The Second Jungle Book
girth and my depth. From Agra, by Etawah and the broad waters by
Allahabad----”
“Oh, the eddy that set under the walls of the fort at Allahabad!” said
the Adjutant. “They came in there like widgeon to the reeds, and round
and round they swung--thus!”
He went off into his horrible dance again, while the Jackal looked on
enviously. He naturally could not remember the terrible year of the
Mutiny they were talking about. The Mugger continued:
“Yes, by Allahabad one lay still in the slack-water and let twenty go
by to pick one; and, above all, the English were not cumbered with
jewellery and nose-rings and anklets as my women are nowadays. To
delight in ornaments is to end with a rope for a necklace, as the saying
is. All the muggers of all the rivers grew fat then, but it was my Fate
to be fatter than them all. The news was that the English were being
hunted into the rivers, and by the Right and Left of Gunga! we believed
it was true. So far as I went south I believed it to be true; and I went
down-stream beyond Monghyr and the tombs that look over the river.”
“I know that place,” said the Adjutant. “Since those days Monghyr is a
lost city. Very few live there now.”
“Thereafter I worked up-stream very slowly and lazily, and a little
above Monghyr there came down a boatful of white-faces--alive! They
were, as I remember, women, lying under a cloth spread over sticks, and
crying aloud. There was never a gun fired at us, the watchers of the
fords in those days. All the guns were busy elsewhere. We could hear
them day and night inland, coming and going as the wind shifted. I rose
up full before the boat, because I had never seen white-faces alive,
though I knew them well--otherwise. A naked white child kneeled by the
side of the boat, and, stooping over, must needs try to trail his hands
in the river. It is a pretty thing to see how a child loves running
water. I had fed that day, but there was yet a little unfilled space
within me. Still, it was for sport and not for food that I rose at the
child’s hands. They were so clear a mark that I did not even look when I
closed; but they were so small that though my jaws rang true--I am sure
of that--the child drew them up swiftly, unhurt. They must have passed
between tooth and tooth--those small white hands. I should have caught
him cross-wise at the elbows; but, as I said, it was only for sport and
desire to see new things that I rose at all. They cried out one after
another in the boat, and presently I rose again to watch them. The boat
was too heavy to push over. They were only women, but he who trusts
a woman will walk on duckweed in a pool, as the saying is: and by the
Right and Left of Gunga, that is truth!”
“Once a woman gave me some dried skin from a fish,” said the Jackal. “I
had hoped to get her baby, but horse-food is better than the kick of a
horse, as the saying is. What did thy woman do?”
“She fired at me with a short gun of a kind I have never seen before or
since. Five times, one after another” (the Mugger must have met with an
old-fashioned revolver); “and I stayed open-mouthed and gaping, my head
in the smoke. Never did I see such a thing. Five times, as swiftly as I
wave my tail--thus!”
The Jackal, who had been growing more and more interested in the story,
had just time to leap back as the huge tail swung by like a scythe.
“Not before the fifth shot,” said the Mugger, as though he had never
dreamed of stunning one of his listeners--“not before the fifth shot
did I sink, and I rose in time to hear a boatman telling all those
white women that I was most certainly dead. One bullet had gone under
a neck-plate of mine. I know not if it is there still, for the reason I
cannot turn my head. Look and see, child. It will show that my tale is
true.”
“I?” said the Jackal. “Shall an eater of old shoes, a bone-cracker,
presume, to doubt the word of the Envy of the River? May my tail be
bitten off by blind puppies if the shadow of such a thought has crossed
my humble mind! The Protector of the Poor has condescended to inform me,
his slave, that once in his life he has been wounded by a woman. That is
sufficient, and I will tell the tale to all my children, asking for no
proof.”
“Over-much civility is sometimes no better than over-much discourtesy,
for, as the saying is, one can choke a guest with curds. I do NOT desire
that any children of thine should know that the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut
took his only wound from a woman. They will have much else to think of
if they get their meat as miserably as does their father.”
“It is forgotten long ago! It was never said! There never was a white
woman! There was no boat! Nothing whatever happened at all.”
The Jackal waved his brush to show how completely everything was wiped
out of his memory, and sat down with an air.
“Indeed, very many things happened,” said the Mugger, beaten in his
second attempt that night to get the better of his friend. (Neither bore
malice, however. Eat and be eaten was fair law along the river, and the
Jackal came in for his share of plunder when the Mugger had finished
a meal.) “I left that boat and went up-stream, and, when I had reached
Arrah and the back-waters behind it, there were no more dead English.
The river was empty for a while. Then came one or two dead, in red
coats, not English, but of one kind all--Hindus and Purbeeahs--then five
and six abreast, and at last, from Arrah to the North beyond Agra, it
was as though whole villages had walked into the water. They came out
of little creeks one after another, as the logs come down in the Rains.
