Book: The Second Jungle Book

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"Then the First of the Tigers came back, and his pride was
broken in him, and, beating his head upon the ground, he tore up
the earth with all his feet and said: 'Remember that I was once
the Master of the Jungle. Do not forget me, O Tha! Let my
children remember that I was once without shame or fear!'
And Tha said: 'This much I will do, because thou and I together
saw the Jungle made. For one night in each year it shall be as
it was before the buck was killed--for thee and for thy
children. In that one night, if ye meet the Hairless One--and
his name is Man--ye shall not be afraid of him, but he shall he
afraid of you, as though ye were judges of the Jungle and
masters of all things. Show him mercy in that night of his
fear, for thou hast known what Fear is.'

"Then the First of the Tigers answered, 'I am content';
but when next he drank he saw the black stripes upon his flank
and his side, and he remembered the name that the Hairless One
had given him, and he was angry. For a year he lived in the
marshes waiting till Tha should keep his promise. And upon a
night when the jackal of the Moon [the Evening Star] stood
clear of the Jungle, he felt that his Night was upon him,
and he went to that cave to meet the Hairless One. Then it
happened as Tha promised, for the Hairless One fell down before
him and lay along the ground, and the First of the Tigers
struck him and broke his back, for he thought that there was
but one such Thing in the Jungle, and that he had killed Fear.
Then, nosing above the kill, he heard Tha coming down from the
woods of the North, and presently the voice of the First of the
Elephants, which is the voice that we hear now----"

The thunder was rolling up and down the dry, scarred hills, but
it brought no rain--only heat--lightning that flickered along
the ridges--and Hathi went on: "THAT was the voice he heard,
and it said: 'Is this thy mercy?' The First of the Tigers
licked his lips and said: 'What matter? I have killed Fear.'
And Tha said: 'O blind and foolish! Thou hast untied the feet
of Death, and he will follow thy trail till thou diest.
Thou hast taught Man to kill!'

"The First of the Tigers, standing stiffly to his kill, said.
'He is as the buck was. There is no Fear. Now I will judge the
Jungle Peoples once more.'

"And Tha said: 'Never again shall the Jungle Peoples come to
thee. They shall never cross thy trail, nor sleep near thee,
nor follow after thee, nor browse by thy lair. Only Fear shall
follow thee, and with a blow that thou canst not see he shall
bid thee wait his pleasure. He shall make the ground to open
under thy feet, and the creeper to twist about thy neck,
and the tree-trunks to grow together about thee higher than
thou canst leap, and at the last he shall take thy hide to wrap
his cubs when they are cold. Thou hast shown him no mercy,
and none will he show thee.'

"The First of the Tigers was very bold, for his Night was still
on him, and he said: 'The Promise of Tha is the Promise of Tha.
He will not take away my Night?' And Tha said: 'The one Night is
thine, as I have said, but there is a price to pay.
Thou hast taught Man to kill, and he is no slow learner.'

"The First of the Tigers said: 'He is here under my foot, and
his back is broken. Let the Jungle know I have killed Fear.'

"Then Tha laughed, and said: 'Thou hast killed one of many, but
thou thyself shalt tell the Jungle--for thy Night is ended.'

"So the day came; and from the mouth of the cave went out
another Hairless One, and he saw the kill in the path, and the
First of the Tigers above it, and he took a pointed stick----"

"They throw a thing that cuts now," said Ikki, rustling down
the bank; for Ikki was considered uncommonly good eating by
the Gonds--they called him Ho-Igoo--and he knew something of
the wicked little Gondee axe that whirls across a clearing
like a dragon-fly.

"It was a pointed stick, such as they put in the foot of a
pit-trap," said Hathi, "and throwing it, he struck the First
of the Tigers deep in the flank. Thus it happened as Tha said,
for the First of the Tigers ran howling up and down the Jungle
till he tore out the stick, and all the Jungle knew that the
Hairless One could strike from far off, and they feared more
than before. So it came about that the First of the Tigers
taught the Hairless One to kill--and ye know what harm that has
since done to all our peoples--through the noose, and the
pitfall, and the hidden trap, and the flying stick and the
stinging fly that comes out of white smoke [Hathi meant the
rifle], and the Red Flower that drives us into the open.
Yet for one night in the year the Hairless One fears the Tiger,
as Tha promised, and never has the Tiger given him cause to be
less afraid. Where he finds him, there he kills him,
remembering how the First of the Tigers was made ashamed.
For the rest, Fear walks up and down the Jungle by day
and by night."

"Ahi! Aoo!" said the deer, thinking of what it all meant
to them.

