Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (379 page)

It was clear, hot daylight now, and Bagheera said, “I smell smoke.”

Men are always more ready to eat than to run, Mowgli answered, trotting in and out between the low scrub bushes of the new Jungle they were exploring. Bagheera, a little to his left, made an indescribable noise in his throat.

“Here is one that has done with feeding,” said he. A tumbled bundle of gay-coloured clothes lay under a bush, and round it was some spilt flour.

“That was done by the bamboo again,” said Mowgli. “See! that white dust is what men eat. They have taken the kill from this one, — he carried their food, — and given him for a kill to Chil, the Kite.”

“It is the third,” said Bagheera.

“I will go with new, big frogs to the Father of Cobras, and feed him fat,” said Mowgli to himself. “The drinker of elephant’s blood is Death himself — but still I do not understand!”

“Follow!” said Bagheera.

They had not gone half a mile farther when they heard Ko, the Crow, singing the death-song in the top of a tamarisk under whose shade three men were lying. A half-dead fire smoked in the centre of the circle, under an iron plate which held a blackened and burned cake of unleavened bread. Close to the fire, and blazing in the sunshine, lay the ruby-and-turquoise ankus.

“The thing works quickly; all ends here,” said Bagheera. “How did THESE die, Mowgli? There is no mark on any.”

A Jungle-dweller gets to learn by experience as much as many doctors know of poisonous plants and berries. Mowgli sniffed the smoke that came up from the fire, broke off a morsel of the blackened bread, tasted it, and spat it out again.

“Apple of Death,” he coughed. “The first must have made it ready in the food for THESE, who killed him, having first killed the Gond.”

“Good hunting, indeed! The kills follow close,” said Bagheera.

“Apple of Death” is what the Jungle call thorn-apple or dhatura, the readiest poison in all India.

“What now?” said the panther. “Must thou and I kill each other for yonder red-eyed slayer?”

“Can it speak?” said Mowgli in a whisper. “Did I do it a wrong when I threw it away? Between us two it can do no wrong, for we do not desire what men desire. If it be left here, it will assuredly continue to kill men one after another as fast as nuts fall in a high wind. I have no love to men, but even I would not have them die six in a night.”

“What matter? They are only men. They killed one another, and were well pleased,” said Bagheera. “That first little woodman hunted well.”

“They are cubs none the less; and a cub will drown himself to bite the moon’s light on the water. The fault was mine,” said Mowgli, who spoke as though he knew all about everything. “I will never again bring into the Jungle strange things — not though they be as beautiful as flowers. This” — he handled the ankus gingerly — ”goes back to the Father of Cobras. But first we must sleep, and we cannot sleep near these sleepers. Also we must bury HIM, lest he run away and kill another six. Dig me a hole under that tree.”

“But, Little Brother,” said Bagheera, moving off to the spot, “I tell thee it is no fault of the blood-drinker. The trouble is with the men.”

“All one,” said Mowgli. “Dig the hole deep. When we wake I will take him up and carry him back.”

Two nights later, as the White Cobra sat mourning in the darkness of the vault, ashamed, and robbed, and alone, the turquoise ankus whirled through the hole in the wall, and clashed on the floor of golden coins.

“Father of Cobras,” said Mowgli (he was careful to keep the other side of the wall), “get thee a young and ripe one of thine own people to help thee guard the King’s Treasure, so that no man may come away alive any more.”

“Ah-ha! It returns, then. I said the thing was Death. How comes it that thou art still alive?” the old Cobra mumbled, twining lovingly round the ankus-haft.

“By the Bull that bought me, I do not know! That thing has killed six times in a night. Let him go out no more.”

THE SONG OF THE LITTLE HUNTER

     Ere Mor the Peacock flutters, ere the Monkey People cry,

       Ere Chil the Kite swoops down a furlong sheer,

     Through the Jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh —

       He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!

     Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade,

       And the whisper spreads and widens far and near;

     And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now —

       He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!

     Ere the moon has climbed the mountain, ere the rocks

           are ribbed with light,

       When the downward-dipping trails are dank and drear,

     Comes a breathing hard behind thee — snuffle-snuffle

           through the night —

       It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!

     On thy knees and draw the bow; bid the shrilling arrow go;

       In the empty, mocking thicket plunge the spear;

     But thy hands are loosed and weak, and the blood has left

           thy cheek —

       It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!

     When the heat-cloud sucks the tempest, when the slivered

           pine-trees fall,

       When the blinding, blaring rain-squalls lash and veer;

     Through the war-gongs of the thunder rings a voice more

           loud than all —

       It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!

