The Jungle Book

The second story steps back in time, to when Mowgli is about seven and Baloo is drilling him in the Law. Forget the cartoon’s lazy, singing bear: Kipling’s Baloo is a serious old schoolmaster who cuffs his pupil when he forgets his lessons, because, he tells Bagheera, it is better to be bruised by someone who loves you than to come to harm through ignorance. He is teaching Mowgli the Master Words, the passwords that let him claim kinship with birds, snakes and hunters: “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

After one cuffing too many, Mowgli sulks off and is taken up by the Bandar-log, the Monkey People, who feed him nuts, call him their brother and promise to make him their leader one day. Baloo is appalled. The monkeys, he explains, have no law, no leader, no memory and no language of their own, only words they overhear and steal, and the rest of the jungle simply ignores them. That very afternoon the monkeys snatch Mowgli and swing him off through the treetops. Thinking fast, he calls out the Master Word to Rann the Kite, who carries the news to his friends.

Baloo and Bagheera know they cannot catch monkeys in the trees, so they do something humbling: they go to Kaa, the thirty-foot rock python, the one hunter the monkeys truly fear. (In Kipling, Kaa is no villain. He is old, vain, enormously wise and, in the end, one of Mowgli’s truest friends.) The monkeys have carried Mowgli to the Cold Lairs, a ruined city of some forgotten king, where they chatter about the great things they will build, forget what they were doing, and start again. When Mowgli tries to leave, they drop him into a marble summer-house full of cobras, and he survives only by giving the Snake People’s Master Word.

The rescue is a pitched battle in the moonlight. Bagheera is swamped by hundreds of monkeys and has to throw himself into a water tank, Baloo fights on the terrace, and Kaa batters a hole through the summer-house wall with his head. Then, as the moon sets, Kaa begins the Dance of the Hunger of Kaa, looping and coiling until the spellbound monkeys shuffle helplessly towards his jaws, and so, to their horror, do Baloo and Bagheera, until Mowgli pulls them away. Mowgli thanks Kaa with perfect jungle manners, and the snake praises his “brave heart and a courteous tongue.” Then Bagheera, by the Law, gives him a spanking for all the trouble he has caused, and the matter is closed for good: in the jungle, Kipling says, punishment settles all scores, and “There is no nagging afterward.” The boy falls asleep on the panther’s back on the way home.

Back to the main thread. Cast out of the Pack, Mowgli trots twenty miles to a village where nobody knows him. A woman named Messua, whose little son Nathoo was carried off by a tiger, thinks she sees her boy in the strange wolf-child, and the priest, who knows her husband is the richest man in the village, declares that what the jungle took, the jungle has returned. Messua feeds him, tries her lost son’s name on him and takes him in. Mowgli picks up words almost as fast as he hears them, refuses to sleep in a hut that looks to him like a panther trap, and is baffled by clothes, money, ploughing and caste. Soon he is sent out to herd the village buffaloes.

Under the great fig tree where the old men gather in the evenings, the village hunter, Buldeo, spins tales about a ghost-tiger, and Mowgli laughs out loud at how little the man knows of the jungle at his own door. Meanwhile his wolf brother, Grey Brother, keeps watch at the edge of the grazing grounds. When word comes that Shere Khan has returned, eaten, drunk and is lying up in a dry ravine, Mowgli makes a plan. With Grey Brother and old Akela, he splits the herd in two, sends the cows to block the bottom of the ravine, and drives the great bulls, led by Rama, down from the top. Shere Khan, too full to climb the cliffs, is caught between them and trampled to death. There is no burning branch tied to a tail, as in the cartoon: the bully is crushed by the very cattle he made his living stealing, and Mowgli sets about skinning him to keep his promise.

Buldeo turns up, plans to claim the hundred-rupee bounty for himself, and ends up pinned to the grass by Akela, convinced the boy is a sorcerer. By the time Mowgli brings the herd home at dusk, Buldeo has told his tale, and Mowgli is met with stones, a musket shot and shouts of “Sorcerer! Wolf’s brat!” Only Messua runs out to him: she does not believe the stories, she says, and he has avenged her son. Thrown out by the wolves for being a man and by the men for being a wolf, Mowgli walks back into the jungle under the moon.

