EPISODE: 1.

Now Rann the Kite brings home the night

That Mang the Bat sets free—

The herds are shut in byre and hut

For loosed till dawn are we.

This is the hour of pride and power,

Talon and tush and claw.

Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all

That keep the Jungle Law!

Night-Song in the Jungle

It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee

hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched

himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to

get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with

her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing

cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they

all lived. "Augrh!" said Father Wolf. "It is time to hunt again." He

was going to spring down hill when a little shadow with a bushy

tail crossed the threshold and whined: "Good luck go with you,

O Chief of the Wolves. And good luck and strong white teeth go

with noble children that they may never forget the hungry in this

world."

It was the jackal—Tabaqui, the Dish-licker—and the wolves of

India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief,

and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the

village rubbish-heaps. But they are afraid of him too, because

Tabaqui, more than anyone else in the jungle, is apt to go mad,

and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of anyone, and runs

through the forest biting everything in his way. Even the tiger

runs and hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for madness is the

most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature. We call

it hydrophobia, but they call it dewanee—the madness—and

run.

"Enter, then, and look," said Father Wolf stiffly, "but there is

no food here." "For a wolf, no," said Tabaqui, "but for so mean a person as

myself a dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log

[the jackal people], to pick and choose?" He scuttled to the back

of the cave, where he found the bone of a buck with some meat

on it, and sat cracking the end merrily.

"All thanks for this good meal," he said, licking his lips. "How

beautiful are the noble children! How large are their eyes! And

so young too! Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the

children of kings are men from the beginning."

Now, Tabaqui knew as well as anyone else that there is

nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces. It

pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.

Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made,

and then he said spitefully:

"Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He

will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told

me."

Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River,

twenty miles away.

"He has no right!" Father Wolf began angrily—"By the Law of

the Jungle he has no right to change his quarters without due

warning. He will frighten every head of game within ten miles,

and I—I have to kill for two, these days."

"His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for

nothing," said Mother Wolf quietly. "He has been lame in one

foot from his birth. That is why he has only killed cattle. Now

the villagers of the Waingunga are angry with him, and he has

come here to make our villagers angry. They will scour the

jungle for him when he is far away, and we and our children

must run when the grass is set alight. Indeed, we are very

grateful to Shere Khan!"

"Shall I tell him of your gratitude?" said Tabaqui. "Out!" snapped Father Wolf. "Out and hunt with thy master.

Thou hast done harm enough for one night."

"I go," said Tabaqui quietly. "Ye can hear Shere Khan below in

the thickets. I might have saved myself the message."

Father Wolf listened, and below in the valley that ran down to

a little river he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a

tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle

knows it.

"The fool!" said Father Wolf. "To begin a night's work with that

noise! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga

bullocks?"

"H'sh. It is neither bullock nor buck he hunts to-night," said

Mother Wolf. "It is Man."

The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that

seemed to come from every quarter of the compass. It was the

noise that bewilders woodcutters and gypsies sleeping in the

open, and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the

tiger.

"Man!" said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth. "Faugh!

Are there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must

eat Man, and on our ground too!"

The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a

reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing

to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside

the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this

is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white

men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with

gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle

suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that

Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and

it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too—and it is

true—that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth. The purr grew louder, and ended in the full-throated "Aaarh!"

of the tiger's charge.

Then there was a howl—an untigerish howl—from Shere

Khan. "He has missed," said Mother Wolf. "What is it?"

Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan

muttering and mumbling savagely as he tumbled about in the

scrub.

"The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a

woodcutter's campfire, and has burned his feet," said Father

Wolf with a grunt. "Tabaqui is with him."

"Something is coming uphill," said Mother Wolf, twitching one

ear. "Get ready."

The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf

dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then,

if you had been watching, you would have seen the most

wonderful thing in the world—the wolf checked in mid-spring.

He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping

at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot

up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost

where he left ground.

"Man!" he snapped. "A man's cub. Look!"

Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a

naked brown baby who could just walk—as soft and as dimpled

a little atom as ever came to a wolf's cave at night. He looked up

into Father Wolf's face, and laughed.

"Is that a man's cub?" said Mother Wolf. "I have never seen

one. Bring it here."

A Wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary,

mouth an egg without breaking it, and though Father Wolf's jaws

closed right on the child's back not a tooth even scratched the

skin as he laid it down among the cubs. "How little! How naked, and—how bold!" said Mother Wolf

softly. The baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get

close to the warm hide. "Ahai! He is taking his meal with the

others. And so this is a man's cub. Now, was there ever a wolf

that could boast of a man's cub among her children?"

"I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our

Pack or in my time," said Father Wolf. "He is altogether without

hair, and I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he

looks up and is not afraid."

The moonlight was blocked out of the mouth of the cave, for

Shere Khan's great square head and shoulders were thrust into

the entrance. Tabaqui, behind him, was squeaking: "My lord, my

lord, it went in here!"

"Shere Khan does us great honor," said Father Wolf, but his

eyes were very angry. "What does Shere Khan need?"

"My quarry. A man's cub went this way," said Shere Khan. "Its

parents have run off. Give it to me."

Shere Khan had jumped at a woodcutter's campfire, as Father

Wolf had said, and was furious from the pain of his burned feet.

But Father Wolf knew that the mouth of the cave was too

narrow for a tiger to come in by. Even where he was, Shere

Khan's shoulders and forepaws were cramped for want of room,

as a man's would be if he tried to fight in a barrel.

"The Wolves are a free people," said Father Wolf. "They take

orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped

cattle-killer. The man's cub is ours—to kill if we choose."

"Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of

choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into

your dog's den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!"

The tiger's roar filled the cave with thunder. Mother Wolf

shook herself clear of the cubs and sprang forward, her eyes,

like two green moons in the darkness, facing the blazing eyes of

Shere Khan....