When the buffaloes were sent to graze the hungry brutes found that the deer had cleared the grazing-grounds , and so wandered into the Jungle and drifted off with their wild mates ; and when twilight fell the three or four ponies that belonged to the village lay in their stables with their heads beaten in . Only Bagheera could have given those strokes , and only Bagheera would have thought of insolently dragging the last carcass to the open street . The villagers had no heart to make fires in the fields that night , so Hathi and his three sons went gleaning among what was left ; and where Hathi gleans there is no need to follow . The men decided to live on their stored seed-corn until the rains had fallen , and then to take work as servants till they could catch up with the lost year ; but as the grain-dealer was thinking of his well-filled crates of corn , and the prices he would levy at the sale of it , Hathi 's sharp tusks were picking out the corner of his mud-house , and smashing open the big wicker chest , leeped with cow-dung , where the precious stuff lay . When that last loss was discovered , it was the Brahmin 's turn to speak . He had prayed to his own Gods without answer . It might be , he said , that , unconsciously , the village had offended some one of the Gods of the Jungle , for , beyond doubt , the Jungle was against them . So they sent for the head-man of the nearest tribe of wandering Gonds -- little , wise , and very black hunters , living in the deep Jungle , whose fathers came of the oldest race in India -- the aboriginal owners of the land . They made the Gond welcome with what they had , and he stood on one leg , his bow in his hand , and two or three poisoned arrows stuck through his top-knot , looking half afraid and half contemptuously at the anxious villagers and their ruined fields . They wished to know whether his Gods -- the Old Gods -- were angry with them and what sacrifices should be offered . The Gond said nothing , but picked up a trail of the Karela , the vine that bears the bitter wild gourd , and laced it to and fro across the temple door in the face of the staring red Hindu image . Then he pushed with his hand in the open air along the road to Khanhiwara , and went back to his Jungle , and watched the Jungle People drifting through it . He knew that when the Jungle moves only white men can hope to turn it aside . There was no need to ask his meaning . The wild gourd would grow where they had worshipped their God , and the sooner they saved themselves the better . But it is hard to tear a village from its moorings . They stayed on as long as any summer food was left to them , and they tried to gather nuts in the Jungle , but shadows with glaring eyes watched them , and rolled before them even at mid-day ; and when they ran back afraid to their walls , on the tree-trunks they had passed not five minutes before the bark would be stripped and chiselled with the stroke of some great taloned paw . The more they kept to their village , the bolder grew the wild things that gambolled and bellowed on the grazing-grounds by the Waingunga . They had no time to patch and plaster the rear walls of the empty byres that backed on to the Jungle ; the wild pig trampled them down , and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbows over the new-won ground , and the coarse grass bristled behind the vines like the lances of a goblin army following a retreat . The unmarried men ran away first , and carried the news far and near that the village was doomed .
Who could fight , they said , against the Jungle , or the Gods of the Jungle , when the very village cobra had XXXXX his hole in the platform under the peepul-tree ?
Gods Gond Gonds Khanhiwara brutes byres fro grain-dealer grazing-grounds left