ill them both?"

The fight went on till one wolf ran away, and Mowgli was left alone on
the torn and bloody ground, looking now at his knife, and now at his
legs and arms, while the feeling of unhappiness he had never known
before covered him as water covers a log.

He killed early that evening and ate but little, so as to be in good
fettle for his spring running, and he ate alone because all the Jungle
People were away singing or fighting. It was a perfect white night,
as they call it. All green things seemed to have made a month's growth
since the morning. The branch that was yellow-leaved the day before
dripped sap when Mowgli broke it. The mosses curled deep and warm over
his feet, the young grass had no cutting edges, and all the voices of
the Jungle boomed like one deep harp-string touched by the moon--the
Moon of New Talk, who splashed her light full on rock and pool, slipped
it between trunk and creeper, and sifted it through a million leaves.
Forgetting his unhappiness, Mowgli sang aloud with pure delight as he
settled into his stride. It was more like flying than anything else, for
he had chosen the long downward slope that leads to the Northern Marshes
through the heart of the main Jungle, where the springy ground deadened
the fall of his feet. A man-taught man would have picked his way with
many stumbles through the cheating moonlight, but Mowgli's 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;