The Jungle Books (31 page)

There was a whistle overhead on the bridge, and the
Delhi Mail
slid across, all the carriages gleaming with light, and the shadows faithfully following along the river. It clanked away into the dark again, but the mugger and the jackal were so well used to it that they never turned their heads.

“Is that anything less wonderful than a boat thrice the size of Mugger-Ghat?” said the bird, looking up.

“I saw that built, child. Stone by stone I saw the bridge-piers rise, and when the men fell off (they were wondrous sure-footed for the most part—but
when
they fell) I was ready. After the first pier was made they never thought to look down the stream for the body to burn. There, again, I saved much trouble. There was nothing strange in the building of the bridge,” said the mugger.

“But that which goes across, pulling the roofed carts,
that
is strange,” the adjutant repeated.

“It is, past any doubt, a new breed of bullock. Some day it will not be able to keep its foothold up yonder, and will fall as the men did. The old mugger will then be ready.”

The jackal looked at the adjutant, and the adjutant looked at the jackal. If there was one thing they were more certain of than another, it was that the engine was everything in the wide world except a bullock. The jackal had watched it time and again from the aloe hedges at the side of the line, and the adjutant had seen engines since the first engine ran in India. But the mugger had only looked up at the thing from below, where the brass dome seemed rather like a bullock’s hump.

“
M
—yes, a new kind of bullock,” the mugger repeated
ponderously, to make himself quite sure in his own mind; and “Certainly it is a bullock,” said the jackal.

“And again it might be—” began the mugger pettishly.

“Certainly—most certainly,” said the jackal, without waiting for the other to finish.

“What?” said the mugger angrily, for he could feel that the others knew more than he did. “What might it be?
I
never finished my words. You said it was a bullock.”

“It is anything the Protector of the Poor pleases. I am
his
servant—not the servant of the thing that crosses the river.”

“Whatever it is, it is white-face work,” said the adjutant, “and for my own part, I would not lie out upon a place so near to it as this bar.”

“You do not know the English as I do,” said the mugger. “There was a white-face here when the bridge was built, and he would take a boat in the evenings and shuffle with his feet on the bottom-boards, and whisper: ‘Is he here? Is he there? Bring me my gun.’ I could hear him before I could see him—each sound that he made—creaking and puffing and rattling his gun, up and down the river. As surely as I had picked up one of his workmen, and thus saved great charges in wood for the burning, so surely would he come down to the ghat, and shout in a loud voice that he would hunt me, and rid the river of me—the mugger of Mugger-Ghat!
Me!
Children, I have swum under the bottom of his boat for hour after hour, and heard him fire his gun at logs, and when I was well sure he was wearied, I have risen by his side and snapped my jaws in his face. When the bridge was finished he went away. All the English hunt in that fashion, except when they are hunted.”

“Who hunts the white-faces?” yapped the jackal. excitedly.

“No one now, but I have hunted them in my time.”

“I remember a little of that hunting. I was young then,” said the adjutant, clattering his beak significantly.

“I was well established here. My village was being built for the third time, as I remember, when my cousin, the gavial, brought me word of rich waters above Benares. At first I would not go, for my cousin, who is a fish-eater, does not always know the good from the bad. But I heard my people talking in the evenings, and what they said made me certain.”

“And what did they say?” the jackal asked.

“They said enough to make me, the mugger of Mugger-Ghat, leave water and take to my feet. I went by night, using the littlest streams as they served me, but it was the beginning of the hot weather and all streams were low. I crossed dusty roads; I went through tall grass; I climbed hills in the moonlight. Even rocks did I climb, children—consider this well! I crossed the tail of Sirhind, the waterless, before I could find the set of the little rivers that flow Gangaward. I was a month’s journey from my own people and the banks that I knew. That was very marvellous!”

“What food on the way?” said the jackal, who kept his soul in his little stomach, and was not a bit impressed by the mugger’s land travels.

“That which I could find—
cousin
,” said the mugger slowly, dragging each word.

