“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 plow 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 of it. A
little killing here and there is no bad thing—but even the Mugger
is sometimes satisfied, as the saying is.”
“Marvelous! Most truly
marvelous!” said the Jackal. “I am become fat through merely
hearing about so much good eating. And afterward what, if it be
permitted to ask, did the Protector of the Poor do?”
“I said to myself—and by the
Right and Left of Gunga! I locked my jaws on that vow—I said I
would never go roving any more. So I lived by the Ghaut, very close
to my own people, and I watched over them year after year; and they
loved me so much that they threw marigold wreaths at my head
whenever they saw it lift. Yes, and my Fate has been very kind to
me, and the river is good enough to respect my poor and infirm
presence; only—”
“No one is all happy from his
beak to his tail,” said the Adjutant sympathetically. “What does
the Mugger of Mugger–Ghaut need more?”
“That little white child which I
did not get,” said the Mugger, with a deep sigh. “He was
very small, but I have not
forgotten. I am old now, but before I die it is my desire to try
one new thing. It is true they are a heavy–footed, noisy, and
foolish people, and the sport would be small, but I remember the
old days above Benares, and, if the child lives, he will remember
still. It may be he goes up and down the bank of some river,
telling how he once passed his hands between the teeth of the
Mugger of Mugger–Ghaut and lived to make a tale of it. My Fate has
been very kind, but that plagues me sometimes in my dreams—the
thought of the little white child in the bows of that boat.” He
yawned, and closed his jaws. “And now I will rest and think. Keep
silent, my children, and respect the aged.”
He turned stiffly, and shuffled
to the top of the sand–bar, while the Jackal drew back with the
Adjutant to the shelter of a tree stranded on the end nearest the
railway bridge.
“That was a pleasant and
profitable life,” he grinned, looking up inquiringly at the bird
who towered above him. “And not once, mark you, did he think fit to
tell me where a morsel might have been left along the banks. Yet I
have told him a hundred times of good things wallowing down–stream.
How true is the saying, ‘All the world forgets the Jackal and the
Barber when the news has been told!’ Now he is going to sleep!
Arrh!”
“How can a Jackal hunt with a
Mugger?” said the Adjutant coolly. “Big thief and little thief; it
is easy to say who gets the pickings.”
The Jackal turned, whining
impatiently, and was going to curl himself up under the tree trunk,
when suddenly he cowered, and looked up through the draggled
branches at the bridge almost above his head.
“What now?” said the Adjutant,
opening his wings uneasily.
“Wait till we see. The wind blows
from us to them, but they are not looking for us—those two
men.”
“Men, is it? My office protects
me. All India knows I am holy.” The Adjutant, being a first–class
scavenger, is allowed to go where he pleases, and so this one never
flinched.
“I am not worth a blow from
anything greater than an old shoe,” said the Jackal, and listened
again. “Hark to that footfall!” he went on. “That was no country
leather, but the shod foot of a white–face. Listen again! Iron hits
iron up there! It is a gun! Friend, those heavy–footed, foolish
English are coming to speak with the Mugger.”
“Warn him, then. He was called
Protector of the Poor by some one not unlike a starving Jackal but
a little time ago.”
“Let my cousin protect his own
hide. He has told me again and again there is nothing to fear from
the white–faces. They must be white–faces. Not a villager of
Mugger–Ghaut would dare to come after him. See, I said it was a
gun! Now, with good luck, we shall feed before daylight. He cannot
hear well out of water, and—this time it is not a woman!”
A shiny barrel glittered for a
minute in the moonlight on the girders. The Mugger was lying on the
sand–bar as still as his own shadow, his fore feet spread out a
little, his head dropped between them, snoring like a—mugger.
A voice on the bridge whispered:
“It’s an odd shot—straight down almost—but as safe as houses.
Better try behind the neck. Golly! what a brute! The villagers will
be wild if he’s shot, though. He’s the deota (godling) of these
parts.”
“Don’t care a rap,” another voice
answered; “he took about fifteen of my best coolies while the
bridge was building, and it’s time he was put a stop to. I’ve been
after him in a boat for weeks. Stand by with the Martini as soon as
I’ve given him both barrels of this.”
“Mind the kick, then. A double
four–bore’s no joke.” “That’s for him to decide. Here goes!”
There was a roar like the sound
of a small cannon (the biggest sort of elephant–rifle is not very
different from some artillery), and a double streak of flame,
followed by the stinging crack of a Martini, whose long bullet
makes nothing of a crocodile’s plates. But the explosive bullets
did the work. One of them struck just behind the Mugger’s neck, a
hand’s breadth to the left of the backbone, while the other burst a
little lower down, at the beginning of the tail. In ninety–nine
cases out of a hundred a mortally wounded crocodile can scramble to
deep water and get away; but the Mugger of Mugger–Ghaut was
literally broken into three pieces. He hardly moved his head before
the life went out of him, and he lay as flat as the Jackal.
“Thunder and lightning! Lightning
and thunder!” said that miserable little beast. “Has the thing that
pulls the covered carts over the bridge tumbled at last?”
“It is no more than a gun,” said
the Adjutant, though his very tail–feathers quivered. “Nothing more
than a gun. He is certainly dead. Here come the white–faces.”
The two Englishmen had hurried
down from the bridge and across to the sand–bar, where they stood
admiring the length of the Mugger. Then a native with an axe cut
off the big head, and four men dragged it across the spit.
“The last time that I had my hand
in a Mugger’s mouth,” said one of the Englishmen, stooping down (he
was the man who had built the bridge), “it was when I was about
five years old—coming down the river by boat to Monghyr. I was a
Mutiny baby, as they call it. Poor mother was in the boat, too, and
she often told me how she fired dad’s old pistol at the beast’s
head.”
