The Jungle Books (38 page)

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.

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.

I
T
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.”