The Strength of the Wolf is the Pack

by Scott Peterson

  Baloo watched as the man-cub swatted at the bees, turned, and almost fell backward off the ledge.

  “Oooooh,” said the scavengers in unison.

  Baloo scoffed. Those jokers were worse than vultures.

  “I can’t watch,” said the pangolin, curling all the way into his defensive ball.

  Baloo moved forward, arms out. He might have to catch the kid.

  Mowgli grabbed the ledge, saving himself, legs kicking free below.

  “You got it, kid!” said Baloo. “Believe in yourself!”

  The pangolin peeked out of his ball and squinted at Baloo curiously. Baloo shrugged. He had just said the first thing that came to his mouth. He was hoping it’d be enough.

  From the nearby brush, the pygmy hog ambled toward the scavengers.

  “What’s happening?” the pygmy hog asked.

  “Man-cub’s gonna fall off a cliff,” said the giant squirrel. He pointed up at Mowgli, who was still struggling to keep his grasp.

  “No he ain’t,” said Baloo.

  “Cool,” said the pygmy hog, sitting down to watch the show. The scavengers passed some seeds and nuts around, chewing absentmindedly as they watched, never taking their eyes off the man-cub.

  Finally, Mowgli managed to swing his long legs up and over the ledge and pull himself to safety.

  Baloo sighed out loud, relieved.

  “Kid’s gonna put me in an early grave,” he said to himself.

  “There you go!” he called out to Mowgli, his paws on the sides of his mouth.

  On the ledge, Mowgli climbed up on top of the honeycomb, one hand still on the vine rope, and jumped up and down on the treat while trying to keep as many of the bees away as possible. Even from Baloo’s vantage point, it was getting more intense by the moment.

  “Kid’s got a death wish,” said the giant squirrel.

  There was a great snapping sound and suddenly the honeycomb broke free from the cliff. Down it went, and Mowgli with it, losing his grip on the vine.

  For a moment, both man-cub and honeycomb were flying.

  Baloo moved quickly, trying to guess where the kid would land. He put his arms up and out, ready for anything.

  The hornbill squawked and the pangolin came out of his ball. The giant squirrel covered the pangolin’s eyes with his paw.

  Mowgli reached out and grabbed the vine, swinging into the canopy of trees as the honeycomb fell past him.

  “Here it comes!” hollered Mowgli.

  The honeycomb headed straight for Baloo.

  “Sweet mother,” said the bear just as the honeycomb landed right on top of him.

  The scavengers observed Baloo, suddenly the strangest-looking but happiest animal in the Jungle: part honeycomb, part bear. Baloo was bathed in honey, slurping it off his fur and his paws and nose.

  “Ha!” laughed Baloo. “How about that, fellas? He did it! He did it!”

  “I gotta get me a monkey,” said the giant squirrel.

  “Man-cub,” corrected the pangolin.

  “I gotta get me a man-cub,” said the giant squirrel.

  “Oh, yeah,” added the pygmy hog.

  “Squawk,” squawked the hornbill.

  Nearby, Mowgli lowered himself to the ground from the vine. He wiped the last of the bees off his shoulders, then caught sight of Baloo in all his honey-gulping glory. Mowgli smiled. Silly bear, he thought.

  “Okay,” said Mowgli, dusting off his hands, careful to avoid the swelling bee stings. As far as he was concerned, he’d done his duty and now he had to follow through on the agreement he’d made with Bagheera. “We’re even now. Good-bye.”

  Mowgli marched off, but Baloo was on his feet almost instantly, following the man-cub, the honeycomb breaking apart on his coat as he moved faster than he’d moved in many moons.

  His meal ticket was leaving him behind.

  “WELL, HOLD ON A MINUTE. What’s your name, anyway?”

  Baloo was not about to let a find like this man-cub slip through his fingers without a fight.

  Mowgli kept walking but answered. “Mowgli.”

  Baloo picked up his pace to keep up, dancing from one side of Mowgli to the other as they both walked, leaving the other animals behind. The hornbill squawked, but no one cared. The show was over and the scavengers headed back into the Jungle.

