Chapter 1 — The Flood
The summer rain fell for three days, and on the fourth the water overflowed its bed.
Rikki-tikki-tavi floated on a tussock of grass, and did not know where it was carrying him. Then the tussock reached the bank, and he fell asleep, because a mongoose can bear that much, but no more.
He woke to a small boy bending over him.
“Mother!” shouted the boy. “There’s something here! It’s alive!”
The mother wrapped him in cotton wool, covered him, warmed him. Rikki sneezed once, opened his eyes and looked around. It was his first day in the bungalow garden, and the moment it was decided that he belonged here.
The boy was called Teddy. His father said that while this mongoose was in the house, the child would sleep safely, as if a bloodhound guarded him.
Rikki’s first day was busy. He examined everything: the bath tub, a bottle of ink, the master’s cigar, and at night he fell asleep on Teddy’s pillow. His motto was this: run, and find out everything.
In the garden he soon met Darzee, the tailor-bird. Darzee’s nest was two large leaves sewn together, lined with cotton wool. The bird sang all the time, and forgot what it was singing about.
“The cobras would start with the child,” said Darzee. “They say that if the child goes, the rest go too. He is the one they have to get rid of first.”
The grass moved. A black cobra rose out of it, five feet high, with a hooded neck.
“Who is talking about the child here?” he asked.
Rikki did not run away. His mother had raised him on dead snakes, and a mongoose’s business is snakes. But when Nag attacked from behind too — because his mate, Nagaina, crouched there in the grass — Rikki realised something: two snakes cannot be beaten at once.
At the time he did not yet know that this summer would be about that.
Chapter 2 — The Dust-Brown Snake
The next morning Teddy bent down on the garden path to pick up a stone.
“Take care,” said a thin voice from the dust. “I am death.”
It was Karait, the little dust-brown snake, whose venom is as dangerous as a cobra’s, and who gives no warning.
Rikki did not spring at once. He approached with a swaying gait, stepped sideways, and bit when the snake’s head moved. It was the most dangerous moment of the summer, and Rikki managed it.
Teddy’s mother hugged him, crying. His father carried the snake out of the garden on a stick.
That night Rikki did not sleep. He slipped along the wall, where Chuchundra the musk-rat went, who never dares come out into the middle of the room.
“Go away,” complained Chuchundra. “Go away and ask the rat. The rat knows something. I only heard.”
Rikki listened. For a long time he heard nothing. Then he heard it: a dry, rustling sound on the brick wall. Snake scales.
The sound came from the bathroom drain. Rikki crept closer and listened to the conversation.
“If the people go away, the garden is ours,” said Nag. “But while they are here we dare not move. So first I shall bite the big man. In the morning, at bathing time. Then the two of us will look for a mongoose.”
“And the eggs?” asked Nagaina.
“They are in the melon bed. They are warm there.”
Rikki understood the plan. And he understood too that he had little time.
Nag slipped through the opening and drank from the largest water jug. Then he went rigid, because he knew the big man never took a stick with him when he went to bathe.
For an hour Rikki crept towards him. All the while he worked out where to bite: the neck below the hood is too thick, a bite towards the tail would only enrage him. He had to strike the head, above the hood. And he must not let go.
Then he sprang.
Nag shook him in the air, knocked over the tin dipper, the soap dish, the back brush, and crashed against the bath tub. Rikki held on with clenched teeth, and did not let go.
From the next room a light flashed, and two gunshots cracked. Then silence.
Chapter 3 — The Eggs
Nag did not move again.
Rikki did not celebrate. He went out into the garden and looked for the melon bed, because he remembered what Nagaina had said. At the end near the wall, under the earth, he found twenty-five eggs. Eggs with leathery shells, the size of a bantam’s egg, and in each one a tiny cobra.
Rikki finished them off. It was the ugliest job of the summer, and he did not like to think of it.
Nagaina was mourning by the stables, and this was the most dangerous moment, because a mourning snake is not careful. Darzee’s wife, a far more sensible bird than her husband, flew out in front of her and pretended to have a broken wing. Nagaina saw through the trick, but followed her — all the way to the house.
Rikki carried the third egg in his mouth and went up onto the veranda.
Nagaina coiled up on the mat beside Teddy’s chair.
“If you move, I strike,” said the snake. “And if you don’t move, I strike anyway.”
His father whispered: “Keep still, Teddy.”
“Turn round and fight, Nagaina!” said Rikki, and held up the egg.
Nagaina turned. In that instant his father snatched Teddy out of the chair, across the tea table, and set him down at the other end of the room.
“Give it to me,” hissed Nagaina. “Give it to me, and I will go away, and never come back.”
“Fight, widow!” said Rikki. “The big man has gone for his gun!”
Nagaina snatched up the egg and set off. Rikki after her. At the end of the garden was a rat hole; the snake straightened out and shot down into the dark. Rikki sank his teeth into her tail and went down with her, braking with his feet on the hot, damp slope.
Down there it was dark, and Rikki could not see. He felt only his own teeth, and the coiling of the snake’s body. Then everything stopped.
Darzee was just beginning a funeral song on the veranda when Rikki crawled out of the hole. He was muddy, tired, and he sneezed once.
“It’s over,” he said. “The widow will never come out again.”
He slept until the afternoon.
The garden’s news-crier, the coppersmith bird, rang it out all over the neighbourhood: Nag is dead, Nagaina is dead. The mother fainted from joy and fright, and the father sat down and said nothing for a long time.
Rikki ate as much as he could. Then he climbed onto Teddy’s shoulder, curled up, and fell asleep.
“He saved our lives,” said the mother. “And Teddy’s too.”
Rikki was already half asleep, but at that he opened his eyes once more.
“Every cobra is dead,” he said. “And if one is left, I am here.”
He did not become conceited. With tooth, spring and bite he guarded the garden, until never again did a single cobra dare show its head inside the walls.
