Kipling Sampler

27
[Selections from] The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated Rudyard Kipling annotated and edited by GMW Wemyss & Markham Shaw Pyle A Bapton Book

description

A series of selections as preview of our The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, from 2011. Amazon UK, http://tinyurl.com/6nlkm2e; Amazon US, http://tinyurl.com/7ywz97q; paperback on demand, http://tinyurl.com/bsgjgbl.

Transcript of Kipling Sampler

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[Selections from]

The

Complete

Mowgli Stories,

Duly Annotated

Rudyard Kipling

annotated and edited

by

GMW Wemyss

&

Markham Shaw Pyle

A Bapton Book

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[from the prefatory essay on] Kipling and the Kaiser

THE LESSER BREEDS WITHOUT THE LAW…. The Jungle Book was

published in 1894; The Second Jungle Book, one year later, in the

year of Wilde’s conviction for sodomy.

Mr Gladstone gave way to Lord Rosebery at Downing Street.

The Kaiser, having ‘dropped the pilot’ Bismarck in 1890, began the

year 1894 with Graf von Caprivi as his Imperial Chancellor, and

ended it with the Prince of Hohenlohe in that office, he whose aunt

was Queen Victoria’s half-sister. Both Chancellors were liberal by

instinct, in favour of free trade, rapprochement with Britain, and a

reconciliation of the parties to the Kulturkampf. Both were also

rendered helpless to effect their hopes and policies; the Anglo-

German Agreement or Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, consule

von Caprivi, had been the last expiring gasp of any hopes of

accommodation between the British and German Empires. It had

been on von Caprivi’s watch also, captive upon the bridge, that the

German jingoes had allowed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia to

expire, leading to the 1894 alliance between Russia and the French

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Republic that left Germany exposed to a future two-front war.

It was a time of anarchy, assassination, and anti-Semitism: the

year of the assassination of Sadi Carnot and of the Dreyfus Affair. It

was the year of the accession of Nicholas 2d to the throne of all the

Russias.

A year after the publication of The Second Jungle Book, that is,

in 1895, Joe Chamberlain entered Cabinet as Colonial Secretary.

France was the Old Enemy, and, as Bismarck had intended,

Britain’s new enemy in colonial and imperial expansion (the

Fashoda Incident of 1898 was already implicit in their rivalry);

Russia was the enemy in the Great Game and the race for control of

Central Asia, with all that that implied for the security of British

India.

Joe Chamberlain — like, fatally, his second son Neville after

him — was set upon striking hands with Germany. In this as in all

else he had the politician’s gift of capturing, incarnating, following,

and pretending to lead, popular sentiment, or a very large strain

therein.

Kipling would have none of it. Certainly the son of the Raj held

Russia — ‘the Bear that walks like a Man’ — to be the enemy of

British India; he did not however therefore embrace Germany, least

of all the noisy Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, that was bent upon

building Tirpitz’ navy and the Kiel Canal, as a friend and ally. A

tribalist rather than a racialist or indeed a nationalist — see

‘Mothers’ sons and motherlands’ in this volume — Kipling had no

use for the Aryan master race fantasies of Gobineau and Houston

Stewart Chamberlain. There is neither East nor West, Border, nor

Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they

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come from the ends of the earth. In 1890, Kipling had thrown back

in the face of the Kaiser ‘An Imperial Rescript’: to the seductive

prospect of ‘“The road to the rest ye seek: The strong shall wait for

the weary, the hale shall halt for the weak; With the even tramp of

an army where no man breaks from the line, Ye shall march to peace

and plenty in the bond of brotherhood — sign!”’, his characters had

replied, that they worked for kids and the missus, ‘and, W.

Hohenzollern, I guess I shall work till I drop’. It was one thing, and

bad enough, for ‘The Islanders’ to fawn upon the Younger Nations

of the Empire for ‘the men who could shoot and ride’; but paying

Danegeld was simply not on. Kipling in 1891 had had his Hans

Breitmann explicitly compare the coral snake that killed his fellow

German and fellow naturalist to the German flag.

