The Jungle Book

, and it is un­sports­man­like to touch him. They say too—and it is true—that man-eaters be­come mangy, and lose their teeth.
The purr grew louder, and ended in the full-throated “Aaarh!” of the tiger’s charge.
Then there was a howl—an untiger­ish howl—from Shere Khan. “He has missed,” said Mother Wolf. “What is it?”
Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan mut­ter­ing and mum­bling sav­agely, as he tum­bled about in the scrub.
“The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a wood­cut­ters’ camp­fi

blan­ket, and go out to tend the cows in the byre.

tooth even scratched the skin, as he laid it down among the cubs.

“Is that a man’s cub?” said Mother Wolf. “I have never seen one. Bring it here.”

A wolf ac­cus­tomed to mov­ing his own cubs can, if nec­es­sary, mouth an egg with­out break­ing it, and though Father Wolf’s jaws closed right on the child’s back not a

tum­bling

dis­grace­ful

Then more than half the Pack yelled: “A man—a man! What has a man to do with us? Let him go to his own place.”

“And turn all the peo­ple of the vil­lages against us?” snarled Shere Khan. “No; give him to me. He is a man, and none of us can look him be­tween the eyes.”

There was a long hush, for no sin­gle wolf cared to fight Akela to the death. Then Shere Khan roared: “Bah! What have we to do with this tooth­less fool? He is doomed to die! It is the man-cub who has lived too long. Free Peo­ple, he was my meat from the first. Give him to me. I am weary of this man-wolf folly. He has trou­bled the jun­gle for ten sea­sons. Give me the man-cub, or I will hunt here al­ways, and not give you one bone! He is a man—a man’s child, and from the mar­row of my bones I hate him!”

Akela raised his old head wearily:

“Free Peo­ple, and ye too, jack­als of Shere Khan, for twelve sea­sons I have led ye to and from the kill, and in all that time not one has been trapped or maimed. Now I have missed my kill. Ye know how that plot was made. Ye know how ye brought me up to an un­tried buck to make my weak­ness known. It was clev­erly done. Your right is to kill me here on the Coun­cil Rock now. There­fore I ask, ‘Who comes to make an end of the Lone Wolf?’ For it is my right, by the Law of the Jun­gle, that ye come one by one.”

When a leader of the Pack has missed his kill, he is called the Dead Wolf as long as he lives, which is not long, as a rule.