This is the Law of the Jungle—which is as old and as unalterable as the gray stone of the hills, and as wide as the night that folds over the bamboo brakes. By that Law, the belly that eats in the morning must be governed by the head that stays cool through the dark; and he who runs before the Word is given is no better than a pariah-dog snapping at flies in the dust-heap of a village.
The fog along the banks of the Waingunga was not the soft, white wool that sleeps in the valleys after rain. It was the heavy, cold, breath-stealing river-damp that rises from the black mud of the channels before the sun has split the sky—a mist so thick that a wolf could press his black nose against his own paw and see neither flesh nor bone. It lay five feet deep over the reed-beds, clinging to the rough bark of the teak trees and turning the dry grass into long, dripping strings of silver wire.
Upon the Council Rock—the great, flat slab of sandstone worn smooth by the ribs of fifty generations of free-hunters—sat Akela. The Lone Wolf was gray as the lichen on a dead oak, and his yellow eyes were half-shut, watching the mist coil like white snakes around the base of the stone. Below him, crouching in the cold crevices where the wind could not bite, lay the young hunters of the Seeonee Pack. They were sleek-ribbed, thick-necked, and hot-blooded, their bellies tight with three days of empty running, and their minds full of the foolish pride that comes with the first growth of the winter coat.
From the dark hollows below the rock came a low, eager rustle, and then a young male—a broad-browed cub of two years named Lala, whose teeth had never yet bitten into the shoulder of a full-grown bull—stepped out upon a ledge. His tail was stiff, his whiskers twitched with impatience, and his voice was as sharp as a broken dry stick.
"Why do we lie here like sleepy otters in the mud?" he whined, turning his head toward the gray outline of the Lone Wolf. "The dawn is breaking! The air is cold enough to make a wolf run for the mere joy of the blood-warmth! Let us go down to the river-meadows and take what the Jungle gives us!"
A second young wolf, dark-coated and heavy-jawed, lifted his snout from his paws and let out a long, singing howl that rattled in his throat:
"As the dawn was breaking the Wolf-pack yelled
Once, twice, and again!"
Three more of the young males took up the cry, their voices joining in a ragged chorus that beat against the damp rock and echoed hollowly down the ravine toward the Waingunga. They stepped forward, their claws clicking sharply on the stone, eager to break away into the gray void below.
"Silence!"
The word did not come as a bark, nor as a growl. It was the deep, chest-toned rumble of Akela, the voice that had held sixty hunters in their places when the great hunts of the south were run. The young wolves dropped their tails, though Phao still grumbled in his teeth.
"We wait for the Word," Akela said, without turning his head. "And the Word comes only when Bhoora speaks."
"Bhoora!" Lala spat, his gray lip curling back over his white canines. "The Pale Ghost sleeps in some dry hole while we freeze on the stone! Give me the lead, Akela! I can follow the trail of Bhoora and the four wolves who went with him before the moon died. I can track them through the long grass by the smell of their feet, and we shall save the time it takes for a beetle to cross the path!"
Akela turned his great gray head very slowly. His eyes, clear and cold as rain-water in a rock-hollow, fixed upon the young hunter until Lala shifted his feet and looked down at the wet moss.
"Track them by the smell of their feet?" Akela said, and there was a dry, rustling laugh deep in his throat—the laugh of an old wolf who has seen thirty generations of foolish cubs die in the thorn-thickets. "Go then, cub! Step down into the long grass of the nullah where the morning fog has settled! Go look for the trail of the Pale Ghost!"
He stood up, his long, scarred forelegs locking like iron pillars beneath his gray chest, and looked down at the small group of hunters gathered in the shadow of the Council Rock.
"How often must the Old Voice tell you that the fog is the great wiper of marks?" Akela said, his voice dropping into the cadence that the Pack knew best—the measured, rhythmic speech of the Law-givers. "The morning damp falls like sand from a tipped basket. Before a wolf can take ten bounds into the high grass, the mist has swallowed his shadow, and the cold dew has washed his foot-scent from the earth. You would hunt by your noses when your noses are filled with the smell of wet leaf-mould, and you would run into the horns of the Big Deer before you knew his tail was turned toward you!"
He stepped down one ledge, his paws making no more sound than falling thistle-down.
