The Jungle Books

by Rudyard Kipling

The girl pushed the two shame-faced creatures towards Kotuko, and, sobbing with laughter, cried: “That is Quiquern, who led us to safe ground. Look at his eight legs and double head!”

  Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and black together, trying to explain how they had got their senses back again. Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were round and well clothed. “They have found food,” he said, with a grin. “I do not think we shall go to Sedna so soon. My tornaq sent these. The sickness has left them.”

  As soon as they had greeted Kotuko these two, who had been forced to sleep and eat and hunt together for the past few weeks, flew at each other’s throats, and there was a beautiful battle in the snow-house. “Empty dogs do not fight,” Kotuko said. “They have found the seal. Let us sleep. We shall find food.”

  When they waked there was open water on the north beach of the island, and all the loosened ice had been driven landward. The first sound of the surf is one of the most delightful that the Innuit can hear, for it means that spring is on the road. Kotuko and the girl took hold of hands and smiled. The clear full roar of the surge among the ice reminded them of salmon and reindeer time and the smell of blossoming ground-willows. Even as they looked the sea began to skim over between the floating cakes of ice, so intense was the cold, but on the horizon there was a vast red glare, and that was the light of the sunken sun. It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep than seeing him rise, and the glare lasted for only a few minutes, but it marked the turn of the year. Nothing, they felt, could alter that.

  Kotuko found the dogs fighting outside over a fresh-killed seal who was following the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first of some twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the course of the day, and, till the sea froze hard, there were hundreds of keen black heads rejoicing in the shallow free water and floating about with the floating ice.

  It was good to eat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps recklessly with blubber and watch the flame blaze three feet in the air; but as soon as the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the girl loaded the hand-sleigh and made the two dogs pull as they had never pulled in their lives, for they feared what might have happened in their village. The weather was as pitiless as ever, but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with good food than to hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal carcasses buried in the ice of the beach all ready for use and hurried back to their people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko told them what was expected, and though there was no sign of a landmark, in two days they were giving tongue outside Kadlu’s village. Only three dogs answered them; the others had been eaten, and the houses were nearly dark. But when Kotuko shouted, “Ojo!” [boiled meat] weak voices answered, and when he called the roll-call of the village name by name, very distinctly, there were no gaps in it.

  An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu’s house, snow-water was heating, the pots were beginning to simmer, and the snow was dripping from the roof as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the village, and the boy-baby chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber, and the hunters slowly and methodically filled themselves to the very brim with seal-meat. Kotuko and the girl told their tale. The two dogs sat between them, and whenever their names came in they cocked an ear apiece and looked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has once gone mad and recovered, the Innuit say, is safe against all further attacks.

  “So the tornaq did not forget us,” said Kotuko. “The storm blew; the ice broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were frightened by the storm. Now the new seal-holes are not two days’ distant. Let the good hunters go to-morrow and bring back the seal I have speared—twenty-five seal buried in the ice. When we have eaten those we will all follow the seal on the floe.”

  “What do you do?” said the village sorcerer, in the same sort of voice as he used to Kadlu, richest of the Tununirmiut.

  Kotuko looked at the girl from the north and said quietly: “We build a house.” He pointed to the northwest side of Kadlu’s house, for that is the side on which the married son or daughter always lives.

  The girl turned her hands, palm upward, with a little despairing shake of her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving, and she could bring nothing to house-keeping.

  Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat and began to sweep things into the girl’s lap—stone-lamps, iron skin-scrapers, tin kettles, deerskins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and real canvas-needles such as sailors use—the finest dowry ever given on the far edge of the Arctic Circle, and the girl from the north bowed her head down to the very floor.

  “Also these!” said Kotuko, laughing and signing to the dogs, who thrust their cold muzzles into the girl’s face.

