"TIGER! TIGER!"




NOW we must go back to the last tale but one. When Mowgli left
the wolf's cave after the fight with the Pack at the Council
Rock, he went down to the plowed lands where the villagers
lived, but he would not stop there because it was too near to
the jungle, and he knew that he had made at least one bad enemy
at the Council. So he hurried on, keeping to the rough road that
ran down the valley, and followed it at a steady jog-trot for
nearly twenty miles, till he came to a country that he did not
know.

The valley opened out into a great plain dotted
over with rocks and cut up by ravines. At one end stood a little
village, and at the other the thick jungle came down in a sweep
to the grazing-grounds, and stopped there as though it had been
cut off with a hoe. All over the plain, cattle and buffaloes
were grazing, and when the little boys in charge of the herds
saw Mowgli they shouted and ran away, and the yellow pariah dogs
that hang about every Indian village barked. Mowgli walked on,
for he was feeling hungry, and when he came to the village gate
he saw the big thorn-bush that was drawn up before the gate at
twilight, pushed to one side.

"Umph!" he said, for he had come across more than one such
barricade in his night rambles after things to eat. "So men are
afraid of the People of the Jungle here also." He sat down by
the gate, and when a man came out he stood up, opened his mouth,
and pointed down it to show that he wanted food. The man stared
and ran back up the one street of the village shouting for the
priest, who was a big, fat man dressed in white, with a red and
yellow mark on his forehead. The priest came to the gate, and
with him at least a hundred people who stared and talked and
shouted and pointed at Mowgli.

"They have no manners, these Men Folk,"
said Mowgli to himself. "Only the gray ape would behave as they
do." So he threw back his long hair and frowned at the crowd.

"What is there to be afraid of?" said the priest. "Look at
the marks on his arms and legs. They are the bites of wolves. He
is but a wolf-child runaway from the jungle."

Of course, in playing together, the cubs had often nipped
Mowgli harder than they intended, and there were white scars all
over his arms and legs. But he would have been the last person
in the world to call these bites; for he knew what real biting
meant.

"Arre! Arre!" said two or three women together. "To be
bitten by wolves, poor child! He is a handsome boy. He has eyes
like red fire. By my honour, Messua, he is not unlike thy boy
that was taken by the tiger."

"Let me look," said a woman with heavy copper rings on her
wrists and ankles, and she peered at Mowgli under the palm of
her hand. "Indeed he is not. He is thinner, but he has the very
look of my boy."

The priest was a clever man, and he knew that Messua was
wife to the richest villager in the place. So he looked up at
the sky for a minute, and said solemnly: "What the jungle has taken
the jungle has restored. Take the boy into thy house, my sister,
and forget not to honour the priest who sees so far into the
lives of men."

"By the Bull that bought me," said Mowgli to himself, "but
all this talking is like another looking-over by the Pack! Well,
if I am a man, a man I must become."

The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut,
where there was a red lacquered bedstead, a great earthen
grain-chest with curious raised patterns on it, half a dozen
copper cooking-pots, an image of a Hindu god in a little alcove,
and on the wall a real looking-glass, such as they sell at the
country fairs.

She gave him a long drink of milk and some bread, and then
she laid her hand on his head and looked into his eyes; for she
thought perhaps that he might be her real son come back from the
jungle where the tiger had taken him. So she said: "Nathoo, O
Nathoo!" Mowgli did not show that he knew the name. "Dost thou
not remember the day when I gave thee thy new shoes?" She
touched his foot, and it was almost as hard as horn. "No," she
said sorrowfully; "those feet have never worn shoes, but thou
art very like my Nathoo, and thou shalt be my son."

Mowgli was uneasy, because he had never
been under a roof before; but as he looked at the thatch, he saw
that he could tear it out any time if he wanted to get away, and
that the window had no fastenings. "What is the good of a man,"
he said to himself at last, "if he does not understand man's
talk? Now I am as silly and dumb as a man would be with us in
the jungle. I must learn their talk."

It was not for fun that he had learned while he was with
the wolves to imitate the challenge of bucks in the jungle and
the grunt of the little wild pig. So as soon as Messua
pronounced a word Mowgli would imitate it almost perfectly, and
before dark he had learned the names of many things in the hut.

