1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling offers an exhaustive collection of one of the foremost literary figures of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Spanning poetry, short stories, and novels, Kipling's oeuvre navigates complex themes such as imperialism, colonialism, and the human condition with a blend of vivid imagery and captivating narratives. His use of rich vernacular and varied stylistic devices showcases not only his mastery of language but also his keen observation of social dynamics within both the British Empire and its colonies. The anthology also invites critical reflection on the moral ambiguities embedded in Kipling's worldview, allowing readers to grapple with the distinctive cultural contexts of his time. Rudyard Kipling, born in 1865 in India, was profoundly influenced by the British imperial experience and his childhood in India. As a writer for various British publications, he gained early recognition for works like "The Jungle Book" and 'ÄúKim.'Äù His upbringing amidst diverse cultures fueled his literary imagination and inspired his characteristic blend of adventure, romance, and realism. Kipling's experiences lend an authenticity and urgency to his exploration of identity and belonging. This comprehensive anthology is not merely a collection; it is a portal into the complexities of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I recommend The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling to scholars, students, and general readers alike, as it provides invaluable insights into the mind of a writer whose influence continues to resonate today. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling
Table of Contents
Introduction
Under the title The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling, this collection brings together a core group of the author's most influential fiction, tracing his range from animal fable and children's lore to sea story, realist sketches, and imperial romance. It includes The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Kim, The Light That Failed, Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks, Plain Tales from the Hills, and The Man Who Would Be King. Read together, these books map a career that moves across continents and registers, uniting narrative craft with an exacting eye for place, character, and the demands of work and loyalty.
The included works span multiple forms: novels (Kim; The Light That Failed; Captains Courageous), a novella or long tale (The Man Who Would Be King), and collections of short stories (The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, Plain Tales from the Hills) alongside inventive stories for children (Just So Stories). Each form is used with purpose—episodic sequences, framed tales, and linked cycles that reward both continuous reading and selective revisiting. While Kipling also produced extensive poetry, journalism, and travel writing, the present selection concentrates on fiction, allowing readers to track how his storytelling methods adapt to audience, setting, and scale without leaving the orbit of narrative prose.
These books emerged from the late Victorian and early Edwardian world, shaped by British India, transoceanic trade, and industrial modernity. Kipling wrote from lived familiarity with Anglo-Indian society and with the rhythms of ships, cantonments, and cities, and he became a central figure in English-language letters, later receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. The works gathered here present settings that range from the forests of central India and the streets and railways of the subcontinent to the fishing grounds of the North Atlantic and the drawing rooms of London. Across them, the pressures of empire, labor, and belonging provide a constant field of meaning.
The two Jungle Books form an imaginative commonwealth in which animal and human worlds speak to one another with clarity and consequence. Stories of a child among the wolves coexist with independent tales of hunters, elephants, and survival, each shaped by a keen understanding of habit, hierarchy, and the natural environment. The forest is rendered as a society with customs and constraints, inviting readers to contemplate responsibility, kinship, and the boundaries between instinct and choice. The prose moves swiftly yet lingers on gesture and sound, balancing wonder with discipline so that awe at the wild is matched by attention to the costs of living within it.
Just So Stories turns to the realm of playful invention, offering origin tales that stage how things might have come to be. The language is patterned and musical, designed for recitation as much as for silent reading, and the humor is paired with an exactness about craft, tools, and behavior that grounds fancy in observation. Though written for children, these narratives carry a sophistication of structure and timing that invites adult appreciation. They reveal the author’s affection for the act of telling itself, where repetition, naming, and rhythm become engines of delight. In that sense, these pieces are a compact school of storytelling.
Kim is a panoramic novel set in British India, following a resourceful boy whose travels place him at the intersection of cultures, loyalties, and a developing intelligence service. Built from episodes of journeying, apprenticeship, and spiritual companionship, the book holds together adventure with an attentive catalogue of languages, trades, and landscapes. It is a coming-of-age narrative with a geopolitical backdrop, yet it keeps its focus on character, curiosity, and the everyday negotiations of identity. The result is a portrait of movement—on roads, rails, and footpaths—where observation is a discipline, and where affection for place coexists with the ambiguities of power.
The Light That Failed turns inward to the city and studio, following an artist and war correspondent whose professional calling and private attachments pull at one another. It is a study of vocation: how an eye trained on conflict seeks to translate experience into form, and what strains such work imposes on friendship and love. The narrative measures ambition against memory and asks what is owed to truth in art. Scenes of foreign service and London society alternate, producing a novel concerned less with battlefield spectacle than with the afterimages that remain and the ethical demands encountered when representing them.
Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks is a sea novel in which a wealthy, wayward boy is rescued by fishermen and must learn the disciplines of a working schooner. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland provide a harsh, communal school where seamanship, patience, and mutual reliance are nonnegotiable. The book honors practical skill and the dignity of labor, presenting the routines of setting lines, hauling catch, and navigating weather with granular respect. Its drama derives from apprenticeship and earned trust rather than from tempest alone, and its moral momentum comes from the discovery that competence and character are forged together aboard.