"The Scout Wolves were chosen before your mothers had opened their eyes in the lair," the Lone Wolf continued, looking round the circle of quieted cubs. "They were chosen because they have feet in the jungle that leave no mark! When Bhoora walks through the dry bamboo, the stalks do not click. When he steps upon the dry mud of the river-bank, the crust does not break. If a running Pack were to go down to the Waingunga now, making a noise like a herd of buffaloes in a dry creek, who do you think would hear us?"
He paused, his eyes narrowing. "Bagheera, resting on his branch above the Pool, would hear us and turn his head, knowing that the wolves are foolish today. Shere Khan, lying in the scrub by the pig-wallows, would hear us and slip downwind to stand between us and the kill. The Dhole—the red murder-dogs of the Deccan, who have crossed the Waingunga this very night—would mark our line and follow behind to steal the brisket from our teeth before the hide was cold! The Cheetal would bark; the Bison would turn his broad head; the Wild Buffalo would smash through the reeds into the deep water; and Hiran Raja—the Great Sambhur—would be three miles up the Seonee hills before you had cleared the first ravine!"
From the back of the crowd, where the young female wolves sat with the half-grown cubs huddled against their warm flanks, a soft, small voice lifted up—the voice of a young female cub whose mother had been born in the same lair as Bhoora:
"He has eyes that see in the dark!" she cried.
And the little cubs, tumbling over one another in the dry grass at the foot of the rock, squeaked together in a high, clear treble:
"Eyes that see in the dark—the dark!"
"Aye," Akela grunted, his gray muzzle dropping toward his paws. "He sees what the sun hides and what the fog covers. He knows where the Sambhur sleeps because he does not look with his eyes alone; he looks with his skin, with his ears, and with the breath that comes through his teeth. Therefore we sit upon the Rock until the Pale Ghost sends us the Word."
Four miles to the south, where the Waingunga bends sharply under the red-sandstone bluffs of the Mahadev Hills, the world was as dark and as thick as cold porridge. The hill-streams came down through the narrow clefts in the rock, tumbling over black boulders with a noise like the heavy breathing of bullocks, before losing themselves in the broad, reed-choked marshes of the river-bottom.
In the middle of a high island of elephant-grass, where the stalks stood twelve feet tall and as thick as a man's thumb, sat Bhoora.
He did not look like a wolf of the Seonee Pack. His coat was neither gray nor red, but the pale, bleached yellow of dry bamboo-husks that have layen under the summer sun for three months. Against the gray fog and the pale sand of the river-margin, he was nothing—a shadow without a body, a drift of dry grass moved by the morning wind.
Beside him, their flanks rising and falling without a sound, crouched two adult male wolves—Gray-Claw, whose right ear was split from an old fight with a leopard, and Kalu, the dark hunter whose chest was as broad as a small bullock's. The fourth wolf of their troop, Phao, had already turned his tail three hours ago, slipping back through the river-mist like a dry leaf blown by the breeze to carry the first Word to Akela at the Council Rock.
Bhoora lifted his long, thin muzzle. His nose-black twitched once, twice, and three times.
"They are all here," he whispered, his voice no louder than the sound of a moth’s wing brushing against a leaf. "The herd is not scattered as it was when the moon was high. The big stag has called them in from the hill-streams."
"Where are they?" Gray-Claw hissed, his yellow eyes straining against the thick curtain of gray mist that hung over the water.
"Twenty paces into the open ground where the wild plantains grow," Bhoora answered. "Hiran Raja stands in the center. He has three young spike-horns with him, four hinds, and the two small fawns that were born after the first rains. He knows we are in the forest, but he does not know where our feet are set."
Through the yellow fog, not thirty yards away, came the sound of a heavy hoof striking a wet stone—tink!—followed by the deep, wet snort of a great beast whose nostrils are full of the morning damp.
It was Hiran Raja himself—the great master-Sambhur whom the villagers of Gangapura spoke of with fear and wonder. His body was dark as a burnt log, his neck was thick with the heavy mud of his river-wallow, and his antlers—six broad, jagged tines that looked like the branches of a dead iron-wood tree—swept back over his shoulders until they almost touched his ribs.
Around him, huddled so close that their flanks brushed against one another, stood the younger males and the hinds. Their ears were turning like broad leaves in a draft, their dark eyes wide with the terror of the unseen.
