The Second Jungle Book
the surf is one of the most delightful that the Inuit can hear, for it
means that spring is on the road. Kotuko and the girl took hold of hands
and smiled, for the clear, full roar of the surge among the ice
reminded them of salmon and reindeer time and the smell of blossoming
ground-willows. Even as they looked, the sea began to skim over between
the floating cakes of ice, so intense was the cold; but on the horizon
there was a vast red glare, and that was the light of the sunken sun.
It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep than seeing him rise, and
the glare lasted for only a few minutes, but it marked the turn of the
year. Nothing, they felt, could alter that.
Kotuko found the dogs fighting over a fresh-killed seal who was
following the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first of some
twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the course of the
day, and till the sea froze hard there were hundreds of keen black heads
rejoicing in the shallow free water and floating about with the floating
ice.
It was good to eat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps recklessly with
blubber, and watch the flame blaze three feet in the air; but as soon
as the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the girl loaded the hand-sleigh, and
made the two dogs pull as they had never pulled in their lives, for they
feared what might have happened in their village. The weather was as
pitiless as usual; but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with good
food than to hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal carcasses
buried in the ice of the beach, all ready for use, and hurried back to
their people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko told them
what was expected, and though there was no sign of a landmark, in two
days they were giving tongue outside Kadlu’s house. Only three dogs
answered them; the others had been eaten, and the houses were all dark.
But when Kotuko shouted, “Ojo!” (boiled meat), weak voices replied, and
when he called the muster of the village name by name, very distinctly,
there were no gaps in it.
An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu’s house; snow-water was heating;
the pots were beginning to simmer, and the snow was dripping from the
roof, as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the village, and the boy-baby
in the hood chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber, and the hunters
slowly and methodically filled themselves to the very brim with
seal-meat. Kotuko and the girl told their tale. The two dogs sat between
them, and whenever their names came in, they cocked an ear apiece and
looked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has once gone
mad and recovered, the Inuit say, is safe against all further attacks.
“So the tornaq did not forget us,” said Kotuko. “The storm blew, the ice
broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were frightened by the
storm. Now the new seal-holes are not two days distant. Let the good
hunters go to-morrow and bring back the seal I have speared--twenty-five
seal buried in the ice. When we have eaten those we will all follow the
seal on the floe.”
“What do YOU do?” said the sorcerer in the same sort of voice as he used
to Kadlu, richest of the Tununirmiut.
Kadlu looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly, “WE build a
house.” He pointed to the north-west side of Kadlu’s house, for that is
the side on which the married son or daughter always lives.
The girl turned her hands palm upward, with a little despairing shake
of her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving, and could bring
nothing to the housekeeping.
Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat, and began to sweep things
into the girl’s lap--stone lamps, iron skin-scrapers, tin kettles,
deer-skins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and real canvas-needles such
as sailors use--the finest dowry that has ever been given on the far
edge of the Arctic Circle, and the girl from the North bowed her head
down to the very floor.
“Also these!” said Kotuko, laughing and signing to the dogs, who thrust
their cold muzzles into the girl’s face.
“Ah,” said the angekok, with an important cough, as though he had been
thinking it all over. “As soon as Kotuko left the village I went to the
Singing-House and sang magic. I sang all the long nights, and called
upon the Spirit of the Reindeer. MY singing made the gale blow that
broke the ice and drew the two dogs toward Kotuko when the ice would
have crushed his bones. MY song drew the seal in behind the broken ice.
My body lay still in the quaggi, but my spirit ran about on the ice, and
guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things they did. I did it.”
Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one contradicted; and the angekok,
by virtue of his office, helped himself to yet another lump of boiled
meat, and lay down to sleep with the others in the warm, well-lighted,
oil-smelling home.
*****
Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit fashion, scratched pictures
of all these adventures on a long, flat piece of ivory with a hole at
one end. When he and the girl went north to Ellesmere Land in the year
of the Wonderful Open Winter, he left the picture-story with Kadlu, who
lost it in the shingle when his dog-sleigh broke down one summer on the
beach of Lake Netilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Inuit found
it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was interpreter on a
Cumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was afterward
a quartermaster on board a big steamer that took tourists to the North
Cape in Norway. When the tourist season was over, the steamer ran
between London and Australia, stopping at Ceylon, and there Olsen sold
the ivory to a Cingalese jeweller for two imitation sapphires. I found
it under some rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from
one end to the other.
‘ANGUTIVAUN TAINA’
[This is a very free translation of the Song of the Returning Hunter,
as the men used to sing it after seal-spearing. The Inuit always repeat
things over and over again.]
Our gloves are stiff with the frozen blood,
Our furs with the drifted snow,
As we come in with the seal--the seal!
