Kaa is a fictional character from the Mowgli stories written by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling describes him as an exceptionally long, yellowish Python molurus. Kaa is one of Mowgli's mentors and friends. He, Baloo and Bagheera sing for Mowgli "The Outsong" of the jungle. First introduced in the story "Kaa's Hunting" in The Jungle Book, Kaa is a huge and powerful snake, more than a hundred years old and still in his prime. Despite his polite, unhurried demeanor, animals seem to have a fearful respect for Kaa. Bagheera and Baloo enlist Kaa's help to rescue Mowgli when the man-cub is captured by the Bandar-log (monkeys) and taken to an abandoned human city. Kaa breaks down the wall of the building in which Mowgli is imprisoned and uses his serpentine hypnosis to draw the monkeys toward his waiting jaws. Bagheera and Baloo are also hypnotized, but Mowgli is immune because he is human, and breaks the spell on his friends.
In The Second Jungle Book Kaa appears in the first half of the story "The King's Ankus". After he and Mowgli spend some time relaxing, bathing and wrestling, Kaa persuades Mowgli to visit a treasure chamber guarded by an old cobra beneath an ancient city. The cobra tries to kill Mowgli but its poison has dried up. Mowgli takes a jeweled item away as a souvenir, not realizing the trouble it will cause in the second half of the story, and Kaa departs.
In "Red Dog" Mowgli asks Kaa for help when his wolf pack is threatened by rampaging dhole (the red dogs of the title). Kaa goes into a trance so that he can search his century-long memory for a stratagem to defeat the dogs:
| “ | For a long hour Mowgli lay back among the coils, while Kaa, his head motionless on the ground, thought of all that he had seen and known since the day he came from the egg.
The light seemed to go out of his eyes and leave them like stale opals, and now and again he made little stiff passes with his head, right and left, as though he were hunting in his sleep. Mowgli dozed quietly, for he knew that there is nothing like sleep before hunting, and he was trained to take it at any hour of the day or night. Then he felt Kaa’s back grow bigger and broader below him as the huge python puffed himself out, hissing with the noise of a sword drawn from a steel scabbard; “I have seen all the dead seasons,” Kaa said at last, “and the great trees and the old elephants, and the rocks that were bare and sharp-pointed ere the moss grew. Art thou still alive, Manling?” |
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With Kaa's help Mowgli tricks the dhole into attacking prematurely. Kaa takes no part in the resulting battle (obliquely citing his loyalty to the boy rather than to the wolves, who often caused Mowgli grief) but Mowgli and the wolves finally kill all the dhole, though not without grievous losses. Kaa makes his last appearance in "The Spring Running," as the teenage Mowgli reluctantly prepares to leave the jungle for the last time. "It is hard to cast the skin," he tells Mowgli, but Mowgli knows he must cast the skin of his old life in order to grow a new one.
Read more about Kaa: The Jungle Book (1967), The Jungle Book 2 (2003), The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo (1997), Other Appearances