"And only when there is one great Fear over all, as there is
now, can we of the Jungle lay aside our little fears, and meet
together in one place as we do now."

"For one night only does Man fear the Tiger?" said Mowgli.

"For one night only," said Hathi.

"But I--but we--but all the Jungle knows that Shere Khan kills
Man twice and thrice in a moon."

"Even so. THEN he springs from behind and turns his head aside
as he strikes, for he is full of fear. If Man looked at him he
would run. But on his one Night he goes openly down to the
village. He walks between the houses and thrusts his head into
the doorway, and the men fall on their faces, and there he does
his kill. One kill in that Night."

"Oh!" said Mowgli to himself, rolling over in the water. "NOW I
see why it was Shere Khan bade me look at him! He got no good
of it, for he could not hold his eyes steady, and--and I
certainly did not fall down at his feet. But then I am not a
man, being of the Free People."

"Umm!" said Bagheera deep in his furry throat. "Does the Tiger
know his Night?"

"Never till the Jackal of the Moon stands clear of the evening
mist. Sometimes it falls in the dry summer and sometimes in the
wet rains--this one Night of the Tiger. But for the First of
the Tigers, this would never have been, nor would any of us
have known fear."

The deer grunted sorrowfully and Bagheera's lips curled in a
wicked smile. "Do men know this--tale?" said he.

"None know it except the tigers, and we, the elephants--the
children of Tha. Now ye by the pools have heard it, and I
have spoken."

Hathi dipped his trunk into the water as a sign that he did not
wish to talk.

"But--but--but," said Mowgli, turning to Baloo, "why did not the
First of the Tigers continue to eat grass and leaves and trees?
He did but break the buck's neck. He did not EAT. What led him
to the hot meat?"

"The trees and the creepers marked him, Little Brother, and made
him the striped thing that we see. Never again would he eat
their fruit; but from that day he revenged himself upon the
deer, and the others, the Eaters of Grass," said Baloo.

"Then THOU knowest the tale. Heh? Why have I never heard?"

"Because the Jungle is full of such tales. If I made a
beginning there would never be an end to them. Let go my ear,
Little Brother."



THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE

Just to give you an idea of the immense variety of the Jungle
Law, I have translated into verse (Baloo always recited them in
a sort of sing-song) a few of the laws that apply to the wolves.
There are, of course, hundreds and hundreds more, but these will
do for specimens of the simpler rulings.

Now this is the Law of the Jungle--as old and as true as
the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf
that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth
forward and back--
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength
of the Wolf is the Pack.

Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink deeply, but
never too deep;
And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not
the day is for sleep.

The jackal may follow the Tiger, but, Cub, when thy
whiskers are grown,
Remember the Wolf is a hunter--go forth and get food
of thine own.

Keep peace with the Lords of the Jungle--the Tiger, the
Panther, the Bear;
And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the Boar
in his lair.

When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither
will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken--it may be fair
words shall prevail.

When ye fight with a Wolf of the Pack, ye must
fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the quarrel, and the Pack be
diminished by war.

The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, and where he has
made him his home,
Not even the Head Wolf may enter, not even the Council
may come.

The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge, but where he has
digged it too plain,
The Council shall send him a message, and so he shall
change it again.

If ye kill before midnight, be silent, and wake not the
woods with your bay,
Lest ye frighten the deer from the crops, and the brothers
go empty away.

Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs
as they need, and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and SEVEN TIMES NEVER
KILL MAN.

If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker, devour not all in
thy pride;
Pack-Right is the right of the meanest; so leave him the
head and the hide.

The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack. Ye must
eat where it lies;
And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair, or
he dies.

The Kill of the Wolf is the meat of the Wolf. He may
do what he will,
But, till he has given permission, the Pack may not eat
of that Kill.

Cub-Right is the right of the Yearling. From all of his
Pack he may claim
Full-gorge when the killer has eaten; and none may
refuse him the same.

Lair-Right is the right of the Mother. From all of her
year she may claim
One haunch of each kill for her litter, and none may
deny her the same.

Cave-Right is the right of the Father--to hunt by himself
for his own.
He is freed of all calls to the Pack; he is judged by the
Council alone.

Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe
and his paw,
In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of the Head
Wolf is Law.

Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and
mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch
and the hump is--Obey!



THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT

The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.

And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!

Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!

Dirge of the Langurs.