Kim, in which the Eurasians, Indians, and Tibetans, and the

sahibs who immerse themselves in Indian culture — Strickland,

Creighton, Kim himself — are the heroes, and the European rivals

of the Empire are the villains, dates from 1901, the year in which

the Queen-Empress died. The Jubilee Year of 1897 had seen the

publication of Kipling’s poem, ‘Recessional’, a stark, stern note in

counterpoint to the easy alleluias, and the first appearance of the

phrase, the ‘lesser breeds without the Law’: the ‘Gentiles’ whose

trust is in military power alone. The Bandar-log date to the 1894

publication of The Jungle Book.

Two years before, Tirpitz had become Chief of the German

Imperials Naval Staff. From 1897 — that Recessional year: ‘far-

called our navies melt away, on dune and headland sinks the fire’ —

Tirpitz was State Secretary of the German Imperial Naval Office,

and it was his task as it was his pleasure to carry out Wilhelm’s

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intention to challenge the Royal Navy.

Kipling wrote as much of the sea and sailors, civilian and RN, as

he did of the British Army; and he was one of many British subjects

who had, from at least 1884 and the German scramble for colonies

(the first, ominously, was in New Guinea, a threat to Australia and

to the British dominance East of Suez), regarded Germany as a

potential enemy. The Russians were a danger to the Raj, sharing a

land border in their Central Asian expansion; a Germany that

acquired colonies and necessarily wanted a fleet to connect and

protect them, was potentially an enemy greater yet. And Germany’s

record: over Schleswig-Holstein, against Austria, against France:

was an ugly one. They were a people outside the Law and not to be

trusted, human-like yet not fully human; and so they appear in

Kipling, bombastic, blustering, bullying: Bandar-log.

In fact, even if one doesn’t take Bronckhorst of the divorce case

as making one, and assesses Breitmann as neutral in his morals —

which were a mistake — there is hardly a ‘good German’ in

Kipling, twenty years and more before the Great War: for further

exploration of which see the essay ‘Mothers’ sons and motherlands’

in this volume.

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PREFACE1

Rudyard Kipling

. . . . .

THE DEMANDS MADE BY A work of this nature upon the generosity of

specialists are very numerous, and the Editor2 would be wanting in

all title to the generous treatment he has received were he not

willing to make the fullest possible acknowledgement of his

indebtedness.

His thanks are due in the first place to the scholarly and

accomplished Bahadur Shah, baggage elephant 174 on the Indian

Register, who, with his amiable sister Pudmini, most courteously

supplied the history of ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ and much of the

information contained in ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’.3 The adventures

of Mowgli were collected at various times and in various places

from a multitude of informants, most of whom desire to preserve

the strictest anonymity. Yet, at this distance, the Editor feels at

liberty to thank a Hindu gentleman of the old rock, an esteemed

1 To The Jungle Book, 1894. 2 Mr Kipling, cakes and all.3 None of the stories not concerning Mowgli appears in this volume.

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resident of the upper slopes of Jakko,4 for his convincing if

somewhat caustic estimate of the national characteristics of his caste

— the Presbytes.5 Sahi, a savant of infinite research and industry, a

member of the recently disbanded Seeonee Pack, and an artist well

known at most of the local fairs of Southern India,6 where his

muzzled dance with his master attracts the youth, beauty, and

culture of many villages, has contributed most valuable data on

people, manners, and customs.7 These have been freely drawn upon,

in the stories of ‘Tiger! Tiger!’, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, and ‘Mowgli’s

Brothers’. For the outlines of ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’ the Editor stands

indebted to one of the leading herpetologists of Upper India, a

fearless and independent investigator who, resolving ‘not to live but

know,’ lately sacrificed his life through over-application to the study

of our Eastern Thanatophidia. A happy accident of travel enabled

the Editor, when a passenger on the Empress of India, to be of some

slight assistance to a fellow-passenger. How richly his poor services

were repaid, readers of ‘The White Seal’ may judge for themselves.

4 Jakko Hill, Simla (now Shimla). 5 The langurs; Presbytis being the genus of Old World monkeys in which the langurs

of India, now placed in Semnopithecus, were then placed. 6 Note that the langur referenced above is resident at Simla, in the Himalayan foothills,

well to the North of Seeonee, whilst Sahi has found himself well to the Southwards. ‘Ye know the saying: “North are the vermin; south are the lice. We are the Jungle.”’ The theme of exile has been already introduced.

