The Second Jungle Book
“I will wait,” said Won-tolla. “The night is before me.”
Nearer and nearer came the bay of the Seeonee wolves. “For the Pack,
for the Full Pack it is met!” and a bend in the river drove the dholes
forward among the sands and shoals opposite the Lairs.
Then they saw their mistake. They should have landed half a mile higher
up, and rushed the wolves on dry ground. Now it was too late. The bank
was lined with burning eyes, and except for the horrible pheeal that had
never stopped since sundown, there was no sound in the Jungle. It seemed
as though Won-tolla were fawning on them to come ashore; and “Turn
and take hold!” said the leader of the dholes. The entire Pack flung
themselves at the shore, threshing and squattering through the shoal
water, till the face of the Waingunga was all white and torn, and the
great ripples went from side to side, like bow-waves from a boat. Mowgli
followed the rush, stabbing and slicing as the dholes, huddled together,
rushed up the river-beach in one wave.
Then the long fight began, heaving and straining and splitting and
scattering and narrowing and broadening along the red, wet sands, and
over and between the tangled tree-roots, and through and among the
bushes, and in and out of the grass clumps; for even now the dholes were
two to one. But they met wolves fighting for all that made the Pack,
and not only the short, high, deep-chested, white-tusked hunters of the
Pack, but the anxious-eyed lahinis--the she-wolves of the lair, as the
saying is--fighting for their litters, with here and there a yearling
wolf, his first coat still half woolly, tugging and grappling by their
sides. A wolf, you must know, flies at the throat or snaps at the flank,
while a dhole, by preference, bites at the belly; so when the dholes
were struggling out of the water and had to raise their heads, the odds
were with the wolves. On dry land the wolves suffered; but in the water
or ashore, Mowgli’s knife came and went without ceasing. The Four had
worried their way to his side. Gray Brother, crouched between the boy’s
knees, was protecting his stomach, while the others guarded his back
and either side, or stood over him when the shock of a leaping, yelling
dhole who had thrown himself full on the steady blade bore him down. For
the rest, it was one tangled confusion--a locked and swaying mob that
moved from right to left and from left to right along the bank; and also
ground round and round slowly on its own centre. Here would be a heaving
mound, like a water-blister in a whirlpool, which would break like a
water-blister, and throw up four or five mangled dogs, each striving to
get back to the centre; here would be a single wolf borne down by two or
three dholes, laboriously dragging them forward, and sinking the while;
here a yearling cub would be held up by the pressure round him, though
he had been killed early, while his mother, crazed with dumb rage,
rolled over and over, snapping, and passing on; and in the middle of the
thickest press, perhaps, one wolf and one dhole, forgetting everything
else, would be manoeuvring for first hold till they were whirled away by
a rush of furious fighters. Once Mowgli passed Akela, a dhole on either
flank, and his all but toothless jaws closed over the loins of a third;
and once he saw Phao, his teeth set in the throat of a dhole, tugging
the unwilling beast forward till the yearlings could finish him. But the
bulk of the fight was blind flurry and smother in the dark; hit, trip,
and tumble, yelp, groan, and worry-worry-worry, round him and behind him
and above him. As the night wore on, the quick, giddy-go-round motion
increased. The dholes were cowed and afraid to attack the stronger
wolves, but did not yet dare to run away. Mowgli felt that the end was
coming soon, and contented himself with striking merely to cripple. The
yearlings were growing bolder; there was time now and again to breathe,
and pass a word to a friend, and the mere flicker of the knife would
sometimes turn a dog aside.
“The meat is very near the bone,” Gray Brother yelled. He was bleeding
from a score of flesh-wounds.
“But the bone is yet to be cracked,” said Mowgli. “Eowawa! THUS do we do
in the Jungle!” The red blade ran like a flame along the side of a dhole
whose hind-quarters were hidden by the weight of a clinging wolf.
“My kill!” snorted the wolf through his wrinkled nostrils. “Leave him to
me.”
“Is thy stomach still empty, Outlier?” said Mowgli. Won-tolla was
fearfully punished, but his grip had paralysed the dhole, who could not
turn round and reach him.
“By the Bull that bought me,” said Mowgli, with a bitter laugh, “it is
the tailless one!” And indeed it was the big bay-coloured leader.
“It is not wise to kill cubs and lahinis,” Mowgli went on
philosophically, wiping the blood out of his eyes, “unless one has also
killed the Outlier; and it is in my stomach that this Won-tolla kills
thee.”
A dhole leaped to his leader’s aid; but before his teeth had found
Won-tolla’s flank, Mowgli’s knife was in his throat, and Gray Brother
took what was left.
“And thus do we do in the Jungle,” said Mowgli.
Won-tolla said not a word, only his jaws were closing and closing on the
backbone as his life ebbed. The dhole shuddered, his head dropped, and
he lay still, and Won-tolla dropped above him.
“Huh! The Blood Debt is paid,” said Mowgli. “Sing the song, Won-tolla.”
“He hunts no more,” said Gray Brother; “and Akela, too, is silent this
long time.”
“The bone is cracked!” thundered Phao, son of Phaona. “They go! Kill,
kill out, O hunters of the Free People!”
Dhole after dhole was slinking away from those dark and bloody sands to
the river, to the thick Jungle, up-stream or down-stream as he saw the
road clear.
“The debt! The debt!” shouted Mowgli. “Pay the debt! They have slain the
Lone Wolf! Let not a dog go!”
