"Children's Books - Kipling, Rudyard - Jungle Book, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Children's Books)

He did not wait for anything more, but dashed on; and the
yells grew fainter behind him as he ran into the croplands where
the villagers lived.

"Bagheera spoke truth," he panted, as he nestled down in some
cattle fodder by the window of a hut. "To-morrow is one day both
for Akela and for me."

Then he pressed his face close to the window and watched the
fire on the hearth. He saw the husbandman's wife get up and feed
it in the night with black lumps. And when the morning came and
the mists were all white and cold, he saw the man's child pick up
a wicker pot plastered inside with earth, fill it with lumps of
red-hot charcoal, put it under his blanket, and go out to tend the
cows in the byre.

"Is that all?" said Mowgli. "If a cub can do it, there is
nothing to fear." So he strode round the corner and met the boy,
took the pot from his hand, and disappeared into the mist while
the boy howled with fear.

"They are very like me," said Mowgli, blowing into the pot as
he had seen the woman do. "This thing will die if I do not give
it things to eat"; and he dropped twigs and dried bark on the red
stuff. Halfway up the hill he met Bagheera with the morning dew
shining like moonstones on his coat.

"Akela has missed," said the Panther. "They would have killed
him last night, but they needed thee also. They were looking for
thee on the hill."

"I was among the plowed lands. I am ready. See!" Mowgli
held up the fire-pot.

"Good! Now, I have seen men thrust a dry branch into that
stuff, and presently the Red Flower blossomed at the end of it.
Art thou not afraid?"

"No. Why should I fear? I remember now--if it is not a
dream--how, before I was a Wolf, I lay beside the Red Flower,
and it was warm and pleasant."

All that day Mowgli sat in the cave tending his fire pot and
dipping dry branches into it to see how they looked. He found a
branch that satisfied him, and in the evening when Tabaqui came to
the cave and told him rudely enough that he was wanted at the
Council Rock, he laughed till Tabaqui ran away. Then Mowgli went
to the Council, still laughing.

Akela the Lone Wolf lay by the side of his rock as a sign that