Plain Tales from the Hills gathers short stories of British India, many set in hill stations and administrative outposts, where public duty and private life meet at close quarters. The pieces are brief, incisive, and varied in mood—from satire to quiet tragedy—offering sketches of civil servants, soldiers, traders, and families. Dialogue, gossip, and rumor propel much of the action, and the collection’s cumulative effect is to present a social world under pressure: heat, hierarchy, and distance from home. It is a primer in economy of means, where a few lines of description or a small failure of tact can carry lasting consequence.
The Man Who Would Be King is an adventure tale with the shape of a cautionary legend. Two determined companions depart India for Kafiristan in the Hindu Kush, intent on carving out fortune and influence by audacity and organization. Framed by a narrator attuned to journalism’s appetite for the extraordinary, the story explores the seductions of power, the construction of myth, and the fragile boundary between ceremony and belief. It harnesses the pace of a frontier narrative while maintaining a clear, almost forensic view of risk. Its enduring force lies in how aspiration and hubris are held in the same steady gaze.
Across these books, certain signatures recur. Settings are rendered with exact detail—tools, garments, slang, and topography anchoring the reader in a working world. Voices are distinct, with dialect and technical vocabulary used to characterize without condescension. Narrative structures favor linked episodes, embedded tales, and shifts of register that move from farce to gravity without strain. The prose often carries a rhythmic undertow influenced by ballad and chant, while dialogue is sharpened to points of wit or warning. Above all, there is an ethic of competence: characters are tested in crafts—hunting, drawing, spying, fishing, administration—and the measure of worth is steady attention to the task.
Taken together, these works remain significant for their scope, craft, and historical witness. They shaped the languages of children’s literature and adventure fiction, offered influential portraits of colonial society, and set a standard for technical precision in narrative prose. They also invite contemporary readers to engage critically with the assumptions and hierarchies of their time, noting how sympathy, admiration, and blind spots coexist. The collection presents a body of writing to be read both for pleasure and for context: compelling stories that carry us through forests, ports, and plains, and documents that illuminate the moods and structures of a world now past but still legible.
Author Biography
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer whose fiction and verse became emblematic of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Born in India and later active in Britain and the United States, he produced short stories, children’s books, novels, travel writing, and ballads that reached a global audience. His work combined technical precision with vivid storytelling and a strong sense of craft and duty. A major figure of imperial literature, he was admired for narrative energy and stylistic control while also drawing sustained criticism for his imperial views. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English-language recipient and then the youngest laureate.
Kipling spent his earliest years in Bombay (now Mumbai) before being educated in Britain. He attended the United Services College at Westward Ho!, a school designed for sons of military officers, where the discipline and camaraderie later informed his fiction. Without a university education, he relied on voracious reading and newsroom training to shape his technique. His formative influences included the Anglo-Indian environment, British ballad traditions, journalism’s emphasis on concision, and the oral storytelling he encountered in India. The resulting style joined plainspoken diction with memorable rhythm and a craftsman’s interest in trades, machinery, and professional codes, qualities that would mark his writing across genres.
Returning to India in the early 1880s, Kipling worked as a journalist in Lahore and Allahabad, producing sketches and stories rooted in colonial life. He issued Departmental Ditties, then Plain Tales from the Hills, which established his gift for the compact short story. Collections such as The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Wee Willie Winkie followed, along with the widely read tale The Man Who Would Be King. These writings displayed his quick scene-setting, ear for vernacular speech, and focus on administrators, soldiers, and civilians navigating the Raj. The newspaper apprenticeship gave his prose pace and economy, while his verse captured barracks-room voices largely absent from earlier literature.
In 1889 he left India, traveled widely, and settled for a time in London, where his reputation accelerated. Barrack-Room Ballads popularized poems like Mandalay and Gunga Din, and he published the novel The Light That Failed. During a subsequent residence in New England in the 1890s, he wrote The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, stories whose animal fables and moral clarity became classics of children’s literature. He also produced Captains Courageous, a maritime tale of apprenticeship and work. By the late 1890s he was back in England, where Stalky & Co. drew on schoolboy experience and further demonstrated his control of dialogue, irony, and episodic form.
Kipling’s turn-of-the-century output broadened his range. Kim, set against the Great Game in South Asia, blended adventure with acute observation of place and culture. He wrote on imperial duty in works such as The White Man’s Burden, texts that later provoked intense debate for their politics and rhetoric. He reported from South Africa during the Second Boer War, intensifying his engagement with military subjects. In 1907 the Nobel Prize in Literature recognized his narrative mastery and imaginative power across poetry and prose. Throughout, he remained a consummate technician: metrically assured in verse, adept with frame tales and linked cycles, and attentive to the textures of labor, bureaucracy, and craft.
In the Edwardian period he published Just So Stories for children; Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, which mingled English history with fantasy and folklore; and the widely quoted poem If—. During the First World War he supported the war effort and wrote poems and epitaphs that wrestled with grief and remembrance, including the sequence Epitaphs of the War. Later volumes such as Debits and Credits and Limits and Renewals showed a darker, more experimental vein, mixing stories and verse on memory, mortality, and the costs of conflict. His travel books and essays extended his global perspective, and his memoir Something of Myself appeared posthumously.
