The Second Jungle Book
hand, expecting to fling the creatures backward as he had often done in
games or Pack hunts. But he had never before interfered with a spring
fight. The two leaped forward and dashed him aside, and without word to
waste rolled over and over close locked.
Mowgli was on his feet almost before he fell, his knife and his white
teeth were bared, and at that minute he would have killed both for no
reason but that they were fighting when he wished them to be quiet,
although every wolf has full right under the Law to fight. He danced
round them with lowered shoulders and quivering hand, ready to send in
a double blow when the first flurry of the scuffle should be over;
but while he waited the strength seemed to ebb from his body, the
knife-point lowered, and he sheathed the knife and watched.
“I have surely eaten poison,” he sighed at last. “Since I broke up the
Council with the Red Flower--since I killed Shere Khan--none of the Pack
could fling me aside. And these be only tail-wolves in the Pack, little
hunters! My strength is gone from me, and presently I shall die. Oh,
Mowgli, why dost thou not kill them both?”
The fight went on till one wolf ran away, and Mowgli was left alone on
the torn and bloody ground, looking now at his knife, and now at his
legs and arms, while the feeling of unhappiness he had never known
before covered him as water covers a log.
He killed early that evening and ate but little, so as to be in good
fettle for his spring running, and he ate alone because all the Jungle
People were away singing or fighting. It was a perfect white night,
as they call it. All green things seemed to have made a month’s growth
since the morning. The branch that was yellow-leaved the day before
dripped sap when Mowgli broke it. The mosses curled deep and warm over
his feet, the young grass had no cutting edges, and all the voices of
the Jungle boomed like one deep harp-string touched by the moon--the
Moon of New Talk, who splashed her light full on rock and pool, slipped
it between trunk and creeper, and sifted it through a million leaves.
Forgetting his unhappiness, Mowgli sang aloud with pure delight as he
settled into his stride. It was more like flying than anything else, for
he had chosen the long downward slope that leads to the Northern Marshes
through the heart of the main Jungle, where the springy ground deadened
the fall of his feet. A man-taught man would have picked his way with
many stumbles through the cheating moonlight, but Mowgli’s muscles,
trained by years of experience, bore him up as though he were a feather.
When a rotten log or a hidden stone turned under his foot he saved
himself, never checking his pace, without effort and without thought.
When he tired of ground-going he threw up his hands monkey-fashion to
the nearest creeper, and seemed to float rather than to climb up into
the thin branches, whence he would follow a tree-road till his mood
changed, and he shot downward in a long, leafy curve to the levels
again. There were still, hot hollows surrounded by wet rocks where he
could hardly breathe for the heavy scents of the night flowers and the
bloom along the creeper buds; dark avenues where the moonlight lay in
belts as regular as checkered marbles in a church aisle; thickets where
the wet young growth stood breast-high about him and threw its arms
round his waist; and hilltops crowned with broken rock, where he leaped
from stone to stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes. He
would hear, very faint and far off, the chug-drug of a boar sharpening
his tusks on a bole; and would come across the great gray brute all
alone, scribing and rending the bark of a tall tree, his mouth dripping
with foam, and his eyes blazing like fire. Or he would turn aside to the
sound of clashing horns and hissing grunts, and dash past a couple of
furious sambhur, staggering to and fro with lowered heads, striped with
blood that showed black in the moonlight. Or at some rushing ford he
would hear Jacala the Crocodile bellowing like a bull, or disturb a
twined knot of the Poison People, but before they could strike he would
be away and across the glistening shingle, and deep in the Jungle again.
So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes singing to himself, the
happiest thing in all the Jungle that night, till the smell of the
flowers warned him that he was near the marshes, and those lay far
beyond his farthest hunting-grounds.
Here, again, a man-trained man would have sunk overhead in three
strides, but Mowgli’s feet had eyes in them, and they passed him from
tussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without asking help from
the eyes in his head. He ran out to the middle of the swamp, disturbing
the duck as he ran, and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk lapped in
the black water. The marsh was awake all round him, for in the spring
the Bird People sleep very lightly, and companies of them were coming
or going the night through. But no one took any notice of Mowgli sitting
among the tall reeds humming songs without words, and looking at the
soles of his hard brown feet in case of neglected thorns. All his
unhappiness seemed to have been left behind in his own Jungle, and he
was just beginning a full-throat song when it came back again--ten times
worse than before.
This time Mowgli was frightened. “It is here also!” he said half aloud.
“It has followed me,” and he looked over his shoulder to see whether
the It were not standing behind him. “There is no one here.” The night
noises of the marsh went on, but never a bird or beast spoke to him, and
the new feeling of misery grew.
“I have surely eaten poison,” he said in an awe-stricken voice. “It must
be that carelessly I have eaten poison, and my strength is going from
me. I was afraid--and yet it was not _I_ that was afraid--Mowgli was
afraid when the two wolves fought. Akela, or even Phao, would have
silenced them; yet Mowgli was afraid. That is true sign I have eaten
poison.... But what do they care in the Jungle? They sing and howl and
fight, and run in companies under the moon, and I--Hai-mai!--I am dying
in the marshes, of that poison which I have eaten.” He was so sorry for
himself that he nearly wept. “And after,” he went on, “they will find
me lying in the black water. Nay, I will go back to my own Jungle, and I
will die upon the Council Rock, and Bagheera, whom I love, if he is not
screaming in the valley--Bagheera, perhaps, may watch by what is left
for a little, lest Chil use me as he used Akela.”