Now you do not call a man a cousin in India unless you think you can establish some kind of blood-relationship, and as it is only in old fairy-tales that the mugger ever marries a jackal, the jackal knew for what reason he had been suddenly lifted into the mugger’s family circle. If they had been alone he would not have cared, but the adjutant’s eyes twinkled with mirth at the ugly jest.

“Assuredly, Father, I might have known,” said the jackal. A mugger does not care to be called a father of jackals, and the mugger of Mugger-Ghat said as much—and a great deal more which there is no use in repeating here.

“The Protector of the Poor has claimed kinship. How can I remember the precise degree? Moreover, we eat the same food. He has said it,” was the jackal’s reply.

That made matters rather worse, for what the jackal hinted at was that the mugger must have eaten his food on that land-march fresh, and fresh every day, instead of keeping it by him till it was in a fit and proper condition, as every self-respecting mugger and most wild beasts do when they can. Indeed, one of the worst terms of contempt along the river-bed is “eater of fresh meat.” It is nearly as bad as calling a man a cannibal.

“That food was eaten thirty seasons ago,” said the adjutant, quietly. “If we talk for thirty seasons more it will never come back. Tell us, now, what happened when the good waters were reached after thy most wonderful land-journey. If we listened to the howling of every jackal the business of the town would stop, as the saying is.”

The mugger must have been grateful for the interruption, because he went on, with a rush:

“By the Right and Left of Ganga! When I came there never did I see such waters!”

“Were they better, then, than the big flood of last season?” said the jackal.

“Better! That flood was no more than comes every five years—a handful of drowned strangers, some chickens, and a dead bullock in muddy water with cross-currents. But the season I think of, the river was low, smooth, and even, and, as the gavial had warned me, the dead English came down, touching each other. I got my girth in that season—my girth and my depth. From Agra, by Etawah and the broad waters by Allahabad—”

“Oh, the eddy that set under the walls of the fort at Allahabad!” said the adjutant. “They came in there like widgeon to the reeds, and round and round they swung—thus!”

He went off into his horrible dance again, while the jackal looked on enviously. He naturally could not remember the terrible year of the Mutiny they were talking about. The mugger continued:

“Yes, by Allahabad one lay still in the slack-water and let twenty go by to pick one; and, above all, the English were not cumbered with jewelry and nose-rings and anklets as my women are nowadays. To delight in ornaments is to end with a rope for necklace, as the saying is. All the muggers of all the rivers grew fat then, but it was my Fate to be fatter than them all. The news was that the English were being hunted into the rivers, and by the Right and Left of Ganga, we believed it was true! So far as I went south I believed it to be true, and I went down-stream beyond Monghyr and the tombs that look over the river.”

“I know that place,” said the adjutant. “Since those days Monghyr is a lost city. Very few live there now.”

“Thereafter I worked up-stream very slowly and lazily, and a little above Monghyr there came down a boatful of white-faces—alive! They were, as I remember, women, lying under a cloth spread over sticks, and crying aloud. There was never a gun fired at us watchers of the fords in those days. All the guns were busy elsewhere. We could hear them day and night inland, coming and going as the wind shifted. I rose up full before the boat, because I had never seen white-faces alive, though I knew them well—otherwise. A naked white child kneeled by the side of that boat, and stooping over, must needs try to trail his hands in the river. It is a pretty thing to see how a child loves running water. I had fed that day, but there was a little unfilled space within me. Still, it was for sport and not for food that I rose at the child’s hands. They were so clear a mark that I did not even look when I closed, but they were so small that though my jaws rang true—I am sure of that—the child drew them up swiftly, unhurt. They must have passed between tooth and tooth—those small white hands. I should have caught him crosswise at the elbows, but, as I said, it was only for sport and desire to see new things that I rose at all. They cried out one after another in the boat, and presently I rose again to watch them. The boat was too heavy to push over. They were only
women, but he who trusts a woman will walk on duck-weed in a pool, as the saying is. And by the Right and Left of Ganga—that is truth!”

