Testlife Mock 6 - Paper 1
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Testlife Mock 6 - Paper 2
“Mowgli’s Brothers”
Excerpt from The Jungle Book
It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf
woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws
one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips.
Mother Wolf lay with her big grey nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing
cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived.
“Augrh!” said Father Wolf. “It is time to hunt again.”
He was going to spring downhill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the
threshold and whined: “Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves. And good
luck and strong white teeth go with noble children that they may never forget the
hungry in this world.”
It was the jackal—Tabaqui, the Dish-licker—and the wolves of India despise
Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief and telling tales, and eats rags and
pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps.
But they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than anyone else in the
jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of anyone and
runs through the forest biting everything in his way.
Even the tiger runs and hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for madness is the
most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature.
We call it hydrophobia, but they call it dewanee—the madness—and run.
“Enter, then, and look,” said Father Wolf stiffly, “but there is no food here.”
“For a wolf, no,” said Tabaqui. “But for so mean a person as myself, a dry bone is a
good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log (the jackal people), to pick and choose?”
He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he found a bone with some meat on it,
and sat cracking the bone contentedly.
“All thanks for this good meal,” he said, licking his lips. “How beautiful are the
noble children! How large are their eyes! And so young too! Indeed, indeed, I might
have remembered that the children of kings are men from the beginning.”
Now, Tabaqui knew as well as anyone else that there is nothing so unlucky as to
compliment children to their faces. It pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf
look uncomfortable.
Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief he had made, and then he said spitefully:
“Shere Khan the Big One has shifted his hunting-grounds. He will hunt among these
hills for the next moon, so he has told me.”
Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River, twenty miles away.
“He has no right!” Father Wolf began angrily. “By the Law of the Jungle, he has no
right to change his quarters without fair warning. He will frighten every head of
game within ten miles; and I—I have to kill for two, these days.”
“His mother did not call him Lungri (the Lame One) for nothing,” said Mother Wolf
quietly. “He has been lame in one foot from his birth. That is why he has only killed
cattle. Now the villagers of the Waingunga are angry with him, and he has come
here to make our villagers angry. They will hunt through the jungle when he is far
away, and we and our children must run when the grass is set alight. Indeed, we
are very grateful to Shere Khan!”
“I go,” said Tabaqui quietly. “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, sing-song 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?”
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