All the Mowgli Stories (Macmillan Collector's Library)

‘Allah! Since when have tigers been driven to and fro like cattle by naked men?’ said Gisborne, aghast at the man’s audacity.

He laughed again softly. ‘Nay, then, come along with me and shoot him in thy own way with the big English rifle.’

Gisborne stepped in his guide’s track, twisted, crawled, and clomb and stooped and suffered through all the many agonies of a jungle-stalk. He was purple and dripping with sweat when Mowgli at the last bade him raise his head and peer over a blue baked rock near a tiny hill pool. By the waterside lay the tiger extended and at ease, lazily licking clean again an enormous elbow and fore-paw. He was old, yellow-toothed, and not a little mangy, but in that setting and sunshine, imposing enough.

Gisborne had no false ideas of sport where the man-eater was concerned. This thing was vermin, to be killed as speedily as possible. He waited to recover his breath, rested the rifle on the rock and whistled. The brute’s head turned slowly not twenty feet from the rifle-mouth, and Gisborne planted his shots, businesslike, one behind the shoulder and the other a little below the eye. At that range the heavy bones were no guard against the rending bullets.

‘Well, the skin was not worth keeping at any rate,’ said he, as the smoke cleared away and the beast lay kicking and gasping in the last agony.

‘A dog’s death for a dog,’ said Mowgli quietly. ‘Indeed there is nothing in that carrion worth taking away.’

‘The whiskers. Dost thou not take the whiskers?’ said Gisborne, who knew how the rangers valued such things.

‘I? Am I a lousy shikarri of the jungle to paddle with a tiger’s muzzle? Let him lie. Here come his friends already.’

A dropping kite whistled shrilly overhead, as Gisborne snapped out the empty shells, and wiped his face.

‘And if thou art not a shikarri, where didst thou learn thy knowledge of the tiger-folk?’ said he. ‘No tracker could have done better.’

‘I hate all tigers,’ said Mowgli curtly. ‘Let the Sahib give me his gun to carry. Arré, it is a very fine one. And where does the Sahib go now?’

‘To my house.’

‘May I come? I have never yet looked within a white man’s house.’

Gisborne returned to his bungalow, Mowgli striding noiselessly before him, his brown skin glistening in the sunlight.

He stared curiously at the verandah and the two chairs there, fingered the split bamboo shade curtains with suspicion, and entered, looking always behind him. Gisborne loosed a curtain to keep out the sun. It dropped with a clatter, but almost before it touched the flagging of the verandah Mowgli had leaped clear, and was standing with heaving chest in the open.

‘It is a trap,’ he said quickly.

Gisborne laughed. ‘White men do not trap men. Indeed thou art altogether of the jungle.’

‘I see,’ said Mowgli, ‘it has neither catch nor fall. I—I never beheld these things till to-day.’

He came in on tiptoe and stared with large eyes at the furniture of the two rooms. Abdul Gafur, who was laying lunch, looked at him with deep disgust.

‘So much trouble to eat, and so much trouble to lie down after you have eaten!’ said Mowgli with a grin. ‘We do better in the jungle. It is very wonderful. There are very many rich things here. Is the Sahib not afraid that he may be robbed? I have never seen such wonderful things.’ He was staring at a dusty Benares brass plate on a rickety bracket.

‘Only a thief from the jungle would rob here,’ said Abdul Gafur, setting down a plate with a clatter. Mowgli opened his eyes wide and stared at the white-bearded Mohammedan.

‘In my country when goats bleat very loud we cut their throats,’ he returned cheerfully. ‘But have no fear, thou. I am going.’

He turned and disappeared into the rukh. Gisborne looked after him with a laugh that ended in a little sigh. There was not much outside his regular work to interest the Forest Officer, and this son of the forest, who seemed to know tigers as other people know dogs, would have been a diversion.

‘He’s a most wonderful chap,’ thought Gisborne; ‘he’s like the illustrations in the Classical Dictionary. I wish I could have made him a gun-boy. There’s no fun in shikarring alone, and this fellow would have been a perfect shikarri. I wonder what in the world he is.’

That evening he sat on the verandah under the stars smoking as he wondered. A puff of smoke curled from the pipe-bowl. As it cleared he was aware of Mowgli sitting with arms crossed on the verandah edge. A ghost could not have drifted up more noiselessly. Gisborne started and let the pipe drop.

‘There is no man to talk to out there in the rukh,’ said Mowgli; ‘I came here, therefore.’ He picked up the pipe and returned it to Gisborne.

‘Oh,’ said Gisborne, and after a long pause, ‘What news is there in the rukh? Hast thou found another tiger?’