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.
