Page 200 - THE JUNGLE BOOK

The Jungle Book

great weals and cuts of bygone fights, and the caked dirt of
their solitary mud baths dropping from their shoulders;
and there was one with a broken tusk and the marks of the
full-stroke, the terrible drawing scrape, of a tiger’s claws

on his side.
They were standing head to head, or walking to and
fro across the ground in couples, or rocking and swaying
all by themselves— scores and scores of elephants.
Toomai knew that so long as he lay still on Kala Nag’s
neck nothing would happen to him, for even in the rush
and scramble of a Keddah drive a wild elephant does not
reach up with his trunk and drag a man off the neck of a
tame elephant. And these elephants were not thinking of
men that night. Once they started and put their ears
forward when they heard the chinking of a leg iron in the
forest, but it was Pudmini, Petersen Sahib’s pet elephant,
her chain snapped short off, grunting, snuffling up the
hillside. She must have broken her pickets and come
straight from Petersen Sahib’s camp; and Little Toomai
saw another elephant, one that he did not know, with
deep rope galls on his back and breast. He, too, must have
run away from some camp in the hills about.
At last there was no sound of any more elephants
moving in the forest, and Kala Nag rolled out from his

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