The Second Jungle Book
motionless on the ground, thought of all that he had seen and known
since the day he came from the egg. The light seemed to go out of his
eyes and leave them like stale opals, and now and again he made little
stiff passes with his head, right and left, as though he were hunting in
his sleep. Mowgli dozed quietly, for he knew that there is nothing like
sleep before hunting, and he was trained to take it at any hour of the
day or night.
Then he felt Kaa’s back grow bigger and broader below him as the huge
python puffed himself out, hissing with the noise of a sword drawn from
a steel scabbard.
“I have seen all the dead seasons,” Kaa said at last, “and the
great trees and the old elephants, and the rocks that were bare and
sharp-pointed ere the moss grew. Art THOU still alive, Manling?”
“It is only a little after moonset,” said Mowgli. “I do not
understand----”
“Hssh! I am again Kaa. I knew it was but a little time. Now we will
go to the river, and I will show thee what is to be done against the
dhole.”
He turned, straight as an arrow, for the main stream of the Waingunga,
plunging in a little above the pool that hid the Peace Rock, Mowgli at
his side.
“Nay, do not swim. I go swiftly. My back, Little Brother.”
Mowgli tucked his left arm round Kaa’s neck, dropped his right close to
his body, and straightened his feet. Then Kaa breasted the current as
he alone could, and the ripple of the checked water stood up in a frill
round Mowgli’s neck, and his feet were waved to and fro in the eddy
under the python’s lashing sides. A mile or two above the Peace Rock
the Waingunga narrows between a gorge of marble rocks from eighty to
a hundred feet high, and the current runs like a mill-race between and
over all manner of ugly stones. But Mowgli did not trouble his head
about the water; little water in the world could have given him a
moment’s fear. He was looking at the gorge on either side and sniffing
uneasily, for there was a sweetish-sourish smell in the air, very like
the smell of a big ant-hill on a hot day. Instinctively he lowered
himself in the water, only raising his head to breathe from time to
time, and Kaa came to anchor with a double twist of his tail round a
sunken rock, holding Mowgli in the hollow of a coil, while the water
raced on.
“This is the Place of Death,” said the boy. “Why do we come here?”
“They sleep,” said Kaa. “Hathi will not turn aside for the Striped One.
Yet Hathi and the Striped One together turn aside for the dhole, and the
dhole they say turn aside for nothing. And yet for whom do the Little
People of the Rocks turn aside? Tell me, Master of the Jungle, who is
the Master of the Jungle?”
“These,” Mowgli whispered. “It is the Place of Death. Let us go.”
“Nay, look well, for they are asleep. It is as it was when I was not the
length of thy arm.”
The split and weatherworn rocks of the gorge of the Waingunga had been
used since the beginning of the Jungle by the Little People of the
Rocks--the busy, furious, black wild bees of India; and, as Mowgli knew
well, all trails turned off half a mile before they reached the gorge.
For centuries the Little People had hived and swarmed from cleft to
cleft, and swarmed again, staining the white marble with stale honey,
and made their combs tall and deep in the dark of the inner caves, where
neither man nor beast nor fire nor water had ever touched them. The
length of the gorge on both siaes was hung as it were with black
shimmery velvet curtains, and Mowgli sank as he looked, for those were
the clotted millions of the sleeping bees. There were other lumps and
festoons and things like decayed tree-trunks studded on the face of the
rock, the old combs of past years, or new cities built in the shadow of
the windless gorge, and huge masses of spongy, rotten trash had rolled
down and stuck among the trees and creepers that clung to the rock-face.
As he listened he heard more than once the rustle and slide of a
honey-loaded comb turning over or failing away somewhere in the dark
galleries; then a booming of angry wings, and the sullen drip, drip,
drip, of the wasted honey, guttering along till it lipped over some
ledge in the open air and sluggishly trickled down on the twigs. There
was a tiny little beach, not five feet broad, on one side of the river,
and that was piled high with the rubbish of uncounted years. There were
dead bees, drones, sweepings, and stale combs, and wings of marauding
moths that had strayed in after honey, all tumbled in smooth piles of
the finest black dust. The mere sharp smell of it was enough to frighten
anything that had no wings, and knew what the Little People were.
Kaa moved up-stream again till he came to a sandy bar at the head of the
gorge.
“Here is this season’s kill,” said he. “Look!” On the bank lay the
skeletons of a couple of young deer and a buffalo. Mowgli could see
that neither wolf nor jackal had touched the hones, which were laid out
naturally.
“They came beyond the line; they did not know the Law,” murmured
Mowgli, “and the Little People killed them. Let us go ere they wake.”
“They do not wake till the dawn,” said Kaa. “Now I will tell thee. A
hunted buck from the south, many, many Rains ago, came hither from the
south, not knowing the Jungle, a Pack on his trail. Being made blind by
fear, he leaped from above, the Pack running by sight, for they were
hot and blind on the trail. The sun was high, and the Little People were
many and very angry. Many, too, were those of the Pack who leaped into
the Waingunga, but they were dead ere they took water. Those who did not
leap died also in the rocks above. But the buck lived.”
“How?”
“Because he came first, running for his life, leaping ere the Little
People were aware, and was in the river when they gathered to kill.
The Pack, following, was altogether lost under the weight of the Little
People.”
“The buck lived?” Mowgli repeated slowly.