  “Ah,” said the angekok, with an important cough, as though he had been thinking it all over. “As soon as Kotuko left the village I went to the Singing-House and sang magic. I sang all the long nights and called upon the Spirit of the Reindeer. My singing made the gale blow that broke the ice and drew the two dogs towards Kotuko when the ice would have crushed his bones. My song drew the seal in behind the broken ice. My body lay still in the quaggi, but my spirit ran about on the ice and guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things they did. I did it.”

  Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one contradicted, and the angekok helped himself to yet another lump of boiled meat and lay down to sleep with the others, in the warm, well-lighted, oil-smelling home.

  Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Innuit style, scratched pictures of all these adventures on a long flat piece of ivory with a hole at one end. When he and the girl went north to Ellesmere Land in the year of the Wonderful Open Winter, he left the picture-story with Kadlu, who lost it in the shingle when his dog-sleigh broke down one summer on the beach of Lake Nettilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Innuit found it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was interpreter on a Cumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was afterwards a quartermaster on board a big steamer that took tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When the tourist season was over the steamer ran between London and Australia, stopping at Ceylon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to a Cingalese jeweller for two imitation sapphires. I found it under some rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from one end to the other.

  ANGUTIVUN TAINA

  This is a very free translation of the Song of the Returning Hunter, as the men used to sing it after seal-spearing. The Innuit always repeat things over and over again.

  Our gloves are stiff with the frozen blood,

  Our furs with the drifted snow,

  As we come in with the seal—the seal!

  In from the edge of the floe.

  Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq!

  And the yelping dog-teams go,

  And the long whips crack, and the men come back,

  Back from the edge of the floe!

  We tracked the seal to his secret place,

  We heard him scratch below,

  We made our mark, and we watched beside,

  Out on the edge of the floe.

  We raised our lance when he rose to breathe,

  We drove it downward—so!

  And we played him thus, and we killed him thus,

  Out on the edge of the floe.

  Our gloves are glued with the frozen blood,

  Our eyes with the drifting snow;

  But we come back to our wives again,

  Back from the edge of the floe!

  Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq!

  And the yelping dog-teams go,

  And the wives can hear their men come back,

  Back from the edge of the floe.

  RED DOG

  For our white and our excellent nights—for the nights of swift running,

  Fair ranging, far-seeing, good hunting, sure cunning!

  For the smells of the dawning, untainted ere dew has departed!

  For the rush through the mist, and the quarry blend-started!

  For the cry of our mates when the
sambur has wheeled and is standing at bay,

  For the risk and the riot of night!

  For the sleep at the lair-mouth by day—

  It is met, and we go to the fight.

  Bay! O bay!

  IT was after the letting in of the jungle that the pleasantest part of Mowgli’s life began. He had the good conscience that comes from paying a just debt, and all the jungle was his friend, for all the jungle was afraid of him. The things that he did and saw and heard when he was wandering from one people to another, with or without his four companions, would make many, many stories, each as long as this one. So you will never be told how he met and escaped from the Mad Elephant of Mandla, who killed two-and-twenty bullocks drawing eleven carts of coined silver to the Government Treasury, and scattered the shiny rupees in the dust; how he fought Jacala the Crocodile all one long night in the Marshes of the North, and broke his skinning-knife on the brute’s back-plates; how he found a new and longer knife round the neck of a man who had been killed by a wild boar, and how he tracked that boar and killed him as a fair price for the knife; how he was caught up in the Great Famine by the moving of the deer, and nearly crushed to death in the swaying hot herds; how he saved Hathi the Silent from being caught in a pit with a stake at the bottom, and how next day he himself fell into a very cunning leopard-trap, and how Hathi broke the thick wooden bars to pieces about him; how he milked the wild buffaloes in the swamp, and how—

  But we must tell one tale at a time. Father and Mother Wolf died, and Mowgli rolled a big boulder against the mouth of the cave and cried the Death-Song over them, and Baloo grew very old and stiff, and even Bagheera, whose nerves were steel and whose muscles were iron, seemed slower at the kill. Akela turned from grey to milky white with pure age; his ribs stuck out, and he walked as though he had been made of wood, and Mowgli killed for him. But the young wolves, the children of the disbanded Seeonee Pack, throve and increased, and when there were some forty of them, masterless, clean-footed five-year-olds, Akela told them that they ought to gather themselves together and follow the Law, and run under one head, as befitted the Free People.

