Page 206 - THE JUNGLE BOOK

The Jungle Book

When they got back to camp it was time for the
evening meal. Petersen Sahib ate alone in his tent, but he
gave orders that the camp should have two sheep and
some fowls, as well as a double ration of flour and rice and

salt, for he knew that there would be a feast.
Big Toomai had come up hotfoot from the camp in the
plains to search for his son and his elephant, and now that
he had found them he looked at them as though he were
afraid of them both. And there was a feast by the blazing
campfires in front of the lines of picketed elephants, and
Little Toomai was the hero of it all. And the big brown
elephant catchers, the trackers and drivers and ropers, and
the men who know all the secrets of breaking the wildest
elephants, passed him from one to the other, and they
marked his forehead with blood from the breast of a newly
killed jungle-cock, to show that he was a forester, initiated
and free of all the jungles.
And at last, when the flames died down, and the red
light of the logs made the elephants look as though they
had been dipped in blood too, Machua Appa, the head of
all the drivers of all the Keddahs—Machua Appa, Petersen
Sahib’s other self, who had never seen a made road in
forty years: Machua Appa, who was so great that he had
no other name than Machua Appa,—leaped to his feet,

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