“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 center 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 a mud castle with mud figures of men and horses and buffaloes, and put reeds into the men’s hands, and pretend that they are kings and the figures are their armies, or that they are gods to be worshiped.  Then evening comes and the children call, and the buffaloes lumber up out of the sticky mud with noises like gunshots going off one after the other, and they all string across the gray plain back to the twinkling village lights.

Day after day Mowgli would lead the buffaloes out to their wallows, and day after day he would see Gray Brother’s back a mile and a half away across the plain (so he knew that Shere Khan had not come back), and day after day he would lie on the grass listening to the noises round him, and dreaming of old days in the jungle.  If Shere Khan had made a false step with his lame paw up in the jungles by the Waingunga, Mowgli would have heard him in those long, still mornings.

At last a day came when he did not see Gray Brother at the signal place, and he laughed and headed the buffaloes for the ravine by the dhk tree, which was all covered with golden-red flowers.  There sat Gray Brother, every bristle on his back lifted.