7 This is an inconsistency, as it seems unlikely from the corpus of the works that any of the Free People of the Seeonee Pack ever fell into the hands of man to be tamed. Note that this is any case a reference to the First Seeonee Pack.

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Mowgli’s Brothers [part one8]

Now Chil the Kite9 brings home the night

That Mang the Bat10 sets free —

The herds are shut in byre and hut,

For loosed till dawn are we.

This is the hour of pride and power,

Talon and tush and claw.

Oh, hear the call! — Good hunting all

That keep the jungle Law!

Night-Song in the Jungle

IT WAS SEVEN O’CLOCK OF a very warm evening in the Seeonee11 hills

when Father Wolf12 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 their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big grey nose

8 In order to give out, as promised, the adventures of Mowgli in their internal chronological order, the editors have, with appalling presumption and no little trepidation, broken this chapter up.

9 The raptor, Milvus migrans spp.; here probably M. m. govinda. 10 There are numerous species and subspecies of bat in India. There is no telling which

Kipling had in mind, as ranges overlap. Clearly Mang is one of the vesper bats, Vespertilionidæ, who appear at evening and ‘set free the night’.

11 Seoni, Madhya Pradesh. 12 C. lupus pallipes.

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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 jackal13 — 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. But 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 runs and 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.14

‘Enter, then, and look,’ said Father Wolf stiffly; ‘but there is no

food here.’

‘For a wolf, no,’ said Tabaqui; ‘but for so mean15 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

13 C. aureus indicus. Much more wolf- or dog-like – coyote-like, Mr Pyle submits – than the African jackal.

14 The reference is of course to rabies. 15 Humble, lowly.

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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.16

Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made: then

he said spitefully:

‘Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting-grounds. He

will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me.’

Shere Khan was the tiger17 who lived near the Waingunga18

River, twenty miles away.

‘He has no right!’ Father Wolf began angrily — ‘By the Law of

the Jungle19 he has no right to change his quarters without due

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!’

16 This recurs in Kipling, the superstition that the praise of a child attracts the envy and enmity of dark powers that revenge themselves upon the child by visiting upon him illness and death. As a superstition, it is much older than Kipling and by no means confined to India. The Romans for one knew it also.

17 P. tigris tigris: the Bengal tiger. 18 Nowadays spelt ‘Wainganga’: a river rising near Seoni in Madhya Pradesh. 19 This is perhaps the happiest of Kipling’s many inventions: that there is a Law even in

the jungle, pace Hobbes; and that transgressors of it do not prosper.

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‘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 below in the 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?’

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[from] Kaa’s Hunting

***

[…] ‘Fool that I am! Oh, fat, brown, root-digging fool that I am,’

said Baloo, uncurling himself with a jerk, ‘it is true what Hathi the

Wild Elephant says: “To each his own fear”; and they, the Bandar-

log, fear Kaa the Rock Snake.20 He can climb as well as they can.

He steals the young monkeys in the night. The whisper of his name

makes their wicked tails cold. Let us go to Kaa.’

‘What will he do for us? He is not of our tribe, being footless —

and with most evil eyes,’ said Bagheera.

‘He is very old and very cunning.21 Above all, he is always

hungry,’ said Baloo hopefully. ‘Promise him many goats.’

‘He sleeps for a full month after he has once eaten. He may be

asleep now, and even were he awake what if he would rather kill his

20 Python molurus. 21 The serpent is traditionally represented as cunning and wise – in earthly wisdom, at

least. Kipling departs from this tradition only in making Kaa rather good than evil, as in the post-Christian West, or ambiguous, as commonly. The oldest myths appear to hold that the Earth is a source of wisdom (the priests of Dodona, the eldest Hellenic oracle, gained prophetic wisdom in dreams by sleeping upon the ground, beneath the oaks, unshod and with unwashed feet); as the creature that goeth upon its belly in the dust, the serpent in cultures that are not Jewish or Christian (or Muslim) is held to have absorbed that wisdom from the Earth-Mother-Goddess. Buddhism and Hinduism alike revere the serpent; Python founded the Oracle of Delphi, and the mythic founder of Athens, Cecrops, was portrayed as half-serpent. That being said, neither of the editors can bear snakes (Mr Wemyss is known to mutter imprecations upon Lord Mandelson in this context).

