"I did not have my tail cut off for stealing cocoa-nuts," sneered Grey Boar. "The tight squeeze was from Python; and do you know that to this day I am half a head longer than I was before our slim Friend twisted about my body. But I got his head in my strong jaws just as I was near dead."
"Perhaps you would not have managed it if he had not squeezed you out long," said Pardus.
"What I say," continued Boar, "is, that we are not the Evil Kind that is in the mouth of everyone. Cobra crawls into the houses of the Men, and for fear of their evil Gods they feed him; and one day in anger he strikes to Kill. That is surely wrong. But we live in houses of our own make."
"Certainly that is a lie," interrupted Magh. "Thou art a wanderer in the Jungle, a dweller in caves, even as Pard the Panther."
"You are wrong, Little One," declared Hathi, "for I have seen Boar's house. It's a sort of grass hauda."
"Yes," affirmed Wild Boar; "it is all of my own making, and of grass, to be sure. For days and days at a time, I do nothing but cut the strong elephant grass, and the big ferns, and the sweet bowlchie, and pile it up into a house. Then I burrow under it, and the rain beats it down over my back, and soon I have a nice, clean, waterproof nest. I am not a homeless vagabond like Magh and her wandering tribe——"
"And that's just it," broke in Big Tusk, the Nagpore Boar. "We, who are quiet and orderly in our manner of life, living in houses of our own building, as Grey Boar has said, are hunted and killed by the White-faced ones as a matter of sport. What think you of that, Sa'-zada—killed just for our tusks—for a pair of teeth?"
"It is likewise so with me, my narrow-faced Brother," whispered Hathi. "Many of my kind are slain for their tusks; I, who have lived amongst the Men, know that."
Continued Big Tusk: "Yes, this is so; I have been in many a run in the corries of Nagpore. You see, I learned the game from my Mother when I was but a 'Squeaker,' for be it to the credit of the White ones, they kill not the Sows with their sharp spears."