The Jungle Book

Deep in the Seeonee jungle of central India, a small naked man-cub crawls out of the underbrush and into the cave of Father Wolf and Mother Wolf, who have just been threatened by the lame tiger Shere Khan. Shere Khan demands the cub, but Mother Wolf, fierce as a demon, refuses; the wolves carry the child to Council Rock, where the Law of the Jungle decides if a man-cub may join the pack. Bagheera the black panther and Baloo the brown bear speak for him, and Bagheera pays a fresh-killed bull as the price of his life. The pack accepts him. They call him Mowgli, the Frog.

Mowgli grows up among the wolves. Baloo teaches him the Law and the Master Words that grant safe passage among every people of the jungle, and Bagheera teaches him to hunt. But Shere Khan never forgets, and as the years pass he turns the younger wolves against Mowgli. Bagheera warns the boy to fetch the Red Flower — fire — from the village. Mowgli does, and at Council Rock he uses a flaming branch to drive Shere Khan away in disgrace. Weeping with a strange new pain in his heart, he leaves the jungle to live among men.

In a small village under a fig tree he is taken in by a kind woman named Messua, who believes he is her own lost son. He learns the speech of men and herds the village buffaloes. One morning his wolf brother Gray Brother brings news that Shere Khan has come back, lying in wait for him in a deep ravine. Mowgli splits the buffalo herd in two, drives the bulls and cows from both ends, and catches Shere Khan between the stampedes. The great tiger is trampled to death. But when Mowgli returns with the hide, the village hunter Buldeo accuses him of witchcraft, and the villagers stone him out of their fields. Mowgli walks back into the jungle to his true family — the wolves, Bagheera, and Baloo — and the moon rises over the Seeonee hills.