snake was to him as his father and mother and yet he had come away in
a hurry without taking a proper farewell, so he went to see whether
it was still there; but he could not find it and he asked the peepul
tree and no answer came so he had to return home disappointed.

XX. Kara and Guja.

Once upon a time there were two brothers named Kara and Guja who
were first class shots with the bow and arrow. In the country
where they lived, a pair of kites were doing great damage: they
had young ones in a nest in a tree and used to carry off children
to feed their nestlings until the whole country was desolated. So
the whole population went in a body to the Raja and told him that
they would have to leave the country if he could not have the kites
killed. Then the Raja made proclamation that any one who could kill
the two kites should receive a large tract of land as a reward, and
thereupon many men tried to kill them; but the kites had made their
nest of ploughs and clod-crushers so that the arrows could not hit
them, and the shooters had to give up the attempt. At last Kara and
Guja thought that they would try, so they made an ambush and waited
till the birds came to the nest to feed their young and then shot them
both through the hole in a clod-crusher into which the pole fits, and
the two kites fell down dead, at the source of the Ganges and Jumna,
and where they fell they made a great depression in the ground. Then
Kara and Guja carried the bodies to the Raja and he gave them a grant
of land; and their grateful neighbours made a large rice field of the
depression which the kites had made in the earth and this was given
to Kara and Guja as service land to their great delight.

Kara and Guja used to spend their time in the forest, living on what
they could find there; they slept in a cave and at evening would
cook their rice there or roast jungle roots. One day a tiger spied
them out as they were roasting tubers and came up to them suddenly
and said. "What are you cooking? Give me some or I will eat you." So
while they went on eating the roasted tubers, they threw the coals
from the fire to the tiger at the mouth of the cave and he crunched
them up and every now and then they threw him a bit of something good
to eat; the tiger would not go away but lay there expecting to be fed,
and Kara and Guja debated how to get rid of him. Then Guja suddenly
jumped up and dashed at the tiger and caught him by the tail and began