here. My village was being builded for the third
time, as I remember, when my cousin, the Gavial, brought me word of rich
waters above Benares. At first I would not go, for my cousin, who is a
fish-eater, does not always know the good from the bad; but I heard my
people talking in the evenings, and what they said made me certain.”
“And what did they say?” the Jackal asked.
“They said enough to make me, the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, leave water
and take to my feet. I went by night, using the littlest streams as they
served me; but it was the beginning of the hot weather, and all streams
were low. I crossed dusty roads; I went through tall grass; I climbed
hills in the moonlight. Even rocks did I climb, children--consider this
well. I crossed the tail of Sirhind, the waterless, before I could
find the set of the little rivers that flow Gungaward. I was a month’s
journey from my own people and the river that I knew. That was very
marvellous!”
“What food on the way?” said the Jackal, who kept his soul in his little
stomach, and was not a bit impressed by the Mugger’s land travels.
“That which I could find--COUSIN,” said the Mugger slowly, dragging each
word.
Now you do not call a man a cousin in India unless you think you can
establish some kind of blood-relationship, and as it is only in old
fairy-tales that the Mugger ever marries a jackal, the Jackal knew for
what reason he had been suddenly lifted into the Mugger’s family circle.
If they had been alone he would not have cared, but the Adjutant’s eyes
twinkled with mirth at the ugly jest.
“Assuredly, Father, I might have known,” said the Jackal. A mugger
does not care to be called a father of jackals, and the Mugger of
Mugger-Ghaut said as much--and a great deal more which there is no use
in repeating here.
“The Protector of the Poor has claimed kinship. How can I remember the
precise degree? Moreover, we eat the same food. He has said it,” was the
Jackal’s reply.
That made matters rather worse, for what the Jackal hinted at was that
the Mugger must have eaten his food on that land-march fresh and fresh
every day, instead of keeping it by him till it was in a fit and proper
condition, as every self-respecting mugger and most wild beasts do when
they can. Indeed, one of the worst terms of contempt along the River-bed
is “eater of fresh meat.” It is nearly as bad as calling a man a
cannibal.
“That food was eaten thirty seasons ago,” said the Adjutant quietly. “If
we talk for thirty seasons more it will never come back. Tell us, now,
what happened when the good waters were reached after thy most wonderful
land journey. If we listened to the howling of every jackal the business
of the town would stop, as the saying is.”
The Mugger must have been grateful for the interruption, because he went
on, with a rush:
“By the Right and Left of Gunga! when I came there never did I see such
waters!”
“Were they better, then, than the big flood of last season?” said the
Jackal.
“Better! That flood was no more than comes every five years--a handful
of drowned strangers, some chickens, and a dead bullock in muddy water
with cross-currents. But the season I think of, the river was low,
smooth, and even, and, as the Gavial had warned me, the dead English
came down, touching each other. I got my girth in that season--my