193).

Like Tennyson’s brotherly bands, Kipling’s beasts team together around common engagement in violent activity. Moreover, the idea of manly solidarity in both Kipling and Tennyson is linked to ineluctable tragedy and loss. Arthur’s reign must end, as must Mowgli’s rule in the jungle, and the male solidarity that these figures embody must as a consequence be lost as well; at the end of The Jungle Books, Mowgli’s mentors are all aging or already dead. In Tennyson’s poems (and Arthurian legend), Arthur’s kingdom suffers corruption from within; similarly, many members of Mowgli’s wolf pack willingly betray the boy. The connection between possible loss and manliness is also made in the Jungle Book tale “Quiquern,” which sets a coming-of-age story among the Inuit in the Arctic. The tale’s epigraph asserts that the Inuit described in the story are “the last of the Men”; they are untainted and pure in their manliness because they live “beyond the white man’s ken,” but they are destined to dwindle (p. 298). This story, like the Mowgli tales, is filled with images of a rugged manliness. At the beginning of the story, the boy Kotuko longs to join the men in their hunting and in the rituals surrounding it, during which they gather in the Singing-House for their “mysteries.” These men keep the community alive by hunting; if they fail, “the people must die” (p. 306). The main activity of the males is hunting, and as in the Mowgli stories, canine and human hunters are paired. Kipling describes the boy and his dog, who is named after him, as the “fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged, yellow brute” (p. 305). In the end, boy and dog together help to save the village from starvation during a particularly brutal winter.

An important model for Kipling’s depiction of fraternal bonding was the male community of Freemasons. Kipling joined the Freemasons’ Lodge Hope and Perseverance No. 782 in Lahore in 1885 when he was nineteen, and through his life he embraced the Masons’ ecumenical vision. The wolf pack into which Mowgli is inducted with much ceremony is called the “Free People,” a title that evokes the Freemasons. Like the Masons, Kipling’s wolves refer to each other as “brother,” and their fraternity crosses species lines just as the Freemasons fraternity crosses race and class lines. At the Masonic lodge, which Kipling characterized in his memoirs as “another world,” Kipling had the opportunity to fraternize with a medley of men: “Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs members of the Aryo and Brahmo Samaj, and a Jew Tyler.” Of course, Kipling’s repeated reference to the “Masonic lions” of his childhood reading as a key influence on The Jungle Books also highlights the link between the Masons and the Jungle Book wolves.

These positive heterogeneous fraternities in The Jungle Books contrast with groups that might be described as anti-brotherhoods. “The Undertakers” centers around such a group, a trio of carrion eaters on intimate terms who discuss their feeding exploits. Unlike the “servants of the Queen” or the wolf brethren, these animals have no law to bind them to each other. Though they cluster together, each of the creatures—a crocodile, a crane, and a jackal—would rather have the good fortune to make a meal of the others than to converse. And in fact, at the end it is implied that two will feast on the remains of the third. The English in the story present a collective force, the force of “progress,” that makes the pickings of these creatures slimmer and that ultimately leads to the demise of the most powerful among them. The Mugger, a notoriously enormous crocodile, grumbles that human food is scarce since the English have built a railway bridge across his river and people no longer need to ford the river; the crane complains that the streets of Calcutta, newly cleaned by the English, leave him little meat.

Kipling presents the Mugger, who is the leader of this pack, as a formidable antagonist for the English. He brags that he achieved his great length and girth by feeding on bodies of those killed in the Indian Mutiny. Most specifically, the Mugger is the antagonist of a particular English child whom he tried to catch “for sport” as the boy escaped with his mother from the violence of the Mutiny. Here as elsewhere, killing “for sport” is associated with lawlessness. This child—now a man—not only has built the railway bridge under which the Mugger hunts, but, at the violent conclusion of the tale, shoots the colossal creature to pieces. The railway bridge, a symbol of British “progress,” ultimately leads to the Mugger’s demise (the man who shoots him stands on it); and it is the Mugger’s ignorance about “progress,” expressed primarily in his inability to fathom the railway, that leads to his downfall.