Kipling spent his later years in England, continuing to publish essays, stories, and poems while facing periods of ill health. He died in 1936, and his ashes were interred in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, marking his status in English letters. His legacy remains complex: celebrated for the vigor and clarity of his prose, a pioneering role in children’s literature, and mastery of the short story, yet scrutinized for imperial ideology and racial attitudes. Today his work is read both for craft and as a historical lens, with Kim and the Indian tales valued for their observational richness, the Jungle Book stories continually adapted, and poems like If— enduring in popular memory.
Historical Context
Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), then in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to John Lockwood Kipling, an art teacher and later curator of the Lahore Museum, and Alice Macdonald. A bilingual childhood among bazaars, cantonments, and railway yards furnished an early intimacy with Indian speech and urban rhythms. After a harsh foster placement in Southsea (1871–77), he attended the United Services College at Westward Ho!, Devon (1878–82), absorbing the ethos of service and discipline. This divided upbringing between India and England underwrites the tonal range and institutional fluency that connect his Indian tales, frontier adventures, maritime narratives, and children’s stories.
Kipling’s formative years coincided with the consolidation of the British Raj after the 1857 uprising. The Crown’s direct rule (from 1858) stabilized administrative routines, enlarged the Indian Civil Service, and created a world of hill stations, clubs, and cantonments. Lahore, Simla (now Shimla), and Allahabad became circuits in which Anglo-Indian society negotiated duty, gossip, and hierarchy. Kipling returned to India in 1882 to work as a journalist, and his close observation of this social order—its magistrates and memsahibs, regiments and rail hubs—shaped the humor, vernacular, and acute bureaucratic detail that recur across his short fiction and frame the moral topography of his better-known longer works.
Victorian geopolitics supplied the frontier atmosphere that pervades Kipling’s oeuvre. The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) and the delineation of the Durand Line (1893) formalized a tense boundary with Afghanistan. Russian expansion across Central Asia, from the capture of Merv (1884) to encroachments near the Pamirs, intensified what came to be called the Great Game. The Khyber Pass, Peshawar, and the North-West Frontier Province became symbols of imperial vigilance and uncertainty. These pressures influenced the espionage motifs, ethnographic curiosity, and fatalism in his frontier fiction, and the legends of Kafiristan—renamed Nuristan in 1895 after forced Islamization—fed the period’s fascination with mountainous, semi-mythic borderlands.
Kipling’s apprenticeship in print culture shaped the pace and texture of his narratives. From 1882 he worked at the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, then moved in 1887 to the Pioneer in Allahabad, filing sketches, verse, and stories amid tight deadlines and hot-season migrations to Simla. Indian newspapers, job presses, and circulating libraries sustained an Anglo-Indian readership craving local color and administrative satire. The short-story form, with crisp beginnings and ironical turns, proved ideal for serialized publication and later collection. That same economy of scene and speech—the journalist’s eye for incident and the compositor’s demand for brevity—infuses his longer works with episodic vigor and topical specificity.
Modern infrastructures supplied both subject and structure for Kipling’s fiction. Indian railways, begun in 1853 and by the 1880s stretching across the subcontinent, linked bazaars, cantonments, and pilgrim routes. The telegraph, installed rapidly after the 1850s, coupled with the Survey of India’s Great Trigonometrical Survey, created new knowledge regimes of mapping and message. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, shortened imperial journeys to weeks, while global steamship lines connected Bombay and Calcutta to London and New York. These networks enabled the swift movement of soldiers, officials, traders, and children, and they provided the narrative sinews—way-stations, compartments, docks, depots—through which characters cross paths, trade codes, and test loyalties.
Language is a historical force throughout Kipling’s career. His dialogic textures draw on Hindustani, Punjabi, Pashto, and Anglo-Indian slang, reflecting a world in which code-switching greased commerce and command. Lexicons of caste, regiment, and trade mingle with proverbial speech and bureaucratic English. Museums and manuals mattered: John Lockwood Kipling’s Lahore Museum—nicknamed the Wonder House—embodied imperial taxonomies of crafts and peoples, while contemporary ethnographies, such as George Scott Robertson’s The Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush (1896), fed public curiosity. Kipling’s fictional voices negotiate this classificatory impulse and the irreducible local knowledge of servants, fakirs, sepoys, fishermen, and children, staging a linguistic marketplace shaped by empire’s practical needs.
Late Victorian small wars supplied imagery and moral debates that recur in Kipling’s writing. The Mahdist revolt in Sudan (1881–99), including the Nile Expedition and the death of General Charles Gordon in 1885, popularized the figure of the war correspondent and the war artist. Regimental life in the British and Indian armies—its drill, medical routines, campaigns, and medals—became familiar to readers through press reports and ballads. Kipling translated that culture into stories of comradeship, professional pride, and trauma, fusing battlefield reportage with studio and barracks scenes. His work sits alongside contemporaneous soldier-poetry and journalism, including his own Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), in distilling an ethic of duty under fire.
