The Second Jungle Book
a brute! The villagers will be wild if he’s shot, though. He’s the deota
[godling] of these parts.”
“Don’t care a rap,” another voice answered; “he took about fifteen of my
best coolies while the bridge was building, and it’s time he was put
a stop to. I’ve been after him in a boat for weeks. Stand by with the
Martini as soon as I’ve given him both barrels of this.”
“Mind the kick, then. A double four-bore’s no joke.”
“That’s for him to decide. Here goes!”
There was a roar like the sound of a small cannon (the biggest sort of
elephant-rifle is not very different from some artillery), and a double
streak of flame, followed by the stinging crack of a Martini, whose long
bullet makes nothing of a crocodile’s plates. But the explosive bullets
did the work. One of them struck just behind the Mugger’s neck, a
hand’s-breadth to the left of the backbone, while the other burst a
little lower down, at the beginning of the tail. In ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred a mortally-wounded crocodile can scramble to deep water
and get away; but the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut was literally broken into
three pieces. He hardly moved his head before the life went out of him,
and he lay as flat as the Jackal.
“Thunder and lightning! Lightning and thunder!” said that miserable
little beast. “Has the thing that pulls the covered carts over the
bridge tumbled at last?”
“It is no more than a gun,” said the Adjutant, though his very
tail-feathers quivered. “Nothing more than a gun. He is certainly dead.
Here come the white-faces.”
The two Englishmen had hurried down from the bridge and across to the
sand-bar, where they stood admiring the length of the Mugger. Then a
native with an axe cut off the big head, and four men dragged it across
the spit.
“The last time that I had my hand in a Mugger’s mouth,” said one of the
Englishmen, stooping down (he was the man who had built the bridge), “it
was when I was about five years old--coming down the river by boat to
Monghyr. I was a Mutiny baby, as they call it. Poor mother was in the
boat, too, and she often told me how she fired dad’s old pistol at the
beast’s head.”
“Well, you’ve certainly had your revenge on the chief of the clan--even
if the gun has made your nose bleed. Hi, you boatmen! Haul that head up
the bank, and we’ll boil it for the skull. The skin’s too knocked about
to keep. Come along to bed now. This was worth sitting up all night for,
wasn’t it?”
*****
Curiously enough, the Jackal and the Adjutant made the very same remark
not three minutes after the men had left.
A RIPPLE SONG
Once a ripple came to land
In the golden sunset burning--
Lapped against a maiden’s hand,
By the ford returning.
Dainty foot and gentle breast--
Here, across, be glad and rest.
“Maiden, wait,” the ripple saith.
“Wait awhile, for I am Death!”
“Where my lover calls I go--
Shame it were to treat him coldly--
‘Twas a fish that circled so,
Turning over boldly.”
Dainty foot and tender heart,
Wait the loaded ferry-cart.
“Wait, ah, wait!” the ripple saith;
“Maiden, wait, for I am Death!”
“When my lover calls I haste--
Dame Disdain was never wedded!”
Ripple-ripple round her waist,
Clear the current eddied.
Foolish heart and faithful hand,
Little feet that touched no land.
Far away the ripple sped,
Ripple--ripple--running red!
THE KING’S ANKUS
These are the Four that are never content, that have never
been filled since the Dews began--
Jacala’s mouth, and the glut of the Kite, and the hands of the
Ape, and the Eyes of Man.
Jungle Saying.
Kaa, the big Rock Python, had changed his skin for perhaps the
two-hundredth time since his birth; and Mowgli, who never forgot that
he owed his life to Kaa for a night’s work at Cold Lairs, which you may
perhaps remember, went to congratulate him. Skin-changing always makes
a snake moody and depressed till the new skin begins to shine and look
beautiful. Kaa never made fun of Mowgli any more, but accepted him, as
the other Jungle People did, for the Master of the Jungle, and brought
him all the news that a python of his size would naturally hear. What
Kaa did not know about the Middle Jungle, as they call it,--the life
that runs close to the earth or under it, the boulder, burrow, and
the tree-bole life,--might have been written upon the smallest of his
scales.
That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa’s great coils,
fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all looped and twisted
among the rocks just as Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed
himself under Mowgli’s broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really
resting in a living arm-chair.
“Even to the scales of the eyes it is perfect,” said Mowgli, under his
breath, playing with the old skin. “Strange to see the covering of one’s
own head at one’s own feet!”
“Ay, but I lack feet,” said Kaa; “and since this is the custom of all
my people, I do not find it strange. Does thy skin never feel old and
harsh?”
