he would die of thirst, he
insisted on starting. The first day they found no water, but the orphan
boy managed to endure it; but the second day he suffered so much, that
he begged the hunters to take him to water; they told him that there
was no water and they could not take him to any. So he set off alone
in the direction in which he understood there might be water, but he
soon lost his way in the jungle; so in despair he climbed a _meral_
tree and picked the fruit and threw it in all directions and to his
joy he heard one fruit splash as it fell into water; so he climbed down
and sure enough close to the tree he found a pool and drank his fill.

And then he saw a fawn stuck fast in the mud at the edge of the pool,
so he fixed an arrow to his bow and crept towards it, resolved to
catch it alive if he could, but if it ran away, to shoot it. The fawn
did not move and he managed to seize it and pulling it out of the mud,
he rubbed it clean and put his bow string round its neck and took it
home. The fawn grew up into a stag and he trained it to fight and
one day he matched it to fight with a goat. The agreement was that
the owner of the winner should take both the animals; in the fight
the stag was victorious, so the boy won the goat. Then he matched his
stag with a ram and a bullock and even with a buffalo, and the stag
was always victorious and in this way he soon grew rich. Seeing him
so rich one of the villagers gave him his daughter in marriage and
took him to live in his house, and so he lived happily ever afterwards.

LXXIII. The Seven Brothers and the Bonga Girl.

Once upon a time there were seven brothers who lived all alone in
the jungle, far from human habitations. None of them was married
and they lived on the game they killed. It chanced that a _bonga_
maiden saw the youngest brother and fell deeply in love with him. So
one day when all the brothers were away hunting, she placed in their
house seven nicely cooked plates of rice.

When the brothers returned in the evening from the chase, they were
astonished to find the rice waiting for them; all but the youngest said
that it must be some plot to kill them and refused to touch the food,
but the youngest wished to eat it. His brothers would not let him and
told him to throw the rice away; so he took it outside the house, but
instead of throwing it away, he ate up the whole seven plates full,
without letting his brothers know. But when they went to bed