`` Ye can hear Shere Khan below in the thickets . I might have saved myself the message . '' Father Wolf listened , and below in the valley that ran down to a little river he heard the dry , angry , snarly , singsong whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it . `` The fool ! '' said Father Wolf . `` To begin a night 's work with that noise ! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga bullocks ? '' `` H'sh . It is neither bullock nor buck he hunts to-night , '' said Mother Wolf . `` It is Man . '' The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that seemed to come from every quarter of the compass . 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 . `` Man ! '' said Father Wolf , showing all his white teeth . `` Faugh ! Are there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must eat Man , and on our ground too ! '' The Law of the Jungle , which never orders anything without a reason , forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill , and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe . The real reason for this is that man-killing means , sooner or later , the arrival of white men on elephants , with guns , and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches . Then everybody in the jungle suffers . The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things , and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him .
They say too -- and it is true -- that man-eaters become mangy , and lose their XXXXX .
arrival beasts beetles compass everybody fool gypsies message nothing teeth