And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man. When the potter’s donkey slipped in the clay pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey too, and the priest told Messua’s husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as soon as possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli that he would have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they grazed. No one was more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he had been appointed a servant of the village, as it were, he went off to a circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree. It was the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the barber, who knew all the gossip of the village, and old Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and smoked. The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked, and pulled at the big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into the night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in the jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the circle bulged out of their heads. Most of the tales were about animals, for the jungle was always at their door. The deer and the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tiger carried off a man at twilight, within sight of the village gates.
Mowgli, who naturally knew something about what they were talking of,had to cover his face not to show that he was laughing,while Buldeo, the Tower musket across his knees,climbed on from one wonderful story to another,and Mowgli’s shoulders shook.
Buldeo was explaining how the tiger that had carried away Messua’s son was a ghost-tiger, and his body was inhabited by the ghost of a wicked, old money-lender, who had died some years ago. “And I know that this is true,” he said, “because Purun Dass always limped from the blow that he got in a riot when his account books were burned, and the tiger that I speak of he limps, too, for the tracks of his pads are unequal.”
“True, true, that must be the truth,” said the gray-beards, nodding together.
“Are all these tales such cobwebs and moontalk?” said Mowgli. “That tiger limps because he was born lame,as everyone knows. To talk of the soul of a money-lender in a beast that never had the courage of a jackal is child’s talk.”
Buldeo was speechless with surprise for a moment,and the head-man stared.
“Oho!It is the jungle brat, is it?” said Buldeo. “If thou art so wise,better bring his hide to Khanhiwara,for the Government has set a hundred rupees on his life.Better still, talk not when thy elders speak.”
Mowgli rose to go. “All the evening I have lain here listening,” he called back over his shoulder, “and,except once or twice,Buldeo has not said one word of truth concerning the jungle,which is at his very doors. How, then,shall I believe the tales of ghosts and gods and goblins which he says he has seen?”
“It is full time that boy went to herding,” said the head-man,while Buldeo puffed and snorted at Mowgli’s impertinence.
The custom of most Indian villages is for a few boys to take the cattle and buffaloes out to graze in the early morning, and bring them back at night. The very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses. So long as the boys keep with the herds they are safe, for not even the tiger will charge a mob of cattle. But if they straggle to pick flowers or hunt lizards, they are sometimes carried off. Mowgli went through the village street in the dawn, sitting on the back of Rama, the great herd bull. The slaty-blue buffaloes, with their long, backward-sweeping horns and savage eyes, rose out their byres, one by one, and followed him, and Mowgli made it very clear to the children with him that he was the master. He beat the buffaloes with a long, polished bamboo, and told Kamya, one of the boys, to graze the cattle by themselves, while he went on with the buffaloes, and to be very careful not to stray away from the herd.
An Indian grazing ground is all rocks and scrub and tussocks and little ravines,among which the herds scatter and disappear.The buffaloes generally keep to the pools and muddy places,where they lie wallowing or basking in the warm mud for hours.Mowgli drove them on to the edge of the plain where the Waingunga came out of the jungle; then he dropped from Rama’s neck, trotted off to a bamboo clump, and found Gray Brother. “Ah,” said Gray Brother, “I have waited here very many days. What is the meaning of this cattle-herding work?”
“It is an order,” said Mowgli.“I am a village herd for a while.What news of Shere Khan?”
“He has come back to this country,and has waited here a long time for thee.Now he has gone off again, for the game is scarce.But he means to kill thee.”
“Very good,” said Mowgli.“So long as he is away do thou or one of the four brothers sit on that rock,so that I can see thee as I come out of the village.When he comes back wait for me in the ravine by the _dhâk_ tree in the center of the plain. We need not walk into Shere Khan’s mouth.”
Then Mowgli picked out a shady place,and lay down and slept while the buffaloes grazed round him.Herding in India is one of the laziest things in the world.The cattle move and crunch, and lie down,and move on again, and they do not even low.They only grunt, and the buffaloes very seldom say anything,but get down into the muddy pools one after another,and work their way into the mud till only their noses and staring china-blue eyes show above the surface, and then they lie like logs. The sun makes the rocks dance in the heat, and the herd children hear one kite (never any more) whistling almost out of sight overhead, and they know that if they died, or a cow died, that kite would sweep down, and the next kite miles away would see him drop and follow, and the next, and the next, and almost before they were dead there would be a score of hungry kites come out of nowhere. Then they sleep and wake and sleep again, and weave little baskets of dried grass and put grasshoppers in them; or catch two praying mantises and make them fight; or string a necklace of red and black jungle nuts; or watch a lizard basking on a rock, or a snake hunting a frog near the wallows. Then they sing long, long songs with odd native quavers at the end of them, and the day seems longer than most people’s whole lives, and perhaps they make a mud castle with mud figures of men and horses and buffaloes, and put reeds into the men’s hands, and pretend that they are kings and the figures are their armies, or that they are gods to be worshiped. Then evening comes and the children call, and the buffaloes lumber up out of the sticky mud with noises like gunshots going off one after the other, and they all string across the gray plain back to the twinkling village lights.
Day after day Mowgli would lead the buffaloes out to their wallows,and day after day he would see Gray Brother’s back a mile and a half away across the plain (so he knew that Shere Khan had not come back), and day after day he would lie on the grass listening to the noises round him, and dreaming of old days in the jungle. If Shere Khan had made a false step with his lame paw up in the jungles by the Waingunga, Mowgli would have heard him in those long, still mornings.