The Second Jungle Book
their food,--and given him for a kill to Chil, the Kite.”
“It is the third,” said Bagheera.
“I will go with new, big frogs to the Father of Cobras, and feed him
fat,” said Mowgli to himself. “The drinker of elephant’s blood is Death
himself--but still I do not understand!”
“Follow!” said Bagheera.
They had not gone half a mile farther when they heard Ko, the Crow,
singing the death-song in the top of a tamarisk under whose shade three
men were lying. A half-dead fire smoked in the centre of the circle,
under an iron plate which held a blackened and burned cake of unleavened
bread. Close to the fire, and blazing in the sunshine, lay the
ruby-and-turquoise ankus.
“The thing works quickly; all ends here,” said Bagheera. “How did THESE
die, Mowgli? There is no mark on any.”
A Jungle-dweller gets to learn by experience as much as many doctors
know of poisonous plants and berries. Mowgli sniffed the smoke that came
up from the fire, broke off a morsel of the blackened bread, tasted it,
and spat it out again.
“Apple of Death,” he coughed. “The first must have made it ready in the
food for THESE, who killed him, having first killed the Gond.”
“Good hunting, indeed! The kills follow close,” said Bagheera.
“Apple of Death” is what the Jungle call thorn-apple or dhatura, the
readiest poison in all India.
“What now?” said the panther. “Must thou and I kill each other for
yonder red-eyed slayer?”
“Can it speak?” said Mowgli in a whisper. “Did I do it a wrong when I
threw it away? Between us two it can do no wrong, for we do not desire
what men desire. If it be left here, it will assuredly continue to kill
men one after another as fast as nuts fall in a high wind. I have no
love to men, but even I would not have them die six in a night.”
“What matter? They are only men. They killed one another, and were well
pleased,” said Bagheera. “That first little woodman hunted well.”
“They are cubs none the less; and a cub will drown himself to bite the
moon’s light on the water. The fault was mine,” said Mowgli, who spoke
as though he knew all about everything. “I will never again bring into
the Jungle strange things--not though they be as beautiful as flowers.
This”--he handled the ankus gingerly--“goes back to the Father of
Cobras. But first we must sleep, and we cannot sleep near these
sleepers. Also we must bury HIM, lest he run away and kill another six.
Dig me a hole under that tree.”
“But, Little Brother,” said Bagheera, moving off to the spot, “I tell
thee it is no fault of the blood-drinker. The trouble is with the men.”
“All one,” said Mowgli. “Dig the hole deep. When we wake I will take him
up and carry him back.”
*****
Two nights later, as the White Cobra sat mourning in the darkness of
the vault, ashamed, and robbed, and alone, the turquoise ankus whirled
through the hole in the wall, and clashed on the floor of golden coins.
“Father of Cobras,” said Mowgli (he was careful to keep the other side
of the wall), “get thee a young and ripe one of thine own people to help
thee guard the King’s Treasure, so that no man may come away alive any
more.”
“Ah-ha! It returns, then. I said the thing was Death. How comes it that
thou art still alive?” the old Cobra mumbled, twining lovingly round the
ankus-haft.
“By the Bull that bought me, I do not know! That thing has killed six
times in a night. Let him go out no more.”
THE SONG OF THE LITTLE HUNTER
Ere Mor the Peacock flutters, ere the Monkey People cry,
Ere Chil the Kite swoops down a furlong sheer,
Through the Jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh--
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade,
And the whisper spreads and widens far and near;
And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now--
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
Ere the moon has climbed the mountain, ere the rocks
are ribbed with light,
When the downward-dipping trails are dank and drear,
Comes a breathing hard behind thee--snuffle-snuffle
through the night--
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
On thy knees and draw the bow; bid the shrilling arrow go;
In the empty, mocking thicket plunge the spear;
But thy hands are loosed and weak, and the blood has left
thy cheek--
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
When the heat-cloud sucks the tempest, when the slivered
pine-trees fall,
When the blinding, blaring rain-squalls lash and veer;
Through the war-gongs of the thunder rings a voice more
loud than all--
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
Now the spates are banked and deep; now the footless
boulders leap--
Now the lightning shows each littlest leaf-rib clear--
But thy throat is shut and dried, and thy heart against
thy side
Hammers: Fear, O Little Hunter--this is Fear!
