The Second Jungle Book
village, stepping in my tracks, turning aside, and lying down, to make
a mixed trail in case one should follow us. But when I had fouled the
trail so that I myself hardly knew it again, Mang, the Bat, came hawking
between the trees, and hung up above me.” Said Mang, “The village of the
Man-Pack, where they cast out the Man-cub, hums like a hornet’s nest.”
“It was a big stone that I threw,” chuckled Mowgli, who had often amused
himself by throwing ripe paw-paws into a hornet’s nest, and racing off
to the nearest pool before the hornets caught him.
“I asked of Mang what he had seen. He said that the Red Flower blossomed
at the gate of the village, and men sat about it carrying guns. Now _I_
know, for I have good cause,”--Akela looked down at the old dry scars
on his flank and side,--“that men do not carry guns for pleasure.
Presently, Little Brother, a man with a gun follows our trail--if,
indeed, he be not already on it.”
“But why should he? Men have cast me out. What more do they need?” said
Mowgli angrily.
“Thou art a man, Little Brother,” Akela returned. “It is not for US, the
Free Hunters, to tell thee what thy brethren do, or why.”
He had just time to snatch up his paw as the skinning-knife cut deep
into the ground below. Mowgli struck quicker than an average human
eye could follow but Akela was a wolf; and even a dog, who is very far
removed from the wild wolf, his ancestor, can be waked out of deep sleep
by a cart-wheel touching his flank, and can spring away unharmed before
that wheel comes on.
“Another time,” Mowgli said quietly, returning the knife to its sheath,
“speak of the Man-Pack and of Mowgli in TWO breaths--not one.”
“Phff! That is a sharp tooth,” said Akela, snuffing at the blade’s
cut in the earth, “but living with the Man-Pack has spoiled thine eye,
Little Brother. I could have killed a buck while thou wast striking.”
Bagheera sprang to his feet, thrust up his head as far as he could,
sniffed, and stiffened through every curve in his body. Gray Brother
followed his example quickly, keeping a little to his left to get the
wind that was blowing from the right, while Akela bounded fifty yards up
wind, and, half-crouching, stiffened too. Mowgli looked on enviously.
He could smell things as very few human beings could, but he had never
reached the hair-trigger-like sensitiveness of a Jungle nose; and his
three months in the smoky village had set him back sadly. However, he
dampened his finger, rubbed it on his nose, and stood erect to catch the
upper scent, which, though it is the faintest, is the truest.
“Man!” Akela growled, dropping on his haunches.
“Buldeo!” said Mowgli, sitting down. “He follows our trail, and yonder
is the sunlight on his gun. Look!”
It was no more than a splash of sunlight, for a fraction of a second,
on the brass clamps of the old Tower musket, but nothing in the Jungle
winks with just that flash, except when the clouds race over the sky.
Then a piece of mica, or a little pool, or even a highly-polished leaf
will flash like a heliograph. But that day was cloudless and still.
“I knew men would follow,” said Akela triumphantly. “Not for nothing
have I led the Pack.”
The four cubs said nothing, but ran down hill on their bellies, melting
into the thorn and under-brush as a mole melts into a lawn.
“Where go ye, and without word?” Mowgli called.
“H’sh! We roll his skull here before mid-day!” Gray Brother answered.
“Back! Back and wait! Man does not eat Man!” Mowgli shrieked.
“Who was a wolf but now? Who drove the knife at me for thinking he might
be Man?” said Akela, as the four wolves turned back sullenly and dropped
to heel.
“Am I to give reason for all I choose to, do?” said Mowgli furiously.
“That is Man! There speaks Man!” Bagheera muttered under his whiskers.
“Even so did men talk round the King’s cages at Oodeypore. We of the
Jungle know that Man is wisest of all. If we trusted our ears we should
know that of all things he is most foolish.” Raising his voice, he
added, “The Man-cub is right in this. Men hunt in packs. To kill one,
unless we know what the others will do, is bad hunting. Come, let us see
what this Man means toward us.”
“We will not come,” Gray Brother growled. “Hunt alone, Little Brother.
WE know our own minds. The skull would have been ready to bring by now.”
Mowgli had been looking from one to the other of his friends, his chest
heaving and his eyes full of tears. He strode forward to the wolves,
and, dropping on one knee, said: “Do I not know my mind? Look at me!”
They looked uneasily, and when their eyes wandered, he called them back
again and again, till their hair stood up all over their bodies, and
they trembled in every limb, while Mowgli stared and stared.
“Now,” said he, “of us five, which is leader?”
“Thou art leader, Little Brother,” said Gray Brother, and he licked
Mowgli’s foot.
“Follow, then,” said Mowgli, and the four followed at his heels with
their tails between their legs.
“This comes of living with the Man-Pack,” said Bagheera, slipping down
after them. “There is more in the Jungle now than Jungle Law, Baloo.”
The old bear said nothing, but he thought many things.
Mowgli cut across noiselessly through the Jungle, at right angles to
Buldeo’s path, till, parting the undergrowth, he saw the old man, his
musket on his shoulder, running up the trail of overnight at a dog-trot.
You will remember that Mowgli had left the village with the heavy weight
of Shere Khan’s raw hide on his shoulders, while Akela and Gray Brother
trotted behind, so that the triple trail was very clearly marked.
