For the rush through the mist , and the quarry blind-started ! For the cry of our mates when the sambhur has wheeled and is standing at bay , For the risk and the riot of night ! For the sleep at the lair-mouth by day , It is met , and we go to the fight . Bay ! O Bay ! It was after the letting in of the Jungle that the pleasantest part of Mowgli 's life began . He had the good conscience that comes from paying debts ; all the Jungle was his friend , and just a little afraid of him . The things that he did and saw and heard when he was wandering from one people to another , with or without his four companions , would make many many stories , each as long as this one . So you will never be told how he met the Mad Elephant of Mandla , who killed two-and-twenty bullocks drawing eleven carts of coined silver to the Government Treasury , and scattered the shiny rupees in the dust ; how he fought Jacala , the Crocodile , all one long night in the Marshes of the North , and broke his skinning-knife on the brute 's back-plates ; how he found a new and longer knife round the neck of a man who had been killed by a wild boar , and how he tracked that boar and killed him as a fair price for the knife ; how he was caught up once in the Great Famine , by the moving of the deer , and nearly crushed to death in the swaying hot herds ; how he saved Hathi the Silent from being once more trapped in a pit with a stake at the bottom , and how , next day , he himself fell into a very cunning leopard-trap , and how Hathi broke the thick wooden bars to pieces above him ; how he milked the wild buffaloes in the swamp , and how -- But we must tell one tale at a time . Father and Mother Wolf died , and Mowgli rolled a big boulder against the mouth of their cave , and cried the Death Song over them ; Baloo grew very old and stiff , and even Bagheera , whose nerves were steel and whose muscles were iron , was a shade slower on the kill than he had been . Akela turned from gray to milky white with pure age ; his ribs stuck out , and he walked as though he had been made of wood , and Mowgli killed for him . But the young wolves , the children of the disbanded Seeonee Pack , throve and increased , and when there were about forty of them , masterless , full-voiced , clean-footed five-year-olds , Akela told them that they ought to gather themselves together and follow the Law , and run under one head , as befitted the Free People . This was not a question in which Mowgli concerned himself , for , as he said , he had eaten sour fruit , and he knew the tree it hung from ; but when Phao , son of Phaona -LRB- his father was the Gray Tracker in the days of Akela 's headship -RRB- , fought his way to the leadership of the Pack , according to the Jungle Law , and the old calls and songs began to ring under the stars once more , Mowgli came to the Council Rock for memory 's sake . When he chose to speak the Pack waited till he had finished , and he sat at Akela 's side on the rock above Phao . Those were days of good hunting and good sleeping . No stranger cared to break into the jungles that belonged to Mowgli 's people , as they called the Pack , and the young wolves grew fat and strong , and there were many cubs to bring to the Looking-over . Mowgli always attended a Looking-over , remembering the night when a black panther bought a naked brown baby into the pack , and the long call , `` Look , look well , O Wolves , '' made his heart flutter . Otherwise , he would be far away in the Jungle with his four brothers , tasting , touching , seeing , and feeling new things . One twilight when he was trotting leisurely across the ranges to give Akela the half of a buck that he had killed , while the Four jogged behind him , sparring a little , and tumbling one another over for joy of being alive , he heard a cry that had never been heard since the bad days of Shere Khan . It was what they call in the Jungle the pheeal , a hideous kind of shriek that the jackal gives when he is hunting behind a tiger , or when there is a big killing afoot .
If you can imagine a mixture of hate , triumph , fear , and despair , with a kind of leer running through it , you will get some notion of the XXXXX that rose and sank and wavered and quavered far away across the Waingunga .
Bay Law Mowgli back-plates bullocks headship jackal night pheeal twilight