As a child of the six­ties, I was exposed to that great 1967 Dis­ney clas­sic, The Jun­gle Book; I remem­ber being tak­en to the cin­e­ma to watch it and at the end, as the cred­its rolled, I begged to stay and watch Mowgli, Baloo and Shere Khan all over again (I seem to remem­ber we’d been a bit late and missed the first few min­utes so I built my jus­ti­fi­ca­tion upon that; it didn’t work). Mean­while, at school, a copy of the book on which the film was based was a sta­ple of the class book­case: Rud­yard Kipling’s The Jun­gle Book. Most of the short sto­ries must have been read out to us at one time or anoth­er but one in par­tic­u­lar stands out in my mem­o­ry: the tale of Rik­ki-Tik­ki-Tavi.

Rik­ki-Tik­ki-Tavi, so named for his chat­ter­ing vocal sounds, was a young Indi­an grey mon­goose who befriends an Eng­lish fam­i­ly resid­ing in India. He gets to know the oth­er crea­tures inhab­it­ing the gar­den and is warned of the cobras Nag and Nagaina (names per­haps inspir­ing J K Rowl­ing to choose, years lat­er, the name Nagi­ni for Voldemort’s snake), who are angered by the human fam­i­ly’s pres­ence in their ter­ri­to­ry and seek to kill them

Accord­ing­ly, Nag enters the house­’s bath­room before dawn to kill the humans, but Rik­ki attacks Nag from behind in the dark­ness. The ensu­ing strug­gle awak­ens the fam­i­ly, and the father kills Nag with a shot­gun blast while Rik­ki bites down on the hood of the strug­gling male cobra. The griev­ing female snake Nagaina attempts revenge against the humans, cor­ner­ing them as they have break­fast on a veran­da, but again Rik­ki saves the day, pur­su­ing Nagaina to her under­ground nest where an unseen final bat­tle takes place. Rik­ki emerges tri­umphant from the hole, and ded­i­cates his life to guard­ing the gar­den.

The sto­ries in The Jun­gle Book were inspired in part by ancient Indi­an fable texts such as the Pan­chatantra and the Jata­ka tales, and indeed there is a sim­i­lar mon­goose and snake ver­sion of the Rik­ki-Tik­ki-Tavi sto­ry found in Book 5 of Pan­chatantra. Kipling’s “beast tales” were thus the revival of an old tra­di­tion, with Kipling’s own spin gleaned from his expe­ri­ences grow­ing up in India for the first five years of his life (and with a hearty dol­lop of aban­don­ment issues, per­haps, after Kipling was sent back to Eng­land for an unhap­py peri­od, but that’s anoth­er sto­ry). Here are the open­ing lines to the sto­ry.

THIS is the sto­ry of the great war that Rik­ki-tik­ki-tavi fought sin­gle-hand­ed, through the bath-rooms of the big bun­ga­low in Segowlee can­ton­ment. Darzee, the tai­lor-bird, helped him, and Chuchun­dra, the muskrat, who nev­er comes out into the mid­dle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rik­ki-tik­ki did the real fight­ing.

He was a mon­goose, rather like a lit­tle cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his rest­less nose were pink; he could scratch him­self any­where he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bot­tle-brush, and his war-cry as he scut­tled through the long grass, was: “Rikk-tikk-tik­ki-tik­ki-tchk!”

One day, a high sum­mer flood washed him out of the bur­row where he lived with his father and moth­er, and car­ried him, kick­ing and cluck­ing, down a road­side ditch. He found a lit­tle wisp of grass float­ing there, and clung to it till he lost his sens­es. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the mid­dle of a gar­den path, very drag­gled indeed, and a small boy was say­ing: “Here’s a dead mon­goose. Let’s have a funer­al.”

“No,” said his moth­er; “let’s take him in and dry him. Per­haps he isn’t real­ly dead.”

They took him into the house, and a big man picked him up between his fin­ger and thumb and said he was not dead but half choked; so they wrapped him in cot­ton-wool, and warmed him, and he opened his eyes and sneezed.

“Now,” said the big man (he was an Eng­lish­man who had just moved into the bun­ga­low); “don’t fright­en him, and we’ll see what he’ll do.”

It is the hard­est thing in the world to fright­en a mon­goose, because he is eat­en up from nose to tail with curios­i­ty. The mot­to of all the mon­goose fam­i­ly is, “Run and find out”; and Rik­ki-tik­ki was a true mon­goose. He looked at the cot­ton-wool, decid­ed that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched him­self, and jumped on the small boy’s shoul­der.

“Don’t be fright­ened, Ted­dy,” said his father. “That’s his way of mak­ing friends.”

“Ouch! He’s tick­ling under my chin,” said Ted­dy.

Rik­ki-tik­ki looked down between the boy’s col­lar and neck, snuffed at his ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rub­bing his nose.