The Second Jungle Book
as they need, and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and SEVEN TIMES NEVER
KILL MAN.
If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker, devour not all in
thy pride;
Pack-Right is the right of the meanest; so leave him the
head and the hide.
The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack. Ye must
eat where it lies;
And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair, or
he dies.
The Kill of the Wolf is the meat of the Wolf. He may
do what he will,
But, till he has given permission, the Pack may not eat
of that Kill.
Cub-Right is the right of the Yearling. From all of his
Pack he may claim
Full-gorge when the killer has eaten; and none may
refuse him the same.
Lair-Right is the right of the Mother. From all of her
year she may claim
One haunch of each kill for her litter, and none may
deny her the same.
Cave-Right is the right of the Father--to hunt by himself
for his own.
He is freed of all calls to the Pack; he is judged by the
Council alone.
Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe
and his paw,
In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of the Head
Wolf is Law.
Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and
mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch
and the hump is--Obey!
THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT
The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.
And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!
Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!
Dirge of the Langurs.
There was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of the
semi-independent native States in the north-western part of the country.
He was a Brahmin, so high-caste that caste ceased to have any particular
meaning for him; and his father had been an important official in the
gay-coloured tag-rag and bobtail of an old-fashioned Hindu Court. But
as Purun Dass grew up he felt that the old order of things was changing,
and that if any one wished to get on in the world he must stand well
with the English, and imitate all that the English believed to be good.
At the same time a native official must keep his own master’s favour.
This was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed young Brahmin,
helped by a good English education at a Bombay University, played it
coolly, and rose, step by step, to be Prime Minister of the kingdom.
That is to say, he held more real power than his master the Maharajah.
When the old king--who was suspicious of the English, their railways and
telegraphs--died, Purun Dass stood high with his young successor, who
had been tutored by an Englishman; and between them, though he always
took care that his master should have the credit, they established
schools for little girls, made roads, and started State dispensaries and
shows of agricultural implements, and published a yearly blue-book on
the “Moral and Material Progress of the State,” and the Foreign Office
and the Government of India were delighted. Very few native States take
up English progress altogether, for they will not believe, as Purun Dass
showed he did, that what was good for the Englishman must be twice as
good for the Asiatic. The Prime Minister became the honoured friend
of Viceroys, and Governors, and Lieutenant-Governors, and medical
missionaries, and common missionaries, and hard-riding English officers
who came to shoot in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts of
tourists who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showing
how things ought to be managed. In his spare time he would endow
scholarships for the study of medicine and manufactures on strictly
English lines, and write letters to the “Pioneer”, the greatest Indian
daily paper, explaining his master’s aims and objects.
At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous sums to
the priests when he came back; for even so high-caste a Brahmin as Purun
Dass lost caste by crossing the black sea. In London he met and talked
with every one worth knowing--men whose names go all over the world--and
saw a great deal more than he said. He was given honorary degrees by
learned universities, and he made speeches and talked of Hindu social
reform to English ladies in evening dress, till all London cried, “This
is the most fascinating man we have ever met at dinner since cloths were
first laid.”
When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for the Viceroy
himself made a special visit to confer upon the Maharajah the Grand
Cross of the Star of India--all diamonds and ribbons and enamel; and at
the same ceremony, while the cannon boomed, Purun Dass was made a Knight
Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire; so that his name stood Sir
Purun Dass, K.C.I.E.
That evening, at dinner in the big Viceregal tent, he stood up with the
badge and the collar of the Order on his breast, and replying to the
toast of his master’s health, made a speech few Englishmen could have
bettered.
Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet, he did
a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the
world’s affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood went
back to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to
the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the
subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the
people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can
do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun
Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up
the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man,
was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law
recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,--though he
had never carried a weapon in his life,--and twenty years head of a
household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to
be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and
cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him.
Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer
needs.
Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and
brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished
brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the
ground--behind him they were firing salutes from the bastions in honour
of his happy successor. Purun Dass nodded. All that life was ended;
and he bore it no more ill-will or good-will than a man bears to a
colourless dream of the night. He was a Sunnyasi--a houseless, wandering
mendicant, depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so
long as there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar
starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom eaten
even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his personal expenses
for food through any one of the many years in which he had been absolute
master of millions of money. Even when he was being lionised in London
he had held before him his dream of peace and quiet--the long, white,
dusty Indian road, printed all over with bare feet, the incessant,
slow-moving traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under
the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their evening
meal.
When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister took
the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily have found a
bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas, than Purun Dass among
the roving, gathering, separating millions of India.
At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness overtook
him--sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside; sometimes by a
mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis, who are another misty
division of holy men, would receive him as they do those who know what
castes and divisions are worth; sometimes on the outskirts of a little
Hindu village, where the children would steal up with the food
their parents had prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare
grazing-grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsy
camels. It was all one to Purun Dass--or Purun Bhagat, as he called
himself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But unconsciously
his feet drew him away northward and eastward; from the south to
Rohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool to ruined Samanah, and then
up-stream along the dried bed of the Gugger river that fills only when
the rain falls in the hills, till one day he saw the far line of the
great Himalayas.
Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was of
Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way--a Hill-woman, always home-sick for
the snows--and that the least touch of Hill blood draws a man in the end
back to where he belongs.
“Yonder,” said Purun Bhagat, breasting the lower slopes of the Sewaliks,
where the cacti stand up like seven-branched candlesticks-“yonder I
shall sit down and get knowledge”; and the cool wind of the Himalayas
whistled about his ears as he trod the road that led to Simla.
The last time he had come that way it had been in state, with a
clattering cavalry escort, to visit the gentlest and most affable of
Viceroys; and the two had talked for an hour together about mutual
friends in London, and what the Indian common folk really thought of
things. This time Purun Bhagat paid no calls, but leaned on the rail
of the Mall, watching that glorious view of the Plains spread out
forty miles below, till a native Mohammedan policeman told him he was
obstructing traffic; and Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law,
because he knew the value of it, and was seeking for a Law of his own.
Then he moved on, and slept that night in an empty hut at Chota Simla,
which looks like the very last end of the earth, but it was only the
beginning of his journey. He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road, the
little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock, or strutted out
on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep; that dips into warm, wet,
shut-in valleys, and climbs out across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where
the sun strikes like a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, dark
forests where the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and the
pheasant calls to his mate. And he met Thibetan herdsmen with their dogs
and flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of borax on his back,
and wandering wood-cutters, and cloaked and blanketed Lamas from
Thibet, coming into India on pilgrimage, and envoys of little solitary
Hill-states, posting furiously on ring-streaked and piebald ponies, or
the cavalcade of a Rajah paying a visit; or else for a long, clear day
he would see nothing more than a black bear grunting and rooting below
in the valley. When he first started, the roar of the world he had left
still rang in his ears, as the roar of a tunnel rings long after the
train has passed through; but when he had put the Mutteeanee Pass behind
him that was all done, and Purun Bhagat was alone with himself, walking,
wondering, and thinking, his eyes on the ground, and his thoughts with
the clouds.
One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then--it had