“Then go I and wash, Flathead; but, it is true, in the great heats I
have wished I could slough my skin without pain, and run skinless.”
“I wash, and ALSO I take off my skin. How looks the new coat?”
Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense back.
“The Turtle is harder-backed, but not so gay,” he said judgmatically.
“The Frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very
beautiful to see--like the mottling in the mouth of a lily.”
“It needs water. A new skin never comes to full colour before the first
bath. Let us go bathe.”
“I will carry thee,” said Mowgli; and he stooped down, laughing, to
lift the middle section of Kaa’s great body, just where the barrel was
thickest. A man might just, as well have tried to heave up a two-foot
water-main; and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amusement. Then the
regular evening game began--the Boy in the flush of his great strength,
and the Python in his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against the
other for a wrestling match--a trial of eye and strength. Of course,
Kaa could have crushed a dozen Mowglis if he had let himself go; but he
played carefully, and never loosed one-tenth of his power. Ever since
Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling, Kaa had
taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing else could.
Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa’s
shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him by
the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both
quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as
it flung backward feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to
and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful,
statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and
struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. “Now! now! now!”
said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli’s quick hand
could not turn aside. “Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here,
and here! Are thy hands numb? Here again!”
The game always ended in one way--with a straight, driving blow of the
head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn the
guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the
least use in trying.
“Good hunting!” Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away
half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full
of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake’s pet bathing-place--a
deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by
sunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle-fashion, without a sound,
and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back,
his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks,
and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa’s
diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest
on Mowgli’s shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool
water.
“It is VERY good,” said Mowgli at last, sleepily. “Now, in the Man-Pack,
at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon hard pieces of
wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having carefully shut out all the
clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heavy heads and made evil songs
through their noses. It is better in the Jungle.”
A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them “Good
hunting!” and went away.
“Sssh!” said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered something. “So
the Jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?”
“Not all,” said Mowgli, laughing; “else there would be a new and strong
Shere Khan to kill once a moon. Now, I could kill with my own hands,
asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished the sun to shine in
the middle of the Rains, and the Rains to cover the sun in the deep of
summer; and also I have never gone empty but I wished that I had killed
a goat; and also I have never killed a goat but I wished it had been
buck; nor buck but I wished it had been nilghai. But thus do we feel,
all of us.”
“Thou hast no other desire?” the big snake demanded.
“What more can I wish? I have the Jungle, and the favour of the Jungle!
Is there more anywhere between sunrise and sunset?”
“Now, the Cobra said----” Kaa began. “What cobra? He that went away just
now said nothing. He was hunting.”
“It was another.”
“Hast thou many dealings with the Poison People? I give them their own
path. They carry death in the fore-tooth, and that is not good--for they
are so small. But what hood is this thou hast spoken with?”
Kaa rolled slowly in the water like a steamer in a beam sea. “Three or
four moons since,” said he, “I hunted in Cold Lairs, which place thou
hast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled shrieking past the tanks
and to that house whose side I once broke for thy sake, and ran into the
ground.”
“But the people of Cold Lairs do not live in burrows.” Mowgli knew that
Kaa was telling of the Monkey People.
“This thing was not living, but seeking to live,” Kaa replied, with
a quiver of his tongue. “He ran into a burrow that led very far. I
followed, and having killed, I slept. When I waked I went forward.”
“Under the earth?”
“Even so, coming at last upon a White Hood [a white cobra], who spoke of
things beyond my knowledge, and showed me many things I had never before
seen.”
“New game? Was it good hunting?” Mowgli turned quickly on his side.
“It was no game, and would have broken all my teeth; but the White Hood
said that a man--he spoke as one that knew the breed--that a man would
give the breath under his ribs for only the sight of those things.”
“We will look,” said Mowgli. “I now remember that I was once a man.”
“Slowly--slowly. It was haste killed the Yellow Snake that ate the sun.
We two spoke together under the earth, and I spoke of thee, naming thee
as a man. Said the White Hood (and he is indeed as old as the Jungle):
‘It is long since I have seen a man. Let him come, and he shall see all
these things, for the least of which very many men would die.’”
“That MUST be new game. And yet the Poison People do not tell us when
game is afoot. They are an unfriendly folk.”
“It is NOT game. It is--it is--I cannot say what it is.”
“We will go there. I have never seen a White Hood, and I wish to see the
other things. Did he kill them?”
“They are all dead things. He says he is the keeper of them all.”
“Ah! As a wolf stands above meat he has taken to his own lair. Let us
go.”
Mowgli swam to bank, rolled on the grass to dry himself, and the two