All the Mowgli Stories (Macmillan Collector's Library)

Then the long fight began, heaving and straining and splitting and scattering and narrowing and broadening along the red, wet sands, and over and between the tangled tree-roots, and through and among the bushes, and in and out of the grass clumps; for even now the dholes were two to one. But they met wolves fighting for all that made the Pack, and not only the short, high, deep-chested, white-tusked hunters of the Pack, but the anxious-eyed lahinis—the she-wolves of the lair, as the saying is—fighting for their litters, with here and there a yearling wolf, his first coat still half woolly, tugging and grappling by their sides. A wolf, you must know, flies at the throat or snaps at the flank, while a dhole, by preference, bites at the belly; so when the dholes were struggling out of the water and had to raise their heads, the odds were with the wolves. On dry land the wolves suffered; but in the water or ashore, Mowgli’s knife came and went without ceasing. The Four had worried their way to his side. Gray Brother, crouched between the boy’s knees, was protecting his stomach, while the others guarded his back and either side, or stood over him when the shock of a leaping, yelling dhole who had thrown himself full on the steady blade bore him down. For the rest, it was one tangled confusion—a locked and swaying mob that moved from right to left and from left to right along the bank; and also ground round and round slowly on its own centre. Here would be a heaving mound, like a water-blister in a whirlpool, which would break like a water-blister, and throw up four or five mangled dogs, each striving to get back to the centre; here would be a single wolf borne down by two or three dholes, laboriously dragging them forward, and sinking the while; here a yearling cub would be held up by the pressure round him, though he had been killed early, while his mother, crazed with dumb rage, rolled over and over, snapping, and passing on; and in the middle of the thickest press, perhaps, one wolf and one dhole, forgetting everything else, would be manoeuvring for first hold till they were whirled away by a rush of furious fighters. Once Mowgli passed Akela, a dhole on either flank, and his all but toothless jaws closed over the loins of a third; and once he saw Phao, his teeth set in the throat of a dhole, tugging the unwilling beast forward till the yearlings could finish him. But the bulk of the fight was blind flurry and smother in the dark; hit, trip, and tumble, yelp, groan, and worry-worry-worry, round him and behind him and above him. As the night wore on, the quick, giddy-go-round motion increased. The dholes were cowed and afraid to attack the stronger wolves, but did not yet dare to run away. Mowgli felt that the end was coming soon, and contented himself with striking merely to cripple. The yearlings were growing bolder; there was time now and again to breathe, and pass a word to a friend, and the mere flicker of the knife would sometimes turn a dog aside.

‘The meat is very near the bone,’ Gray Brother yelled. He was bleeding from a score of flesh-wounds.

‘But the bone is yet to be cracked,’ said Mowgli. ‘Eowawa! Thus do we do in the Jungle!’ The red blade ran like a flame along the side of a dhole whose hindquarters were hidden by the weight of a clinging wolf.

‘My kill!’ snorted the wolf through his wrinkled nostrils. ‘Leave him to me.’

‘Is thy stomach still empty, Outlier?’ said Mowgli. Won-tolla was fearfully punished, but his grip had paralysed the dhole, who could not turn round and reach him.

‘By the Bull that bought me,’ said Mowgli, with a bitter laugh, ‘it is the tailless one!’ And indeed it was the big bay-coloured leader.

‘It is not wise to kill cubs and lahinis,’ Mowgli went on philosophically, wiping the blood out of his eyes, ‘unless one has also killed the Outlier; and it is in my stomach that this Won-tolla kills thee.’

A dhole leaped to his leader’s aid; but before his teeth had found Won-tolla’s flank, Mowgli’s knife was in his throat, and Gray Brother took what was left.

‘And thus do we do in the Jungle,’ said Mowgli.

Won-tolla said not a word, only his jaws were closing and closing on the backbone as his life ebbed. The dhole shuddered, his head dropped, and he lay still, and Won-tolla dropped above him.

‘Huh! The Blood Debt is paid,’ said Mowgli. ‘Sing the song, Won-tolla.’

‘He hunts no more,’ said Gray Brother; ‘and Akela, too, is silent this long time.’

‘The bone is cracked!’ thundered Phao, son of Phaona. ‘They go! Kill, kill out, O hunters of the Free People!’

Dhole after dhole was slinking away from those dark and bloody sands to the river, to the thick Jungle, upstream or down-stream as he saw the road clear.

‘The debt! The debt!’ shouted Mowgli. ‘Pay the debt! They have slain the Lone Wolf! Let not a dog go!’