Page 15

The Jungle book

Mowgli and Bagheera

He took his place at the Council Rock, too, when the Pack met, and there he discovered that if he stared hard at any wolf, the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes, and so he used to stare for fun. At other times he would pick the long thorns out of the pads of his friends, for wolves suffer terribly from thorns and burs in their coats.

He would go down the hillside into the cultivated lands by night, and look very curiously at the villagers in their huts, but he had a mistrust of men because Bagheera showed him a square box with a drop gate so cunningly hidden in the jungle that he nearly walked into it, and told him that it was a trap. He loved better than anything else to go with Bagheera into the dark warm heart of the forest, to sleep all through the drowsy day, and at night see how Bagheera did his killing.

Bagheera killed right and left as he felt hungry, and so did Mowgli - with one exception. As soon as he was old enough to understand things, Bagheera told him that he must never touch cattle because he had been bought into the Pack at the price of a bull's life. "All the jungle is thine," said Bagheera, "and you can kill everything that you are strong enough to kill; but for the sake of the bull that bought thee thou must never kill or eat any cattle young or old. That is the Law of the Jungle."

Vocabulary:

Pad: The soft parts under an animal's foot
Bur: A grass seed that catches on clothes or hair
Drowsy: Being sleepy without actually sleeping
Exception: The one thing that is not the same as the others
Thine Yours (old English)
For the sake: Because of; for the benefit of

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