stay hungry

In the short story I was studying / celebrating last week, you can just wrap yourself in the majesty and music of the author's phrases, and telling-style.

[excerpts from Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi]

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 ...

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.

…They gave him a little piece of raw meat. Rikki-tikki liked it immensely, and when it was finished he went out onto the verandah and sat in the sunshine and fluffed up his fur to make it dry to the roots. Then he felt better.

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...he thought he could just catch the faintest scratch-scratch in the world, -- a noise as faint as that of a wasp walking on a window-pane, -- the dry scratch of a snake's scales on brick-work.
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...Angry as he was, Rikki-tikki was very frightened as he saw the size of the big cobra. Nag coiled himself up, raised his head, and looked into the bath-room in the dark, and Rikki could see his eyes glitter.
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"...I shall wait here in the cool till daytime.''


Nag coiled himself down, coil by coil, round the bulge at the bottom of the water-jar. [shiver]


When morning came he was very stiff, but well pleased with his doings.
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[at the end of the story when he has won the battle with the evil, mean snakes]:

Rikki-tikki had a right to be proud of himself; but he did not grow too proud, and he kept that garden as a mongoose should keep it, with tooth and jump and spring and bit...

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Where it says that he "had a right to be proud of himself; but he did not grow too proud..." it echoes the Kipling poem "If" and it's kind of like a T-shirt they have in one dept. where I work: it reads, "Stay hungry, stay humble."

----------------- [from "Rikki-Tikki]:
...he danced up to Karait with the peculiar rocking, swaying motion that he had inherited from his family. It looks very funny, but it is so perfectly balanced a gait that you can fly off from it at any angle you please; and in dealing with snakes this is an advantage. If Rikki-tikki had only known, he was doing a much more dangerous thing that fighting Nag, for Karait is so small, and can turn so quickly...
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Rikki-Tikki-Tavi also "stays hungry," come to think about it:
"That bite paralysed Karait, and Rikki-tikki was just going to eat him up from the tail, after the custom of his family at dinner, when he remembered that a full meal makes a slow mongoose, and if he wanted all his strength and quickness ready, he must keep himself thin."

-30-