"Then Tha called us all together and said: 'The first of your masters
has brought Death into the Jungle, and the second Shame. Now it is
time there was a Law, and a Law that ye must not break. Now ye shall
know Fear, and when ye have found him ye shall know that he is your
master, and the rest shall follow.' Then we of the Jungle said, 'What
is Fear?' And Tha said, 'Seek till ye find.' So we went up and down
the Jungle seeking for Fear, and presently the buffaloes--"
"Ugh!" said Mysa, the leader of the buffaloes, from their sand-bank.
"Yes, Mysa, it was the buffaloes. They came back with the news that in
a cave in the Jungle sat Fear, and that he had no hair, and went upon
his hind legs. Then we of the Jungle followed the herd till we came to
that cave, and Fear stood at the mouth of it, and he was, as the
buffaloes had said, hairless, and he walked upon his hinder legs. When
he saw us he cried out, and his voice filled us with the fear that we
have now of that voice when we hear it, and we ran away, tramping upon
and tearing each other because we were afraid. That night, so it was
told to me, we of the Jungle did not lie down together as used to be
our custom, but each tribe drew off by itself--the pig with the pig,
the deer with the deer; horn to horn, hoof to hoof,--like keeping to
like, and so lay shaking in the Jungle.
"Only the First of the Tigers was not with us, for he was still hidden
in the marshes of the North, and when word was brought to him of the
Thing we had seen in the cave, he said: 'I will go to this Thing and
break his neck.' So he ran all the night till he came to the cave; but
the trees and the creepers on his path, remembering the order that
Tha had given, let down their branches and marked him as he ran,
drawing their fingers across his back, his flank, his forehead, and
his jowl. Wherever they touched him there was a mark and a stripe upon
his yellow hide. _And those stripes do his children wear to this day!_
When he came to the cave, Fear, the Hairless One, put out his hand and
called him 'The Striped One that comes by night,' and the First of the
Tigers was afraid of the Hairless One, and ran back to the swamps
howling."
Mowgli chuckled quietly here, his chin in the water.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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