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