ore me."

Nearer and nearer came the bay of the Seeonee wolves. "For the Pack,
for the Full Pack it is met!" and a bend in the river drove the dholes
forward among the sands and shoals opposite the Lairs.

Then they saw their mistake. They should have landed half a mile higher
up, and rushed the wolves on dry ground. Now it was too late. The bank
was lined with burning eyes, and except for the horrible pheeal that had
never stopped since sundown, there was no sound in the Jungle. It seemed
as though Won-tolla were fawning on them to come ashore; and "Turn
and take hold!" said the leader of the dholes. The entire Pack flung
themselves at the shore, threshing and squattering through the shoal
water, till the face of the Waingunga was all white and torn, and the
great ripples went from side to side, like bow-waves from a boat. Mowgli
followed the rush, stabbing and slicing as the dholes, huddled together,
rushed up the river-beach in one wave.

Then the long fight began, heaving and straining and splitting and
scattering and narrowing and broadening along the red, wet sands, and
over and between the tangled tree-roots, and through and among the
bushes, and in and out of the grass clumps; for even now the dholes were
two to one. But they met wolves fighting for all that made the Pack,
and not only the short, high, deep-chested, white-tusked hunters of the
Pack, but the anxious-eyed lahinis--the she-wolves of the lair, as the
saying is--fighting for their litters, with here and there a yearling
wolf, his first coat still half woolly, tugging and grappling by their
sides. A wolf, you must know, flies at the throat or snaps at the flank,
while a dhole, by preference, bites at the belly; so when the dholes
were struggling out of the water and had to raise their heads, the odds
were with the wolves. On dry land the wolves suffered; but in the water
or ashore, Mowgli's knife came and went without ceasing. The Four had
worried their way to his side. Gray Brother, crouched between the boy's
knees, was protecting his stomach, while the others guarded his back
and either side, or stood over him when the shock of a leaping, yelling
dhole who had thrown himself full on the steady blade bore him down. For
the rest, it was one tangled confusion--a locked and swaying mob that
moved from right to left and from left to right along the bank; and also
ground round and round slowly on its own centre. Here would be a heaving
mound, like a wat