Presently Buldeo came to where Akela, as you know, had gone back and
mixed it all up. Then he sat down, and coughed and grunted, and made
little casts round and about into the Jungle to pick it up again, and,
all the time he could have thrown a stone over those who were watching
him. No one can be so silent as a wolf when he does not care to be
heard; and Mowgli, though the wolves thought he moved very clumsily,
could come and go like a shadow. They ringed the old man as a school
of porpoises ring a steamer at full speed, and as they ringed him they
talked unconcernedly, for their speech began below the lowest end of the
scale that untrained human beings can hear. [The other end is bounded by
the high squeak of Mang, the Bat, which very many people cannot catch at
all. From that note all the bird and bat and insect talk takes on.]
“This is better than any kill,” said Gray Brother, as Buldeo stooped
and peered and puffed. “He looks like a lost pig in the Jungles by the
river. What does he say?” Buldeo was muttering savagely.
Mowgli translated. “He says that packs of wolves must have danced round
me. He says that he never saw such a trail in his life. He says he is
tired.”
“He will be rested before he picks it up again,” said Bagheera coolly,
as he slipped round a tree-trunk, in the game of blindman’s-buff that
they were playing. “NOW, what does the lean thing do?”
“Eat or blow smoke out of his mouth. Men always play with their mouths,”
said Mowgli; and the silent trailers saw the old man fill and light
and puff at a water-pipe, and they took good note of the smell of the
tobacco, so as to be sure of Buldeo in the darkest night, if necessary.
Then a little knot of charcoal-burners came down the path, and naturally
halted to speak to Buldeo, whose fame as a hunter reached for at least
twenty miles round. They all sat down and smoked, and Bagheera and
the others came up and watched while Buldeo began to tell the story of
Mowgli, the Devil-child, from one end to another, with additions and
inventions. How he himself had really killed Shere Khan; and how Mowgli
had turned himself into a wolf, and fought with him all the afternoon,
and changed into a boy again and bewitched Buldeo’s rifle, so that the
bullet turned the corner, when he pointed it at Mowgli, and killed one
of Buldeo’s own buffaloes; and how the village, knowing him to be the
bravest hunter in Seeonee, had sent him out to kill this Devil-child.
But meantime the village had got hold of Messua and her husband, who
were undoubtedly the father and mother of this Devil-child, and had
barricaded them in their own hut, and presently would torture them to
make them confess they were witch and wizard, and then they would be
burned to death.
“When?” said the charcoal-burners, because they would very much like to
be present at the ceremony.
Buldeo said that nothing would be done till he returned, because the
village wished him to kill the Jungle Boy first. After that they would
dispose of Messua and her husband, and divide their lands and buffaloes
among the village. Messua’s husband had some remarkably fine buffaloes,
too. It was an excellent thing to destroy wizards, Buldeo thought; and
people who entertained Wolf-children out of the Jungle were clearly the
worst kind of witches.
But, said the charcoal-burners, what would happen if the English heard
of it? The English, they had heard, were a perfectly mad people, who
would not let honest farmers kill witches in peace.
Why, said Buldeo, the head-man of the village would report that Messua
and her husband had died of snake-bite. THAT was all arranged, and the
only thing now was to kill the Wolf-child. They did not happen to have
seen anything of such a creature?
The charcoal-burners looked round cautiously, and thanked their stars
they had not; but they had no doubt that so brave a man as Buldeo would
find him if any one could. The sun was getting rather low, and they had
an idea that they would push on to Buldeo’s village and see that wicked
witch. Buldeo said that, though it was his duty to kill the Devil-child,
he could not think of letting a party of unarmed men go through the
Jungle, which might produce the Wolf-demon at any minute, without his
escort. He, therefore, would accompany them, and if the sorcerer’s child
appeared--well, he would show them how the best hunter in Seeonee dealt
with such things. The Brahmin, he said, had given him a charm against
the creature that made everything perfectly safe.
“What says he? What says he? What says he?” the wolves repeated every
few minutes; and Mowgli translated until he came to the witch part of
the story, which was a little beyond him, and then he said that the man
and woman who had been so kind to him were trapped.
“Does Man trap Man?” said Bagheera.
“So he says. I cannot understand the talk. They are all mad together.
What have Messua and her man to do with me that they should be put in
a trap; and what is all this talk about the Red Flower? I must look
to this. Whatever they would do to Messua they will not do till Buldeo
returns. And so----” Mowgli thought hard, with his fingers playing round
the haft of the skinning-knife, while Buldeo and the charcoal-burners
went off very valiantly in single file.
“I go hot-foot back to the Man-Pack,” Mowgli said at last.
“And those?” said Gray Brother, looking hungrily after the brown backs
of the charcoal-burners.
“Sing them home,” said Mowgli, with a grin; “I do not wish them to be at
the village gates till it is dark. Can ye hold them?”
Gray Brother bared his white teeth in contempt. “We can head them round
and round in circles like tethered goats--if I know Man.”
“That I do not need. Sing to them a little, lest they be lonely on the
road, and, Gray Brother, the song need not be of the sweetest. Go with
them, Bagheera, and help make that song. When night is shut down, meet
me by the village--Gray Brother knows the place.”
“It is no light hunting to work for a Man-cub. When shall I sleep?” said
Bagheera, yawning, though his eyes showed that he was delighted with the
amusement. “Me to sing to naked men! But let us try.”