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own goats?’ Bagheera, who did not know much about Kaa, was

naturally suspicious.

‘Then in that case, thou and I together, old hunter, might make

him see reason.’ Here Baloo rubbed his faded brown shoulder

against the Panther, and they went off to look for Kaa the Rock

Python.

They found him stretched out on a warm ledge in the afternoon

sun, admiring his beautiful new coat, for he had been in retirement

for the last ten days, changing his skin, and now he was very

splendid — darting his big blunt-nosed head along the ground, and

twisting the thirty feet of his body into fantastic knots and curves,

and licking his lips as he thought of his dinner to come.

‘He has not eaten,’ said Baloo, with a grunt of relief, as soon as

he saw the beautifully mottled brown-and-yellow jacket. ‘Be

careful, Bagheera! He is always a little blind after he has changed

his skin, and very quick to strike.’

Kaa was not a poison-snake — in fact he rather despised the

poison-snakes as cowards — but his strength lay in his hug, and

when he had once lapped his huge coils round anybody there was

no more to be said. ‘Good hunting!’ cried Baloo, sitting up on his

haunches. Like all snakes of his breed, Kaa was rather deaf,22 and

did not hear the call at first. Then he curled up ready for any

accident, his head lowered.

‘Good hunting for us all!’ he answered. ‘Oho, Baloo, what dost

thou do here? Good hunting, Bagheera! One of us at least needs

food. Is there any news of game afoot? A doe now, or even a young

buck? I am as empty as a dried well.’

22 That is an understatement.

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‘We are hunting,’ said Baloo carelessly. He knew that you must

not hurry Kaa. He is too big.23

‘Give me permission to come with you,’ said Kaa. ‘A blow more

or less is nothing to thee, Bagheera or Baloo, but I — I have to wait

and wait for days in a wood-path and climb half a night on the mere

chance of a young ape. Pss-haw! The branches are not what they

were when I was young. Rotten twigs and dry boughs are they all.’

‘Maybe thy great weight has something to do with the matter,’

said Baloo.

‘I am a fair length — a fair length,’ said Kaa, with a little pride.

‘But for all that, it is the fault of this new-grown timber. I came very

near to falling on my last hunt — very near indeed — and the noise

of my slipping, for my tail was not tight wrapped round the tree,

waked the Bandar-log, and they called me most evil names.’

‘Footless, yellow earth-worm,’ said Bagheera under his

whiskers, as though he were trying to remember something.

‘Sssss! Have they ever called me that?’ said Kaa.

‘Something of that kind it was that they shouted to us last moon,

but we never noticed them. They will say anything — even that

thou hast lost all thy teeth, and wilt not face anything bigger than a

kid, because (they are indeed shameless, these Bandar-log) —

because thou art afraid of the he-goat’s horns,’ Bagheera went on

sweetly.24

Now a snake, especially a wary old python like Kaa, very

seldom shows that he is angry, but Baloo and Bagheera could see

the big swallowing-muscles on either side of Kaa’s throat ripple and

23 As Kipling also notes of the Raj itself. 24 The Black Panther is not without cunning of his own. Shades of Gandalf snookering

Beorn, really.

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bulge.

‘The Bandar-log have shifted their grounds,’ he said quietly.

‘When I came up into the sun to-day I heard them whooping among

the tree-tops.’

‘It — it is the Bandar-log that we follow now,’ said Baloo; but

the words stuck in his throat, for that was the first time in his

memory that one of the Jungle-People had owned to being

interested in the doings of the monkeys.

‘Beyond doubt then it is no small thing that takes two such

hunters — leaders in their own Jungle I am certain — on the trail of

the Bandar-log,’ Kaa replied courteously, as he swelled with

curiosity.

‘Indeed,’ Baloo began, ‘I am no more than the old and

sometimes very foolish Teacher of the Law to the Seeonee wolf-

cubs, and Bagheera here — ’

‘Is Bagheera,’ said the Black Panther, and his jaws shut with a

snap, for he did not believe in being humble. ‘The trouble is this,

Kaa. Those nut-stealers and pickers of palm-leaves have stolen

away our Man-cub, of whom thou hast perhaps heard.’