There was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of
the semi-independent native States in the north-western part of
the country. He was a Brahmin, so high-caste that caste ceased
to have any particular meaning for him; and his father had been
an important official in the gay-coloured tag-rag and bobtail of
an old-fashioned Hindu Court. But as Purun Dass grew up he felt
that the old order of things was changing, and that if any one
wished to get on in the world he must stand well with the
English, and imitate all that the English believed to be good.
At the same time a native official must keep his own master's
favour. This was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed
young Brahmin, helped by a good English education at a Bombay
University, played it coolly, and rose, step by step, to be
Prime Minister of the kingdom. That is to say, he held more real
power than his master the Maharajah.

When the old king--who was suspicious of the English, their
railways and telegraphs--died, Purun Dass stood high with his
young successor, who had been tutored by an Englishman; and
between them, though he always took care that his master should
have the credit, they established schools for little girls,
made roads, and started State dispensaries and shows of
agricultural implements, and published a yearly blue-book on
the "Moral and Material Progress of the State," and the Foreign
Office and the Government of India were delighted. Very few
native States take up English progress altogether, for they will
not believe, as Purun Dass showed he did, that what was good for
the Englishman must be twice as good for the Asiatic. The Prime
Minister became the honoured friend of Viceroys, and Governors,
and Lieutenant-Governors, and medical missionaries, and common
missionaries, and hard-riding English officers who came to shoot
in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts of tourists
who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showing how
things ought to be managed. In his spare time he would endow
scholarships for the study of medicine and manufactures on
strictly English lines, and write letters to the "Pioneer",
the greatest Indian daily paper, explaining his master's aims
and objects.

At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous
sums to the priests when he came back; for even so high-caste a
Brahmin as Purun Dass lost caste by crossing the black sea.
In London he met and talked with every one worth knowing--
men whose names go all over the world--and saw a great deal
more than he said. He was given honorary degrees by learned
universities, and he made speeches and talked of Hindu social
reform to English ladies in evening dress, till all London
cried, "This is the most fascinating man we have ever met at
dinner since cloths were first laid."

When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for
the Viceroy himself made a special visit to confer upon the
Maharajah the Grand Cross of the Star of India--all diamonds
and ribbons and enamel; and at the same ceremony, while the
cannon boomed, Purun Dass was made a Knight Commander of the
Order of the Indian Empire; so that his name stood Sir Purun
Dass, K.C.I.E.

That evening, at dinner in the big Viceregal tent, he stood up
with the badge and the collar of the Order on his breast,
and replying to the toast of his master's health, made a speech
few Englishmen could have bettered.

Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet,
he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing;
for, so far as the world's affairs went, he died. The jewelled
order of his knighthood went back to the Indian Government,
and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs,
and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate
appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the people
guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can
do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan
Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and
power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of
a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary.
He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth,
twenty years a fighter,--though he had never carried a weapon in
his life,--and twenty years head of a household. He had used his
wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had
taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities
far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him.
Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no
longer needs.

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope
skin and brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl
of polished brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with
eyes cast on the ground--behind him they were firing salutes
from the bastions in honour of his happy successor. Purun Dass
nodded. All that life was ended; and he bore it no more ill-will
or good-will than a man bears to a colourless dream of the
night. He was a Sunnyasi--a houseless, wandering mendicant,
depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so long as
there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar
starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom
eaten even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his
personal expenses for food through any one of the many years in
which he had been absolute master of millions of money. Even
when he was being lionised in London he had held before him his
dream of peace and quiet--the long, white, dusty Indian road,
printed all over with bare feet, the incessant, slow-moving
traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under
the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their
evening meal.

When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister
took the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily
have found a bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas,
than Purun Dass among the roving, gathering, separating millions
of India.

At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness
overtook him--sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside;
sometimes by a mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis,
who are another misty division of holy men, would receive him as
they do those who know what castes and divisions are worth;
sometimes on the outskirts of a little Hindu village, where
the children would steal up with the food their parents had
prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare grazing-
grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsy
camels. It was all one to Purun Dass--or Purun Bhagat, as he
called himself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But
unconsciously his feet drew him away northward and eastward;
from the south to Rohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool
to ruined Samanah, and then up-stream along the dried bed of the
Gugger river that fills only when the rain falls in the hills,
till one day he saw the far line of the great Himalayas.

Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was
of Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way--a Hill-woman, always
home-sick for the snows--and that the least touch of Hill blood
draws a man in the end back to where he belongs.

"Yonder," said Purun Bhagat, breasting the lower slopes of
the Sewaliks, where the cacti stand up like seven-branched
candlesticks-"yonder I shall sit down and get knowledge";
and the cool wind of the Himalayas whistled about his ears
as he trod the road that led to Simla.

