"I think you are a very good tiger," said Dorothy, patting the huge head of the beast.
"I am a good beast, perhaps, but a disgracefully bad tiger. For it is the nature of tigers to be cruel and ferocious, and in refusing to eat harmless living creatures I am acting as no good tiger has ever before acted.
None but the Lame Tiger would so have boasted of his right at this season when--when we suffer together--Man and Jungle People alike." Clean or unclean, get to thy lair, Shere Khan!"
"For one night only does Man fear the Tiger?" said Mowgli.
Its legs were quite as long as the tiger had said, and its body covered with coarse black hair.
There were tigers and elephants and bears and wolves and foxes and all the others in the natural history, and for a moment Dorothy was afraid.
Delcarte wanted to fetch the tiger's skin, but I had to deny him permission, since we had no means to properly cure it.
I saw that three rifles would be no match for them, and so I gave the word to put out from shore, hoping that the "tiger," as the ancients called him, could not swim.
All its efforts to rid itself of the
tiger seemed futile, until in desperation it threw itself upon the ground, rolling over and over.
"Hush, Dorothy," whispered the
Tiger; "you'll ruin my reputation if you are not more discreet.
"Now I've got him afraid of me, and the rest ought to be easy," he announced, resting off and panting hard from his exertions, while the great
tiger crouched and quivered and shrank back from him against the base of the arena-bars.
The
Tiger seemed to smile, and winked one eye slowly.
It was the noise that bewilders woodcutters and gypsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the
tiger.
And then we will go out together, the Fish-Eaters and the Meat-Eaters, and we will kill the
tigers and the lions and the wolves and the wild dogs, and we will pasture our goats on all the hill-sides and plant our corn and fat roots in all the high mountain valleys.
Out of your wild cats must
tigers have evolved, and out of your poison- toads, crocodiles: for the good hunter shall have a good hunt!