The big stag lifted his head, his black nose dripping with cold dew. He did not run, for he was an old king who had lived through ten hunting-seasons by knowing that to run in the fog is to run into the jaws of the gray hunters.
"Listen!" the Great Sambhur grunted to the young spike-horns who were pressing against his shoulder. "Keep your ears wide! Hark! Do you hear the sound of a dry leaf breaking?"
The young males held their breath, their thin legs trembling in the cold mud.
"O Hark!" the stag rasped again, his voice dropping into a low, vibrating rumble that made the water-drops tremble on the lotus leaves. "Hear carefully—once, twice, and again! For they are not the foolish wild dogs that run with a loud noise down the open timber. They are led by the Great One—the gray wolf of the Council Rock whom the humans call Akela! And somewhere—somewhere in the white mist where the eye sees only water—walks the Pale Ghost! He who has no scent, who leaves no mark, and who comes upon the herd like the cold air before the rain!"
Inside the high grass, Bhoora turned his head toward Kalu. His pale yellow eyes were bright with the cold, fierce intelligence of the scout who has built his trap and needs only to pull the string.
"Now," Bhoora whispered. "They are tight together, as a herd should be when the danger is near. If they stay in a ring, they cannot scatter into the ravines where the Pack would lose them one by one. We must keep them where they stand until Akela brings the hunters down from the stone."
He nudged Kalu with his pale shoulder.
"Give tongue!" Bhoora commanded softly. "Give tongue to it as I told you! Call from the low bank behind the plantains! And you, Gray-Claw, drop back fifty paces into the dry nullah and call from the rocks! Make them believe the Pack is on three sides of them!"
Kalu drew a deep breath into his broad chest, dropped his chin until it almost touched the wet sand between his paws, and let out the hunting-call—not the loud, full-throated bay of a wolf who has brought his prey to a stand, but the eerie, rising bell-note of a scout who calls down the wind:
"Tongue—give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!
Once, twice, and again!"
The sound rose up through the damp air, echoing off the sandstone bluffs of the Mahadev Hills until it seemed to come not from one wolf, but from five—from the river-bank, from the high grass, and from the stony slopes behind the plantain-grove.
Before the echo had died among the rocks, Gray-Claw lifted his voice from the dry nullah to the west—a long, mournful howl that ended in a sharp, metallic bark:
Once!
And then again, higher and clearer, from the shadow of the hill-stream:
Twice!
And a third time, from the very edge of the bamboo-brake where the gray fog was thinnest:
And again!
The great stag let out a whistling bell of alarm—a sound that shook the mist from the wild-indigo bushes—and swung his massive antlers around toward the river.
"Hold!" Hiran Raja bellowed to the young males who were ready to break and run toward the open plain. "Hold your ground! The gray hunters are in the nullah! They are in the grass! They are behind the stone! If you run now, you run into their teeth! Stand back-to-back and present the spears!"
The young bulls turned, locking their heads together, their short tines forming a wall of bone and horn, while the hinds and the small fawns pressed into the deep center of the ring. They stood frozen in the cold light, their breath rising in white plumes that joined the river-mist, waiting for the gray death that they believed was closing in from every side.
And all the while, not twenty paces away in the yellow reed-bed, Bhoora sat quietly upon his haunches.
He did not bay. He did not growl. He did not move so much as a single hair of his pale, sun-bleached coat. He merely watched them with his wide, yellow, unblinking eyes—the eyes that could see through the fog, through the dark, and through the foolish minds of the forest-folk who hunt by strength instead of the Law.
Far up the valley, down from the cold heights of the Council Rock and across the stony slopes of the Seonee hills, came a new sound—a sound that made the grass-roots tremble and the cold mud settle in the river-beds. It was not the single voice of a scout, nor the frantic whine of a cub, but the full, deep, rhythmic baying of thirty adult hunters running in line, their feet making no mark upon the damp earth, their eyes fixed upon the Word that had been sent down from the hills.
Bhoora turned his head toward the north, his black nose catching the faint, warm scent of his brothers coming down through the timber. A small, thin smile seemed to pass over his pale muzzle as he dropped his belly back into the damp sand, waiting for Akela to reach the edge of the clearing.
The dawn had broken at last over the Waingunga; the fog was beginning to lift into long, gray ribbons under the first yellow light of the sun; and the hunt of the Seonee Pack was begun.