There was a difficulty at bedtime, because Mowgli would not
sleep under anything that looked so like a panther-trap as that
hut, and when they shut the door he went through the window.
"Give him his will," said Messua's husband. "Remember he can
never till now have slept on a bed. If he is indeed sent in the
place of our son he will not run away."

So Mowgli stretched himself in some long, clean grass at
the edge of the field, but before he had closed his eyes a soft
gray nose poked him under the chin.

"Phew!" said Gray Brother (he was the eldest of Mother
Wolf's cubs). "This is a poor reward for following thee twenty
miles. Thou smellest of wood-smoke and cattle -- altogether like
a man already. Wake, Little Brother; I bring news."

"Are all well in the jungle?" said Mowgli, hugging him.

"All except the wolves that were burned with the Red
Flower. Now, listen. Shere Khan has gone away to hunt far off
till his coat grows again, for he is badly singed. When he
returns he swears that he will lay thy bones in the Waingunga."

"There are two words to that. I also have made a little
promise. But news is always good. I am tired tonight, -- very
tired with new things, Gray Brother, -- but bring me the news
always."

"Thou wilt not forget that thou art a wolf? Men will not
make thee forget?" said Gray Brother, anxiously.

"Never. I will always remember that I love thee and all in
our cave; but also I will always remember that I have been cast
out of the Pack."

"And that thou mayest be cast out of another pack. Men are
only men, Little Brother, and their talk is like the talk of
frogs in a pond. When I come down here again, I will wait for
thee in the bamboos at the edge of the grazing-ground."

For three months after that night Mowgli hardly ever left
the village gate, he was so busy learning the ways and customs
of men. First he had to wear a cloth round him, which annoyed
him horribly; and then he had to learn about money, which he did
not in the least understand, and about plowing, of which he did
not see the use. Then the little children in the village made
him very angry. Luckily, the Law of the Jungle had taught him to
keep his temper, for in the jungle, life and food depend on
keeping your temper; but when they made fun of him because he
would not play games or fly kites, or because he mispronounced
some word, only the knowledge that it was unsportsmanlike to
kill little naked cubs kept him from picking them up and
breaking them in two.

He did not know his own strength in the least. In the
jungle he knew he was weak compared with the beasts, but in the
village, people said he was as strong as a bull.

And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that
caste makes between man and man. When the potter's donkey
slipped in the clay-pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and
helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at
Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a
low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded
him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey, too, and the
priest told Messua's husband that Mowgli had better be set to
work as soon as possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli
that he would have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and
herd them while they grazed. No one was more pleased than Mowgli;
and that night, because he had been appointed a servant of the
village, as it were, he went off to a circle that met every
evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree. It was
the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the
barbet (who knew all the gossip of the village), and old
Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and
smoked. The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches,
and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra
lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because
he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked,
and pulled at the big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into the
night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and
Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in
the jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the
circle bulged out of their heads. Most of the tales were about
animals, for the jungle was always at their door. The deer and
the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tiger
carried off a man at twilight, within sight of the village
gates.

Mowgli, who naturally knew something about what they were
talking of, had to cover his face not to show that he was
laughing, while Buldeo, the Tower musket across his knees,
climbed on from one wonderful story to another, and Mowgli's
shoulders shook.

Buldeo was explaining how the tiger that had carried away
Messua's son was a ghost-tiger, and his body was inhabited by
the ghost of a wicked old money-lender, who had died some years
ago. "And I know that this is true," he said, "because Purun
Dass always limped from the blow that he got in a riot when his
account-books were burned, and the tiger that I speak of he
limps, too, for the tracks of his pads are unequal."

"True, true; that must be the truth," said the graybeards,
nodding together.

"Are all these tales such cobwebs and moon-talk?" said
Mowgli. "That tiger limps because he was born lame, as every one
knows. To talk of the soul of a money-lender in a beast that
never had the courage of a jackal is child's talk."

Buldeo was speechless with surprise for a moment, and the
head-man stared.

"Oho! It is the jungle brat, is it?" said Buldeo. "If thou
art so wise, better bring his hide to Khanhiwara, for the
Government has set a hundred rupees [$30] on his life. Better
still, do not talk when thy elders speak."

