the side of three gullies. These I shall
throw down with my feet in running, and the Little People will rise up
behind me, very angry."

"That is Man's talk and Man's cunning," said Kaa. "Thou art wise, but
the Little People are always angry."

"Nay, at twilight all wings near and far rest for a while. I will play
with the dhole at twilight, for the dhole hunts best by day. He follows
now Won-tolla's blood-trail."

"Chil does not leave a dead ox, nor the dhole the blood-trail," said
Kaa.

"Then I will make him a new blood-trail, of his own blood, if I can, and
give him dirt to eat. Thou wilt stay here, Kaa, till I come again with
my dholes?"

"Ay, but what if they kill thee in the Jungle, or the Little People kill
thee before thou canst leap down to the river?"

"When to-morrow comes we will kill for to-morrow," said Mowgli, quoting
a Jungle saying; and again, "When I am dead it is time to sing the Death
Song. Good hunting, Kaa!"

He loosed his arm from the python's neck and went down the gorge like
a log in a freshet, paddling toward the far bank, where he found
slack-water, and laughing aloud from sheer happiness. There was nothing
Mowgli liked better than, as he himself said, "to pull the whiskers
of Death," and make the Jungle know that he was their overlord. He had
often, with Baloo's help, robbed bees' nests in single trees, and
he knew that the Little People hated the smell of wild garlic. So he
gathered a small bundle of it, tied it up with a bark string, and then
followed Won-tolla's blood-trail, as it ran southerly from the Lairs,
for some five miles, looking at the trees with his head on one side, and
chuckling as he looked.

"Mowgli the Frog have I been," said he to himself; "Mowgli the Wolf have
I said that I am. Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before I am Mowgli the
Buck. At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man. Ho!" and he slid his thumb
along the eighteen-inch blade of his knife.

Won-tolla's trail, all rank with dark blood-spots, ran under a forest of
thick trees that grew close together and stretched away north-eastward,
gradually growing thinner and thinner to within two miles of the Bee
Rocks. From the last tree to the low scrub of the Bee Rocks was open
country, where there was hardly cover enough to hide a wolf. Mowgli
trotted along under the trees, judging distances between branch and
branch, occasionally climbing up a trunk and taking a trial leap from
one tree to another till he came to t