Bronze Boomerang
5 – Our Cub Scout Traditions
* Talk about the main characters in the Jungle Books and what their names are.
* Tell the story of how Mowgli came to be in the Jungle.
Read Mowgli’s Brothers from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. It is hard to read the text version on-line so it is worth getting a copy of the book from a local library (or borrow a copy from your pack Akela). You can also listen to an audiobook.
In this story, Mowgli crawls into the wolves’ den and is adopted by Mother and Father Wolf who protect him from Shere Khan. The wolf pack allows Mowgli to stay after Baloo promise to care for him and to teach him the Law of the Jungle, and Bagheera gives the pack a freshly killed bull. The story skips forward ten or eleven years and Mowgli returns to the man’s village. Mowgli returns to the jungle with fire and defeats Shere Khan and saves Akela.
… The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf
dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if
you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful
thing in the world–the wolf checked in mid-spring. He made his
bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he
tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight
into the air for four or five feet, landing almost where he left
ground.“Man!” he snapped. “A man’s cub. Look!”
Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a
naked brown baby who could just walk–as soft and as dimpled a
little atom as ever came to a wolf’s cave at night. He looked up
into Father Wolf’s face, and laughed.“Is that a man’s cub?” said Mother Wolf. “I have never seen
one. Bring it here.”A Wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary,
mouth an egg without breaking it, and though Father Wolf’s jaws
closed right on the child’s back not a tooth even scratched the
skin as he laid it down among the cubs.“How little! How naked, and–how bold!” said Mother Wolf
softly. The baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get
close to the warm hide. “Ahai! He is taking his meal with the
others. And so this is a man’s cub. Now, was there ever a wolf
that could boast of a man’s cub among her children?”“I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our
Pack or in my time,” said Father Wolf. “He is altogether without
hair, and I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he
looks up and is not afraid.”The moonlight was blocked out of the mouth of the cave, for
Shere Khan’s great square head and shoulders were thrust into the
entrance. Tabaqui, behind him, was squeaking: “My lord, my lord,
it went in here!” …
If you have only seen the Disney version of the Jungle book, see if you can find a copy of the Shonen Mowgli animated version;
“Jungle book” – Episode 1 – “Mowgli is born”
(Shonen Mowgli / Dschungelbuch – Die Serie)
This is an anime adaption of the original Jungle Book is closer to the book than the Disney version, but it does drift away on more than one occasion.
“Jungle book” – Episode 2 – “The Adventure Continues”
(Shonen Mowgli / Dschungelbuch – Die Serie)
Who are?
For each of the following characters, work out who they are and what they do in the story;
- Akela
- Mowgli
- Tabaqui
- Shere Khan
- Chil
- Hathi
- Raksha
- Bagheera
- Baloo
- Kaa
[1] The Jungle Books – Part I [Gellibranded]
[2] Jungle Book Shonen Mowgli [Wikipedia]
[3] The Jungle Book – Factsheet – Teacher’s notes (PDF) [Pearson Education]
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