Mowgli rose to go. "All the evening I have lain here
listening," he called back over his shoulder, "and, except once
or twice, Buldeo has not said one word of truth concerning the
jungle, which is at his very doors. How, then, shall I believe
the tales of ghosts and gods and goblins which he says he has
seen?"

"It is full time that boy went to herding," said the
head-man, while Buldeo puffed and snorted at Mowgli's
impertinence.

The custom of most Indian villages is for a few boys to
take the cattle and buffaloes out to graze in the early morning,
and bring them back at night; and the very cattle that would
trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged
and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to
their noses. So long as the boys keep with the herds they are
safe, for not even the tiger will charge a mob of cattle. But if
they straggle to pick flowers or hunt lizards, they are
sometimes carried off. Mowgli went through the village street in
the dawn, sitting on the back of Rama, the great herd bull; and
the slaty-blue buffaloes, with their long, backward-sweeping
horns and savage eyes, rose out of their byres, one by one, and
followed him, and Mowgli made it very clear to the children with
him that he was the master. He beat the buffaloes with a long
polished bamboo, and told Kamya, one of the boys, to graze the
cattle by themselves, while he went on with the buffaloes, and
to be very careful not to stray away from the herd.

An Indian grazing-ground is all rocks and scrub and
tussocks and little ravines, among which the herds scatter and
disappear. The buffaloes generally keep to the pools and muddy
places, where they lie wallowing or basking in the warm mud for
hours. Mowgli drove them on to the edge of the plain where the
Waingunga River came out of the jungle; then he dropped from
Rama's neck, trotted off to a bamboo clump, and found Gray
Brother. "Ah," said Gray Brother, "I have waited here very many
days. What is the meaning of this cattle-herding work?"

"It is an order," said Mowgli. "I am a village herd for a
while. What news of Shere Khan?"

"He has come back to this country, and has waited here a
long time for thee. Now he has gone off again, for the game is
scarce. But he means to kill thee."

"Very good," said Mowgli. "So long as he is away do thou or
one of the brothers sit on that rock so that I can see thee as
I come out of the village. When he comes back wait for me in the
ravine by the dhak-tree in the center of the plain. We need not
walk into Shere Khan's mouth."

Then Mowgli picked out a shady place, and lay down and
slept while the buffaloes grazed round him. Herding in India is
one of the laziest things in the world. The cattle move and
crunch, and lie down, and move on again, and they do not even
low. They only grunt, and the buffaloes very seldom say
anything, but get down into the muddy pools one after another,
and work their way into the mud till only their noses and
staring china-blue eyes show above the surface, and there they
lie like logs. The sun makes the rocks dance in the heat,
and the herd-children hear one kite (never any more) whistling
almost out of sight overhead, and they know that if they
died, or a cow died that kite would sweep down, and the next
kite miles away would see him drop and follow, and the
next, and the next, and almost before they were dead there would
be a score of hungry kites come out of nowhere. Then they sleep
and wake and sleep again, and weave little baskets of dried
grass and put grasshoppers in them; or catch two
praying-mantises and make them fight; or string a necklace of
red and black junglenuts; or watch a lizard basking on a rock,
or a snake hunting a frog near the wallows. Then they sing long,
long songs with odd native quavers at the end of them, and the
day seems longer than most people's whole lives, and perhaps
they make a mud castle with mud figures of men and horses and
buffaloes, and put reeds into the men's hands, and pretend that
they are kings and the figures are their armies or that they are
gods to be worshiped. Then evening comes, and the children call,
and the buffaloes lumber up out of the sticky mud with noises
like gun-shots going off one after the other, and they all
string across the gray plain back to the twinkling village
lights.

Day after day Mowgli would lead the buffaloes out to their
wallows, and day after day he would see Gray Brother's back a
mile and a half away across the plain (so he knew that Shere
Khan had not come back), and day after day he would lie on the
grass listening to the noise around him, and dreaming of old
days in the jungle. If Shere Khan had made a false step with
his lame paw up in the jungles by the Waingunga, Mowgli would
have heard him in those long still mornings.