‘I heard some news from Ikki (his quills make him

presumptuous)25 of a man-thing that was entered into a wolf-pack,

but I did not believe. Ikki is full of stories half heard and very badly

told.’

‘But it is true. He is such a Man-cub as never was,’ said Baloo.

‘The best and wisest and boldest of Man-cubs — my own pupil,

who shall make the name of Baloo famous through all the jungles;

and besides, I — we — love him, Kaa.’

25 His quills, as we have seen, make him invulnerable, in fact.

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‘Tss! Tss!’ said Kaa, shaking his head to and fro. ‘I also have

known what love is. There are tales I could tell that –’

‘That need a clear night when we are all well fed to praise

properly,’ said Bagheera quickly.26 ‘Our Man-cub is in the hands of

the Bandar-log now, and we know that of all the Jungle-People they

fear Kaa alone.’

‘They fear me alone. They have good reason,’ said Kaa.

‘Chattering, foolish, vain — vain, foolish, and chattering, are the

monkeys. But a man-thing in their hands is in no good luck. They

grow tired of the nuts they pick, and throw them down. They carry a

branch half a day, meaning to do great things with it, and then they

snap it in two. That man-thing is not to be envied. They called me

also — “yellow fish,” was it not?’

‘Worm — worm — earth-worm,’ said Bagheera, ‘as well as

other things which I cannot now say for shame.’

‘We must remind them to speak well of their master. Aaa-ssh!

We must help their wandering memories. Now, whither went they

with the cub?’

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26 Well played, sir.

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[from] Mowgli’s Brothers [part two]

***

[…] 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,

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he would have told thee of something that concerned thee closely.

Open those eyes, Little Brother. Shere Khan dare not kill thee in the

Jungle; 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.27 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;

27 Udaipur, the Venice of India, the Rajput City of Lakes, and one of the loveliest places upon Earth.

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and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible

in the Jungle than Shere Khan.28 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,

28 Well, that’s one explanation.

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and take some of the Red Flower29 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.30

‘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!’

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29 Fire. 30 The tapu against naming that which is feared, and the use of periphrases, is ancient

and deep-seated. Ms Rowling has lately made use of it, like a thousand writers before her. Nor is it restricted to not naming things that are feared, as such: as witness the Jewish periphrases for God, or the way in which Gaelic speakers in the Isles use bye-names for certain islands or fish or game at certain seasons. At bottom, all that has mana implicates tapu.

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In the Rukh31 (from Many Inventions)

The Only Son32

She dropped the bar, she shot the bolt, she fed the fire anew,

For she heard a whimper under the sill and a great grey paw

came through.

The fresh flame comforted the hut and shone on the roof-beam,

And the Only Son lay down again and dreamed that he

dreamed a dream.

The last ash fell from the withered log with the click of a falling spark,

And the Only Son woke up again, and called across the dark:

‘Now was I born of womankind and laid in33 a mother’s breast?

For I have dreamed of a shaggy hide whereon I went to rest.

And was I born of womankind and laid on a father's arm?

For I have dreamed of clashing teeth that guarded me from

31 As a matter of chronology, this is the last of the Mowgli stories; it was written well before the Jungle Books, however, and there are contradictions, as we shall see. ‘Rukh’ is ‘forest’, of course.

32 This is the complete poem, in its final version, not that appended to the story in Many Inventions.

33 ‘In’ appears the proper reading, not ‘on’; the pious are in Abraham’s bosom, and the roisteringly impious Englishman Sir John Falstaff of course in Arthur’s bosom. Henry V, Act II, Scene 3.

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harm.

And was I born an Only Son and did I play alone?

For I have dreamed of comrades twain that bit me to the bone.

And did I break the barley-cake and steep it in the tyre?34

For I have dreamed of a youngling kid new-riven35 from the

byre:

For I have dreamed of a midnight sky and a midnight call to blood

And red-mouthed shadows racing by, that thrust me from my

food.

’Tis an hour yet and an hour yet to the rising of the moon,

But I can see the black roof-tree as plain as it were noon.

’Tis a league and a league to the Lena Falls36 where the trooping

blackbuck go;

But I can hear the little fawn that bleats behind the doe.

’Tis a league and a league to the Lena Falls where the crop and the

upland meet,

But I can smell the wet dawn-wind that wakes the sprouting

wheat.