  This was not a matter in which Mowgli gave advice, for, as he said, he had eaten sour fruit, and he knew the tree it hung from; but when Phao, son of Phaona (his father was the Grey Tracker in the days of Akela’s headship), fought his way to the leadership of the pack according to the Jungle Law, and when the old calls and the old songs began to ring under the stars once more, Mowgli came to the Council Rock for memory’s sake. If he chose to speak the pack waited till he had finished, and he sat at Akela’s side on the rock above Phao. Those were the days of good hunting and good sleeping. No stranger cared to break into the jungles that belonged to Mowgli’s people, as they called the pack, and the young wolves grew fat and strong, and there were many cubs to bring to the looking-over. Mowgli always attended a looking-over, for he remembered the night when a black panther brought a naked brown baby into the pack, and the long call, “Look, look well, O wolves,” made his heart flutter with strange feelings. Otherwise, he would be far away in the jungle, tasting, touching, seeing, and feeling new things.

  One twilight when he was trotting leisurely across the ranges to give Akela the half of a buck that he had killed, while his four wolves were jogging behind him, sparring a little and tumbling one over another for joy of being alive, he heard a cry that he had not heard since the bad days of Shere Khan. It was what they call in the jungle the Pheeal, a kind of shriek that the jackal gives when he is hunting behind a tiger, or when there is some big killing afoot. If you can imagine a mixture of hate, triumph, fear, and despair, with a kind of leer running through it, you will get some notion of the Pheeal that rose and sank and wavered and quivered far away across the Wainganga. The Four began to bristle and growl. Mowgli’s hand went to his knife and he too checked as though he had been turned into stone.

  “There is no Striped One would dare kill here,” he said, at last.

  “That is not the cry of the Forerunner,” said Grey Brother. “It is some great killing. Listen!”

  It broke out again, half sobbing and half chuckling, just as though the jackal had soft human lips. Then Mowgli drew a deep breath, and ran to the Council Rock, overtaking on his way hurrying wolves of the pack. Phao and Akela were on the rock together, and below them, every nerve strained, sat the others. The mothers and the cubs were cantering to their lairs, for when the Pheeal cries is no time for weak things to be abroad.

  They could hear nothing except the Wainganga gurgling in the dark and the evening winds among the tree-tops, till suddenly across the river a wolf called. It was no wolf of the pack, for those were all at the rock. The note changed to a long despairing bay; and “Dhole!” it said, “Dhole! Dhole! Dhole!” In a few mutes they heard tired feet on the rocks, and a gaunt, dripping wolf, streaked with red on his flanks, his right fore paw useless, and his jaws white with foam, flung himself into the circle and lay gasping at Mowgli’s feet.

  “Good hunting? Under whose headship?” said Phao gravely.

  “Good hunting! Won-tolla am I,” was the answer. He meant that he was a solitary wolf, fending for himself, his mate, and his cubs in some lonely lair. Won-tolla means an outlier—one who lies out from any pack. When he panted they could see his heart shake him backwards and forwards.

  “What moves?” said Phao, for that is the question all the jungle asks after the Pheeal.

  “The dholes, the dholes of the Dekkan—Red Dog the Killer! They came north from the south saying the Dekkan was empty and killing out by the way. When this moon was new there were four to me—my mate and three cubs. She would teach them to kill on the grass plains, hiding to drive the buck, as we do who are of the open. At midnight I heard them together, full tongue on the trail. At the dawn-wind I found them stiff in the grass—four, Free People, four when this moon was new! Then sought I my blood-right and found the dhole.”

  “How many?” said Mowgli. The pack growled deep in their throats.

  “I do not know. Three of them will kill no more, but at the last they drove me like the buck, on three legs they drove me. Look, Free People!”

  He thrust out his mangled fore foot, all dark with dried blood. There were cruel bites low down on his side, and his throat was torn and worried.

