Ch. 15: The Spring Running

Man goes to Man! Cry the challenge through the Jungle!
He that was our Brother goes away.
Hear, now, and judge, O ye People of the Jungle,--
Answer, who shall turn him--who shall stay?

Man goes to Man! He is weeping in the Jungle:
He that was our Brother sorrows sore!
Man goes to Man! (Oh, we loved him in the Jungle!)
To the Man-Trail where we may not follow more.

The second year after the great fight with Red Dog and the death
of Akela, Mowgli must have been nearly seventeen years old.
He looked older, for hard exercise, the best of good eating,
and baths whenever he felt in the least hot or dusty, had given
him strength and growth far beyond his age. He could swing by
one hand from a top branch for half an hour at a time, when he
had occasion to look along the tree-roads. He could stop a young
buck in mid-gallop and throw him sideways by the head. He could
even jerk over the big, blue wild boars that lived in the
Marshes of the North. The Jungle People who used to fear him
for his wits feared him now for his strength, and when he
moved quietly on his own affairs the mere whisper of his coming
cleared the wood-paths. And yet the look in his eyes was always
gentle. Even when he fought, his eyes never blazed as Bagheera's
did. They only grew more and more interested and excited;
and that was one of the things that Bagheera himself did
not understand.

He asked Mowgli about it, and the boy laughed and said.
"When I miss the kill I am angry. When I must go empty for two
days I am very angry. Do not my eyes talk then?"

"The mouth is hungry," said Bagheera, "but the eyes say nothing.
Hunting, eating, or swimming, it is all one--like a stone in wet
or dry weather." Mowgli looked at him lazily from under his long
eyelashes, and, as usual, the panther's head dropped. Bagheera
knew his master.

They were lying out far up the side of a hill overlooking the
Waingunga, and the morning mists hung below them in bands of
white and green. As the sun rose it changed into bubbling seas
of red gold, churned off, and let the low rays stripe the dried
grass on which Mowgli and Bagheera were resting. It was the end
of the cold weather, the leaves and the trees looked worn and
faded, and there was a dry, ticking rustle everywhere when the
wind blew. A little leaf tap-tap-tapped furiously against a
twig, as a single leaf caught in a current will. It roused
Bagheera, for he snuffed the morning air with a deep, hollow
cough, threw himself on his back, and struck with his fore-paws
at the nodding leaf above.

"The year turns," he said. "The Jungle goes forward. The Time of
New Talk is near. That leaf knows. It is very good."