Page 180 - THE JUNGLE BOOK

The Jungle Book

difficult to judge distances), and, picking out the biggest
and wildest tusker of the mob, would hammer him and
hustle him into quiet while the men on the backs of the
other elephants roped and tied the smaller ones.

There was nothing in the way of fighting that Kala
Nag, the old wise Black Snake, did not know, for he had
stood up more than once in his time to the charge of the
wounded tiger, and, curling up his soft trunk to be out of
harm’s way, had knocked the springing brute sideways in
mid-air with a quick sickle cut of his head, that he had
invented all by himself; had knocked him over, and
kneeled upon him with his huge knees till the life went
out with a gasp and a howl, and there was only a fluffy
striped thing on the ground for Kala Nag to pull by the
tail.
‘Yes,’ said Big Toomai, his driver, the son of Black
Toomai who had taken him to Abyssinia, and grandson of
Toomai of the Elephants who had seen him caught, ‘there
is nothing that the Black Snake fears except me. He has
seen three generations of us feed him and groom him, and
he will live to see four.’
‘He is afraid of me also,’ said Little Toomai, standing
up to his full height of four feet, with only one rag upon
him. He was ten years old, the eldest son of Big Toomai,

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