Collection: The Second Jungle Book

Overview
Rudyard Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book (1895) gathers a new cycle of animal fables and adventure tales that deepen and darken the world introduced in The Jungle Book. Several stories return to Mowgli, the human child raised by wolves, tracing his growing power, moral education, and ultimate parting from the jungle. Interwoven are independent tales set in India and far beyond, each paired with brief poems, that meditate on law, fear, renunciation, and the costs of power. The result is a mosaic of myth, natural history, and parable, where the animal world mirrors human societies and the human world is never fully separate from the wild.

Setting and Structure
The collection ranges widely in place and mood, yet most roads lead back to the Seonee hills and the Law of the Jungle, a code of mutual restraint that holds only so long as creatures remember their limits. Droughts expose the Peace Rock and enforce a water truce; monsoons remake the forests. The British Raj appears obliquely through roads, rifles, and steam launches that alter balances of power. Each prose tale is framed by verses that echo or complicate its moral, binding disparate stories into a single imaginative realm.

Mowgli’s Later Adventures
In How Fear Came, a parching drought drives all beasts to a temporary peace at the river, where Hathi the elephant recounts a primal episode: the first killing of man and the birth of fear. The myth places Man outside the old order and explains the unease that shadows every pact in the jungle. Letting in the Jungle finds Mowgli paying back wrongs done by villagers who persecuted his human friends; he summons Hathi and the elephants to tear down fields and walls, allowing the forest to reclaim stolen ground. It is both vengeance and ecological restoration, guided by a stern sense of justice.

In The King’s Ankus, Mowgli is led into an abandoned treasure-house, where he casually takes a jeweled elephant goad. He learns, as men follow and slaughter one another for it, that objects of wealth carry a trail of blood. He discards the ankus, but the lesson of human greed lingers more deeply than any fang or claw. Red Dog pits him and the Seeonee wolves against a murderous pack of dholes. Using jungle craft and the fury of bees, he lures the invaders to destruction; the victory costs the life of Akela, whose fall marks the end of Mowgli’s boyhood. In The Spring Running, a restless pull stronger than any law draws him toward his own kind. Farewells to Bagheera and the Pack carry the ache of change, and the jungle accepts what it cannot prevent: man goes to man.

Beyond Mowgli
The Miracle of Purun Bhagat tells of a powerful prime minister who renounces rank to live as a holy man in the hills. Attuned to the animals, he senses a landslide and guides a village to safety, then dies as he chose to live, close to the creatures he trusted. The Undertakers features a cynical river-side dialogue among a mugger crocodile, a jackal, and an adjutant stork. Their swagger is punctured when a passing steamboat and a sahib’s rifle end the crocodile’s long reign, a hard parable of technology’s cold supremacy. Quiquern leaves India for the Arctic, where a starving camp is saved when two young Inuit, guided by a phantom many-legged dog-spirit across shifting ice, find new hunting grounds. What seems superstition becomes endurance and insight under polar skies.

Themes and Tone
Across the collection, Kipling weighs law against instinct, justice against vengeance, and renunciation against desire. Power, of teeth, treasure, office, or machinery, always exacts a price. The prose is swift and tactile, animated by precise observation of animals and by a bardic cadence in its myths. Mowgli’s arc resolves with poignancy: mastery of the jungle leads not to dominion but to departure, and the forest remains itself, ancient and undeceived.