ust a little afraid of him.
The things that he did and saw and heard when he was wandering from one
people to another, with or without his four companions, would make many
many stories, each as long as this one. So you will never be told how
he met the Mad Elephant of Mandla, who killed two-and-twenty bullocks
drawing eleven carts of coined silver to the Government Treasury,
and scattered the shiny rupees in the dust; how he fought Jacala, the
Crocodile, all one long night in the Marshes of the North, and broke his
skinning-knife on the brute's back-plates; how he found a new and longer
knife round the neck of a man who had been killed by a wild boar, and
how he tracked that boar and killed him as a fair price for the knife;
how he was caught up once in the Great Famine, by the moving of the
deer, and nearly crushed to death in the swaying hot herds; how he saved
Hathi the Silent from being once more trapped in a pit with a stake
at the bottom, and how, next day, he himself fell into a very cunning
leopard-trap, and how Hathi broke the thick wooden bars to pieces above
him; how he milked the wild buffaloes in the swamp, and how----

But we must tell one tale at a time. Father and Mother Wolf died, and
Mowgli rolled a big boulder against the mouth of their cave, and cried
the Death Song over them; Baloo grew very old and stiff, and even
Bagheera, whose nerves were steel and whose muscles were iron, was a
shade slower on the kill than he had been. Akela turned from gray to
milky white with pure age; his ribs stuck out, and he walked as though
he had been made of wood, and Mowgli killed for him. But the young
wolves, the children of the disbanded Seeonee Pack, throve and
increased, and when there were about forty of them, masterless,
full-voiced, clean-footed five-year-olds, Akela told them that they
ought to gather themselves together and follow the Law, and run under
one head, as befitted the Free People.

This was not a question in which Mowgli concerned himself, for, as he
said, he had eaten sour fruit, and he knew the tree it hung from; but
when Phao, son of Phaona (his father was the Gray Tracker in the days
of Akela's headship), fought his way to the leadership of the Pack,
according to the Jungle Law, and the old calls and songs began to ring
under the stars once more, Mowgli came to the Council Rock for memory's
sake. When he chose to speak the Pack waited till he had finished, and
he sat at Akela's side on the r