When the river rose they rose also in companies from the shoals they
had rested upon; and the falling flood dragged them with it across the
fields and through the Jungle by the long hair. All night, too, going
North, I heard the guns, and by day the shod feet of men crossing fords,
and that noise which a heavy cart-wheel makes on sand under water; and
every ripple brought more dead. At last even I was afraid, for I said:
‘If this thing happen to men, how shall the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut
escape?’ There were boats, too, that came up behind me without sails,
burning continually, as the cotton-boats sometimes burn, but never
sinking.”
“Ah!” said the Adjutant. “Boats like those come to Calcutta of the
South. They are tall and black, they beat up the water behind them with
a tail, and they----”
“Are thrice as big as my village. MY boats were low and white; they beat
up the water on either side of them and were no larger than the boats
of one who speaks truth should be. They made me very afraid, and I
left water and went back to this my river, hiding by day and walking
by night, when I could not find little streams to help me. I came to
my village again, but I did not hope to see any of my people there.
Yet they were ploughing and sowing and reaping, and going to and fro in
their fields, as quietly as their own cattle.”
“Was there still good food in the river?” said the Jackal.
“More than I had any desire for. Even I--and I do not eat mud--even
I was tired, and, as I remember, a little frightened of this constant
coming down of the silent ones. I heard my people say in my village
that all the English were dead; but those that came, face down, with the
current were NOT English, as my people saw. Then my people said that it
was best to say nothing at all, but to pay the tax and plough the land.
After a long time the river cleared, and those that came down it had
been clearly drowned by the floods, as I could well see; and though it
was not so easy then to get food, I was heartily glad of it. A little
killing here and there is no bad thing--but even the Mugger is sometimes
satisfied, as the saying is.”
“Marvellous! Most truly marvellous!” said the Jackal. “I am become fat
through merely hearing about so much good eating. And afterward what, if
it be permitted to ask, did the Protector of the Poor do?”
“I said to myself--and by the Right and Left of Gunga! I locked my jaws
on that vow--I said I would never go roving any more. So I lived by the
Ghaut, very close to my own people, and I watched over them year after
year; and they loved me so much that they threw marigold wreaths at my
head whenever they saw it lift. Yes, and my Fate has been very kind to
me, and the river is good enough to respect my poor and infirm presence;
only----”
“No one is all happy from his beak to his tail,” said the Adjutant
sympathetically. “What does the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut need more?”
“That little white child which I did not get,” said the Mugger, with a
deep sigh. “He was very small, but I have not forgotten. I am old now,
but before I die it is my desire to try one new thing. It is true they
are a heavy-footed, noisy, and foolish people, and the sport would be
small, but I remember the old days above Benares, and, if the child
lives, he will remember still. It may be he goes up and down the bank
of some river, telling how he once passed his hands between the teeth of
the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, and lived to make a tale of it. My Fate has
been very kind, but that plagues me sometimes in my dreams--the thought
of the little white child in the bows of that boat.” He yawned, and
closed his jaws. “And now I will rest and think. Keep silent, my
children, and respect the aged.”
He turned stiffly, and shuffled to the top of the sand-bar, while the
Jackal drew back with the Adjutant to the shelter of a tree stranded on
the end nearest the railway bridge.
“That was a pleasant and profitable life,” he grinned, looking up
inquiringly at the bird who towered above him. “And not once, mark you,
did he think fit to tell me where a morsel might have been left along
the banks. Yet I have told HIM a hundred times of good things wallowing
down-stream. How true is the saying, ‘All the world forgets the Jackal
and the Barber when the news has been told!’ Now he is going to sleep!
Arrh!”
“How can a jackal hunt with a Mugger?” said the Adjutant coolly. “Big
thief and little thief; it is easy to say who gets the pickings.”
The Jackal turned, whining impatiently, and was going to curl himself
up under the tree-trunk, when suddenly he cowered, and looked up through
the draggled branches at the bridge almost above his head.
“What now?” said the Adjutant, opening his wings uneasily.
“Wait till we see. The wind blows from us to them, but they are not
looking for us--those two men.”
“Men, is it? My office protects me. All India knows I am holy.” The
Adjutant, being a first-class scavenger, is allowed to go where he
pleases, and so this one never flinched.
“I am not worth a blow from anything better than an old shoe,” said the
Jackal, and listened again. “Hark to that footfall!” he went on. “That
was no country leather, but the shod foot of a white-face. Listen
again! Iron hits iron up there! It is a gun! Friend, those heavy-footed,
foolish English are coming to speak with the Mugger.”
“Warn him, then. He was called Protector of the Poor by some one not
unlike a starving Jackal but a little time ago.”
“Let my cousin protect his own hide. He has told me again and again
there is nothing to fear from the white-faces. They must be white-faces.
Not a villager of Mugger-Ghaut would dare to come after him. See, I said
it was a gun! Now, with good luck, we shall feed before daylight. He
cannot hear well out of water, and--this time it is not a woman!”
A shiny barrel glittered for a minute in the moonlight on the girders.
The Mugger was lying on the sand-bar as still as his own shadow, his
fore-feet spread out a little, his head dropped between them, snoring
like a--mugger.
A voice on the bridge whispered: “It’s an odd shot--straight down
almost--but as safe as houses. Better try behind the neck. Golly! what