Buldeo

No one was more pleased than Mowgli, and that night, because he had been appointed a servant of the village as it were, he went off to a circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great fig tree.

It was the village club, and the headman and the watchman and the barber, who knew all the gossip of the village, and old Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a tower musket, met and smoked.

The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because he was sacred.

And the old men sat around the tree and talked and pulled at the big hookahs, the water pipes, till far into the night.

They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts, and Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of the beasts in the jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the circle bulged out of their heads.

Most of the tales were about animals, for the jungle was always at their door.

The deer and the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tiger carried off a man at twilight within sight of the village gates.

Mowgli, who naturally knew something about what they were talking of, had to cover his face not to show that he was laughing, while Buldeo, the tower musket across his knees, climbed on from one wonderful story to another, and Mowgli's shoulders shook.