My strength is gone from me , and presently I shall die . Oh , Mowgli , why dost thou not kill them both ? '' The fight went on till one wolf ran away , and Mowgli was left alone on the torn and bloody ground , looking now at his knife , and now at his legs and arms , while the feeling of unhappiness he had never known before covered him as water covers a log . He killed early that evening and ate but little , so as to be in good fettle for his spring running , and he ate alone because all the Jungle People were away singing or fighting . It was a perfect white night , as they call it . All green things seemed to have made a month 's growth since the morning . The branch that was yellow-leaved the day before dripped sap when Mowgli broke it . The mosses curled deep and warm over his feet , the young grass had no cutting edges , and all the voices of the Jungle boomed like one deep harp-string touched by the moon -- the Moon of New Talk , who splashed her light full on rock and pool , slipped it between trunk and creeper , and sifted it through a million leaves . Forgetting his unhappiness , Mowgli sang aloud with pure delight as he settled into his stride . It was more like flying than anything else , for he had chosen the long downward slope that leads to the Northern Marshes through the heart of the main Jungle , where the springy ground deadened the fall of his feet . A man-taught man would have picked his way with many stumbles through the cheating moonlight , but Mowgli 's muscles , trained by years of experience , bore him up as though he were a feather . When a rotten log or a hidden stone turned under his foot he saved himself , never checking his pace , without effort and without thought . When he tired of ground-going he threw up his hands monkey-fashion to the nearest creeper , and seemed to float rather than to climb up into the thin branches , whence he would follow a tree-road till his mood changed , and he shot downward in a long , leafy curve to the levels again . There were still , hot hollows surrounded by wet rocks where he could hardly breathe for the heavy scents of the night flowers and the bloom along the creeper buds ; dark avenues where the moonlight lay in belts as regular as checkered marbles in a church aisle ; thickets where the wet young growth stood breast-high about him and threw its arms round his waist ; and hilltops crowned with broken rock , where he leaped from stone to stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes . He would hear , very faint and far off , the chug-drug of a boar sharpening his tusks on a bole ; and would come across the great gray brute all alone , scribing and rending the bark of a tall tree , his mouth dripping with foam , and his eyes blazing like fire . Or he would turn aside to the sound of clashing horns and hissing grunts , and dash past a couple of furious sambhur , staggering to and fro with lowered heads , striped with blood that showed black in the moonlight . Or at some rushing ford he would hear Jacala the Crocodile bellowing like a bull , or disturb a twined knot of the Poison People , but before they could strike he would be away and across the glistening shingle , and deep in the Jungle again . So he ran , sometimes shouting , sometimes singing to himself , the happiest thing in all the Jungle that night , till the smell of the flowers warned him that he was near the marshes , and those lay far beyond his farthest hunting-grounds . Here , again , a man-trained man would have sunk overhead in three strides , but Mowgli 's feet had eyes in them , and they passed him from tussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without asking help from the eyes in his head . He ran out to the middle of the swamp , disturbing the duck as he ran , and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk lapped in the black water .
The marsh was awake all round him , for in the spring the Bird People sleep very lightly , and companies of them were coming or going the XXXXX through .
Jacala Mowgli fettle grunts harp-string monkey-fashion night scents shingle tussock