Kipling’s rise coincided with changes in the literary marketplace. The dominance of the three-decker novel collapsed around 1894 as Mudie’s and other circulating libraries altered purchasing patterns, while magazines like The Strand, St. Nicholas, and McClure’s favored illustrated, short-form fiction. Kipling embraced transatlantic serialization, with pieces appearing in American and British periodicals before book publication. Collaboration with illustrators—W. H. Drake, E. Boyd Smith, and John Lockwood Kipling—shaped the reception of animal stories and adventure tales. The interplay of image and text, and the magazine habit of episodic reading, encouraged modular narratives braided by recurring characters, songs, and maxims that readers could memorize, clip, and recite.
Victorian and Edwardian child culture framed much of Kipling’s appeal. Public school ideals of fair play, endurance, and leadership, along with muscular Christianity and imperial civics, shaped family reading and school anthologies. The emergence of Empire Day (from 1902) and, later, Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908), created a moral pedagogy of service and self-reliance that resonated with tales of apprenticeship, code, and craft. Kipling’s children’s stories, many first told as bedtime pieces and some associated with his daughter Josephine (1892–1899), traded in mnemonic rhythms, just-so explanations, and maxims. They occupy the intersection of nursery, parade ground, and field station, wrapping technical know-how in fable and play.
Imperial natural history and environmental politics provided both content and contradiction. The Bombay Natural History Society (founded 1883), forest conservancies, and the Indian Forest Act of 1878 advanced a scientific management of terrain and species, even as shikar culture celebrated predation and prowess. Colonial science cataloged tigers, wolves, and elephants, mapped teak and sal forests, and debated vermin versus protection. Across the Atlantic, the U.S. Fish Commission (established 1871) studied cod stocks on the Grand Banks, where schooner fleets and dorymen faced fog, gales, and cold economies. Kipling’s animal and maritime narratives encode this technocratic gaze alongside respect for local craft ecologies and unwritten field lore.
Kipling’s transatlantic life reshaped his career. He married Caroline Balestier at All Souls, Langham Place, London, on 18 January 1892, and soon settled at Naulakha, a long, green-roofed house in Dummerston near Brattleboro, Vermont. There he wrote intensively, working with American publishers such as The Century Company and McClure’s Magazine, and drawing on New England weather, speech, and work rhythms. The period yielded major children’s fiction and a North Atlantic sea novel, while connecting him to a U.S. readership of reformers, captains of industry, and magazine subscribers. This Vermont interlude consolidated his international reputation and demonstrated the portability of his imperial themes to other frontiers.
Gilded Age capitalism and maritime labor offer crucial context for Kipling’s Atlantic materials. The prosperity of American railroad and shipping magnates contrasted with the precarious work of Gloucester, Massachusetts, fishermen on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Salt-cod markets, immigrant crews from Portuguese and Canadian communities, and technological competition between sail and steam shaped the fleet’s culture. U.S. coastal life-saving services, harbor pilots, and yacht clubs formed a social spectrum from dories to drawing rooms. Kipling’s interest in apprenticeship and earned authority transposed well to this economy of risk, reward, and weather, aligning his broader imperial ethics with the discipline of a working sea.
Religious pluralism and spiritual inquiry mark the intellectual climate surrounding Kipling’s work. In Lahore and along the Grand Trunk Road, Islamic, Hindu, and Sikh practices coexisted with Christian missions. The Theosophical Society established its Indian headquarters at Adyar in 1882, popularizing syncretic mysticism in Anglo-American circles. The 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago introduced figures like Swami Vivekananda to a transatlantic audience. Against this backdrop, Kipling’s fiction juxtaposes clerical authority and bureaucratic routine with pilgrimage, mendicancy, and philosophical debate, treating faith not as exotic ornament but as a lived system of knowledge, consolation, and power that intersects with espionage, law, and domestic obligation.
Debates over imperial justice framed Anglo-Indian public life during Kipling’s newspaper years. The Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883, which proposed allowing Indian magistrates to try European defendants, exposed racial anxieties in clubland and press rooms. The Indian National Congress, founded in Bombay in 1885, grew as a constitutional forum, while the Age of Consent Act (1891) and viceroy Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal (1905) galvanized reform and swadeshi boycott movements. Vernacular and English-language papers contested loyalty, law, and economic policy. Kipling’s journalism and fiction responded to this argumentative world, dramatizing the habits, prejudices, and civic scripts that upheld imperial order even as they frayed.
The South African War (1899–1902) altered imperial self-confidence and Kipling’s outlook. He traveled to the war zone, helped produce the soldiers’ newspaper The Friend at Bloemfontein, and associated with commanders like Lord Roberts. The war’s guerrilla phases, blockhouse lines, and civilian suffering intensified British debates about means and ends. In 1902 Kipling purchased Bateman’s, a seventeenth-century house in Burwash, Sussex, where he fashioned a counterpoint between English rural craftsmanship and the stresses of empire. This postwar settlement coincided with the publication and reception of late-Victorian and Edwardian works, and it colored how audiences read his earlier frontier and Indian stories against a backdrop of imperial strain.
Imperial governance unfolded amid crisis. The Great Famine of 1876–78 in southern India exposed the limits of laissez-faire policy; plague struck Bombay from 1896; cholera haunted cantonments and pilgrim routes. On the frontier, punitive expeditions and relief columns confronted terrain and logistics as much as enemies. At sea, gales, fog, and collisions made the Grand Banks a theater of repetitive peril. Industrial growth brought railway accidents and dockside injuries in Britain and America. These conditions shaped Kipling’s preoccupation with drill, craft knowledge, and luck, and they suffuse his narratives with a practical stoicism that links soldier, surveyor, fisherman, engine driver, and even mythic beast.
