The Jungle Book - by Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (UK Edition) (DE Edition) is well known in the states as the basis for a Disney Movie.  In England, I suspect it is still a staple of the nursery, but perhaps now – thanks to Disney.

But we will look past the adaptations and back to the original series of stories and poems. 

He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink. He could scratch himself anywhere he pleased with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use. He could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle brush, and his war cry as he scuttled through the long grass was: "Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!"

One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed, and a small boy was saying, "Here's a dead mongoose. Let's have a funeral."

"No," said his mother, "let's take him in and dry him. Perhaps he isn't really dead."

I liked this Amazon reader review:  

"His books also have that ultimate mark of any classic, the ability to be enjoyed as much by grown-ups as by children. The jungle book is most probably familiar to the world now through the Disney cartoon, which bears all the relationship to the original book as Muppet Treasure Island does to Robert Louis Stevenson. The real book is much darker, much more dangerous, much more exciting and much, much more enjoyable."

So I leave it for you to decide for yourself if Kipling speaks to us today and if he can speak to adults as well as children.

“It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity.”

I can relate to that!

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