  “Mowgli!” said Baloo. “Terrific name. I like that name. Look, I got a lot more gathering to do in these next few weeks…a lot a lot, on account of my hibernation and all…and I could really use the help. Especially from someone with such clever tricks.”

  Baloo smiled the biggest smile he could and a bee flew out of his mouth.

  Mowgli kept walking.

  Baloo caught right back up.

  “Maybe you stick around and we split shares,” offered Baloo. “Proportional to body weight, of course…”

  Mowgli didn’t skip a step as he spoke. “No way. I’m not getting stung again just so you can eat. Anyway, I can’t. I have to go to a Man-village.”

  “A Man-village? Why d’you wanna go there?”

  “I don’t,” said Mowgli.

  “First sensible thing you’ve said today—” Baloo started, but Mowgli cut him off.

  “But I don’t have a choice. There’s a tiger hunting me.”

  “A tiger? Why?” asked Baloo.

  “Because I’m a man-cub, all right?” Mowgli said, stomping. “Just leave me alone.”

  “Hey, hey, hey, Mowgli. Buddy.”

  Baloo placed a soft paw on Mowgli’s shoulder. There was honey still on it and it stuck a bit.

  “Sorry,” said the bear. “What’s wrong with being a man-cub? Being a man-cub is great!”

  Finally, Mowgli stopped. Baloo couldn’t think and walk at the same time anymore, so he sat down. What was going on with this kid?

  “It is?” asked Mowgli.

  “Of course it is!” said Baloo. “It’s who you are. And that’s the best thing you can be. Yourself. You get what I’m saying?”

  “I guess,” said Mowgli.

  Baloo scooted over and put his big arm around Mowgli’s shoulder, encouraging the man-cub to sit next to him.

  “Look here, Mowgli. I’m just gonna lay this on the line. I like you. You know why?”

  Mowgli shook his head.

  “’Cause you got something I don’t see much around these parts. It’s called potential.”

  Mowgli tried the word on his tongue, weighing it as he spoke.

  “‘Potential….” He didn’t know what it meant.

  Baloo got excited and stood up, flapping his great big paws around like giant bird wings.

  “That’s right. And there is nothing worse than a cub, a man-cub, who doesn’t live up to his potential. Mmm-mmmm. That’s a darn shame is what it is. But I’m tellin’ you, you don’t have to go to some Man-village to be a man.”

  Mowgli’s mind spun. Could this bear be right?

  “You can be a man right here in the Jungle. And lucky for you, I’m just the bear who can help you do it!”

  Mowgli’s eyes grew wide, a smile drawing across his face as he thought of the possibilities, and then, suddenly, the smile was gone. Baloo watched the kid age five seasons right before his eyes. It broke his big bear heart to see it. The burden the kid carried was weighing him down plenty.

  “I can’t,” said Mowgli. “I gotta get moving. Bagheera told me—”

  Baloo almost shouted. “Bagheera! Hah!”

  “You know him?” asked Mowgli, perking up a bit.

  “Oh, do I know him,” said Baloo, shaking his head. Poor kid has been brainwashed by that uptight old cat. No wonder he’s so messed up.

  “You know what that cat’s problem is?” offered Baloo. “C’mon, I can think of six or seven without even breakin’ a sweat.” But he didn’t wait for Mowgli to answer. “I’ll tell you his problem. He always plays by the rules! Always. And sometimes rules were meant to be broken!”

  Mowgli had heard enough. It was too tempting an offer and if he
stayed a moment longer, he knew he’d make another mistake, do something stupid, stick his hand in another honeycomb. There was honey with this bear, but there were also bees. Lots of bees. He’d learned that much.

  Mowgli got up to leave.

  “Well, he told me to go to the Man-village, so that’s where I’m gonna go,” said Mowgli, throwing up his words like a pangolin shell to cover his heart.

  Baloo jogged in front of Mowgli, craning his great head down so he could stare the man-cub right in the eyes.

  “You’re makin’ me run, kid. Nobody makes me run. Tell you what—you wanna see a Man-village? How about ol’ Baloo takes you there?” offered the bear. “I’ll show you a Man-village. Then you, man-cub of the Jungle, then you can decide for yourself. Deal?”

  Baloo put out a big paw, honey drying between his clawed fingers.

