The Second Jungle Book
pitilessly along Won-tolla’s trail. Seen from above, the red dhole does
not look half the size of a wolf, but Mowgli knew how strong his feet
and jaws were. He watched the sharp bay head of the leader snuffing
along the trail, and gave him “Good hunting!”
The brute looked up, and his companions halted behind him, scores and
scores of red dogs with low-hung tails, heavy shoulders, weak quarters,
and bloody mouths. The dholes are a very silent people as a rule, and
they have no manners even in their own Jungle. Fully two hundred must
have gathered below him, but he could see that the leaders sniffed
hungrily on Won-tolla’s trail, and tried to drag the Pack forward. That
would never do, or they would be at the Lairs in broad daylight, and
Mowgli meant to hold them under his tree till dusk.
“By whose leave do ye come here?” said Mowgli.
“All Jungles are our Jungle,” was the reply, and the dhole that gave
it bared his white teeth. Mowgli looked down with a smile, and imitated
perfectly the sharp chitter-chatter of Chikai, the leaping rat of the
Dekkan, meaning the dholes to understand that he considered them no
better than Chikai. The Pack closed up round the tree-trunk and the
leader bayed savagely, calling Mowgli a tree-ape. For an answer Mowgli
stretched down one naked leg and wriggled his bare toes just above the
leader’s head. That was enough, and more than enough, to wake the Pack
to stupid rage. Those who have hair between their toes do not care to be
reminded of it. Mowgli caught his foot away as the leader leaped up, and
said sweetly: “Dog, red dog! Go back to the Dekkan and eat lizards. Go to
Chikai thy brother--dog, dog--red, red dog! There is hair between every
toe!” He twiddled his toes a second time.
“Come down ere we starve thee out, hairless ape!” yelled the Pack, and
this was exactly what Mowgli wanted. He laid himself down along the
branch, his cheek to the bark, his right arm free, and there he told the
Pack what he thought and knew about them, their manners, their customs,
their mates, and their puppies. There is no speech in the world so
rancorous and so stinging as the language the Jungle People use to show
scorn and contempt. When you come to think of it you will see how this
must be so. As Mowgli told Kaa, he had many little thorns under his
tongue, and slowly and deliberately he drove the dholes from silence to
growls, from growls to yells, and from yells to hoarse slavery ravings.
They tried to answer his taunts, but a cub might as well have tried to
answer Kaa in a rage; and all the while Mowgli’s right hand lay crooked
at his side, ready for action, his feet locked round the branch. The big
bay leader had leaped many times in the air, but Mowgli dared not risk
a false blow. At last, made furious beyond his natural strength, he
bounded up seven or eight feet clear of the ground. Then Mowgli’s hand
shot out like the head of a tree-snake, and gripped him by the scruff
of his neck, and the branch shook with the jar as his weight fell back,
almost wrenching Mowgli to the ground. But he never loosed his grip, and
inch by inch he hauled the beast, hanging like a drowned jackal, up on
the branch. With his left hand he reached for his knife and cut off the
red, bushy tail, flinging the dhole back to earth again. That was all he
needed. The Pack would not go forward on Won-tolla’s trail now till they
had killed Mowgli or Mowgli had killed them. He saw them settle down
in circles with a quiver of the haunches that meant they were going
to stay, and so he climbed to a higher crotch, settled his back
comfortably, and went to sleep.
After three or four hours he waked and counted the Pack. They were all
there, silent, husky, and dry, with eyes of steel. The sun was beginning
to sink. In half an hour the Little People of the Rocks would be ending
their labours, and, as you know, the dhole does not fight best in the
twilight.
“I did not need such faithful watchers,” he said politely, standing up
on a branch, “but I will remember this. Ye be true dholes, but to my
thinking over much of one kind. For that reason I do not give the big
lizard-eater his tail again. Art thou not pleased, Red Dog?”
“I myself will tear out thy stomach!” yelled the leader, scratching at
the foot of the tree.
“Nay, but consider, wise rat of the Dekkan. There will now be many
litters of little tailless red dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that sting
when the sand is hot. Go home, Red Dog, and cry that an ape has done
this. Ye will not go? Come, then, with me, and I will make you very
wise!”
He moved, Bandar-log fashion, into the next tree, and so on into the
next and the next, the Pack following with lifted hungry heads. Now and
then he would pretend to fall, and the Pack would tumble one over the
other in their haste to be at the death. It was a curious sight--the boy
with the knife that shone in the low sunlight as it sifted through the
upper branches, and the silent Pack with their red coats all aflame,
huddling and following below. When he came to the last tree he took the
garlic and rubbed himself all over carefully, and the dholes yelled with
scorn. “Ape with a wolf’s tongue, dost thou think to cover thy scent?”
they said. “We follow to the death.”
“Take thy tail,” said Mowgli, flinging it back along the course he had
taken. The Pack instinctively rushed after it. “And follow now--to the
death.”
He had slipped down the tree-trunk, and headed like the wind in bare
feet for the Bee Rocks, before the dholes saw what he would do.
