and would come across the great gray brute all
alone, scribing and rending the bark of a tall tree, his mouth dripping
with foam, and his eyes blazing like fire. Or he would turn aside to the
sound of clashing horns and hissing grunts, and dash past a couple of
furious sambhur, staggering to and fro with lowered heads, striped with
blood that showed black in the moonlight. Or at some rushing ford he
would hear Jacala the Crocodile bellowing like a bull, or disturb a
twined knot of the Poison People, but before they could strike he would
be away and across the glistening shingle, and deep in the Jungle again.

So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes singing to himself, the
happiest thing in all the Jungle that night, till the smell of the
flowers warned him that he was near the marshes, and those lay far
beyond his farthest hunting-grounds.

Here, again, a man-trained man would have sunk overhead in three
strides, but Mowgli's feet had eyes in them, and they passed him from
tussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without asking help from
the eyes in his head. He ran out to the middle of the swamp, disturbing
the duck as he ran, and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk lapped in
the black water. The marsh was awake all round him, for in the spring
the Bird People sleep very lightly, and companies of them were coming
or going the night through. But no one took any notice of Mowgli sitting
among the tall reeds humming songs without words, and looking at the
soles of his hard brown feet in case of neglected thorns. All his
unhappiness seemed to have been left behind in his own Jungle, and he
was just beginning a full-throat song when it came back again--ten times
worse than before.

This time Mowgli was frightened. "It is here also!" he said half aloud.
"It has followed me," and he looked over his shoulder to see whether
the It were not standing behind him. "There is no one here." The night
noises of the marsh went on, but never a bird or beast spoke to him, and
the new feeling of misery grew.

"I have surely eaten poison," he said in an awe-stricken voice. "It must
be that carelessly I have eaten poison, and my strength is going from
me. I was afraid--and yet it was not _I_ that was afraid--Mowgli was
afraid when the two wolves fought. Akela, or even Phao, would have
silenced them; yet Mowgli was afraid. That is true sign I have eaten
poison.... But what do they care in the Jungle? They sing and howl and
fight,