circles far and wide, whistling and shrieking the warning.

By the Law of the Jungle it is death to kill at the
drinking-places when once the Water Truce has been declared.
The reason of this is that drinking comes before eating. Every
one in the Jungle can scramble along somehow when only game is
scarce; but water is water, and when there is but one source of
supply, all hunting stops while the Jungle People go there for
their needs. In good seasons, when water was plentiful, those
who came down to drink at the Waingunga--or anywhere else, for
that matter--did so at the risk of their lives, and that risk
made no small part of the fascination of the night's doings.
To move down so cunningly that never a leaf stirred; to wade
knee-deep in the roaring shallows that drown all noise from
behind; to drink, looking backward over one shoulder, every
muscle ready for the first desperate bound of keen terror;
to roll on the sandy margin, and return, wet-muzzled and
well plumped out, to the admiring herd, was a thing that all
tall-antlered young bucks took a delight in, precisely because
they knew that at any moment Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap
upon them and bear them down. But now all that life-and-death
fun was ended, and the Jungle People came up, starved and
weary, to the shrunken river,--tiger, bear, deer, buffalo,
and pig, all together,--drank the fouled waters, and hung above
them, too exhausted to move off.

The deer and the pig had tramped all day in search of something
better than dried bark and withered leaves. The buffaloes had
found no wallows to be cool in, and no green crops to steal.
The snakes had left the Jungle and come down to the river in