At the Council Rock he pegs out Shere Khan’s striped hide on the stone where Akela used to sit. The ragged, leaderless Pack, limping from traps and gunshot after a season of doing as they please, begs him and Akela to lead them again. Bagheera answers for them: they fought for freedom, so let them eat it. Mowgli goes off to hunt with his four wolf brothers, and Kipling signs off with a wink: years later Mowgli grew up and married, “But that is a story for grown-ups.” The poem that follows, “Mowgli’s Song,” is the emotional heart of the whole book. Dancing on the tiger’s skin, his mouth cut by village stones, Mowgli cannot understand why his heart is heavy and light at once. “I am two Mowglis,” he sings.

That is where the first book leaves him. His story ends in The Second Jungle Book (1895), where an older Mowgli takes revenge on the village that tried to burn Messua, fights off the red dogs, and at nearly seventeen leaves the jungle for the world of men, with Baloo, Kaa and Bagheera seeing him off.

The book now leaves India entirely, for the foggy beaches of Novastoshnah on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea, a tale the narrator claims he heard from a winter wren blown onto a steamer’s rigging. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of fur seals haul out there to fight, breed and play. Among them is born Kotick, son of the scarred old warrior Sea Catch and gentle Matkah, and, uniquely, his coat is pure white.

As a yearling, Kotick tags along when the seal-hunters drive a herd of young bachelor seals inland, and he sees what the others never look at: the clubbing and skinning on the killing-grounds. Nobody else wants to think about it. His father tells him to grow up and fight for a place on the beach; his mother tells him he will never stop the killing. So Kotick goes looking for a beach where men have never come. For five seasons he searches the oceans, from the Galápagos to lonely rocks in the far South Atlantic, and everywhere finds the same thing: seals lived here once, until men killed them. A dying old seal tells him of a legend that a white seal would one day lead the seal people to safety.

At last he meets the sea cows, slow, silent, comically ugly creatures that cannot even speak, and follows them, fuming at their pace, until they dive through a tunnel under a cliff into a hidden sea with perfect, untouched beaches. When he comes home, the other seals laugh at him. So, for the first time in his life, Kotick fights, thrashing half the beach until his white coat runs red, and his astonished father joins in at his side. Ten thousand seals follow him through the sea cows’ tunnel, and more come every year. The poem that follows, “Lukannon,” is a lament for the beaches “before the sealers came.”

Back in India, a summer flood washes a young mongoose out of his family’s burrow and leaves him, half-drowned, on the garden path of an English family’s bungalow in the Segowlee cantonment. The little boy, Teddy, wants to give him a funeral; his mother wants to dry him off. Rikki-tikki-tavi, named for his chattering war cry, is soon living in the house and investigating everything, because the family motto of all mongooses is “Run and find out.”

The garden belongs to two cobras, Nag and his even more dangerous wife, Nagaina, and they see at once that a mongoose in the house threatens the eggs they are hatching in the melon bed. Rikki, young and untested, learns fast. He kills Karait, a tiny and deadly snake, in the dust beside Teddy. Then, overhearing the cobras plotting to kill the whole family so the garden will be theirs again, he waits all night in the bathroom and clamps his teeth on Nag’s head while the snake sleeps coiled around a water jar. He is shaken like a rat in a dog’s mouth, and holds on, certain he is going to die, until Teddy’s father blows the cobra in two with a shotgun.

Next morning, the quick-thinking wife of Darzee the tailorbird pretends to have a broken wing to lure Nagaina away while Rikki smashes the eggs. Nagaina strikes back by coiling at Teddy’s feet at the breakfast table. Rikki saves the boy by bargaining with the last egg, then chases the widow down into her hole, where no sensible mongoose ever follows a cobra. After an agonizing wait he crawls out, covered in earth and licking his whiskers. From then on, Kipling says, he kept that garden “with tooth and jump and spring and bite,” and never a cobra dared show its head inside the walls.

In the hills of Assam, the government catches wild elephants by driving them into a stockade called a keddah. Kala Nag, the Black Snake, is the champion fighting elephant: nearly seventy, a veteran of the British expedition to Abyssinia, and handled by the same family for generations. Now his driver is Big Toomai, and Big Toomai’s ten-year-old son, Little Toomai, loves the wild camp life as much as his father longs for the comfortable brick stables of the plains. When Little Toomai darts into the stockade to throw a rope, he catches the eye of Petersen Sahib, the Englishman who runs the whole operation. Petersen laughs and tells the boy he may join the keddahs when he has seen the elephants dance, which is a hunter’s joke, since no man ever has.