QUIQUERN
The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow--
They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go.
The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight;
“They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their souls
to the white.
The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler’s
crew;
Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few.
But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man’s ken--
Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the
last of the Men!
Translation.
“He has opened his eyes. Look!”
“Put him in the skin again. He will be a strong dog. On the fourth month
we will name him.”
“For whom?” said Amoraq.
Kadlu’s eye rolled round the skin-lined snow-house till it fell on
fourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench, making a button
out of walrus ivory. “Name him for me,” said Kotuko, with a grin. “I
shall need him one day.”
Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were almost buried in the fat of his
flat cheeks, and nodded to Amoraq, while the puppy’s fierce mother
whined to see her baby wriggling far out of reach in the little sealskin
pouch hung above the warmth of the blubber-lamp. Kotuko went on with his
carving, and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of leather dog-harnesses into a
tiny little room that opened from one side of the house, slipped off his
heavy deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a whalebone-net that hung above
another lamp, and dropped down on the sleeping-bench to whittle at
a piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq, his wife, should bring the
regular dinner of boiled meat and blood-soup. He had been out since
early dawn at the seal-holes, eight miles away, and had come home with
three big seal. Half-way down the long, low snow passage or tunnel
that led to the inner door of the house you could hear snappings and
yelpings, as the dogs of his sleigh-team, released from the day’s work,
scuffled for warm places.
When the yelpings grew too loud Kotuko lazily rolled off the
sleeping-bench, and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch handle of
springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy, plaited thong. He
dived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs were
eating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace before
meals. When he crawled out at the far end, half a dozen furry heads
followed him with their eyes as he went to a sort of gallows of
whale-jawbones, from which the dog’s meat was hung; split off the frozen
stuff in big lumps with a broad-headed spear; and stood, his whip in
one hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name, the
weakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn; for
the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning, and flick away
an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped, choked once
over his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the passage,
while the boy stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and
dealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of
the team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed; and to him Kotuko
gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra crack of the whip.
“Ah!” said Kotuko, coiling up the lash, “I have a little one over the
lamp that will make a great many howlings. SARPOK! Get in!”
He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from his
furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door, tapped the
skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might have
fallen from the dome of snow above, and curled up on the bench. The
dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep, the boy-baby in
Amoraq’s deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled, and the mother of
the newly-named puppy lay at Kotuko’s side, her eyes fixed on the bundle
of sealskin, warm and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp.
And all this happened far away to the north, beyond Labrador, beyond
Hudson’s Strait, where the great tides heave the ice about, north of
Melville Peninsula--north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla Straits--on
the north shore of Baffin Land, where Bylot’s Island stands above the
ice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong side up. North of
Lancaster Sound there is little we know anything about, except North
Devon and Ellesmere Land; but even there live a few scattered people,
next door, as it were, to the very Pole.
Kadlu was an Inuit,--what you call an Esquimau,--and his tribe, some
thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut--“the country lying
at the back of something.” In the maps that desolate coast is written
Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name is best, because the country lies
at the very back of everything in the world. For nine months of the year
there is only ice and snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no
one can realise who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six
months of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible.
In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other day and
every night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the southerly
slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly buds, a tiny
stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom, beaches of fine gravel and
rounded stones run down to the open sea, and polished boulders and
streaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow. But all that is gone
in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down again on the land; while
at sea the ice tears up and down the offing, jamming and ramming, and
splitting and hitting, and pounding and grounding, till it all freezes
together, ten feet thick, from the land outward to deep water.
In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this land-ice,
and spear them as they came up to breathe at their blow-holes. The
seal must have open water to live and catch fish in, and in the deep of
winter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from the
nearest shore. In the spring he and his people retreated from the floes
to the rocky mainland, where they put up tents of skins, and snared the
sea-birds, or speared the young seal basking on the beaches. Later, they
would go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer, and to get their
year’s store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of the
interior; coming back north in September or October for the musk-ox
hunting and the regular winter sealery. This travelling was done with
dog-sleighs, twenty and thirty miles a day, or sometimes down the coast
in big skin “woman-boats,” when the dogs and the babies lay among the