Kipling’s legacy straddles acclaim and contention. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the first English-language laureate, he died in London on 18 January 1936 after decades of global fame. The First World War, including the death of his son John at Loos in 1915, darkened his later writings and public persona. Decolonization and postcolonial critique have scrutinized his imperial commitments, even as his technical authority, polyglot dialogue, and institutional literacy continue to attract readers. Across Indian plains, Afghan passes, London studios, and North Atlantic fog, his works register the infrastructures, hierarchies, and improvisations of a world-system between roughly 1880 and 1910.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Jungle Book
A collection of linked animal tales centered on Mowgli, a human child raised by wolves, as he learns the Law of the Jungle under the guidance of Baloo and Bagheera and confronts threats like the tiger Shere Khan. Other stories, including Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal, explore survival, loyalty, and the order of the natural world.
The Second Jungle Book
Continuing Mowgli’s story, this collection follows his maturing years as he navigates between the jungle and human society and tests his allegiance to each. Additional animal fables deepen themes of law, belonging, and freedom.
Just So Stories
Playful origin tales for children that imagine how animals and natural phenomena came to be—how the camel got his hump, the leopard his spots, and more. Told in rhythmic, incantatory prose, each story offers a whimsical 'just so' explanation.
Kim
A coming-of-age and espionage novel about Kimball O’Hara, an orphan in British-ruled India, who accompanies a Tibetan lama on a spiritual quest while being drawn into the Great Game of imperial intelligence. The narrative blends adventure with a portrait of diverse cultures and the question of identity.
The Light That Failed
The story of war artist Dick Heldar, whose career and relationships are tested by trauma and the onset of blindness. Set between London and colonial battlefields, it examines ambition, love, and the costs of art and war.
Captain Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks
After a wealthy, pampered boy falls overboard from an ocean liner, he is rescued by Grand Banks fishermen and must earn his keep aboard their schooner. Over a season at sea he learns seamanship, discipline, and humility.
Plain Tales From the Hills
Short stories drawn from Kipling’s early journalism in British India, offering vignettes of Anglo-Indian life among soldiers, civil servants, and memsahibs. The tales mix satire, romance, and moral irony in sketches of the Raj’s social world.
The Man Who Would Be King
A novella about two British adventurers who head to the remote highlands of Kafiristan to make themselves rulers. Their audacious scheme leads to brief triumph and an ultimate reckoning with the perils of ambition and belief.
The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling
The Jungle Book
The Jungle Book
Mowgli's Brothers
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 the 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"; and he was going to spring downhill 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 the 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. They are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than any one else in the jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of any one, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way. Even the tiger 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 any one else that there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces; and 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 during 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 fair 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 in the dark 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 that he hunts to-night," said Mother Wolf; "it is Man." The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that seemed to roll from every quarter of the compass. It was the noise that bewilders wood-cutters, and gipsies 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 wood-cutters' camp-fire, so he 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 thing 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 wood-cutter's camp-fire, 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 fore paws 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.
"And it is I, Raksha [the Demon], who answer. The man's cub is mine, Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog-eater—fish-killer, he shall hunt thee! Now get hence, or by the Sambhur that I killed (I eat no starved cattle), back thou goest to thy mother, burned beast of the jungle, lamer than ever thou camest into the world! Go!"
Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called the Demon for compliment's sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave-mouth growling, and when he was clear he shouted:
"Each dog barks in his own yard! We will see what the Pack will say to this fostering of man-cubs. The cub is mine, and to my teeth he will come in the end, O bush-tailed thieves!"
Mother Wolf threw herself down panting among the cubs, and Father Wolf said to her gravely:
"Shere Khan speaks this much truth. The cub must be shown to the Pack. Wilt thou still keep him, Mother?"
"Keep him!" she gasped. "He came naked, by night, alone and very hungry; yet he was not afraid! Look, he has pushed one of my babes to one side already. And that lame butcher would have killed him, and would have run off to the Waingunga while the villagers here hunted through all our lairs in revenge! Keep him? Assuredly I will keep him. Lie still, little frog. O thou Mowgli,—for Mowgli, the Frog, I will call thee,—the time will come when thou wilt hunt Shere Khan as he has hunted thee!"
"But what will our Pack say?" said Father Wolf.
The Law of the Jungle lays down very clearly that any wolf may, when he marries, withdraw from the Pack he belongs to; but as soon as his cubs are old enough to stand on their feet he must bring them to the Pack Council, which is generally held once a month at full moon, in order that the other wolves may identify them. After that inspection the cubs are free to run where they please, and until they have killed their first buck no excuse is accepted if a grown wolf of the Pack kills one of them. The punishment is death where the murderer can be found; and if you think for a minute you will see that this must be so.
