The Jackal winced, though he was full three seasons old, but you cannot resent an insult from a person with a beak a yard long, and the power of driving it like a javelin. The Adjutant was a most notorious coward, but the Jackal was worse.
"We must live before we can learn," said the Mugger, "and there is this to say: Little jackals are very common, child, but such a mugger as I am is not common. For all that, I am not proud, since pride is destruction; but take notice, it is Fate, and against his Fate no one who swims or walks or runs should say anything at all. I am well contented with Fate. With good luck, a keen eye, and the custom of considering whether a creek or a backwater has an outlet to it ere you ascend, much may be done.""Once I heard that even the Protector of the Poor made a mistake," said the Jackal viciously.
"True; but there my Fate helped me. It was before I had come to my full growth--before the last famine but three (by the Right and Left of Gunga, how full used the streams to be in those days!). Yes, I was young and unthinking, and when the flood came, who so pleased as I? A little made me very happy then.
The village was deep in flood, and I swam above the Ghaut and went far inland, up to the rice-fields, and they were deep in good mud. I remember also a pair of bracelets (glass they were, and troubled me not a little) that I found that evening. Yes, glass bracelets; and, if my memory serves me well, a shoe.
I should have shaken off both shoes, but I was hungry. I learned better later. Yes. And so I fed and rested me; but when I was ready to go to the river again the flood had fallen, and Iwalked through the mud of the main street. Who but I? Came out all my people, priests and women and children, and I looked upon them with benevolence. The mud is not a good place to fight in.
Said a boatman, "Get axes and kill him, for he is the Mugger of the ford." "Not so," said the Brahmin. "Look, he is driving the flood before him! He is the godling of the village." Then they threw many flowers at me, and by happy thought one led a goat across the road.""How good--how very good is goat!" said the Jackal.
"Hairy--too hairy, and when found in the water more than likely to hide a cross-shaped hook. But that goat I accepted, and went down to the Ghaut in great honour. Later, my Fate sent me the boatman who had desired to cut off my tail with an axe. His boat grounded upon an old shoal which you would not remember.""We are not ALL jackals here," said the Adjutant. Was it the shoal made where the stone-boats sank in the year of the great drouth--a long shoal that lasted three floods?""There were two," said the Mugger; "an upper and a lower shoal.""Ay, I forgot. A channel divided them, and later dried up again," said the Adjutant, who prided himself on his memory.
"On the lower shoal my well-wisher"s craft grounded. He was sleeping in the bows, and, half awake, leaped over to his waist--no, it was no more than to his knees--to push off.
His empty boat went on and touched again below the next reach, as the river ran then. I followed, because I knew men would come out to drag it ashore.""And did they do so?" said the Jackal, a little awe-stricken.
This was hunting on a scale that impressed him.
"There and lower down they did. I went no farther, but that gave me three in one day--well-fed manjis (boatmen) all, and, except in the case of the last (then I was careless), never a cry to warn those on the bank.""Ah, noble sport! But what cleverness and great judgment it requires!" said the Jackal.
"Not cleverness, child, but only thought. A little thought in life is like salt upon rice, as the boatmen say, and I have thought deeply always. The Gavial, my cousin, the fish-eater, has told me how hard it is for him to follow his fish, and how one fish differs from the other, and how he must know them all, both together and apart. I say that is wisdom; but, on the other hand, my cousin, the Gavial, lives among his people. MY people do not swim in companies, with their mouths out of the water, as Rewa does; nor do they constantly rise to the surface of the water, and turn over on their sides, like Mohoo and little Chapta; nor do they gather in shoals after flood, like Batchua and Chilwa.""All are very good eating," said the Adjutant, clattering his beak.
"So my cousin says, and makes a great to-do over hunting them, but they do not climb the banks to escape his sharp nose.
MY people are otherwise. Their life is on the land, in the houses, among the cattle. I must know what they do, and what they are about to do; and adding the tail to the trunk, as the saying is, I make up the whole elephant. Is there a green branch and an iron ring hanging over a doorway? The old Mugger knows that a boy has been born in that house, and must some day come down to the Ghaut to play. Is a maiden to be married?
The old Mugger knows, for he sees the men carry gifts back and forth; and she, too, comes down to the Ghaut to bathe before her wedding, and--he is there. Has the river changed its channel, and made new land where there was only sand before?
The Mugger knows."
"Now, of what use is that knowledge?" said the Jackal.
"The river has shifted even in my little life." Indian rivers are nearly always moving about in their beds, and will shift, sometimes, as much as two or three miles in a season, drowning the fields on one bank, and spreading good silt on the other.
"There is no knowledge so useful," said the Mugger, "for new land means new quarrels. The Mugger knows. Oho! the Mugger knows. As soon as the water has drained off, he creeps up the little creeks that men think would not hide a dog, and there he waits. Presently comes a farmer saying he will plant cucumbers here, and melons there, in the new land that the river has given him. He feels the good mud with his bare toes. Anon comes another, saying he will put onions, and carrots, and sugar-cane in such and such places. They meet as boats adrift meet, and each rolls his eye at the other under the big blue turban.
The old Mugger sees and hears. Each calls the other "Brother,"and they go to mark out the boundaries of the new land.
