Page 171 - New Grammar with a Smile 8

Comprehension

1
Rikki-tikki-tavi

Read the passage carefully.

This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through
the bathrooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. 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.

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 in 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 over a little fire, 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.’

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