“I go,” said Tabaqui, quietly. “Ye can hear Shere Khan below in the thickets. I might have saved myself the message.”

Father Wolf listened, and in the dark valley that ran down to a little river, he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.

“The fool!” said Father Wolf. “To begin a night’s work with that noise! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga bullocks?”

“H’sh! It is neither bullock nor buck that he hunts tonight,” said Mother Wolf; “it is Man.” The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that seemed to roll from every quarter of the compass. It was the noise that bewilders woodcutters, and gipsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the tiger.

“Man!” said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth. “Faugh! Are there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must eat Man⁠—and on our ground too!”