He was flying to the river, knife in hand, to check any dhole who dared
to take water, when, from under a mound of nine dead, rose Akela’s head
and fore-quarters, and Mowgli dropped on his knees beside the Lone Wolf.
“Said I not it would be my last fight?” Akela gasped. “It is good
hunting. And thou, Little Brother?”
“I live, having killed many.”
“Even so. I die, and I would--I would die by thee, Little Brother.”
Mowgli took the terrible scarred head on his knees, and put his arms
round the torn neck.
“It is long since the old days of Shere Khan, and a Man-cub that rolled
naked in the dust.”
“Nay, nay, I am a wolf. I am of one skin with the Free People,” Mowgli
cried. “It is no will of mine that I am a man.”
“Thou art a man, Little Brother, wolfling of my watching. Thou art a
man, or else the Pack had fled before the dhole. My life I owe to thee,
and to-day thou hast saved the Pack even as once I saved thee. Hast thou
forgotten? All debts are paid now. Go to thine own people. I tell thee
again, eye of my eye, this hunting is ended. Go to thine own people.”
“I will never go. I will hunt alone in the Jungle. I have said it.”
“After the summer come the Rains, and after the Rains comes the spring.
Go back before thou art driven.”
“Who will drive me?”
“Mowgli will drive Mowgli. Go back to thy people. Go to Man.”
“When Mowgli drives Mowgli I will go,” Mowgli answered.
“There is no more to say,” said Akela. “Little Brother, canst thou raise
me to my feet? I also was a leader of the Free People.”
Very carefully and gently Mowgli lifted the bodies aside, and raised
Akela to his feet, both arms round him, and the Lone Wolf drew a long
breath, and began the Death Song that a leader of the Pack should sing
when he dies. It gathered strength as he went on, lifting and lifting,
and ringing far across the river, till it came to the last “Good
hunting!” and Akela shook himself clear of Mowgli for an instant, and,
leaping into the air, fell backward dead upon his last and most terrible
kill.
Mowgli sat with his head on his knees, careless of anything else, while
the remnant of the flying dholes were being overtaken and run down by
the merciless lahinis. Little by little the cries died away, and the
wolves returned limping, as their wounds stiffened, to take stock of the
losses. Fifteen of the Pack, as well as half a dozen lahinis, lay dead
by the river, and of the others not one was unmarked. And Mowgli sat
through it all till the cold daybreak, when Phao’s wet, red muzzle was
dropped in his hand, and Mowgli drew back to show the gaunt body of
Akela.
“Good hunting!” said Phao, as though Akela were still alive, and then
over his bitten shoulder to the others: “Howl, dogs! A Wolf has died
to-night!”
But of all the Pack of two hundred fighting dholes, whose boast was
that all jungles were their Jungle, and that no living thing could stand
before them, not one returned to the Dekkan to carry that word.
CHIL’S SONG
[This is the song that Chil sang as the kites dropped down one after
another to the river-bed, when the great fight was finished. Chil is
good friends with everybody, but he is a cold-blooded kind of creature
at heart, because he knows that almost everybody in the Jungle comes to
him in the long-run.]
These were my companions going forth by night--
(For Chil! Look you, for Chil!)
Now come I to whistle them the ending of the fight.
(Chil! Vanguards of Chil!)
Word they gave me overhead of quarry newly slain,
Word I gave them underfoot of buck upon the plain.
Here’s an end of every trail--they shall not speak again!
They that called the hunting-cry--they that followed fast--
(For Chil! Look you, for Chil!)
They that bade the sambhur wheel, or pinned him as he passed--
(Chil! Vanguards of Chil!)
They that lagged behind the scent--they that ran before,
They that shunned the level horn--they that overbore.
Here’s an end of every trail--they shall not follow more.
These were my companions. Pity ‘twas they died!
(For Chil! Look you, for Chil!)
Now come I to comfort them that knew them in their pride.
(Chil! Vanguards of Chil!)
Tattered flank and sunken eye, open mouth and red,
Locked and lank and lone they lie, the dead upon their dead.
Here’s an end of every trail--and here my hosts are fed.
THE SPRING RUNNING
Man goes to Man! Cry the challenge through the Jungle!
He that was our Brother goes away.
Hear, now, and judge, O ye People of the Jungle,--
Answer, who shall turn him--who shall stay?
Man goes to Man! He is weeping in the Jungle:
He that was our Brother sorrows sore!
Man goes to Man! (Oh, we loved him in the Jungle!)
To the Man-Trail where we may not follow more.
The second year after the great fight with Red Dog and the death of
Akela, Mowgli must have been nearly seventeen years old. He looked
older, for hard exercise, the best of good eating, and baths whenever
he felt in the least hot or dusty, had given him strength and growth far
beyond his age. He could swing by one hand from a top branch for half
an hour at a time, when he had occasion to look along the tree-roads.
He could stop a young buck in mid-gallop and throw him sideways by the
head. He could even jerk over the big, blue wild boars that lived in
the Marshes of the North. The Jungle People who used to fear him for his
wits feared him now for his strength, and when he moved quietly on his
own affairs the mere whisper of his coming cleared the wood-paths. And
yet the look in his eyes was always gentle. Even when he fought, his
eyes never blazed as Bagheera’s did. They only grew more and more
interested and excited; and that was one of the things that Bagheera
himself did not understand.