The Jungle Books (29 page)

There was no need to ask his meaning. The wild gourd would grow where they had worshipped their god, and the sooner they saved themselves the better.

But it is hard to tear a village from its moorings. They stayed on as long as any summer food was left to them, and they tried to gather nuts in the jungle, but shadows with glaring eyes watched them, and rolled before them even at mid-day, and when they ran back afraid to their walls, on the tree-trunks they had passed not five minutes before the bark would be striped and chiselled with the stroke of some great taloned paw. The more they kept to their village, the bolder grew the wild things that gambolled and bellowed on the grazing-grounds by the Wainganga. They had no heart to patch and plaster the rear walls of the empty byres that backed on to the jungle; the wild pig trampled them down, and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbows over the new-won ground, and the coarse grass bristled behind the vines. The unmarried men ran away first, and carried the news far and near that the village was doomed. Who could fight, they said, against the jungle, or the gods of the jungle, when the very village cobra had left his hole in the platform under the peepul? So their little commerce with the outside world shrank as the trodden paths across the open grew fewer and fainter. And the nightly trumpetings of Hathi and his three sons ceased
to trouble them; they had no more to go. The crop on the ground and the seed in the ground had been taken. The outlying fields were already losing their shape, and it was time to throw themselves on the charity of the English at Khanhiwara.

Native fashion, they delayed their departure from one day to another till the first rains caught them and the unmended roofs let in a flood, and the grazing-ground stood ankle deep, and all green things came on with a rush after the heat of the summer. Then they waded out—men, women, and children—through the blinding hot rain of the morning, but turned naturally for one farewell look at their homes.

They heard, as the last burdened family filed through the gate, a crash of falling beams and thatch behind the walls. They saw a shiny, snaky black trunk lifted for an instant, scattering sodden thatch. It disappeared, and there was another crash, followed by a squeal. Hathi had been plucking off the roofs of the huts as you pluck water-lilies, and a rebounding beam had pricked him. He needed only this to unchain his full strength, for of all things in the jungle the wild elephant enraged is the most wantonly destructive. He kicked backwards at a mud wall that crumbled at the stroke, and, crumbling, melted to yellow mud under the torrents of rain. Then he wheeled and squealed, and tore through the narrow streets, leaning against the huts right and left, shivering the crazy doors, and crumpling up the eaves, while his three sons raged behind as they had raged at the sack of the fields of Bhurtpore.

“The jungle will swallow these shells,” said a quiet voice in the wreckage. “It is the outer walls that must lie down.” And Mowgli, with the rain sluicing over his bare shoulders and arms, leaped back from a wall that was settling like a tired buffalo.

“All in good time,” panted Hathi. “Oh, but my tusks were red at Bhurtpore! To the outer wall, children! With the head! Together! Now!”

The four pushed side by side. The outer wall bulged,
split, and fell, and the villagers, dumb with horror, saw the savage, clay-streaked heads of the wreckers in the ragged gap. Then they fled, houseless and foodless, down the valley, as their village, shredded and tossed and trampled, melted behind them.

A month later the place was a dimpled mound, covered with soft, green young stuff, and by the end of the rains there was the roaring jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before.

When ye say to Tabaqui: “My Brother!” When ye call the hyena to meat,

Ye may cry the full truce with Jacala—the belly that runs on four feet.

Jungle Law

“
Respect the Aged!
”

It was a thick voice—a muddy voice that would have made you shudder—a voice like something soft breaking in two. There was a quaver in it, a croak and a whine.

“
Respect the aged! O companions of the river—respect the aged!
”

Nothing could be seen on the broad reach of the river except a little fleet of square-sailed, wooden-pinned barges, loaded with building-stone, that had just come under the railway bridge, and were driving down-stream. They put their clumsy helms over to avoid the sandbar made by the scour of the bridge-piers, and as they passed, three abreast, the horrible voice began again:

“
O Brahmins of the river—respect the aged and infirm!
”

A boatman turned where he sat on the gunwale, lifted up his hand, said something that was not a blessing, and the boats creaked on through the twilight. The broad Indian river, that looked more like a chain of little lakes than a stream, was as smooth as glass, reflecting the sandy-red sky in mid-channel, but splashed with patches of yellow and dusky purple near and under the low banks. Little creeks ran into it in the wet season, but
now their dry mouths hung clear above water-line. On the left shore, almost under the railway bridge, stood a mud and brick and thatch and stick village, whose main street, full of cattle going back to their byres, ran straight to the river, and ended in a sort of rude brick pier-head, where people who wanted to wash could wade in step by step. That was the ghat of the village of Mugger-Ghat.

Night was falling fast over the fields of lentils and rice and cotton in the low-lying grounds yearly flooded by the river, over the reeds that fringed the elbow of the bend, and the tangled jungle of the grazing-grounds behind the still reeds. The parrots and crows, who had been chattering and shouting over their evening drink, had flown inland to roost, crossing the out-going battalions of the flying-foxes, and cloud upon cloud of water-birds came whistling and “honking” to the cover of the reed-beds. There were geese, barrel-headed and black-backed, teal, widgeon, mallard and sheldrake, with curlews, and here and there a flamingo.

A lumbering adjutant-crane brought up the rear, flying as though each slow stroke would be his last.