Father Wolf waited till his cubs could run a little, and then on the night of the Pack Meeting took them and Mowgli and Mother Wolf to the Council Rock—a hilltop covered with stones and boulders where a hundred wolves could hide. Akela, the great gray Lone Wolf, who led all the Pack by strength and cunning, lay out at full length on his rock, and below him sat forty or more wolves of every size and color, from badger-colored veterans who could handle a buck alone, to young black three-year-olds who thought they could. The Lone Wolf had led them for a year now. He had fallen twice into a wolf-trap in his youth, and once he had been beaten and left for dead; so he knew the manners and customs of men.
There was very little talking at the Rock. The cubs tumbled over one another in the center of the circle where their mothers and fathers sat, and now and again a senior wolf would go quietly up to a cub, look at him carefully, and return to his place on noiseless feet. Sometimes a mother would push her cub far out into the moonlight, to be sure that he had not been overlooked. Akela from his rock would cry: "Ye know the Law—ye know the Law! Look well, O Wolves!" And the anxious mothers would take up the call: "Look—look well, O Wolves!"
At last—and Mother Wolf's neck-bristles lifted as the time came—Father Wolf pushed "Mowgli, the Frog," as they called him, into the center, where he sat laughing and playing with some pebbles that glistened in the moonlight.
Akela never raised his head from his paws, but went on with the monotonous cry, "Look well!" A muffled roar came up from behind the rocks—the voice of Shere Khan crying, "The cub is mine; give him to me. What have the Free People to do with a man's cub?"
Akela never even twitched his ears. All he said was, "Look well, O Wolves! What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People? Look well!"
There was a chorus of deep growls, and a young wolf in his fourth year flung back Shere Khan's question to Akela: "What have the Free People to do with a man's cub?"
Now the Law of the Jungle lays down that if there is any dispute as to the right of a cub to be accepted by the Pack, he must be spoken for by at least two members of the Pack who are not his father and mother.
"Who speaks for this cub?" said Akela. "Among the Free People, who speaks?" There was no answer, and Mother Wolf got ready for what she knew would be her last fight, if things came to fighting.
Then the only other creature who is allowed at the Pack Council—Baloo, the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle; old Baloo, who can come and go where he pleases because he eats only nuts and roots and honey—rose up on his hind quarters and grunted.
"The man's cub—the man's cub?" he said. "I speak for the man's cub. There is no harm in a man's cub. I have no gift of words, but I speak the truth. Let him run with the Pack, and be entered with the others. I myself will teach him."
"We need yet another," said Akela. "Baloo has spoken, and he is our teacher for the young cubs. Who speaks besides Baloo?"
A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera, the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.
"O Akela, and ye, the Free People," he purred, "I have no right in your assembly; but the Law of the Jungle says that if there is a doubt which is not a killing matter in regard to a new cub, the life of that cub may be bought at a price. And the Law does not say who may or may not pay that price. Am I right?"
"Good! good!" said the young wolves, who are always hungry. "Listen to Bagheera. The cub can be bought for a price. It is the Law."
"Knowing that I have no right to speak here, I ask your leave."
"Speak then," cried twenty voices.
"To kill a naked cub is shame. Besides, he may make better sport for you when he is grown. Baloo has spoken in his behalf. Now to Baloo's word I will add one bull, and a fat one, newly killed, not half a mile from here, if ye will accept the man's cub according to the Law. Is it difficult?"
There was a clamor of scores of voices, saying: "What matter? He will die in the winter rains. He will scorch in the sun. What harm can a naked frog do us? Let him run with the Pack. Where is the bull, Bagheera? Let him be accepted." And then came Akela's deep bay, crying: "Look well—look well, O Wolves!"
Mowgli was still playing with the pebbles, and he did not notice when the wolves came and looked at him one by one. At last they all went down the hill for the dead bull, and only Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, and Mowgli's own wolves were left. Shere Khan roared still in the night, for he was very angry that Mowgli had not been handed over to him.
"Ay, roar well," said Bagheera, under his whiskers; "for the time comes when this naked thing will make thee roar to another tune, or I know nothing of Man."
"It was well done," said Akela. "Men and their cubs are very wise. He may be a help in time."
"Truly, a help in time of need; for none can hope to lead the Pack forever," said Bagheera.
Akela said nothing. He was thinking of the time that comes to every leader of every pack when his strength goes from him and he gets feebler and feebler, till at last he is killed by the wolves and a new leader comes up—to be killed in his turn.
"Take him away," he said to Father Wolf, "and train him as befits one of the Free People."
And that is how Mowgli was entered into the Seeonee wolf-pack for the price of a bull and on Baloo's good word.
Now you must be content to skip ten or eleven whole years, and only guess at all the wonderful life that Mowgli led among the wolves, because if it were written out it would fill ever so many books. He grew up with the cubs, though they of course were grown wolves almost before he was a child, and Father Wolf taught him his business, and the meaning of things in the jungle, till every rustle in the grass, every breath of the warm night air, every note of the owls above his head, every scratch of a bat's claws as it roosted for a while in a tree, and every splash of every little fish jumping in a pool, meant just as much to him as the work of his office means to a business man. When he was not learning he sat out in the sun and slept, and ate, and went to sleep again; when he felt dirty or hot he swam in the forest pools; and when he wanted honey (Baloo told him that honey and nuts were just as pleasant to eat as raw meat) he climbed up for it, and that Bagheera showed him how to do.