  “Eat,” said Akela, rising up from the meat Mowgli had brought him. The outlier flung himself on it famishing.

  “This shall be no loss,” he said humbly when he had taken off the edge of his hunger. “Give me a little strength, Free People, and I also will kill! My lair is empty that was full when this moon was new, and the blood-debt is not all paid.”

  Phao heard his teeth crack on a haunch-bone and grunted approvingly.

  “We shall need those jaws,” said he. “Were their cubs with the dholes?”

  “Nay, nay. Red hunters all—grown dogs of their pack, heavy and strong.”

  That meant that the dhole, the red hunting-dog of the Dekkan, was moving to fight, and the wolves knew well that even the tiger will surrender a new kill to the dholes. They drive straight through the jungle, and what they meet they pull down and tear to pieces. Though they are not as big nor half as cunning as the wolf, they are very strong and very numerous. The dholes, for instance, do not begin to call themselves a pack till they are a hundred strong, whereas forty wolves make a very fair pack. Mowgli’s wanderings had taken him to the edge of the high grassy downs of the Dekkan, and he had often seen the fearless dholes sleeping and playing and scratching themselves among the little hollows and tussocks that they use for lairs. He despised and hated them because they did not smell like the Free People, because they did not live in caves, and, above all, because they had hair between their toes while he and his friends were clean-footed. But he knew, for Hathi had told him, what a terrible thing a dhole hunting-pack was. Hathi himself moves aside from their line, and until they are all killed, or till game is scarce, they go forward killing as they go.

  Akela knew something of
the dholes, too. He said to Mowgli quietly: “It is better to die in the full pack than leaderless and alone. It is good hunting, and—my last. But, as men live, thou hast very many more nights and days, Little Brother. Go north and lie down, and if any wolf live after the dhole has gone by he shall bring thee word of the fight.”

  “Ah,” said Mowgli, quite gravely, “must I go to the marshes and catch little fish and sleep in a tree, or must I ask help of the Bandar-log and eat nuts while the pack fights below?”

  “It is to the death,” said Akela. “Thou hast never met the dholes—the Red Killers. Even the Striped One—”

  “Aowa! Aowa!” said Mowgli pettingly. “I have killed one striped ape. Listen now: There was a wolf, my father, and there was a wolf, my mother, and there was an old grey wolf (not too wise: he is white now) was my father and my mother. Therefore I—” He raised his voice. “I say that when the dholes come, and if the dholes come, Mowgli and the Free People are of one skin for that hunting. And I say, by the bull that bought me, by the bull Bagheera paid for me in the old days which ye of the pack do not remember, I say, that the trees and the river may hear and hold fast if I forget. I say that this my knife shall be as a tooth to the pack—and I do not think it is so blunt. This is my word which has gone from me.”

  “Thou dost not know the dhole, man with a wolf’s tongue,” Won-tolla cried. “I look only to clear my blood-debt against them ere they have me in many pieces. They move slowly, killing out as they go, but in two days a little strength will come back to me and I turn again for my blood-debt. But for ye, Free People, my counsel is that ye go north and eat but little for a while till the dhole are gone. There is no sleep in this hunting.”

  “Hear the Outlier!” said Mowgli with a laugh. “Free People, we must go north and eat lizards and rats from the bank, lest by any chance we meet the dhole. He must kill out our hunting-grounds while we lie hid in the north till it please him to give us our own again. He is a dog—and the pup of a dog—red, yellow-bellied, lairless, and haired between every toe! He counts his cubs six and eight at the litter, as though he were Chikai, the little leaping rat. Surely we must run away, Free People, and beg leave of the peoples of the north for the offal of dead cattle! Ye know the saying: ‘North are the vermin; South are the lice. We are the jungle.’ Choose ye, O choose. It is good hunting! For the pack—for the full pack—for the lair and the litter; for the in-kill and the out-kill; for the mate that drives the doe and the little, little cub within the cave, it is met—it is met—it is met!”