might have saved myself the message.'

Father Wolf listened, and below in the valley that ran down to a
little river, he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a
tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle
knows it.

'The fool!' said Father Wolf. 'To begin a night's work with that
noise. Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga
bullocks?'

'H'sh. It is neither bullock nor buck he hunts to-night,' said Mother
Wolf. 'It is Man.' The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr
that seemed to come from every quarter of the compass. It was the
noise that bewilders woodcutters and gipsies sleeping in the open,
and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the tiger.

'Man!' said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth. 'Faugh! Are
there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must eat Man,
and on our ground too!'

The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason,
forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his
children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the
hunting-grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is
that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on
elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and
rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers. The reason
the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most
defenceless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch
him. They say too--and it is true--that man-eaters become mangy, and
lose their teeth.

The purr grew louder, and ended in the full-throated 'Aaarh!' of the
tiger's charge.

Then there was a howl--an untigerish howl--from Shere Khan. He has
missed,' said Mother Wolf. 'What is it?'

Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan muttering and
mumbling savagely, as he tumbled about in the scrub.

'The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a woodcutters'
camp-fire, and has burned his feet,' said Father Wolf, with a grunt.
'Tabaqui is with him.'

'Something is coming up hill,' said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear.
'Get ready.'

The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped
with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had
been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the
world--the wolf checked in mid spring. He made his bound before he
saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to