Directions: Read the excerpt below from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and then answer the questions.
The birds and the monkey-people went north early in the year, for they knew what was coming. The deer and the wild pig broke far away to the perished fields of the villages dying sometimes before the eyes of men too weak to kill them. Chil, the Kite, stayed and grew fat, for there was a great deal of carrion. Evening after evening, he brought the news to the beasts, too weak to force their way to fresh hunting-grounds that the sun was killing the Jungle for three days’ flight in every direction.
Mowgli, who had never known what real hunger meant, fell back on stale honey, three years old, scraped out of deserted rock-hives—honey black as a sloe and dusty with dried sugar. He hunted, too, for deep-boring grubs under the bark of the trees and robbed the wasps of their new broods. All the game in the jungle was no more than skin and bone, and Bagheera could kill thrice in a night and hardly get a full meal. The want of water was the worst, for though the Jungle People drink seldom they must drink deep.
The heat went on and on and sucked up all the moisture till at last the main channel of the Waingunga was the only stream that carried a trickle of water between its dead banks. When Hathi, the wild elephant, who lives for a hundred years and more, saw a long, lean blue ridge of rock show dry in the very center of the stream, he knew that he was looking at the Peace Rock. Then and there he lifted up his trunk and proclaimed the Water Truce, as his father before him had proclaimed it fifty years ago. The deer, wild pig, and buffalo took up the cry hoarsely. Chil, the Kite, flew in great 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. Everyone in the Jungle can scramble along somehow when only game is scarce. 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. 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. This was done precisely because they knew that at any moment Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap upon them and bear them down. 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.
Note
Only spelling mistakes, if any, in the above passage have been corrected. No other corrections, including grammatical, have been made so that the originality of the passage is maintained.
