the village street in the dawn, sitting on the back of Rama, the great herd bull; and the slaty-blue buffaloes, with their long, backward-sweeping horns and savage eyes, rose out of their byres, one by one, and followed him, and Mowgli made it very clear to the children with him that he was the master.  He beat the buffaloes with a long, polished bamboo, and told Kamya, one of the boys, to graze the cattle by themselves, while he went on with the buffaloes, and to be very careful not to stray away from the herd.

An Indian grazing-ground is all rocks, and scrubs, and tussocks, and little ravines, among which the herds scatter and disappear.  The buffaloes generally keep to the pools and muddy places, where they lie wallowing or basking in the warm mud for hours.  Mowgli drove them on to the edge of the plain where the Waingunga came out of the jungle; then he dropped from Rama’s neck, trotted off to a bamboo clump and found Gray Brother.  ‘Ah,’ said Gray Brother, ’I have waited here very many days.  What is the meaning of this cattle-herding work?’

‘It is an order,’ said Mowgli; ’I am a village herd for a while.  What news of Shere Khan?’

’He has come back to this country, and has waited here a long time for thee.  Now he has gone off again, for the game is scarce.  But he means to kill thee.’

‘Very good,’ said Mowgli.  ’So long as he is away do thou or one of the four brothers sit on that rock, so that I can see thee as I come out of the village.  When he comes back wait for me in the ravine by the dhak-tree in the centre of the plain.  We need not walk into Shere Khan’s mouth.’

Then Mowgli picked out a shady place, and lay down and slept while the buffaloes grazed round him.  Herding, in India, is one of the laziest things in the world.  The cattle move and crunch, and lie down, and move on again, and they do not even low.  They only grunt, and the buffaloes very seldom say anything, but get down into the muddy pools one after another, and work their way into the mud till only their noses and staring china-blue eyes show above the surface, and then they lie like logs.  The sun makes the rocks dance in the heat, and the herd-children hear one kite (never any more) whistling almost out of sight overhead, and they know that if they died, or a cow died, that kite would sweep down, and the next kite miles away would see him drop and follow, and the next, and the next, and almost before they were dead there would be a score of hungry kites come out of nowhere.  Then they sleep and wake and sleep again, and weave little baskets of dried grass and put grasshoppers in them, or catch two praying mantises and make them fight; or string a necklace of red and black jungle-nuts, or watch a lizard basking on a rock, or a snake hunting a frog near the wallows.  Then they sing long, long songs with odd native quavers at the end of them, and the day seems longer than most people’s whole lives, and perhaps they make