They gave one deep howl, and settled down to the long, lobbing canter
that can at the last run down anything that runs. Mowgli knew their
pack-pace to be much slower than that of the wolves, or he would never
have risked a two-mile run in full sight. They were sure that the boy
was theirs at last, and he was sure that he held them to play with as he
pleased. All his trouble was to keep them sufficiently hot behind him
to prevent their turning off too soon. He ran cleanly, evenly, and
springily; the tailless leader not five yards behind him; and the Pack
tailing out over perhaps a quarter of a mile of ground, crazy and blind
with the rage of slaughter. So he kept his distance by ear, reserving
his last effort for the rush across the Bee Rocks.
The Little People had gone to sleep in the early twilight, for it
was not the season of late blossoming flowers; but as Mowgli’s first
foot-falls rang hollow on the hollow ground he heard a sound as though
all the earth were humming. Then he ran as he had never run in his life
before, spurned aside one--two--three of the piles of stones into the
dark, sweet-smelling gullies; heard a roar like the roar of the sea in a
cave; saw with the tail of his eye the air grow dark behind him; saw the
current of the Waingunga far below, and a flat, diamond-shaped head
in the water; leaped outward with all his strength, the tailless dhole
snapping at his shoulder in mid-air, and dropped feet first to the
safety of the river, breathless and triumphant. There was not a sting
upon him, for the smell of the garlic had checked the Little People for
just the few seconds that he was among them. When he rose Kaa’s coils
were steadying him and things were bounding over the edge of the
cliff--great lumps, it seemed, of clustered bees falling like plummets;
but before any lump touched water the bees flew upward and the body of a
dhole whirled down-stream. Overhead they could hear furious short yells
that were drowned in a roar like breakers--the roar of the wings of the
Little People of the Rocks. Some of the dholes, too, had fallen into the
gullies that communicated with the underground caves, and there choked
and fought and snapped among the tumbled honeycombs, and at last, borne
up, even when they were dead, on the heaving waves of bees beneath
them, shot out of some hole in the river-face, to roll over on the black
rubbish-heaps. There were dholes who had leaped short into the trees
on the cliffs, and the bees blotted out their shapes; but the greater
number of them, maddened by the stings, had flung themselves into the
river; and, as Kaa said, the Waingunga was hungry water.
Kaa held Mowgli fast till the boy had recovered his breath.
“We may not stay here,” he said. “The Little People are roused indeed.
Come!”
Swimming low and diving as often as he could, Mowgli went down the
river, knife in hand.
“Slowly, slowly,” said Kaa. “One tooth does not kill a hundred unless
it be a cobra’s, and many of the dholes took water swiftly when they saw
the Little People rise.”
“The more work for my knife, then. Phai! How the Little People follow!”
Mowgli sank again. The face of the water was blanketed with wild bees,
buzzing sullenly and stinging all they found.
“Nothing was ever yet lost by silence,” said Kaa--no sting could
penetrate his scales--“and thou hast all the long night for the hunting.
Hear them howl!”
Nearly half the pack had seen the trap their fellows rushed into, and
turning sharp aside had flung themselves into the water where the gorge
broke down in steep banks. Their cries of rage and their threats against
the “tree-ape” who had brought them to their shame mixed with the yells
and growls of those who had been punished by the Little People. To
remain ashore was death, and every dhole knew it. Their pack was swept
along the current, down to the deep eddies of the Peace Pool, but even
there the angry Little People followed and forced them to the water
again. Mowgli could hear the voice of the tailless leader bidding his
people hold on and kill out every wolf in Seeonee. But he did not waste
his time in listening.
“One kills in the dark behind us!” snapped a dhole. “Here is tainted
water!”
Mowgli had dived forward like an otter, twitched a struggling dhole
under water before he could open his mouth, and dark rings rose as the
body plopped up, turning on its side. The dholes tried to turn, but the
current prevented them, and the Little People darted at the heads and
ears, and they could hear the challenge of the Seeonee Pack growing
louder and deeper in the gathering darkness. Again Mowgli dived, and
again a dhole went under, and rose dead, and again the clamour broke
out at the rear of the pack; some howling that it was best to go ashore,
others calling on their leader to lead them back to the Dekkan, and
others bidding Mowgli show himself and be killed.
“They come to the fight with two stomachs and several voices,” said Kaa.
“The rest is with thy brethren below yonder, The Little People go back
to sleep. They have chased us far. Now I, too, turn back, for I am not
of one skin with any wolf. Good hunting, Little Brother, and remember
the dhole bites low.”
A wolf came running along the bank on three legs, leaping up and down,
laying his head sideways close to the ground, hunching his back, and
breaking high into the air, as though he were playing with his cubs. It
was Won-tolla, the Outlier, and he said never a word, but continued his
horrible sport beside the dholes. They had been long in the water now,
and were swimming wearily, their coats drenched and heavy, their bushy
tails dragging like sponges, so tired and shaken that they, too, were
silent, watching the pair of blazing eyes that moved abreast.
“This is no good hunting,” said one, panting.
“Good hunting!” said Mowgli, as he rose boldly at the brute’s side, and
sent the long knife home behind the shoulder, pushing hard to avoid his
dying snap.
“Art thou there, Man-cub?” said Won-tolla across the water.
“Ask of the dead, Outlier,” Mowgli replied. “Have none come down-stream?
I have filled these dogs’ mouths with dirt; I have tricked them in the
broad daylight, and their leader lacks his tail, but here be some few
for thee still. Whither shall I drive them?”