muscles, trained by years of experience, bore him up as though
he were a feather. When a rotten log or a hidden stone turned
under his foot he saved himself, never checking his pace,
without effort and without thought. When he tired of ground-
going he threw up his hands monkey-fashion to the nearest
creeper, and seemed to float rather than to climb up into the
thin branches, whence he would follow a tree-road till his mood
changed, and he shot downward in a long, leafy curve to the
levels again. There were still, hot hollows surrounded by wet
rocks where he could hardly breathe for the heavy scents of the
night flowers and the bloom along the creeper buds; dark avenues
where the moonlight lay in belts as regular as checkered marbles
in a church aisle; thickets where the wet young growth stood
breast-high about him and threw its arms round his waist;
and hilltops crowned with broken rock, where he leaped from
stone to stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes.
He would hear, very faint and far off, the chug-drug of a boar
sharpening his tusks on a bole; and would come across the great
gray brute all alone, scribing and rending the bark of a tall
tree, his mouth dripping with foam, and his eyes blazing like
fire. Or he would turn aside to the sound of clashing horns and
hissing grunts, and dash past a couple of furious sambhur,
staggering to and fro with lowered heads, striped with blood
that showed black in the moonlight. Or at some rushing ford he
would hear Jacala the Crocodile bellowing like a bull,
or disturb a twined knot of the Poison People, but before they
could strike he would be away and across the glistening shingle,
and deep in the Jungle again.

So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes singing to himself,
the happiest thing in all the Jungle that night, till the smell
of the flowers warned him that he was near the marshes,
and those lay far beyond his farthest hunting-grounds.

Here, again, a man-trained man would have sunk overhead in three
strides, but Mowgli's feet had eyes in them, and they passed him
from tussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without
asking help from the eyes in his head. He ran out to the middle
of the swamp, disturbing the duck as he ran, and sat down on a
moss-coated tree-trunk lapped in the black water. The marsh was
awake all round him, for in the spring the Bird People sleep
very lightly, and companies of them were coming or going the
night through. But no one took any notice of Mowgli sitting
among the tall reeds humming songs without words, and looking at
the soles of his hard brown feet in case of neglected thorns.
All his unhappiness seemed to have been left behind in his own
Jungle, and he was just beginning a full-throat song when it came
back again--ten times worse than before.

This time Mowgli was frightened. "It is here also!" he said half
aloud. "It has followed me," and he looked over his shoulder to
see whether the It were not standing behind him. "There is no
one here." The night noises of the marsh went on, but never a
bird or beast spoke to him, and the new feeling of misery grew.

"I have surely eaten poison," he said in an awe-stricken voice.
"It must be that carelessly I have eaten poison, and my strength
is going from me. I was afraid--and yet it was not _I_ that was
afraid--Mowgli was afraid when the two wolves fought. Akela, or
even Phao, would have silenced them; yet Mowgli was afraid.
That is true sign I have eaten poison. . . . But what do they
care in the Jungle? They sing and howl and fight, and run in
companies under the moon, and I--Hai-mai!--I am dying in the
marshes, of that poison which I have eaten." He was so sorry for
himself that he nearly wept. "And after," he went on, "they will
find me lying in the black water. Nay, I will go back to my own
Jungle, and I will die upon the Council Rock, and Bagheera,
whom I love, if he is not screaming in the valley--Bagheera,
perhaps, may watch by what is left for a little, lest Chil use
me as he used Akela."

A large, warm tear splashed down on his knee, and, miserable as
he was, Mowgli felt happy that he was so miserable, if you can
understand that upside-down sort of happiness. "As Chil the
Kite used Akela," he repeated, "on the night I saved the Pack
from Red Dog." He was quiet for a little, thinking of the
last words of the Lone Wolf, which you, of course, remember.
"Now Akela said to me many foolish things before he died,
for when we die our stomachs change. He said . . . None the
less, I AM of the Jungle!"

In his excitement, as he remembered the fight on Waingunga bank,
he shouted the last words aloud, and a wild buffalo-cow among
the reeds sprang to her knees, snorting, "Man!"

"Uhh!" said Mysa the Wild Buffalo (Mowgli could hear him turn
in his wallow), "THAT is no man. It is only the hairless wolf
of the Seeonee Pack. On such nights runs he to and fro."

"Uhh!" said the cow, dropping her head again to graze,
"I thought it was Man."

"I say no. Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?" lowed Mysa.

"Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?" the boy called back mockingly.
"That is all Mysa thinks for: Is it danger? But for Mowgli,
who goes to and fro in the Jungle by night, watching, what
do ye care?"

"How loud he cries!" said the cow. "Thus do they cry," Mysa


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