“Well, you’ve certainly had your
revenge on the chief of the clan—even if the gun has made your nose
bleed. Hi, you boatman! Haul that head up the bank, and we’ll boil
it for the skull. The skin’s too knocked about to keep. Come along
to bed now. This was worth sitting up all night for, wasn’t
it?”
* * * * *
Curiously enough, the Jackal and
the Adjutant made the very same remark not three minutes after the
men had left.
Illustration
illus155.jpg
A RIPPLE SONG
Once a ripple came to land
In the golden sunset burning—
Lapped against a maiden’s hand, By the ford returning.
_Dainty foot and gentle breast—
Here, across, be glad and rest. “Maiden, wait,” the ripple saith;
“Wait awhile, for I am Death!“_
“Where my lover calls I go— Shame
it were to treat him coldly— ‘Twas a fish that circled so, Turning
over boldly.”
_Dainty foot and tender heart,
Wait the loaded ferry–cart. “Wait, ah, wait!” the ripple saith;
“Maiden, wait, for I am Death!“_
“When my lover calls I haste—
Dame Disdain was never wedded!” Ripple–ripple round her waist,
Clear the current eddied.
_Foolish heart and faithful hand,
Little feet that touched no land. Far away the ripple sped,
Ripple—ripple—running red!_
THE KING’S ANKUS
These are the Four that are never
content, that have never been filled since the Dews began— Jacala’s
mouth, and the glut of the Kite, and the hands of the Ape, and the
Eyes of Man.
—Jungle Saying.
Kaa, the big Rock Python, had
changed his skin for perhaps the two hundredth time since his
birth; and Mowgli, who never forgot that he owed his life to Kaa
for a night’s work at Cold Lairs, which you may perhaps remember,
went to congratulate him. Skin–changing always makes a snake moody
and depressed till the new skin begins to shine and look beautiful.
Kaa never made fun of Mowgli any more, but accepted him, as the
other Jungle People did, for the Master of the Jungle, and brought
him all the news that a python of his size would naturally hear.
What Kaa did not know about the Middle Jungle, as they call
it,
—the life that runs close to the
earth or under it, the boulder, burrow, and the tree–bole
life,—might have been written upon the smallest of his
scales.
That afternoon Mowgli was sitting
in the circle of Kaa’s great coils, fingering the flaked and broken
old skin that lay all looped and twisted among the rocks just as
Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed himself under
Mowgli’s broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really resting
in a living arm–chair.
“Even to the scales of the eyes
it is perfect,” said Mowgli, under his breath, playing with the old
skin. “Strange to see the covering of one’s own head at one’s own
feet!”
“Aye, but I lack feet,” said Kaa;
“and since this is the custom of all my people, I do not find it
strange. Does thy skin never feel old and harsh?”
“Then go I and wash, Flathead;
but, it is true, in the great heats I have wished I could slough my
skin without pain, and run skinless.”
“I wash, and also I take off my
skin. How looks the new coat?”
Mowgli ran his hand down the
diagonal checkerings of the immense back. “The Turtle is
harder–backed, but not so gay,” he said judgmatically. “The Frog,
my name–bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very beautiful
to see—like the mottling in the mouth of a lily.”
“It needs water. A new skin never
comes to full color before the first bath. Let us go bathe.”
“I will carry thee,” said Mowgli;
and he stooped down, laughing, to lift the middle section of Kaa’s
great body, just where the barrel was thickest. A man might just as
well have tried to heave up a two–foot water–main; and Kaa lay
still, puffing with quiet amusement. Then the regular evening game
began—the boy in the flush of his great strength, and the Python in
his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against the other for a
wrestling–match—a trial of eye and strength. Of course, Kaa could
have crushed a dozen Mowglis if he had let himself go; but he
played carefully, and never loosed one tenth of his power. Ever
since Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling,
Kaa had taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing
else could. Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his
throat in Kaa’s shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and
catch him by the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and
Mowgli, with both quick– moving feet, would try to cramp the
purchase of that huge tail as it flung backward feeling for a rock
or a stump. They would rock to and fro, head to head, each waiting
for his chance, till the beautiful, statue–like group melted in a
whirl of black–and–yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to
rise up again and again. “Now! now! now!” said Kaa, making feints
with his head that even Mowgli’s quick hand could not turn aside.
“Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here, and here! Are thy
hands numb? Here again!”
The game always ended in one
way—with a straight, driving blow of the head that knocked the boy
over and over. Mowgli could never learn the guard for that
lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the least use in
trying.
“Good hunting!” Kaa grunted at
last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away half a dozen yards,
gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full of grass, and
followed Kaa to the wise snake’s pet bathing–place—a deep,
pitchy–black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by
sunken tree–stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle–fashion, without a
sound, and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on
his back, his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above
the rocks, and breaking up her reflection in the water with his
toes. Kaa’s diamond–shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came
out to rest on Mowgli’s shoulder. They lay still, soaking
luxuriously in the cool water.
“It is very good,” said Mowgli at
last, sleepily. “Now, in the Man–Pack, at this hour, as I remember,
they laid them down upon hard pieces of wood in the inside of a
mud–trap, and, having carefully shut out all the clean winds, drew
foul cloth over their heavy heads, and made evil songs through
their noses. It is better in the Jungle.”
A hurrying cobra slipped down
over a rock and drank, gave them “Good hunting!” and went
away.
“Sssh!” said Kaa, as though he
had suddenly remembered something. “So the Jungle gives thee all
that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?”
“Not all,” said Mowgli, laughing;
“else there would be a new and strong Shere Khan to