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 brushes, 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 grap pling 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 center. 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 center; 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 manœvering 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 paralyzed 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-colored 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 red head and fore-quarters, and Mowgli dropped on his knees beside the Lone Wolf.
“Said I not it would be my last fight?” Akela panted. “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 come 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 the 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 Paho’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, and 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 ’t was they died!
(For Chil! Look you, for Chil!)
Now come I to comfort them that knew 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.
Here, 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.
She 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.
He asked Mowgli about it, and the boy laughed and said: “When I miss the kill I am angry. When I must go empty for two days I am very angry. Do not my eyes talk then?”
“The mouth is angry,” said Bagheera, “but the eyes say nothing. Hunting, eating, or swimming, it is all one—like a stone in wet or dry weather.” Mowgli looked at him lazily from under his long eyelashes, and, as usual, the panther’s head dropped. Bagheera knew his master.
They were lying out far up the side of a hill overlooking the Waingunga, and the morning mist hung below them in bands of white and green. As the sun rose it changed into bubbling seas of red gold, churned off, and let the low rays stripe the dried grass on which Mowgli and Bagheera were resting. It was the end of the cold weather, the leaves and the trees looked worn and faded, and there was a dry, ticking rustle everywhere when the wind blew. A little leaf tap-tap-tapped furiously against a twig, as a single leaf caught in a current will. It roused Bagheera, for he snuffed the morning air with a deep, hollow cough, threw himself on his back, and struck with his fore-paws at the nodding leaf above.
“The year turns,” he said. “The Jungle goes forward. The Time of New Talk is near. That leaf knows. It is very good.”
“The grass is dry,” Mowgli answered, pulling up a tuft. “Even Eye-of-the-Spring [that is a little trumpet-shaped, waxy red flower that runs in and out among the grasses]—even Eye-of the-Spring is shut, and ... Bagheera, is it well for the Black Panther so to lie on his back and beat with his paws in the air, as though he were the tree-cat?”
“Aowh?” said Bagheera. He seemed to be thinking of other things.
“I say, is it well for the Black Panther so to mouth and cough, and howl and roll? Remember, we be the Masters of the Jungle, thou and I.”
“Indeed, yes: I hear, Man-cub.” Bagheera rolled over hurriedly and sat up, the dust on his ragged, black flanks. (He was just casting his winter coat.) “We be surely the Masters of the Jungle! Who is so strong as Mowgli? Who so wise?” There was a curious drawl in the voice that made Mowgli turn to see whether by any chance the Black Panther were making fun of him, for the Jungle is full of words that sound like one thing, but mean another. “I said we be beyond question the Masters of the Jungle,” Bagheera repeated. “Have I done wrong? I did not know that the Man-cub no longer lay upon the ground. Does he fly, then?”
Mowgli sat with his elbows on his knees, looking out across the valley at the daylight. Somewhere down in the woods below a bird was trying over in a husky, reedy voice the first few notes of his spring song. It was no more than a shadow of the liquid, tumbling call he would be pouring later, but Bagheera heard it.
“I said the Time of New Talk is near,” growled the panther, switching his tail.
“I hear,” Mowgli answered. “Bagheera, why dost thou shake all over? The sun is warm.”
“That is Ferao, the scarlet woodpecker,” said Bagheera. “He has not forgotten. Now I, too, must remember my song,” and he began purring and crooning to himself, harking back dissatisfied again and again.
“There is no game afoot,” said Mowgli.
“Little Brother, are both thine ears stopped? That is no killing-word, but my song that I make ready against the need.”
“I had forgotten. I shall know when the Time of New Talk is here, because then thou and the others all run away and leave me alone.” Mowgli spoke rather savagely.
“But, indeed, Little Brother,” Bagheera began, “we do not always—”
“I say ye do,” said Mowgli, shooting out his forefinger angrily. “Ye do run away, and I, who am the Master of the Jungle, must needs walk alone. How was it last season, when I would gather sugar-cane from the fields of a Man-Pack? I sent a runner—I sent thee!—to Hathi, bidding him to come upon such a night and pluck the sweet grass for me with his trunk.”
“He came only two nights later,” said Bagheera, cowering a little; “and of that long, sweet grass that pleased thee so he gathered more than any Man-cub could eat in all the nights of the Rains. That was no fault of mine.”
“He did not come upon the night when I sent him the word. No, he was trumpeting and running and roaring through the valleys in the moonlight. His trail was like the trail of three elephants, for he would not hide among the trees. He danced in the moonlight before the houses of the Man-Pack. I saw him, and yet he would not come to me; and I am the Master of the Jungle!”
“It was the Time of New Talk,” said the panther, always very humble. “Perhaps, Little Brother, thou didst not that time call him by a Master-word? Listen to Ferao, and be glad!”
Mowgli’s bad temper seemed to have boiled itself away. He lay back with his head on his arms, his eyes shut. “I do not know—nor do I care,” he said sleepily. “Let us sleep, Bagheera. My stomach is heavy in me. Make me a rest for my head.”
The panther lay down again with a sigh, because he could hear Ferao practising and repractising his song against the Springtime of New Talk, as they say.
In an Indian Jungle the seasons slide one into the other almost without division. There seem to be only two—the wet and the dry; but if you look closely below the torrents of rain and the clouds of char and dust you will find all four going round in their regular ring. Spring is the most wonderful, because she has not to cover a clean, bare field with new leaves and flowers, bu
t to drive before her and to put away the hanging-on, over-surviving raffle of half-green things which the gentle winter has suffered to live, and to make the partly dressed stale earth feel new and young once more. And this she does so well that there is no spring in the world like the Jungle spring.
There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells, as they drift on the heavy air, are old and used. One cannot explain this, but it feels so. Then there is another day—to the eye nothing whatever has changed—when all the smells are new and delightful, and the whiskers of the Jungle People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes away from their sides in long, draggled locks. Then, perhaps, a little rain falls, and all the trees and the bushes and the bamboos and the mosses and the juicy-leaved plants wake with a noise of growing that you can almost hear, and under this noise runs, day and night, a deep hum. That is the noise of the spring—a vibrating boom which is neither bees, nor falling water, nor the wind in tree-tops, but the purring of the warm, happy world.
Up to this year Mowgli had always delighted in the turn of the seasons. It was he who generally saw the first Eye-of-the-Spring deep down among the grasses, and the first bank of spring clouds which are like nothing else in the Jungle. His voice could be heard in all sorts of wet, star-lighted, blossoming places, helping the big frogs through their choruses, or mocking the little upside-down owls that hoot through the white nights. Like all his people, spring was the season he chose for his flittings—moving, for the mere joy of rushing through the warm air, thirty, forty, or fifty miles between twilight and the morning star, and coming back panting and laughing and wreathed with strange flowers. The Four did not follow him on these wild ringings of the Jungle, but went off to sing songs with other wolves. The Jungle People are very busy in the spring, and Mowgli could hear them grunting and screaming and whistling according to their kind. Their voices then are different from their voices at other times of the year, and that is one of the reasons why spring in the Jungle is called the Time of New Talk.
Jungle Books (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 36