“Once a woman gave me some dried skin from a fish,” said the jackal. “I had hoped to get her baby, but horse-food is better than the kick of a horse, as the saying is. What did thy woman do?”

“She fired at me with a short gun of a kind I have never seen before or since. Five times. one after another”—[the mugger must have met with an old-fashioned revolver]—“and I stayed open-mouthed and gaping, my head in the smoke. Never did I see such a thing. Five times, as swiftly as I wave my tail—thus!”

The jackal, who had been growing more and more interested in the story, had just time to leap back as the huge tail swung by like a scythe.

“Not before the fifth shot,” said the mugger, as though he had never dreamed of stunning one of his listeners, “not before the fifth shot did I sink, and I rose in time to hear a boatman telling all those white women that I was most certainly dead. One bullet had gone under a neck-plate of mine. I know not if it is there still, for the reason I cannot turn my head. Look and see, child. It will show that my tale is true.”

“I?” said the jackal. “Shall an eater of old shoes, a bone-cracker, presume to doubt the word of the Envy of the River? May my tail be bitten off by blind puppies if the shadow of such a thought has crossed my humble mind. The Protector of the Poor has condescended to inform me, his slave, that once in his life he has been wounded by a woman. That is sufficient, and I will tell the tale to all my children, asking for no proof.”

“Over-much civility is sometimes no better than overmuch discourtesy, for, as the saying is, one can choke a guest with curds. I do
not
desire that any children of thine should know that the mugger of Mugger-Ghat took his only wound from a woman. They will have much else to think of if they get their meat as miserably as does their father.”

“It is forgotten long ago! It was never said! There never was a white woman! There was no boat! Nothing whatever happened at all.”

The jackal waved his brush to show how completely everything was wiped out of his memory, and sat down with an air.

“Indeed, very many things happened,” said the mugger, beaten in his second attempt that night to get the better of his friend. (Neither bore malice, however. Eat and be eaten was fair law along the river, and the jackal came in for his share of plunder when the mugger had finished a meal.) “I left that boat and went up-stream, and, when I had reached Arrah and the back-waters behind it, there were no more dead English. The river was empty for a while. Then came one or two dead, in red coats, not English, but of one kind all—Hindus and Purbeeahs—then five and six abreast, and at last, from Arrah to the north beyond Agra, it was as though whole villages had walked into the water. They came out of little creeks one after another, as the logs come down in the rains. When the river rose they rose also in companies from the shoals they had rested upon, and the falling flood dragged them with it across the fields and through the jungle by the long hair. All night, too, going north, I heard the guns, and by day the shod feet of men crossing fords, and that noise which a heavy cart-wheel makes on sand under water, and every ripple brought more dead. At last even I was afraid, for I said: ‘If this thing happens to men, how shall the mugger of Mugger-Ghat escape?’ There were boats, too, that came up behind me without sails, burning continually, as the cotton-boats sometimes burn, but never sinking.”

“Ah!” said the adjutant. “Boats like those come to Calcutta of the South. They are tall and black, they beat up the water behind them with a tail, and they—”

“Are thrice as big as my village.
My
boats were low and white; they beat up the water on either side of them, and were no larger than the boats of one who speaks truth should be. They made me very afraid, and I left
water and went back to this my river, hiding by day and walking by night, when I could not find little streams to help me. I came to my village again, but I did not hope to see any of my people there. Yet they were ploughing and sowing and reaping, and going to and fro in their fields as quietly as their own cattle.”

“Was there still good food in the river?” said the jackal.

“More than I had any desire for. Even I—and I do not eat mud—even
I
was tired, and, as I remember, a little frightened of this constant coming down of the silent ones. I heard my people say in my village that all the English were dead, but those that came, face down, with the current were
not
English, as my people saw. Then my people said that it was best to say nothing at all, but to pay the tax and plough the land. After a long time the river cleared, and those that came down it had been clearly drowned by the floods, as I could well see, and, though it was not so easy then to get food, I was heartily glad. A little killing here and there is no bad thing—but even the mugger is sometimes satisfied, as the saying is.”