Mowgli's Brothers

The Seeonee Hills on a warm evening. Tabaqui the jackal arrives at Father Wolf's cave with Shere Khan's warning: the tiger is hunting men tonight. Moments later the infant Mowgli crawls out of the darkness into the den, following the warmth. Shere Khan appears at the entrance and demands his prey. Father Wolf refuses. Mother Wolf — fiercer than Father Wolf in this crisis — names the child Mowgli, "the Frog," and claims him. The wolves carry him to the Council Rock, where any adult member of the pack may challenge a cub's acceptance. Shere Khan roars his objection from the valley below. Baloo the bear speaks for Mowgli. Bagheera pays a freshly killed bull as the price of acceptance. Mowgli is in.

He grows up in the pack — faster than any wolf cub, learning every jungle tongue, mastering the Master Words that open every creature's cooperation, learning to think as a predator thinks. But he is also unmistakably human: he stares snakes into stillness, which no wolf can do; he pulls thorns from paws, which endears him to every creature; he does not understand, for a long time, why Shere Khan hates him with such constancy. Years pass. Akela grows old. Shere Khan works on the young wolves, reminding them that a man-cub is not a wolf, that the pack was broken when it accepted him, that Akela's missed kill is the moment to correct the mistake.

At the next Council Rock, Akela misses his kill and the pack closes in on him and on Mowgli at the same moment. Mowgli goes to the human village, steals fire in an earthen pot — the Red Flower — and returns. He burns Shere Khan's flank and drives the wolves back. Then, for the first time, he weeps: because he is leaving, because Baloo and Bagheera and Akela are not the pack that betrayed him, and because the human village to which he is walking has not yet accepted him either. He goes. The story ends before the village does.