Free to read
The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling
Enter a world of wolves, tigers, a fearless mongoose and a boy learning the laws of the jungle. These stories follow creatures finding their place in worlds that can be both protective and dangerous.
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Adventure / Short fiction
- Length
- 14 chapters · About 4 hours
- First published
- 1894
- Availability
- Free
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Is this book for you?
A collection to read one story at a time, including Mowgli and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Includes poems, animal conflict and the cultural assumptions of its era.
Read it in English. This edition is free to add to your library.
Text source: Project Gutenberg. Source license and territorial terms.
THE OPENING PAGES
Try the first few lines.
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 gray 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 down hill 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 eating 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,…Start reading this book ↗