“Ye can hear Shere Khan below in the thickets.
Thou hast done harm enough for one night.” “Shall I tell him of your gratitude?” said Tabaqui. Indeed, we are very grateful to Shere Khan!” 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. Now the villagers of the Waingunga are angry with him, and he has come here to make our villagers angry. “He has been lame in one foot from his birth. “His mother did not call him Lungri for nothing,” said Mother Wolf, quietly. He will frighten every head of game within ten miles and I-I have to kill for two, these days.” “By the Law of the Jungle he has no right to change his quarters without fair warning.
“He has no right!” Father Wolf began angrily. Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River, twenty miles away. He will hunt among these hills during the next moon, so he has told me.” “Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting-grounds. Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made, and then he said spitefully: 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. “How 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.” “All thanks for this good meal,” he said, licking his lips. Who are we, the Gidur-log, 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. “For a wolf, no,” said Tabaqui “but for so mean a person as myself a dry bone is a good feast. “Enter, then, and look,” said Father Wolf, stiffly “but there is no food here.” We call it hydrophobia, but they call it dewanee-the madness-and run. Even the tiger hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature. 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.
It was the jackal-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. “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.” “‘GOOD LUCK GO WITH YOU, O CHIEF OF THE WOLVES.'” Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. IT was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf 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 the tips.
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