The motto of all the mongoose family is 'Run and find out,' and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. '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. So they wrapped him in cotton wool, and warmed him over a little fire, and he opened his eyes and sneezed. 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.

Let's have a funeral.' 'No,' said his mother, 'let's take him in and dry him. 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. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. 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 could scratch himself anywhere he pleased with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink.

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.

Darzee, the Tailorbird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, 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. 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. Hear what little Red-Eye saith: 'Nag, come up and dance with death!' Eye to eye and head to head, (Keep the measure, Nag.) This shall end when one is dead (At thy pleasure, Nag.) Turn for turn and twist for twist- (Run and hide thee, Nag.) Hah! The hooded Death has missed! (Woe betide thee, Nag!)

At the hole where he went in Red-Eye called to Wrinkle-Skin.

Rudyard kipling fables