     Now the spates are banked and deep; now the footless

           boulders leap —

       Now the lightning shows each littlest leaf-rib clear —

     But thy throat is shut and dried, and thy heart against

           thy side

       Hammers: Fear, O Little Hunter — this is Fear!

QUIQUERN

     The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow —

     They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go.

     The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight;

     “They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their souls

         to the white.

     The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler’s

     crew;

     Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few.

     But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man’s ken —

     Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the

         last of the Men!

                                         Translation.

“He has opened his eyes. Look!”

“Put him in the skin again. He will be a strong dog. On the fourth month we will name him.”

“For whom?” said Amoraq.

Kadlu’s eye rolled round the skin-lined snow-house till it fell on fourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench, making a button out of walrus ivory. “Name him for me,” said Kotuko, with a grin. “I shall need him one day.”

Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were almost buried in the fat of his flat cheeks, and nodded to Amoraq, while the puppy’s fierce mother whined to see her baby wriggling far out of reach in the little sealskin pouch hung above the warmth of the blubber-lamp. Kotuko went on with his carving, and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of leather dog-harnesses into a tiny little room that opened from one side of the house, slipped off his heavy deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a whalebone-net that hung above another lamp, and dropped down on the sleeping-bench to whittle at a piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq, his wife, should bring the regular dinner of boiled meat and blood-soup. He had been out since early dawn at the seal-holes, eight miles away, and had come home with three big seal. Half-way down the long, low snow passage or tunnel that led to the inner door of the house you could hear snappings and yelpings, as the dogs of his sleigh-team, released from the day’s work, scuffled for warm places.

When the yelpings grew too loud Kotuko lazily rolled off the sleeping-bench, and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch handle of springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy, plaited thong. He dived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs were eating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace before meals. When he crawled out at the far end, half a dozen furry heads followed him with their eyes as he went to a sort of gallows of whale-jawbones, from which the dog’s meat was hung; split off the frozen stuff in big lumps with a broad-headed spear; and stood, his whip in one hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name, the weakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn; for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning, and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped, choked once over his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the passage, while the boy stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and dealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of the team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed; and to him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra crack of the whip.

“Ah!” said Kotuko, coiling up the lash, “I have a little one over the lamp that will make a great many howlings. SARPOK! Get in!”

He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from his furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door, tapped the skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might have fallen from the dome of snow above, and curled up on the bench. The dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep, the boy-baby in Amoraq’s deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled, and the mother of the newly-named puppy lay at Kotuko’s side, her eyes fixed on the bundle of sealskin, warm and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp.

And all this happened far away to the north, beyond Labrador, beyond Hudson’s Strait, where the great tides heave the ice about, north of Melville Peninsula — north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla Straits — on the north shore of Baffin Land, where Bylot’s Island stands above the ice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong side up. North of Lancaster Sound there is little we know anything about, except North Devon and Ellesmere Land; but even there live a few scattered people, next door, as it were, to the very Pole.

Kadlu was an Inuit, — what you call an Esquimau, — and his tribe, some thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut — ”the country lying at the back of something.” In the maps that desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name is best, because the country lies at the very back of everything in the world. For nine months of the year there is only ice and snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no one can realise who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six months of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible. In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other day and every night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly buds, a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom, beaches of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea, and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow. But all that is gone in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down again on the land; while at sea the ice tears up and down the offing, jamming and ramming, and splitting and hitting, and pounding and grounding, till it all freezes together, ten feet thick, from the land outward to deep water.

In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this land-ice, and spear them as they came up to breathe at their blow-holes. The seal must have open water to live and catch fish in, and in the deep of winter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from the nearest shore. In the spring he and his people retreated from the floes to the rocky mainland, where they put up tents of skins, and snared the sea-birds, or speared the young seal basking on the beaches. Later, they would go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer, and to get their year’s store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of the interior; coming back north in September or October for the musk-ox hunting and the regular winter sealery. This travelling was done with dog-sleighs, twenty and thirty miles a day, or sometimes down the coast in big skin “woman-boats,” when the dogs and the babies lay among the feet of the rowers, and the women sang songs as they glided from cape to cape over the glassy, cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut knew came from the south — driftwood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron for harpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked food much better than the old soap-stone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches, as well as coloured ribbons for the women’s hair, little cheap mirrors, and red cloth for the edging of deerskin dress-jackets. Kadlu traded the rich, creamy, twisted narwhal horn and musk-ox teeth (these are just as valuable as pearls) to the Southern Inuit, and they, in turn, traded with the whalers and the missionary-posts of Exeter and Cumberland Sounds; and so the chain went on, till a kettle picked up by a ship’s cook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-lamp somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle.