The Jungle Book: "Tiger, Tiger!" & Mowgli's Song

Brother, it ebbs from my flank and side.

Brother, it ebbs from my flank and side.

The valley opened out into a great plain dotted over with rocks and cut up by ravines.

All over the plain, cattle and buffaloes were grazing, and when the little boys in charge of the herds saw Mowgli they shouted and ran away, and the yellow pariah dogs that hang about every Indian village barked.

“Umph!” he said, for he had come across more than one such barricade in his night rambles after things to eat.

So he looked up at the sky for a minute and said solemnly: “What the jungle has taken the jungle has restored. Take the boy into thy house, my sister, and forget not to honor the priest who sees so far into the lives of men.”

The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut, where there was a red lacquered bedstead, a great earthen grain chest with funny raised patterns on it, half a dozen copper cooking pots, an image of a Hindu god in a little alcove, and on the wall a real looking glass, such as they sell at the country fairs.

The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut, where there was a red lacquered bedstead, a great earthen grain chest with funny raised patterns on it, half a dozen copper cooking pots, an image of a Hindu god in a little alcove, and on the wall a real looking glass, such as they sell at the country fairs.

But as he looked at the thatch, he saw that he could tear it out any time if he wanted to get away, and that the window had no fastenings.

And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man.

No one was more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he had been appointed a servant of the village, as it were, he went off to a circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree.

“It is full time that boy went to herding,” said the head-man, while Buldeo puffed and snorted at Mowgli’s impertinence.

But if they straggle to pick flowers or hunt lizards, they are sometimes carried off.

An Indian grazing ground is all rocks and scrub and tussocks and little ravines, among which the herds scatter and disappear.

The buffaloes generally keep to the pools and muddy places, where they lie wallowing or basking in the warm mud for hours.

The buffaloes generally keep to the pools and muddy places, where they lie wallowing or basking in the warm mud for hours.

Then they sing long, long songs with odd native quavers at the end of them, and the day seems longer than most people’s whole lives, and perhaps they make a mud castle with mud figures of men and horses and buffaloes, and put reeds into the men’s hands, and pretend that they are kings and the figures are their armies, or that they are gods to be worshiped.

“The big ravine of the Waingunga. That opens out on the plain not half a mile from here. I can take the herd round through the jungle to the head of the ravine and then sweep down—but he would slink out at the foot. We must block that end. Gray Brother, canst thou cut the herd in two for me?”

Then there lifted up a huge gray head that Mowgli knew well, and the hot air was filled with the most desolate cry of all the jungle—the hunting howl of a wolf at midday.

In the other, the bulls and the young bulls snorted and stamped, but though they looked more imposing they were much less dangerous, for they had no calves to protect.

All he wanted to do was to make a big circle uphill and get at the head of the ravine, and then take the bulls down it and catch Shere Khan between the bulls and the cows; for he knew that after a meal and a full drink Shere Khan would not be in any condition to fight or to clamber up the sides of the ravine.

After a long time there came back the drawling, sleepy snarl of a full-fed tiger just wakened.

“Now thou knowest!” and the torrent of black horns, foaming muzzles, and staring eyes whirled down the ravine just as boulders go down in floodtime; the weaker buffaloes being shouldered out to the sides of the ravine where they tore through the creepers.

Buldeo, who was still stooping over Shere Khan’s head, found himself sprawling on the grass, with a gray wolf standing over him, while Mowgli went on skinning as though he were alone in all India.

It was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, thought Buldeo, and he wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protect him.

The herd rounded up in the misty twilight, and when they got near the village Mowgli saw lights, and heard the conches and bells in the temple blowing and banging.

“They are not unlike the Pack, these brothers of thine,” said Akela, sitting down composedly.

“Keep count!” shouted Mowgli scornfully. “It may be that I have stolen one of them. Keep count, for I will do your herding no more. Fare you well, children of men, and thank Messua that I do not come in with my wolves and hunt you up and down your street.”

Ever since Akela had been deposed, the Pack had been without a leader, hunting and fighting at their own pleasure.

With the knife, with the knife that men use, with the knife of the
hunter, I will stoop down for my gift.