has done
this. Ye will not go? Come, then, with me, and I will make you very
wise!"

He moved, Bandar-log fashion, into the next tree, and so on into the
next and the next, the Pack following with lifted hungry heads. Now and
then he would pretend to fall, and the Pack would tumble one over the
other in their haste to be at the death. It was a curious sight--the boy
with the knife that shone in the low sunlight as it sifted through the
upper branches, and the silent Pack with their red coats all aflame,
huddling and following below. When he came to the last tree he took the
garlic and rubbed himself all over carefully, and the dholes yelled with
scorn. "Ape with a wolf's tongue, dost thou think to cover thy scent?"
they said. "We follow to the death."

"Take thy tail," said Mowgli, flinging it back along the course he had
taken. The Pack instinctively rushed after it. "And follow now--to the
death."

He had slipped down the tree-trunk, and headed like the wind in bare
feet for the Bee Rocks, before the dholes saw what he would do.

They gave one deep howl, and settled down to the long, lobbing canter
that can at the last run down anything that runs. Mowgli knew their
pack-pace to be much slower than that of the wolves, or he would never
have risked a two-mile run in full sight. They were sure that the boy
was theirs at last, and he was sure that he held them to play with as he
pleased. All his trouble was to keep them sufficiently hot behind him
to prevent their turning off too soon. He ran cleanly, evenly, and
springily; the tailless leader not five yards behind him; and the Pack
tailing out over perhaps a quarter of a mile of ground, crazy and blind
with the rage of slaughter. So he kept his distance by ear, reserving
his last effort for the rush across the Bee Rocks.

The Little People had gone to sleep in the early twilight, for it
was not the season of late blossoming flowers; but as Mowgli's first
foot-falls rang hollow on the hollow ground he heard a sound as though
all the earth were humming. Then he ran as he had never run in his life
before, spurned aside one--two--three of the piles of stones into the
dark, sweet-smelling gullies; heard a roar like the roar of the sea in a
cave; saw with the tail of his eye the air grow dark behind him; saw the
current of the Waingunga far below, and a flat, diamond-shaped head
in the water; leaped outward with all his strength, the tailless dhole
snapping at his shoul