A large, warm tear splashed down on his knee, and, miserable as he was,
Mowgli felt happy that he was so miserable, if you can understand
that upside-down sort of happiness. “As Chil the Kite used Akela,” he
repeated, “on the night I saved the Pack from Red Dog.” He was quiet
for a little, thinking of the last words of the Lone Wolf, which you,
of course, remember. “Now Akela said to me many foolish things before he
died, for when we die our stomachs change. He said... None the less, I
AM of the Jungle!”
In his excitement, as he remembered the fight on Waingunga bank, he
shouted the last words aloud, and a wild buffalo-cow among the reeds
sprang to her knees, snorting, “Man!”
“Uhh!” said Mysa the Wild Buffalo (Mowgli could hear him turn in his
wallow), “THAT is no man. It is only the hairless wolf of the Seeonee
Pack. On such nights runs he to and fro.”
“Uhh!” said the cow, dropping her head again to graze, “I thought it was
Man.”
“I say no. Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?” lowed Mysa.
“Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?” the boy called back mockingly. “That is all
Mysa thinks for: Is it danger? But for Mowgli, who goes to and fro in
the Jungle by night, watching, what do ye care?”
“How loud he cries!” said the cow. “Thus do they cry,” Mysa answered
contemptuously, “who, having torn up the grass, know not how to eat it.”
“For less than this,” Mowgli groaned to himself, “for less than this even
last Rains I had pricked Mysa out of his wallow, and ridden him through
the swamp on a rush halter.” He stretched a hand to break one of the
feathery reeds, but drew it back with a sigh. Mysa went on steadily
chewing the cud, and the long grass ripped where the cow grazed. “I will
not die HERE,” he said angrily. “Mysa, who is of one blood with Jacala
and the pig, would see me. Let us go beyond the swamp and see what
comes. Never have I run such a spring running--hot and cold together.
Up, Mowgli!”
He could not resist the temptation of stealing across the reeds to Mysa
and pricking him with the point of his knife. The great dripping bull
broke out of his wallow like a shell exploding, while Mowgli laughed
till he sat down.
“Say now that the hairless wolf of the Seeonee Pack once herded thee,
Mysa,” he called.
“Wolf! THOU?” the bull snorted, stamping in the mud. “All the jungle
knows thou wast a herder of tame cattle--such a man’s brat as shouts in
the dust by the crops yonder. THOU of the Jungle! What hunter would have
crawled like a snake among the leeches, and for a muddy jest--a jackal’s
jest--have shamed me before my cow? Come to firm ground, and I will--I
will...” Mysa frothed at the mouth, for Mysa has nearly the worst temper
of any one in the Jungle.
Mowgli watched him puff and blow with eyes that never changed. When
he could make himself heard through the pattering mud, he said: “What
Man-Pack lair here by the marshes, Mysa? This is new Jungle to me.”
“Go north, then,” roared the angry bull, for Mowgli had pricked him
rather sharply. “It was a naked cow-herd’s jest. Go and tell them at the
village at the foot of the marsh.”
“The Man-Pack do not love jungle-tales, nor do I think, Mysa, that a
scratch more or less on thy hide is any matter for a council. But I will
go and look at this village. Yes, I will go. Softly now. It is not every
night that the Master of the Jungle comes to herd thee.”
He stepped out to the shivering ground on the edge of the marsh, well
knowing that Mysa would never charge over it and laughed, as he ran, to
think of the bull’s anger.
“My strength is not altogether gone,” he said. “It may be that the poison
is not to the bone. There is a star sitting low yonder.” He looked at it
between his half-shut hands. “By the Bull that bought me, it is the Red
Flower--the Red Flower that I lay beside before--before I came even
to the first Seeonee Pack! Now that I have seen, I will finish the
running.”
The marsh ended in a broad plain where a light twinkled. It was a long
time since Mowgli had concerned himself with the doings of men, but this
night the glimmer of the Red Flower drew him forward.
“I will look,” said he, “as I did in the old days, and I will see how
far the Man-Pack has changed.”
Forgetting that he was no longer in his own Jungle, where he could do
what he pleased, he trod carelessly through the dew-loaded grasses till
he came to the hut where the light stood. Three or four yelping dogs
gave tongue, for he was on the outskirts of a village.
“Ho!” said Mowgli, sitting down noiselessly, after sending back a deep
wolf-growl that silenced the curs. “What comes will come. Mowgli, what
hast thou to do any more with the lairs of the Man-Pack?” He rubbed his
mouth, remembering where a stone had struck it years ago when the other
Man-Pack had cast him out.
The door of the hut opened, and a woman stood peering out into the
darkness. A child cried, and the woman said over her shoulder, “Sleep.
It was but a jackal that waked the dogs. In a little time morning
comes.”
Mowgli in the grass began to shake as though he had fever. He knew that
voice well, but to make sure he cried softly, surprised to find how
man’s talk came back, “Messua! O Messua!”
“Who calls?” said the woman, a quiver in her voice.
“Hast thou forgotten?” said Mowgli. His throat was dry as he spoke.