Bagheera would lie out on a branch and call, "Come along, Little Brother," and at first Mowgli would cling like the sloth, but afterward he would fling himself through the branches almost as boldly as the gray ape. He took his place at the Council Rock, too, when the Pack met, and there he discovered that if he stared hard at any wolf, the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes, and so he used to stare for fun.
At other times he would pick the long thorns out of the pads of his friends, for wolves suffer terribly from thorns and burs in their coats. He would go down the hillside into the cultivated lands by night, and look very curiously at the villagers in their huts, but he had a mistrust of men because Bagheera showed him a square box with a drop-gate so cunningly hidden in the jungle that he nearly walked into it, and told him it was a trap.
He loved better than anything else to go with Bagheera into the dark warm heart of the forest, to sleep all through the drowsy day, and at night see how Bagheera did his killing. Bagheera killed right and left as he felt hungry, and so did Mowgli—with one exception. As soon as he was old enough to understand things, Bagheera told him that he must never touch cattle because he had been bought into the Pack at the price of a bull's life. "All the jungle is thine," said Bagheera, "and thou canst kill everything that thou art strong enough to kill; but for the sake of the bull that bought thee thou must never kill or eat any cattle young or old. That is the Law of the Jungle." Mowgli obeyed faithfully.
And he grew and grew strong as a boy must grow who does not know that he is learning any lessons, and who has nothing in the world to think of except things to eat.
Mother Wolf told him once or twice that Shere Khan was not a creature to be trusted, and that some day he must kill Shere Khan; but though a young wolf would have remembered that advice every hour, Mowgli forgot it because he was only a boy—though he would have called himself a wolf if he had been able to speak in any human tongue.
Shere Khan was always crossing his path in the jungle, for as Akela grew older and feebler the lame tiger had come to be great friends with the younger wolves of the Pack, who followed him for scraps, a thing Akela would never have allowed if he had dared to push his authority to the proper bounds. Then Shere Khan would flatter them and wonder that such fine young hunters were content to be led by a dying wolf and a man's cub. "They tell me," Shere Khan would say, "that at Council ye dare not look him between the eyes"; and the young wolves would growl and bristle.
Bagheera, who had eyes and ears everywhere, knew something of this, and once or twice he told Mowgli in so many words that Shere Khan would kill him some day; and Mowgli would laugh and answer: "I have the Pack and I have thee; and Baloo, though he is so lazy, might strike a blow or two for my sake. Why should I be afraid?"
It was one very warm day that a new notion came to Bagheera—born of something that he had heard. Perhaps Ikki, the Porcupine, had told him; but he said to Mowgli when they were deep in the jungle, as the boy lay with his head on Bagheera's beautiful black skin: "Little Brother, how often have I told thee that Shere Khan is thy enemy?"
"As many times as there are nuts on that palm," said Mowgli, who, naturally, could not count. "What of it? I am sleepy, Bagheera, and Shere Khan is all long tail and loud talk, like Mao, the Peacock."
"But this is no time for sleeping. Baloo knows it, I know it, the Pack know it, and even the foolish, foolish deer know. Tabaqui has told thee too."
"Ho! ho!" said Mowgli. "Tabaqui came to me not long ago with some rude talk that I was a naked man's cub, and not fit to dig pig-nuts; but I caught Tabaqui by the tail and swung him twice against a palm-tree to teach him better manners."
"That was foolishness; for though Tabaqui is a mischief-maker, he would have told thee of something that concerned thee closely. Open those eyes, Little Brother! Shere Khan dares not kill thee in the jungle for fear of those that love thee; but remember, Akela is very old, and soon the day comes when he cannot kill his buck, and then he will be leader no more. Many of the wolves that looked thee over when thou wast brought to the Council first are old too, and the young wolves believe, as Shere Khan has taught them, that a man-cub has no place with the Pack. In a little time thou wilt be a man."
"And what is a man that he should not run with his brothers?" said Mowgli. "I was born in the jungle; I have obeyed the Law of the Jungle; and there is no wolf of ours from whose paws I have not pulled a thorn. Surely they are my brothers!"
Bagheera stretched himself at full length and half shut his eyes. "Little Brother," said he, "feel under my jaw."
Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera's silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.
"There is no one in the jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark—the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of the King's Palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera, the Panther, and no man's plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw, and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?"
"Yes," said Mowgli; "all the jungle fear Bagheera—all except Mowgli."
"Oh, thou art a man's cub," said the Black Panther, very tenderly; "and even as I returned to my jungle, so thou must go back to men at last,—to the men who are thy brothers,—if thou art not killed in the Council."
"But why—but why should any wish to kill me?" said Mowgli.
"Look at me," said Bagheera; and Mowgli looked at him steadily between the eyes. The big panther turned his head away in half a minute.
"That is why," he said, shifting his paw on the leaves. "Not even I can look thee between the eyes, and I was born among men, and I love thee, Little Brother. The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man."
"I did not know these things," said Mowgli, sullenly; and he frowned under his heavy black eyebrows.