“At least he did not die THEN, though none waited his coming down with
a strong body to hold him safe against the water, as a certain old fat,
deaf, yellow Flathead would wait for a Manling--yea, though there were
all the dholes of the Dekkan on his trail. What is in thy stomach?”
Kaa’s head was close to Mowgli’s ear; and it was a little time before
the boy answered.
“It is to pull the very whiskers of Death, but--Kaa, thou art, indeed,
the wisest of all the Jungle.”
“So many have said. Look now, if the dhole follow thee----”
“As surely they will follow. Ho! ho! I have many little thorns under my
tongue to prick into their hides.”
“If they follow thee hot and blind, looking only at thy shoulders, those
who do not die up above will take water either here or lower down, for
the Little People will rise up and cover them. Now the Waingunga is
hungry water, and they will have no Kaa to hold them, but will go down,
such as live, to the shallows by the Seeonee Lairs, and there thy Pack
may meet them by the throat.”
“Ahai! Eowawa! Better could not be till the Rains fall in the dry
season. There is now only the little matter of the run and the leap.
I will make me known to the dholes, so that they shall follow me very
closely.”
“Hast thou seen the rocks above thee? From the landward side?”
“Indeed, no. That I had forgotten.”
“Go look. It is all rotten ground, cut and full of holes. One of thy
clumsy feet set down without seeing would end the hunt. See, I leave
thee here, and for thy sake only I will carry word to the Pack that they
may know where to look for the dhole. For myself, I am not of one skin
with ANY wolf.”
When Kaa disliked an acquaintance he could be more unpleasant than any
of the Jungle People, except perhaps Bagheera. He swam down-stream,
and opposite the Rock he came on Phao and Akela listening to the night
noises.
“Hssh! Dogs,” he said cheerfully. “The dholes will come down-stream. If
ye be not afraid ye can kill them in the shallows.”
“When come they?” said Phao. “And where is my Man-cub?” said Akela.
“They come when they come,” said Kaa. “Wait and see. As for THY Man-cub,
from whom thou hast taken a Word and so laid him open to Death, THY
Man-cub is with ME, and if he be not already dead the fault is none
of thine, bleached dog! Wait here for the dhole, and be glad that the
Man-cub and I strike on thy side.”
Kaa flashed up-stream again, and moored himself in the middle of
the gorge, looking upward at the line of the cliff. Presently he saw
Mowgli’s head move against the stars, and then there was a whizz in
the air, the keen, clean schloop of a body falling feet first, and next
minute the boy was at rest again in the loop of Kaa’s body.
“It is no leap by night,” said Mowgli quietly. “I have jumped twice as
far for sport; but that is an evil place above--low bushes and gullies
that go down very deep, all full of the Little People. I have put big
stones one above the other by the side of three gullies. These I shall
throw down with my feet in running, and the Little People will rise up
behind me, very angry.”
“That is Man’s talk and Man’s cunning,” said Kaa. “Thou art wise, but
the Little People are always angry.”
“Nay, at twilight all wings near and far rest for a while. I will play
with the dhole at twilight, for the dhole hunts best by day. He follows
now Won-tolla’s blood-trail.”
“Chil does not leave a dead ox, nor the dhole the blood-trail,” said
Kaa.
“Then I will make him a new blood-trail, of his own blood, if I can, and
give him dirt to eat. Thou wilt stay here, Kaa, till I come again with
my dholes?”
“Ay, but what if they kill thee in the Jungle, or the Little People kill
thee before thou canst leap down to the river?”
“When to-morrow comes we will kill for to-morrow,” said Mowgli, quoting
a Jungle saying; and again, “When I am dead it is time to sing the Death
Song. Good hunting, Kaa!”
He loosed his arm from the python’s neck and went down the gorge like
a log in a freshet, paddling toward the far bank, where he found
slack-water, and laughing aloud from sheer happiness. There was nothing
Mowgli liked better than, as he himself said, “to pull the whiskers
of Death,” and make the Jungle know that he was their overlord. He had
often, with Baloo’s help, robbed bees’ nests in single trees, and
he knew that the Little People hated the smell of wild garlic. So he
gathered a small bundle of it, tied it up with a bark string, and then
followed Won-tolla’s blood-trail, as it ran southerly from the Lairs,
for some five miles, looking at the trees with his head on one side, and
chuckling as he looked.
“Mowgli the Frog have I been,” said he to himself; “Mowgli the Wolf have
I said that I am. Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before I am Mowgli the
Buck. At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man. Ho!” and he slid his thumb
along the eighteen-inch blade of his knife.
Won-tolla’s trail, all rank with dark blood-spots, ran under a forest of
thick trees that grew close together and stretched away north-eastward,
gradually growing thinner and thinner to within two miles of the Bee
Rocks. From the last tree to the low scrub of the Bee Rocks was open
country, where there was hardly cover enough to hide a wolf. Mowgli
trotted along under the trees, judging distances between branch and
branch, occasionally climbing up a trunk and taking a trial leap from
one tree to another till he came to the open ground, which he studied
very carefully for an hour. Then he turned, picked up Won-tolla’s trail
where he had left it, settled himself in a tree with an outrunning
branch some eight feet from the ground, and sat still, sharpening his
knife on the sole of his foot and singing to himself.
A little before mid-day, when the sun was very warm, he heard the patter
of feet and smelt the abominable smell of the dhole-pack as they trotted