In from the edge of the floe.
Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq!
And the yelping dog-teams go,
And the long whips crack, and the men come back,
Back from the edge of the floe!
We tracked our seal to his secret place,
We heard him scratch below,
We made our mark, and we watched beside,
Out on the edge of the floe.
We raised our lance when he rose to breathe,
We drove it downward--so!
And we played him thus, and we killed him thus,
Out on the edge of the floe.
Our gloves are glued with the frozen blood,
Our eyes with the drifting snow;
But we come back to our wives again,
Back from the edge of the floe!
Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq!
And the loaded dog-teams go,
And the wives can hear their men come back.
Back from the edge of the floe!
RED DOG
For our white and our excellent nights---for the nights of
swift running.
Fair ranging, far seeing, good hunting, sure cunning!
For the smells of the dawning, untainted, ere dew has departed!
For the rush through the mist, and the quarry blind-started!
For the cry of our mates when the sambhur has wheeled and is
standing at bay,
For the risk and the riot of night!
For the sleep at the lair-mouth by day,
It is met, and we go to the fight.
Bay! O Bay!
It was after the letting in of the Jungle that the pleasantest part of
Mowgli’s life began. He had the good conscience that comes from paying
debts; all the Jungle was his friend, and just a little afraid of him.
The things that he did and saw and heard when he was wandering from one
people to another, with or without his four companions, would make many
many stories, each as long as this one. So you will never be told how
he met the Mad Elephant of Mandla, who killed two-and-twenty bullocks
drawing eleven carts of coined silver to the Government Treasury,
and scattered the shiny rupees in the dust; how he fought Jacala, the
Crocodile, all one long night in the Marshes of the North, and broke his
skinning-knife on the brute’s back-plates; how he found a new and longer
knife round the neck of a man who had been killed by a wild boar, and
how he tracked that boar and killed him as a fair price for the knife;
how he was caught up once in the Great Famine, by the moving of the
deer, and nearly crushed to death in the swaying hot herds; how he saved
Hathi the Silent from being once more trapped in a pit with a stake
at the bottom, and how, next day, he himself fell into a very cunning
leopard-trap, and how Hathi broke the thick wooden bars to pieces above
him; how he milked the wild buffaloes in the swamp, and how----
But we must tell one tale at a time. Father and Mother Wolf died, and
Mowgli rolled a big boulder against the mouth of their cave, and cried
the Death Song over them; Baloo grew very old and stiff, and even
Bagheera, whose nerves were steel and whose muscles were iron, was a
shade slower on the kill than he had been. Akela turned from gray to
milky white with pure age; his ribs stuck out, and he walked as though
he had been made of wood, and Mowgli killed for him. But the young
wolves, the children of the disbanded Seeonee Pack, throve and
increased, and when there were about forty of them, masterless,
full-voiced, clean-footed five-year-olds, Akela told them that they
ought to gather themselves together and follow the Law, and run under
one head, as befitted the Free People.
This was not a question in which Mowgli concerned himself, for, as he
said, he had eaten sour fruit, and he knew the tree it hung from; but
when Phao, son of Phaona (his father was the Gray Tracker in the days
of Akela’s headship), fought his way to the leadership of the Pack,
according to the Jungle Law, and the old calls and songs began to ring
under the stars once more, Mowgli came to the Council Rock for memory’s
sake. When he chose to speak the Pack waited till he had finished, and
he sat at Akela’s side on the rock above Phao. Those were days of good
hunting and good sleeping. No stranger cared to break into the jungles
that belonged to Mowgli’s people, as they called the Pack, and the young
wolves grew fat and strong, and there were many cubs to bring to the
Looking-over. Mowgli always attended a Looking-over, remembering the
night when a black panther bought a naked brown baby into the pack,
and the long call, “Look, look well, O Wolves,” made his heart flutter.
Otherwise, he would be far away in the Jungle with his four brothers,
tasting, touching, seeing, and feeling new things.
One twilight when he was trotting leisurely across the ranges to give
Akela the half of a buck that he had killed, while the Four jogged
behind him, sparring a little, and tumbling one another over for joy of
being alive, he heard a cry that had never been heard since the bad days
of Shere Khan. It was what they call in the Jungle the pheeal, a hideous
kind of shriek that the jackal gives when he is hunting behind a tiger,
or when there is a big killing afoot. If you can imagine a mixture of
hate, triumph, fear, and despair, with a kind of leer running through
it, you will get some notion of the pheeal that rose and sank and
wavered and quavered far away across the Waingunga. The Four stopped at
once, bristling and growling. Mowgli’s hand went to his knife, and he
checked, the blood in his face, his eyebrows knotted.
“There is no Striped One dare kill here,” he said.