who could handle a buck alone, to young black three-year-olds who thought they could.  The Lone Wolf had led them for a year now.  He had fallen twice into a wolf-trap in his youth, and once he had been beaten and left for dead; so he knew the manners and customs of men.  There was very little talking at the rock.  The cubs tumbled over each other in the centre of the circle where their mothers and fathers sat, and now and again a senior wolf would go quietly up to a cub, look at him carefully, and return to his place on noiseless feet.  Sometimes a mother would push her cub far out into the moonlight, to be sure that he had not been overlooked.  Akela from his rock would cry:  ’Ye know the Law—­ye know the Law.  Look well, O Wolves!’ and the anxious mothers would take up the call:  ‘Look—­look well, O Wolves!’

At last—­and Mother Wolfs neck-bristles lifted as the time came—­Father Wolf pushed ‘Mowgli the Frog,’ as they called him, into the centre, where he sat laughing and playing with some pebbles that glistened in the moonlight.

Akela never raised his head from his paws, but went on with the monotonous cry:  ‘Look well!’ A muffled roar came up from behind the rocks—­the voice of Shere Khan crying:  ’The cub is mine.  Give him to me.  What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?’ Akela never even twitched his ears:  all he said was:  ’Look well, O Wolves!  What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People?  Look well!’

There was a chorus of deep growls, and a young wolf in his fourth year flung back Shere Khan’s question to Akela:  ’What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?’ Now the Law of the Jungle lays down that if there is any dispute as to the right of a cub to be accepted by the Pack, he must be spoken for by at least two members of the Pack who are not his father and mother.

‘Who speaks for this cub?’ said Akela.  ’Among the Free People who speaks?’ There was no answer, and Mother Wolf got ready for what she knew would be her last fight, if things came to fighting.

Then the only other creature who is allowed at the Pack Council—­Baloo, the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle:  old Baloo, who can come and go where he pleases because he eats only nuts and roots and honey—­rose up on his hind quarters and grunted.

‘The man’s cub—­the man’s cub?’ he said. ’I speak for the man’s cub.  There is no harm in a man’s cub.  I have no gift of words, but I speak the truth.  Let him run with the Pack, and be entered with the others.  I myself will teach him.’

‘We need yet another,’ said Akela.  ’Baloo has spoken, and he is our teacher for the young cubs.  Who speaks beside Baloo?’

A black shadow dropped down into the circle.  It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk.  Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant.  But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.