"Enter, then, and look," said Father Wolf stiffly, "but there is no food
here."

"For a wolf, no," said Tabaqui, "but for so mean a person as myself a
dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log [the jackal people],
to pick and choose?" He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he
found the bone of a buck with some meat on it, and sat cracking the end
merrily.

"All thanks for this good meal," he said, licking his lips. "How
beautiful are the noble children! How large are their eyes! And so young
too! Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the children of kings
are men from the beginning."

Now, Tabaqui knew as well as anyone else that there is nothing so
unlucky as to compliment children to their faces. It pleased him to see
Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.

Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made, and then
he said spitefully:

"Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will hunt
among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me."

Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River, twenty
miles away.

"He has no right!" Father Wolf began angrily--"By the Law of the Jungle
he has no right to change his quarters without due warning. He will
frighten every head of game within ten miles, and I--I have to kill for