Unbar the door. I may not bide, but I must out and see

If those are wolves that wait outside or my own kin to me!’

….

She loosed the bar, she slid the bolt, she opened the door anon,

And a grey bitch-wolf came out of the dark and fawned on the

Only Son!

34 Tayir, soured cream. 35 Reived, rustled, stolen away. 36 Possibly near the Ellora Caves in Maharashtra. That modern state adjoins, of course,

modern Madhya Pradesh, wherein lies Seoni — Kipling’s Seeonee. Certainly there are falls near Ellora and its cave-temples (including the Gopilena and Dhumar Lena), in an area that quite notably is where ‘the crop and the upland meet’.

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OF THE WHEELS OF PUBLIC SERVICE that turn under the Indian

Government, there is none more important than the Department of

Woods and Forests.37 The reboisement38 of all India is in its hands;

or will be when Government has the money to spend. Its servants

wrestle with wandering sand-torrents and shifting dunes: wattling

them at the sides, damming them in front, and pegging them down

atop with coarse grass and spindling pine after the rules of Nancy.39

They are responsible for all the timber in the State forests of the

Himalayas, as well as for the denuded hillsides that the monsoons

wash into dry gullies and aching ravines; each cut a mouth crying

aloud what carelessness can do.40 They experiment with battalions

of foreign trees, and coax the blue gum41 to take root and, perhaps,

dry up the Canal fever.42 In the plains the chief part of their duty is

to see that the belt fire-lines in the forest reserves are kept clean, so

that when drought comes and the cattle starve, they may throw the

reserve open to the villager’s herds and allow the man himself to

gather sticks. They poll and lop for the stacked railway-fuel along

the lines that burn no coal; they calculate the profit of their

37 And is yet so. The MoEF (Ministry of Environment and Forests) is a very important Indian ministry.

38 Re-afforestation. 39 Nancy, in Lorraine, being the centre of French forestry education, was long

considered the premier school of forestry. France’s reputation for scientific management and engineering pre-dated Colbert’s intendancy, in agriculture, forestry, civil and military engineering (Vauban’s fortifications come to mind, as does the French ministry of ponts et chaussées), and the like. It turns up even, quite extensively, in Simon Schama.

40 Mr Pyle suggests it as having been a pity, that the farmers of the soon-to-be Dust Bowl didn’t read Kipling.

41 The Australian eucalyptus tree. The dissemination of Useful Plants across the Empire is a fascinating subject of study – see Jan Morris – and has left the mark of Empire upon widely separated lands, discernible long after that Empire has, in Kipling’s own, recessional phrase, become one with Nineveh and Tyre.

42 Malaria was not yet understood, or at least its vectors weren’t.

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plantations to five points of decimals; they are the doctors and

midwives of the huge teak forests of Upper Burma, the rubber of the

Eastern Jungles, and the gall-nuts43 of the South; and they are

always hampered by lack of funds. But since a Forest Officer’s

business takes him far from the beaten roads and the regular

stations, he learns to grow wise in more than wood-lore alone; to

know the people and the polity of the jungle; meeting tiger, bear,

leopard, wild-dog, and all the deer, not once or twice after days of

beating, but again and again in the execution of his duty. He spends

much time in saddle or under canvas — the friend of newly-planted

trees, the associate of uncouth rangers and hairy trackers — till the

woods, that show his care, in turn set their mark upon him, and he

ceases to sing the naughty French songs he learned at Nancy,44 and

grows silent with the silent things of the underbrush.

Gisborne45 of the Woods and Forests had spent four years in the

service. At first he loved it without comprehension, because it led

him into the open on horseback and gave him authority. Then he

hated it furiously, and would have given a year’s pay for one month

of such society as India affords. That crisis over, the forests took

him back again, and he was content to serve them, to deepen and

widen his fire-lines, to watch the green mist of his new plantation

against the older foliage, to dredge out the choked stream, and to

follow and strengthen the last struggle of the forest where it broke

43 Indian laurel. 44 The association of naughty songs and French education is in the British mind

ineradicable. Sir Richard Dalyngridge and Sir Hugh of Dallington said as much, and proved it by Fulke and Clerk Gilbert, in Puck of Pook’s Hill.

