"Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"

A young mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is washed out of his burrow in the Indian hills by a summer flood and found nearly drowned on the road by a small boy named Teddy. The family — an English family in a bungalow with a large garden — revives him and keeps him. Rikki is curious in the way all mongooses are curious: the family motto is "run and find out," which means investigate everything, retreat from nothing. He spends his first day investigating the entire bungalow, learning every room's function and every creature's character. The garden, he discovers, is the territory of Nag and Nagaina — two large king cobras who have lived there before the family arrived and intend to live there after the family is gone.

Nag and Nagaina's plan is direct: kill the humans, remove the complication, reclaim the garden. Nag hides in the bathroom that night waiting for the man who comes to water the garden. Rikki follows him in. The fight is brief and violent — Rikki latches onto Nag's hood and holds on while the cobra smashes him against the wall and the floor and the bath. He holds on. The man's shotgun finishes what Rikki started. But Nagaina is still alive, and she has eggs in the melon bed that will hatch more cobras.

Rikki goes to the melon bed and begins destroying Nagaina's eggs one by one, until he has only one left. He uses the last egg to lure Nagaina away from Teddy, where she has cornered the family on the veranda. She comes for the egg. Rikki follows her into her burrow. The burrow is dark. Underground fights between mongooses and cobras do not have witnesses. What Teddy's father later finds is the mongoose coming out of the hole, shaking dust from his fur. Nagaina does not come out. Rikki, very tired, eats a small frog for dinner and is carried back to the house by Teddy. The garden is safe.