At last a day came when he did not see Gray
Brother at the signal place, and he laughed and headed the
buffaloes for the ravine by the dhak-tree, which was all covered
with golden-red flowers. There sat Gray Brother, every bristle
on his back lifted.

"He has hidden for a month to throw thee off thy guard. He
crossed the ranges last night with Tabaqui, hot-foot on thy
trail," said the wolf, panting.

Mowgli frowned. "I am not afraid of Shere Khan, but Tabaqui
is very cunning."

"Have no fear," said Gray Brother, licking his lips a
little. "I met Tabaqui in the dawn. Now he is telling all his
wisdom to the kites, but he told me everything before I broke
his back. Shere Khan's plan is to wait for thee at the village
gate this evening -- for thee and for no one else. He is lying
up now in the big dry ravine of the Waingunga."

"Has he eaten to-day, or does he hunt empty?" said Mowgli,
for the answer meant life or death to him.

"He killed at dawn, -- a pig -- and he has drunk too.
Remember, Shere Khan could never fast even for the sake of
revenge."

"Oh! Fool, fool! What a cub's cub it is! Eaten and drunk
too, and he thinks that I shall wait till he has slept! Now,
where does he lie up? If there were but ten of us we might pull
him down as he lies. These buffaloes will not charge unless
they wind him, and I cannot speak their language. Can we get
behind his track so that they may smell it?"

"He swam far down the Waingunga to cut that off," said Gray
Brother.

"Tabaqui told him that, I know. He would never have thought
of it alone." Mowgli stood with his finger in his mouth,
thinking. "The big ravine of the Waingunga. That opens out on
the plain not half a mile from here. I can take the herd round
through the jungle to the head of the ravine and then sweep down
-- but he would slink out at the foot. We must block that end.
Gray Brother, canst thou cut the herd in two for me?"

"Not I, perhaps -- but I have brought a wise helper." Gray
Brother trotted off and dropped into a hole. Then there lifted
up a huge gray head that Mowgli knew well, and the hot air was
filled with the most desolate cry of all the jungle -- the
hunting-howl of a wolf at midday.

"Akela! Akela!" said Mowgli, clapping his hands. "I might
have known that thou wouldst not forget me. We have a big work
in hand. Cut the herd in two, Akela. Keep the cows and
calves together, and the bulls and the plow-buffaloes by
themselves."

The two wolves ran, ladies'-chain fashion, in and out of
the herd, which snorted and threw up its head and separated into
two clumps. In one the cow-buffaloes stood, with their calves in
the center, and glared and pawed, ready, if a wolf would only
stay still, to charge down and trample the life out of him. In
the other the bulls and the young bulls snorted and stampeded;
but, though they looked more imposing, they were much less
dangerous, for they had no calves to protect. No six men could
have divided the herd so neatly.

"What orders!" panted Akela. "They are trying to join
again."

Mowgli slipped on to Rama's back. "Drive the bulls away to
the left, Akela. Gray Brother, when we are gone hold the cows
together, and drive them into the foot of the ravine."

"How far?" said Gray Brother, panting and snapping.

"Till the sides are higher than Shere Khan can jump,"
shouted Mowgli. "Keep them there till we come down." The bulls
swept off as Akela bayed, and Gray Brother stopped in front of
the cows. They charged down on him, and he ran just before
them to the foot of the ravine, as Akela drove the bulls far
to the left.

"Well done! Another charge and they are fairly started.
Careful, now -- careful, Akela. A snap too much, and the bulls
will charge. Hujah! This is wilder work than driving black-buck.
Didst thou think these creatures could move so swiftly?" Mowgli
called.

"I have -- have hunted these too in my time," gasped Akela
in the dust. "Shall I turn them into the jungle?"

"Ay, turn! Swiftly turn them. Rama is mad with rage. Oh, if
I could only tell him what I need of him to-day!"

The bulls were turned to the right this time, and crashed
into the standing thicket. The other herd-children, watching
with the cattle half a mile away, hurried to the village as fast
as their legs could carry them, crying that the buffaloes had
gone mad and run away.