45 Although this surname has been borne by MPs, by divines of the Church by law established, and by various Colonial ministers, it seems derived, and subverted, from that odd, forest-bound, curiously Herne-like figure who was Robin’s antagonist, Guy of Gisbourne.

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down and died among the long pig-grass. On some still day that

grass would be burned off, and a hundred beasts that had their

homes there would rush out before the pale flames at high noon.46

Later, the forest would creep forward over the blackened ground in

orderly lines of saplings, and Gisborne, watching, would be well

pleased.47 His bungalow, a thatched white-walled cottage of two

rooms, was set at one end of the great rukh and overlooking it. He

made no pretence at keeping a garden, for the rukh swept up to his

door, curled over in a thicket of bamboo, and he rode from his

verandah into its heart without the need of any carriage-drive.

Abdul Gafur, his fat Mohammedan butler, fed him when he was

at home, and spent the rest of the time gossiping with the little band

of native servants whose huts lay behind the bungalow. There were

two grooms, a cook, a water-carrier, and a sweeper, and that was all.

Gisborne cleaned his own guns and kept no dog. Dogs scared the

game, and it pleased the man to be able to say where the subjects of

his kingdom would drink at moonrise, eat before dawn, and lie up in

the day’s heat. The rangers and forest-guards lived in little huts far

away in the rukh, only appearing when one of them had been

injured by a falling tree or a wild beast. There Gisborne was alone.

In spring the rukh put out few new leaves, but lay dry and still

untouched by the finger of the year, waiting for rain.48 Only there

was then more calling and roaring in the dark on a quiet night; the

tumult of a battle-royal among the tigers, the bellowing of arrogant

buck, or the steady wood-chopping of an old boar sharpening his

tushes against a bole. Then Gisborne laid aside his little-used gun

46 Mr Pyle is put in mind here of several passages in Aldo Leopold and John Graves. 47 If you are reminded of the letting in of the jungle, you’re perfectly correct. 48 Shades of Baloo awaiting the mohwa blossom.

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altogether, for it was to him a sin to kill.49 In summer, through the

furious May heats, the rukh reeled in the haze, and Gisborne

watched for the first sign of curling smoke that should betray a

forest fire. Then came the Rains with a roar, and the rukh was

blotted out in fetch after fetch of warm mist, and the broad leaves

drummed the night through under the big drops; and there was a

noise of running water, and of juicy green stuff crackling where the

wind struck it, and the lightning wove patterns behind the dense

matting of the foliage, till the sun broke loose again and the rukh

stood with hot flanks smoking to the newly-washed sky.50 Then the

heat and the dry cold subdued everything to tiger-colour again. So

Gisborne learned to know his rukh and was very happy. His pay

came month by month, but he had very little need for money. The

currency notes accumulated in the drawer where he kept his

homeletters and the recapping-machine.51 If he drew anything, it

was to make a purchase from the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, or to

pay a ranger’s widow a sum that the Government of India would

never have sanctioned for her man’s death.

Payment was good, but vengeance was also necessary, and he

took that when he could. One night of many nights a runner,

breathless and gasping, came to him with the news that a forest-

guard lay dead by the Kanye stream, the side of his head smashed in

as though it had been an eggshell. Gisborne went out at dawn to

look for the murderer. It is only travellers and now and then young

soldiers who are known to the world as great hunters. The Forest

49 One simply doesn’t shoot game in their mating season. Or there shall soon be no new generations of game to shoot.

50 This should be familiar by now. 51 Why buy new shells and cartridges when one can recap one’s spent rounds?

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Officers take their shikar52 as part of the day’s work, and no one

hears of it. Gisborne went on foot to the place of the kill: the widow

was wailing over the corpse as it lay on a bedstead, while two or

three men were looking at footprints on the moist ground. ‘That is

the Red One,’ said a man. ‘I knew he would turn to man in time, but

surely there is game enough even for him. This must have been

done for devilry.’

‘The Red One lies up in the rocks at the back of the sal53 trees,’

said Gisborne. He knew the tiger under suspicion.

END OF THIS PREVIEW

52 Stalking. 53 The valuable tropical hardwood S. robusta, traditionally both sacred to Vishnu and

the tree that sheltered the mother of the Buddha as she gave birth to him.