  Maybe the bear is right. Maybe Bagheera is wrong. Maybe—

  Mowgli thought for a moment, his heart filling right back up with hope, and the promise of a new story, his own story, pushing Bagheera out of his head with a rush of emotion.

  He stuck out two hands and shook Baloo’s paw up and down.

  “Deal,” said Mowgli.

  THE BEAR AND THE MAN-CUB cut through the belly of the Jungle.

  Dwarfed by the gargantuan twisted branches of the thousand-year-old trees reaching high to blot out the sun, Baloo and Mowgli clambered up the steep overgrown trail. Few animals used it any longer, but the man-cub had no trouble keeping up as the bear huffed and puffed his way higher. Mowgli laughed.

  “What?” asked Baloo. “You got a funny to share, share it.”

  “You sound like a snorting rhino,” Mowgli said, laughing again. “Hrumph hrumph hrumph!”

  “I said if you had a funny to share it. It’s hard work being this beautiful. And I have a bit more me to carry up this hill than you do, little man-cub.”

  “A lot more,” Mowgli agreed, running quick circles around the lumbering bear.

  Eventually, the path flattened out and Baloo’s puffing eased. He hummed to himself as he walked. Soon he was singing.

  “Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities. Forget about your worries and your strife….”

  “What are you doing?” Mowgli asked, his brow knitted as he stared at Baloo. He had never heard such strange sounds from a ground-dwelling creature. From the birds in the sky, perhaps, but never from a bear.

  “It’s a song,” Baloo replied, “about the good life.”

  “A song?” Mowgli repeated, puzzling over the word. “What’s a song?”

  “What? You never heard a song before? Didn’t the wolves ever sing?” Baloo stopped in his tracks, astonished.

  “I don’t know,” Mowgli said, struggling to remember. “We howl and…Oh! We say the Law of the Jungle!”

  Mowgli stood at attention, reciting from memory, his voice serious and monotone: “This is the Law of the Jungle, as old and as true as the sky. The Wolf that keeps it may prosper, but the Wolf that breaks it will die.”

  “Kid, that’s not a song,” Baloo groaned, shaking his head. “That’s propaganda.”

  Baloo pushed through the brush, past the confused man-cub, muttering under his breath. “That kid doesn’t have a poetic bone in his body.”

  As the two climbed higher, Mowgli found himself falling behind. The man-cub refused to admit he was tired, but in time his heavy breathing gave him away.

  “Now who sounds like a rhino?” Baloo chuckled.

  “My legs are shorter than yours,” Mowgli grumbled. “I have to take a lot more steps.”

  “All right, all right,” Baloo sighed, stooping down to Mowgli’s level. “Climb on.” With a smile and a whoop, Mowgli leapt nimbly onto the broad downy back of the mighty bear, grabbing fistfuls of fur to hold on tight. Baloo grunted and began lumbering up the hill.

  “Kid, I don’t know what kind of hold you got on me, but let me tell you I wouldn’t do this for just anybody. Doing extra work—heck, doing any work—well, that’s just not in my nature.”

  But despite the extra effort, Baloo didn’t stop, and the two continued to rise up the twisting spine of the mountain.

  Up the mountain trail they climbed, the air growing thinner as they broke free of the thick Jungle canopy, its familiar sounds and smells giving way to the gentle breath of the wind and a new scent that Mowgli did not recognize.

  Mowgli climbed down from Baloo and gasped, taking in the view before them. The vastness of the mighty Jungle was laid out against the burnt orange of the setting sun like a brand-new world. Mowgli had had no idea the Jungle was so big.

  “Wow,” Mowgli whispered. He had never seen anything like it in his life.

  “Not bad, huh?” Baloo smiled. “So that’s what you’re leaving. And this…”

  Baloo took Mowgli by his bony shoulders and turned him around, one mighty paw pushing back the leafy overgrowth to reveal another astonishing view.

  “This is where you wanna go.”

  Mowgli stepped forward slowly, haltingly, as if under the spell of Kaa herself, mesmerized by the scene below. The slope of the mountain dropped to a green valley with pockets of yellow grain and brown grassland. In the center of the valley lay a group of wooden structures curved like the back of a pangolin, made of trees and rocks, their flanks lit by bursts of sun glowing from wooden sticks. They glowed. Mowgli stared breathlessly, then spoke in a low whisper.