But Mowgli's plan was simple enough. All he wanted to do
was to make a big circle uphill and get at the head of the
ravine, and then take the bulls down it and catch Shere Khan
between the bulls and the cows, for he knew that after a meal
and a full drink Shere Khan would not be in any condition to
fight or to clamber up the sides of the ravine. He was
soothing the buffaloes now by voice, and Akela had dropped
far to the rear, only whimpering once or twice to hurry
the rear-guard. It was a long, long circle, for they did
not wish to get too near the ravine and give Shere Khan
warning. At last Mowgli rounded up the bewildered herd at
the head of the ravine on a grassy patch that sloped steeply
down to the ravine itself. From that height you could see
across the tops of the trees down to the plain below:
but what Mowgli looked at was the sides of the ravine, and he
saw with a great deal of satisfaction that they ran nearly
straight up and down, and the vines and creepers that hung over
them would give no foothold to a tiger who wanted to get out.

"Let them breathe, Akela," he said, holding up his hand.
"They have not winded him yet. Let them breathe. I must tell
Shere Khan who comes. We have him in the trap."

He put his hands to his mouth and shouted down the ravine,
-- it was almost like shouting down a tunnel, -- and the echoes
jumped from rock to rock.

After a long time there came back the drawling, sleepy
snarl of a full-fed tiger just awakened.

"Who calls?" said Shere Khan, and a splendid peacock
fluttered up out of the ravine, screeching.

"I, Mowgli. Cattle-thief, it is time to come to the Council
Rock! Down -- hurry them down, Akela. Down, Rama, down!"

The herd paused for an instant at the edge of the slope,
but Akela gave tongue in the full hunting-yell, and they pitched
over one after the other just as steamers shoot rapids, the sand
and stones spurting up round them. Once started, there was no
chance of stopping, and before they were fairly in the bed of
the ravine Rama winded Shere Khan and bellowed.

"Ha! Ha!" said Mowgli, on his back. "Now thou knowest!" and
the torrent of black horns, foaming muzzles, and staring eyes
whirled down the ravine like boulders in flood-time; the weaker
buffaloes being shouldered out to the sides of the ravine where
they tore through the creepers. They knew what the business was
before them -- the terrible charge of the buffalo-herd, against
which no tiger can hope to stand. Shere Khan heard the thunder
of their hoofs, picked himself up, and lumbered down the ravine,
looking from side to side for some way of escape, but the walls
of the ravine were straight, and he had to keep on, heavy
with his dinner and his drink, willing to do anything rather
than fight. The herd splashed through the pool he had just
left, bellowing till the narrow cut rang. Mowgli heard an
answering bellow from the foot of the ravine, saw Shere
Khan turn (the tiger knew if the worse came to the worst it was
better to meet the bulls than the cows with their calves), and
then Rama tripped, stumbled, and went on again over something
soft, and, with the bulls at his heels, crashed full into the
other herd, while the weaker buffaloes were lifted clean off
their feet by the shock of the meeting. That charge carried both
herds out into the plain, goring and stamping and snorting.
Mowgli watched his time, and slipped off Rama's neck, laying
about him right and left with his stick.

"Quick, Akela! Break them up. Scatter them, or they will be
fighting one another. Drive them away, Akela. Hai, Rama! Hai!
hai! hai! my children. Softly now, softly! It is all over."

Akela and Gray Brother ran to and fro nipping the
buffaloes' legs, and though the herd wheeled once to charge up
the ravine again, Mowgli managed to turn Rama, and the others
followed him to the wallows.

Shere Khan needed no more trampling. He was dead, and the
kites were coming for him already.

"Brothers, that was a dog's death," said Mowgli, feeling
for the knife he always carried in a sheath round his neck now
that he lived with men. "But he would never have shown fight.
His hide will look well on the Council Rock. We must get to work
swiftly."

A boy trained among men would never have dreamed of
skinning a ten-foot tiger alone, but Mowgli knew better than any
one else how an animal's skin is fitted on, and how it can be
taken off. But it was hard work, and Mowgli slashed and tore and
grunted for an hour, while the wolves lolled out their tongues,
or came forward and tugged as he ordered them.

Presently a hand fell on his shoulder, and looking up he
saw Buldeo with the Tower musket. The children had told the
village about the buffalo stampede, and Buldeo went out angrily,
only too anxious to correct Mowgli for not taking better care of
the herd. The wolves dropped out of sight as soon as they saw
the man coming.