The last time he had come that way it had been in state, with
a clattering cavalry escort, to visit the gentlest and most
affable of Viceroys; and the two had talked for an hour together
about mutual friends in London, and what the Indian common folk
really thought of things. This time Purun Bhagat paid no calls,
but leaned on the rail of the Mall, watching that glorious view
of the Plains spread out forty miles below, till a native
Mohammedan policeman told him he was obstructing traffic; and
Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law, because he knew the
value of it, and was seeking for a Law of his own. Then he moved
on, and slept that night in an empty hut at Chota Simla, which
looks like the very last end of the earth, but it was only the
beginning of his journey. He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road,
the little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock,
or strutted out on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep;
that dips into warm, wet, shut-in valleys, and climbs out
across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where the sun strikes like
a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, dark forests where
the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and the
pheasant calls to his mate. And he met Thibetan herdsmen with
their dogs and flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of
borax on his back, and wandering wood-cutters, and cloaked and
blanketed Lamas from Thibet, coming into India on pilgrimage,
and envoys of little solitary Hill-states, posting furiously on
ring-streaked and piebald ponies, or the cavalcade of a Rajah
paying a visit; or else for a long, clear day he would see
nothing more than a black bear grunting and rooting below in the
valley. When he first started, the roar of the world he had left
still rang in his ears, as the roar of a tunnel rings long after
the train has passed through; but when he had put the Mutteeanee
Pass behind him that was all done, and Purun Bhagat was alone
with himself, walking, wondering, and thinking, his eyes on the
ground, and his thoughts with the clouds.

One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then--it
had been a two-day's climb--and came out on a line of snow-peaks
that banded all the horizon--mountains from fifteen to twenty
thousand feet high, looking almost near enough to hit with a
stone, though they were fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was
crowned with dense, dark forest--deodar, walnut, wild cherry,
wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the
Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a
deserted shrine to Kali--who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is
sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.

Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, smiled at the grinning
statue, made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the
shrine, spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles,
tucked his bairagi--his brass-handled crutch--under his armpit,
and sat down to rest.

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared
for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled
houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt.
All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of
patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than
beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the
threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was
deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise
that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-
flank, was in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat
saw an eagle swoop across the gigantic hollow, but the great
bird dwindled to a dot ere it was half-way over. A few bands of
scattered clouds strung up and down the valley, catching on a
shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying out when they were
level with the head of the pass. And "Here shall I find peace,"
said Purun Bhagat.

Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down,
and as soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted
shrine, the village priest climbed up the terraced hillside to
welcome the stranger.

When he met Purun Bhagat's eyes--the eyes of a man used to
control thousands--he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl
without a word, and returned to the village, saying, "We have at
last a holy man. Never have I seen such a man. He is of the
Plains--but pale-coloured--a Brahmin of the Brahmins." Then all
the housewives of the village said, "Think you he will stay with
us?" and each did her best to cook the most savoury meal for the
Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with buckwheat and Indian
corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out of the stream
in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in the
stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger,
and bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and
it was a full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was
he going to stay? asked the priest. Would he need a chela--
a disciple--to beg for him? Had he a blanket against the cold
weather? Was the food good?

Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to
stay. That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl
be placed outside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two
twisted roots, and daily should the Bhagat be fed; for the
village felt honoured that such a man--he looked timidly into
the Bhagat's face--should tarry among them.

That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat's wanderings. He had come
to the place appointed for him--the silence and the space. After
this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine,
could not tell whether he were alive or dead; a man with control
of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the
shifting rain and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to
himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he
seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the
doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the door was
opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt
he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.

Every morning the filled begging-bowl was laid silently in the
crutch of the roots outside the shrine. Sometimes the priest
brought it; sometimes a Ladakhi trader, lodging in the village,
and anxious to get merit, trudged up the path; but, more often,
it was the woman who had cooked the meal overnight; and she
would murmur, hardly above her breath. "Speak for me before the
gods, Bhagat. Speak for such a one, the wife of so-and-so!"
Now and then some bold child would be allowed the honour, and
Purun Bhagat would hear him drop the bowl and run as fast as his
little legs could carry him, but the Bhagat never came down to
the village. It was laid out like a map at his feet. He could
see the evening gatherings, held on the circle of the threshing-
floors, because that was the only level ground; could see the
wonderful unnamed green of the young rice, the indigo blues of
the Indian corn, the dock-like patches of buckwheat, and, in its
season, the red bloom of the amaranth, whose tiny seeds, being
neither grain nor pulse, make a food that can be lawfully eaten
by Hindus in time of fasts.

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