That night Kala Nag pulls up his picket and, with Little Toomai on his neck, slips away into the Garo hills. Deep in the forest, in a clearing, wild and tame elephants gather in the dark and stamp, all together, until the ground shakes and the earth is beaten flat. In the morning, Petersen Sahib and the great tracker Machua Appa follow the trail and find the trampled “ball-room” and the tracks of seventy elephants crossing the river. At the feast that night, Machua Appa lifts the boy over his head and renames him Toomai of the Elephants, like his great-grandfather before him, and every elephant in the lines raises its trunk in salute.

The last story is set in a huge, rain-soaked army camp at Rawal Pindi, where thirty thousand men and thousands of animals have gathered so the Viceroy of India can show them off to the visiting Amir of Afghanistan. When a stampede of loose camels flattens his tent, the narrator takes shelter among the cannon and lies awake listening to the animals talk: Billy the mountain-battery mule, a cavalry troop-horse, a camel, a team of big gun-bullocks and an elephant known as Two Tails. They compare what frightens them. The horse trusts his rider, Dick Cunliffe, completely; the stolid bullocks are proud to be the only ones not afraid; and Two Tails dreads shellfire because, unlike the others, he can picture what will happen. “I know just enough to be uncomfortable,” he says, and he is terrified of the narrator’s little fox terrier, Vixen. When a young mule asks why they have to fight at all, the answer comes back from every side: because it is an order, and asking questions gets you kicked.

The next day, at the review, the whole army advances in a line three-quarters of a mile wide and halts in perfect order before the Viceroy and the Amir. An old Central Asian chief asks how it is done. A native officer explains the chain of obedience, from animal to driver to sergeant and so on up to the Viceroy, “who is the servant of the Empress.” Then he adds, twirling his moustache, that this is why the Amir must come and take orders from the Viceroy. It is the book’s most openly imperial moment, and it is worth reading slowly.

As old Akela, the Pack’s leader, weakens, Shere Khan turns the young wolves against the man-cub. Warned by Bagheera, Mowgli steals fire, the Red Flower, from a village. At the Council he routs the Pack, saves Akela’s life and beats the tiger with a burning branch, swearing to return with his hide. Then he cries for the first time in his life, and Bagheera tells him these are human tears: he must go to men.

A village woman, Messua, whose son was taken by a tiger, takes him in as her own. Herding the village buffaloes, Mowgli learns from his wolf brother that Shere Khan is sleeping off a meal in a dry ravine. With Akela’s help he traps him between the two halves of the herd, and the tiger is trampled to death. But the boastful village hunter, Buldeo, spreads the story that the boy is a sorcerer, and the villagers stone him out; only Messua runs to say goodbye. Rejected by the wolves for being a man and by the men for being a wolf, Mowgli spreads Shere Khan’s hide on the Council Rock and sings that he is “two Mowglis.” His story ends in The Second Jungle Book (1895), when at nearly seventeen he leaves the jungle for good.

Each story in the book is followed by a poem, and the next four tales leave Mowgli behind. In “The White Seal,” Kotick, a rare white fur seal in the Bering Sea, follows the hunters and sees the clubbing on the killing-grounds. While everyone else looks away, he spends five years searching the oceans for a beach where men cannot reach, and finally follows the slow, silent sea cows through an underwater tunnel to a hidden refuge. When the others laugh, he fights them until they follow him. In “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” a young mongoose, washed out of his burrow by a flood and adopted by an English family in India, discovers that two cobras, Nag and Nagaina, plan to kill the household. Living by the mongoose motto, “Run and find out,” he kills Nag in the bathroom, smashes the eggs and follows Nagaina down her hole to finish the war.

In “Toomai of the Elephants,” a ten-year-old elephant driver’s son is told he may hunt with the men when he has seen the elephants dance, which no man ever has. That very night his old elephant, Kala Nag, carries him into the Garo hills to the secret dance, and he comes back with a new name. In “Her Majesty’s Servants,” the animals of a vast army camp compare their fears through a rainy night, and at the next day’s review the lesson is spelled out for a visiting Afghan chief: everyone obeys the one above, all the way up to the Empress. It is the book at its most imperial.