"What is this folly?" said Buldeo, angrily. "To think that
thou canst skin a tiger! Where did the buffaloes kill him? It is
the Lame Tiger too, and there is a hundred rupees on his head.
Well, well, we will overlook thy letting the herd run off, and
perhaps I will give thee one of the rupees of the reward when I
have taken the skin to Khanhiwara." He fumbled in his waist-cloth
for flint and steel, and stooped down to singe Shere Khan's
whiskers. Most native hunters singe a tiger's whiskers to prevent
his ghost haunting them.

"Hum!" said Mowgli, half to himself as he ripped back the
skin of a fore paw. "So thou wilt take the hide to Khanhiwara
for the reward, and perhaps give me one rupee? Now it is in my
mind that I need the skin for my own use. Heh! old man, take
away that fire!"

"What talk is this to the chief hunter of the village? Thy
luck and the stupidity of thy buffaloes have helped thee to this
kill. The tiger has just fed, or he would have gone twenty miles
by this time. Thou canst not even skin him properly, little
beggar-brat, and forsooth I, Buldeo, must be told not to singe
his whiskers. Mowgli, I will not give thee one anna of the
reward, but only a very big beating. Leave the carcass!"

"By the Bull that bought me," said Mowgli, who was trying
to get at the shoulder, "must I stay babbling to an old ape all
noon? Here, Akela, this man plagues me."

Buldeo, who was still stooping over Shere Khan's head,
found himself sprawling on the grass, with a gray wolf standing
over him, while Mowgli went on skinning as though he were alone
in all India.

"Ye-es," he said, between his teeth. "Thou art altogether
right, Buldeo. Thou wilt never give me one anna of the reward.
There is an old war between this lame tiger and myself -- a very
old war, and -- I have won."

To do Buldeo justice, if he had been ten years younger he
would have taken his chance with Akela had he met the wolf in
the woods, but a wolf who obeyed the orders of this boy who had
private wars with man-eating tigers was not a common animal. It
was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, thought Buldeo, and he
wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protect him. He
lay as still as still, expecting every minute to see Mowgli turn
into a tiger, too.

"Maharaj! Great King," he said at last, in a husky whisper.

"Yes," said Mowgli, without turning his head, chuckling a
little.

"I am an old man. I did not know that thou wast anything
more than a herd-boy. May I rise up and go away, Or will thy
servant tear me to pieces?"

"Go, and peace go with thee. Only, another time do not
meddle with my game. Let him go, Akela."

Buldeo hobbled away to the village as fast as he could,
looking back over his shoulder in case Mowgli should change into
something terrible. When he got to the village he told a tale of
magic and enchantment and sorcery that made the priest look very
grave.

Mowgli went on with his work, but it was nearly twilight
before he and the wolves had drawn the great gay skin clear of
the body.

"Now we must hide this and take the buffaloes home! Help me
to herd them, Akela."

The herd rounded up in the misty twilight, and when they
got near the village Mowgli saw lights, and heard the conches
and bells in the temple blowing and banging. Half the village
seemed to be waiting for him by the gate. "That is because I
have killed Shere Khan," he said to himself; but a shower of
stones whistled about his ears, and the villagers shouted:
"Sorcerer! Wolf's brat! Jungle-demon! Go away! Get hence quickly,
or the priest will turn thee into a wolf again. Shoot, Buldeo, shoot!"

The old Tower musket went off with a bang, and a young
buffalo bellowed in pain.

"More sorcery!" shouted the villagers. "He can turn
bullets. Buldeo, that was thy buffalo."

"Now what is this?" said Mowgli, bewildered, as the stones
flew thicker.

"They are not unlike the Pack, these brothers of thine,"
said Akela, sitting down composedly. "It is in my head that, if
bullets mean anything, they would cast thee out."

"Wolf! Wolf's cub! Go away!" shouted the priest, waving a
sprig of the sacred tulsi plant.

"Again? Last time it was because I was a man. This time it
is because I am a wolf. Let us go, Akela."

