, striving to get one arm free and catch him by
the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both
quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as
it flung backward feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to
and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful,
statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and
struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. "Now! now! now!"
said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli's quick hand
could not turn aside. "Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here,
and here! Are thy hands numb? Here again!"

The game always ended in one way--with a straight, driving blow of the
head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn the
guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the
least use in trying.

"Good hunting!" Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away
half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full
of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake's pet bathing-place--a
deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by
sunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle-fashion, without a sound,
and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back,
his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks,
and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa's
diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest
on Mowgli's shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool
water.

"It is VERY good," said Mowgli at last, sleepily. "Now, in the Man-Pack,
at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon hard pieces of
wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having carefully shut out all the
clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heavy heads and made evil songs
through their noses. It is better in the Jungle."

A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them "Good
hunting!" and went away.

"Sssh!" said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered something. "So
the Jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?"

"Not all," said Mowgli, laughing; "else there would be a new and strong
Shere Khan to kill once a moon. Now, I could kill with my own hands,
asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished the sun to shine in
the middle of the Rains, and the Rains to cover the sun in the deep of
summer; and al