Ch. 13: Red Dog

For our white and our excellent nights---for the nights of
swift running.
Fair ranging, far seeing, good hunting, sure cunning!
For the smells of the dawning, untainted, ere dew has departed!
For the rush through the mist, and the quarry blind-started!
For the cry of our mates when the sambhur has wheeled and is
standing at bay,
For the risk and the riot of night!
For the sleep at the lair-mouth by day,
It is met, and we go to the fight.
Bay! O Bay!

It was after the letting in of the Jungle that the pleasantest
part of Mowgli's life began. He had the good conscience that
comes from paying debts; all the Jungle was his friend, and just
a little afraid of him. The things that he did and saw and heard
when he was wandering from one people to another, with or
without his four companions, would make many many stories,
each as long as this one. So you will never be told how he met
the Mad Elephant of Mandla, who killed two-and-twenty bullocks
drawing eleven carts of coined silver to the Government
Treasury, and scattered the shiny rupees in the dust; how he
fought Jacala, the Crocodile, all one long night in the Marshes
of the North, and broke his skinning-knife on the brute's back-
plates; how he found a new and longer knife round the neck of a
man who had been killed by a wild boar, and how he tracked that
boar and killed him as a fair price for the knife; how he was
caught up once in the Great Famine, by the moving of the deer,
and nearly crushed to death in the swaying hot herds; how he
saved Hathi the Silent from being once more trapped in a pit
with a stake at the bottom, and how, next day, he himself fell
into a very cunning leopard-trap, and how Hathi broke the thick
wooden bars to pieces above him; how he milked the wild
buffaloes in the swamp, and how----

But we must tell one tale at a time. Father and Mother Wolf
died, and Mowgli rolled a big boulder against the mouth of their
cave, and cried the Death Song over them; Baloo grew very old
and stiff, and even Bagheera, whose nerves were steel and whose
muscles were iron, was a shade slower on the kill than he had
been. Akela turned from gray to milky white with pure age;
his ribs stuck out, and he walked as though he had been made
of wood, and Mowgli killed for him. But the young wolves,
the children of the disbanded Seeonee Pack, throve and
increased, and when there were about forty of them, masterless,
full-voiced, clean-footed five-year-olds, Akela told them that
they ought to gather themselves together ahd follow the Law,
and run under one head, as befitted the Free People.

This was not a question in which Mowgli concerned himself, for,
as he said, he had eaten sour fruit, and he knew the tree it