A woman -- it was Messua -- ran across to the herd, and
cried: "Oh, my son, my son! They say thou art a sorcerer who can
turn himself into a beast at will. I do not believe, but go
away or they will kill thee. Buldeo says thou art a wizard, but
I know thou hast avenged Nathoo's death."

"Come back, Messua!" shouted the crowd. "Come back, or we
will stone thee."

Mowgli laughed a little short ugly laugh, for a stone had
hit him in the mouth. "Run back, Messua. This is one of the
foolish tales they tell under the big tree at dusk. I have at
least paid for thy son's life. Farewell; and run quickly, for I
shall send the herd in more swiftly than their brickbats. I am
no wizard, Messua. Farewell!

"Now, once more, Akela," he cried. "Bring the herd."

The buffaloes were anxious enough to get to the village.
They hardly needed Akela's yell, but charged through the gate
like a whirlwind, scattering the crowd right and left.

"Keep count!" shouted Mowgli, scornfully. "It may be that
I have stolen one of them. Keep count, for I will do your
herding no more. Fare you well, children of men, and thank
Messua that I do not come in with my wolves and hunt you up and
down your street."

He turned on his heel and walked away with the Lone Wolf;
and as he looked up at the stars he felt happy. "No more
sleeping in traps for me, Akela. Let us get Shere Khan's skin
and go away. No; we will not hurt the village, for Messua was
kind to me."

When the moon rose over the plain, making it look all
milky, the horrified villagers saw Mowgli, with two wolves at
his heels and a bundle on his head, trotting across at the
steady wolf's trot that eats up the long miles like fire. Then they
banged the temple bells and blew the conches louder than ever;
and Messua cried, and Buldeo embroidered the story of his
adventures in the jungle, till he ended by saying that Akela
stood up on his hind legs and talked like a man.

The moon was just going down when Mowgli and the two wolves
came to the hill of the Council Rock, and they stopped at Mother
Wolf's cave.

"They have cast me out from the Man Pack,
Mother," shouted Mowgli, "but I come with the hide of Shere Khan
to keep my word." Mother Wolf walked stiffly from the cave with
the cubs behind her, and her eyes glowed as she saw the skin.

"I told him on that day, when he crammed his head and
shoulders into this cave, hunting for thy life, Little Frog --
I told him that the hunter would be the hunted. It is well
done."

"Little Brother, it is well done," said a deep voice in the
thicket. "We were lonely in the jungle without thee," and
Bagheera came running to Mowgli's bare feet. They clambered up
the Council Rock together, and Mowgli spread the skin out on the
flat stone where Akela used to sit, and pegged it down with four
slivers of bamboo, and Akela lay down upon it, and called the
old call to the Council, "Look -- look well, O Wolves!" exactly
as he had called when Mowgli was first brought there.

Ever since Akela had been deposed, the Pack had been
without a leader, hunting and fighting at their own pleasure.
But they answered the call from habit, and some of them were
lame from the traps they had fallen into, and some limped from
shot-wounds, and some were mangy from eating bad food, and many
were missing; but they came to the Council Rock, all that were
left of them, and saw Shere Khan's striped hide on the rock, and
the huge claws dangling at the end of the empty, dangling feet. It
was then that Mowgli made up a song without any rhymes, a song
that came up into his throat all by itself, and he shouted it
aloud, leaping up and down on the rattling skin, and beating
time with his heels till he had no more breath left, while Gray
Brother and Akela howled between the verses.

"Look well, O Wolves. Have I kept my word?" said Mowgli
when he had finished; and the wolves bayed "Yes," and one
tattered wolf howled:

"Lead us again, O Akela. Lead us again, O Man-cub, for we
be sick of this lawlessness, and we would be the Free People
once more."

"Nay," purred Bagheera, "that may not be. When ye are
full-fed, the madness may come upon ye again.


Not for nothing are ye called the Free People. Ye fought for
freedom, and it is yours. Eat it, O Wolves."

"Man Pack and Wolf Pack have cast me out," said Mowgli.
"Now I will hunt alone in the jungle."

"And we will hunt with thee," said the four cubs.

So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the
jungle from that day on. But he was not always alone, because
years afterward he became a man and married.

But that is a story for grown-ups.




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