“
Respect the aged! Brahmins of the river—respect the aged!
”

The adjutant half turned his head, sheered a little in the direction of the voice, and landed stiffly on the sandbar below the bridge. Then you saw what a ruffianly brute he really was. His back-view was immensely respectable, for he stood nearly six feet high, and looked rather like a very proper bald-headed parson. In front it was different, for his Ally Sloper–like head and neck had not a feather to them, and there was a horrible raw-skin pouch on his neck under his chin—a hold-all for the things his pick-axe beak might steal. His legs were long and thin and skinny, but he moved them delicately, and looked at them with pride as he preened down his ashy-grey tail-feathers, glanced over the smooth of his shoulder, and stiffened into “Stand at attention.”

A mangy little jackal, who had been yapping hungrily
on a low bluff, cocked up his ears and tail, and scuttered across the shallows to join the adjutant.

He was the lowest of his caste—not that the best of jackals are good for much, but this one was peculiarly low, being half a beggar, half a criminal—a cleaner-up of village rubbish-heaps, desperately timid or wildly bold, everlastingly hungry, and full of cunning that never did him any good.

“
Ugh!
” he said, shaking himself dolefully as he landed. “May the red mange destroy the dogs of this village! I have three bites for each flea upon me, and all because I looked—only looked, mark you—at an old shoe in a cow-byre. Can I eat mud?” He scratched himself under his left ear.

“I heard,” said the adjutant, in a voice like a blunt saw going through a thick board, “I
heard
there was a new-born puppy in that same shoe.”

“To hear is one thing, to know is another,” said the jackal, who had a very fair knowledge of proverbs, picked up by listening to men round the village fires of an evening.

“Quite true. So, to make sure, I took care of that puppy while the dogs were busy elsewhere.”

“They were
very
busy,” said the jackal. “Well, I must not go to the village hunting for scraps yet a while. And so there truly was a blind puppy in that shoe?”

“It is here,” said the adjutant, squinting over his beak at his full pouch. “A small thing, but acceptable now that charity is dead in the world.”

“
Ahai!
The world is iron in these days,” wailed the jackal. Then his restless eye caught the least possible ripple on the water, and he went on quickly: “Life is hard for us all, and I doubt not that even our excellent master, the Pride of the Ghat and the Envy of the River—”

“A liar, a flatterer, and a jackal were all hatched out one egg,” said the adjutant to nobody in particular, for he was rather a fine sort of a liar on his own account when he took the trouble.

“Yes, the Envy of the River,” the jackal repeated, raising his voice. “Even he, I doubt not, finds that since the bridge has been built good food is more scarce. But on the other hand, though I would by no means say this to his noble face, he is so wise and so virtuous—as I, alas! am not—”

“When the jackal says that he is grey, how black must the jackal be!” muttered the adjutant. He could not see what was coming.

“That
his
food never fails, and in consequence—”

There was a soft grating sound as though a boat had just touched in shoal water. The jackal spun round quickly and faced (it is always best to face) the creature he had been talking about. It was a twenty-four-foot crocodile, cased in what looked like treble-riveted boiler-plate, studded and keeled and crested, the yellow points of his upper teeth just overhanging his beautifully fluted lower jaw. It was the blunt-nosed mugger of Mugger-Ghat, older than any man in the village, who had given his name to the village, the demon of the ford before the railway bridge came—murderer, man-eater, and local fetish in one. He lay with his chin in the shallows, keeping his place by an almost invisible rippling of his tail, and well the jackal knew that one stroke of that same tail in the water could carry the mugger up the bank with the rush of a steam-engine.

“Auspiciously met, Protector of the Poor!” he fawned, backing at every word. “A delectable voice was heard, and we came in the hopes of sweet conversation. My tailless presumption, while, waiting here, led me, indeed, to speak of thee. It is my hope that nothing was overheard.”

Now the jackal had spoken just to be listened to, for he knew flattery was the best way of getting things to eat, and the mugger knew that the jackal had spoken for this end, and the jackal knew that the mugger knew, and the mugger knew that the jackal knew that the mugger knew, and so they were all very contented together.

The old brute pushed and panted and grunted up the
bank, mumbling: “Respect the aged and infirm!” And all the time his little eyes burned like coals under the heavy horny eyelids on the top of his triangular head, as he shoved his bloated barrel-body along between his crutched legs. Then he settled down, and accustomed as the jackal was to his ways, he could not help starting, for the hundredth time, when he saw how exactly the mugger imitated a log adrift on the bar. He had even taken pains to lie at the exact angle a naturally stranded log would make with the water, having regard to the current of the season at the time and place. All this was only a matter of habit, of course, because the mugger had come ashore for pleasure. But a crocodile is never quite full, and if the jackal had been deceived by the likeness he would not have lived to philosophise over it.

“My child, I heard nothing,” said the mugger, shutting one eye. “The water was in my ears, and also I was faint with hunger. Since the railway bridge was built my people at my village have ceased to love me, and that is breaking my heart.”

“Ah, shame!” said the jackal. “So noble a heart, too! But men are all alike to my mind.”

“Nay, there are very great differences indeed,” the mugger answered, gently. “Some are as lean as boat-poles. Others again are fat as young ja—– dogs. Never would I causelessly revile men. They are of all fashions, but the long years have shown me that, one with another, they are very good. Men, women, and children—I have no fault to find with them. And remember, child, he who rebukes the world is rebuked by the world.”