  “The Man-village…”

  THE MAN-CUB’S EYES refused to blink.

  Mowgli stepped forward until his toes felt the rush of wind climbing up past the cliff’s edge. He wanted to move closer to the alien landscape below, but that was as far as his feet could take him.

  “It’s so bright. Like the night stars fell to Earth,” Mowgli said, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It was beautiful. Even brighter than what the snake had shown him.

  “Yup. You can always tell a Man-village by the Red Flower,” Baloo said with a sigh. “They do love their Red Flower.”

  The man-cub watched as columns of smoke rose from the village like tall thin clouds, always tethered to the Red Flower but trying desperately to escape.

  “The Red Flower doesn’t seem so bad,” Mowgli thought aloud.

  “Not from here it doesn’t,” Baloo admitted. “But let it loose and it destroys everything it touches. Hard to imagine something so small and beautiful could be capable of such a thing.”

  Baloo looked at the man-cub for a long moment, then dropped down on all fours to Mowgli’s level, his dark black eyes inches from the boy’s wide brown ones. He was suddenly, unexpectedly, very serious.

  “Stay away from that. You hear me? You should never play with it or bring it into the Jungle. You got that?”

  “Why?” Mowgli asked.

  “You got that?” Baloo growled. It was a command, not a question.

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Good,” Baloo said, satisfied that he had made his point. He finally dropped onto his backside to take a load off. But Mowgli didn’t join him. The boy’s attention had been pulled uncontrollably back to the glowing lights of the small Indian village.

  “Baloo,” he said quietly, “do you think that’s where I’m from?”

  “I don’t know, kid. Could be. Does it look familiar?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember it.” Mowgli frowned, looking up into the star-filled darkness that hung above him. “All I remember is living with the wolves. My first memories are fighting with my brothers and sisters to get my share of whatever Akela had killed for us. The wolves were always my family. I don’t know man.”

  And Mowgli wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  “What if they don’t want me?” Mowgli continued after turning back to the Man-village. His face was lined with worry. “Then I won’t have a people at all.”

  “Are you kidding me? A kid like you? Of course they’re gonna want you,” Baloo said, clapping Mowgli on the back and nearly sending him over the edge of the c
liff. “The question is, do you want them?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said honestly. How could he know how he felt about creatures he had never met? He still didn’t know where he truly belonged. “But Bagheera said I need a people.”

  “Bagheera,” Baloo snorted. “There you go again, listening to Bagheera. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you stick around for a little while, just till winter, and help me out? Then you can decide. ’Cause I gotta tell you, kid, we make a pretty good team.”

  “Really?” Mowgli asked, his mood lifting for the first time since they’d reached the mountaintop.

  “Really,” Baloo assured him. “Your brains and my stomach, there’s no stoppin’ us. And if you decide you wanna leave, you leave. No rules. No Bagheera. Whattaya say?”

  Mowgli couldn’t see any reason to refuse.

  “Okay,” Mowgli said, grinning.

  “Great!” Baloo grinned back. “That’s just great, kid. Trust me, we’re gonna have some real fun together.”

  Suddenly, the treetops all around them erupted with piercing squeaking sounds that reverberated off the mountain walls.

  “Oh! Hear that?” Baloo grinned wider. “Right on time. The fun’s about to start. Watch this, little brother. It’s gonna blow your mind.”

  Half running, half sliding down the mountain trail, Baloo led a perplexed Mowgli to a better vantage point, looking out at a giant fig tree. The leaves swayed and danced in the wind.

  “It’s a tree,” Mowgli said, unimpressed.

  “But what’s on the tree?” Baloo chuckled.

  “Leaves?” Mowgli yawned.

  “Those aren’t leaves,” Baloo sang.

  All at once, the tree erupted, a torrent of black shapes exploding outward like the jetting spray from an elephant’s trunk. They were bats, hundreds upon hundreds of them, their leathery wings beating at the night and blocking out the light of the stars. The high-pitched keening of the creatures, joined in unison, bounced off every surface at once, both a homing beacon and a peculiar kind of night music.

  “See?” Baloo shrugged. “Every tribe has a song.”