Page 205 - THE JUNGLE BOOK

The Jungle Book

They made more room with their feet. I have seen it. Kala
Nag took me, and I saw. Also Kala Nag is very leg-weary!’
Little Toomai lay back and slept all through the long
afternoon and into the twilight, and while he slept

Petersen Sahib and Machua Appa followed the track of the
two elephants for fifteen miles across the hills. Petersen
Sahib had spent eighteen years in catching elephants, and
he had only once before found such a dance-place.
Machua Appa had no need to look twice at the clearing to
see what had been done there, or to scratch with his toe in
the packed, rammed earth.
‘The child speaks truth,’ said he. ‘All this was done last
night, and I have counted seventy tracks crossing the river.
See, Sahib, where Pudmini’s leg-iron cut the bark of that
tree! Yes; she was there too.’
They looked at one another and up and down, and
they wondered. For the ways of elephants are beyond the
wit of any man, black or white, to fathom.
‘Forty years and five,’ said Machua Appa, ‘have I
followed my lord, the elephant, but never have I heard
that any child of man had seen what this child has seen. By
all the Gods of the Hills, it is—what can we say?’ and he
shook his head.

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