"What is the Law of the Jungle? Strike first and then give tongue. By thy very carelessness they know that thou art a man. But be wise. It is in my heart that when Akela misses his next kill,—and at each hunt it costs him more to pin the buck,—the Pack will turn against him and against thee. They will hold a jungle Council at the Rock, and then—and then ... I have it!" said Bagheera, leaping up. "Go thou down quickly to the men's huts in the valley, and take some of the Red Flower which they grow there, so that when the time comes thou mayest have even a stronger friend than I or Baloo or those of the Pack that love thee. Get the Red Flower."
By Red Flower Bagheera meant fire, only no creature in the jungle will call fire by its proper name. Every beast lives in deadly fear of it, and invents a hundred ways of describing it.
"The Red Flower?" said Mowgli. "That grows outside their huts in the twilight. I will get some."
"There speaks the man's cub," said Bagheera, proudly. "Remember that it grows in little pots. Get one swiftly, and keep it by thee for time of need."
"Good!" said Mowgli. "I go. But art thou sure, O my Bagheera"—he slipped his arm round the splendid neck, and looked deep into the big eyes—"art thou sure that all this is Shere Khan's doing?"
"By the Broken Lock that freed me, I am sure, Little Brother."
"Then, by the Bull that bought me, I will pay Shere Khan full tale for this, and it may be a little over," said Mowgli; and he bounded away.
"That is a man. That is all a man," said Bagheera to himself, lying down again. "Oh, Shere Khan, never was a blacker hunting than that frog-hunt of thine ten years ago!"
Mowgli was far and far through the forest, running hard, and his heart was hot in him. He came to the cave as the evening mist rose, and drew breath, and looked down the valley. The cubs were out, but Mother Wolf, at the back of the cave, knew by his breathing that something was troubling her frog.
"What is it, Son?" she said.
"Some bat's chatter of Shere Khan," he called back. "I hunt among the plowed fields to-night"; and he plunged downward through the bushes, to the stream at the bottom of the valley. There he checked, for he heard the yell of the Pack hunting, heard the bellow of a hunted Sambhur, and the snort as the buck turned at bay. Then there were wicked, bitter howls from the young wolves: "Akela! Akela! Let the Lone Wolf show his strength. Room for the leader of our Pack! Spring, Akela!"
The Lone Wolf must have sprung and missed his hold, for Mowgli heard the snap of his teeth and then a yelp as the Sambhur knocked him over with his fore foot.
He did not wait for anything more, but dashed on; and the yells grew fainter behind him as he ran into the crop-lands where the villagers lived.
"Bagheera spoke truth," he panted, as he nestled down in some cattle-fodder by the window of a hut. "To-morrow is one day for Akela and for me."
Then he pressed his face close to the window and watched the fire on the hearth. He saw the husbandman's wife get up and feed it in the night with black lumps; and when the morning came and the mists were all white and cold, he saw the man's child pick up a wicker pot plastered inside with earth, fill it with lumps of red-hot charcoal, put it under his blanket, and go out to tend the cows in the byre.
"Is that all?" said Mowgli. "If a cub can do it, there is nothing to fear"; so he strode around the corner and met the boy, took the pot from his hand, and disappeared into the mist while the boy howled with fear.
"They are very like me," said Mowgli, blowing into the pot, as he had seen the woman do. "This thing will die if I do not give it things to eat"; and he dropped twigs and dried bark on the red stuff. Half-way up the hill he met Bagheera with the morning dew shining like moonstones on his coat.
"Akela has missed," said the panther. "They would have killed him last night, but they needed thee also. They were looking for thee on the hill."
"I was among the plowed lands. I am ready. Look!" Mowgli held up the fire-pot.
"Good! Now, I have seen men thrust a dry branch into that stuff, and presently the Red Flower blossomed at the end of it. Art thou not afraid?"
"No. Why should I fear? I remember now—if it is not a dream—how, before I was a wolf, I lay beside the Red Flower, and it was warm and pleasant."
All that day Mowgli sat in the cave tending his fire-pot and dipping dry branches into it to see how they looked. He found a branch that satisfied him, and in the evening when Tabaqui came to the cave and told him, rudely enough, that he was wanted at the Council Rock, he laughed till Tabaqui ran away. Then Mowgli went to the Council, still laughing.
Akela the Lone Wolf lay by the side of his rock as a sign that the leadership of the Pack was open, and Shere Khan with his following of scrap-fed wolves walked to and fro openly, being flattered. Bagheera lay close to Mowgli, and the fire-pot was between Mowgli's knees. When they were all gathered together, Shere Khan began to speak—a thing he would never have dared to do when Akela was in his prime.
"He has no right," whispered Bagheera. "Say so. He is a dog's son. He will be frightened."
Mowgli sprang to his feet. "Free People," he cried, "does Shere Khan lead the Pack? What has a tiger to do with our leadership?"
"Seeing that the leadership is yet open, and being asked to speak—" Shere Khan began.
"By whom?" said Mowgli. "Are we all jackals, to fawn on this cattle-butcher? The leadership of the Pack is with the Pack alone."
There were yells of "Silence, thou man's cub!" "Let him speak; he has kept our law!" And at last the seniors of the Pack thundered: "Let the Dead Wolf speak!"
When a leader of the Pack has missed his kill, he is called the Dead Wolf as long as he lives, which is not long, as a rule.
Akela raised his old head wearily:
