Hathi tells the jungle animals about the first tiger in Rudyard Kipling’s “How Fear Came.”
“How Fear Came” appears in The Second Jungle Book. During a drought, the animals gather at the Peace Rock, where the Law of the Jungle requires a truce around the remaining water. Hathi, the elephant, tells the story of how fear entered the jungle and how the first tiger became associated with killing.
The story gives Hathi an unusually authoritative role. Elephants are presented as ancient keepers of memory, and Hathi’s account reaches back to a time before the current order of the jungle. The tale also explains the origin of the tiger’s fear of humans in Kipling’s imaginative mythology.
Readers sometimes associate Hathi primarily with the comic elephant patrol in Disney’s 1967 film. Kipling’s Hathi is much more solemn: he is an ancient figure whose memories preserve the jungle’s deepest history.