"Tiger! Tiger!"

Mowgli arrives at the human village at night and is taken in by a woman named Messua, who believes he may be the son she lost years ago to a tiger. The village accepts him provisionally: he is put to work herding cattle, which suits him because he is outdoors and the cattle trust him. But the village children mock him — he does not know their games, he moves strangely, he talks to animals — and Buldeo the hunter, the village's expert on tigers, tells stories about Shere Khan that Mowgli knows to be entirely wrong. Mowgli knows Shere Khan. The stories are invented.

Word comes through the jungle that Shere Khan has come back from his burns and is hunting again. Grey Brother, a young wolf, brings the message to Mowgli at the herding grounds. Mowgli plans the trap carefully: he separates the cattle into two groups at opposite ends of a dry ravine, sends Akela and Grey Brother to drive them from both sides simultaneously, and positions himself to watch. Shere Khan, walking in the ravine, is caught between the two stampeding herds — the buffaloes from above, the cows from below. He has nowhere to go. He is old and has eaten recently; he is slow. The buffaloes trample him.

Mowgli skins the tiger — a long, precise operation that he carries out alone. Buldeo arrives and tries to claim the skin and the authority to tell Mowgli what to do; Grey Brother pins him at Mowgli's word. Buldeo goes back to the village with the story of what he has seen. The village elders decide Mowgli is a sorcerer — a child raised by wolves who can command wild animals is not a child but a devil. Messua is kind; the rest of the village is not. They drive him out with stones and hard words. Mowgli goes back to the jungle, carrying the tiger's skin, not weeping this time. He is received by the wolves. The story ends with the jungle taking him back.