“The stream is shrunk–” from How Fear Came, The Second Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling, 1895
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a British author and poet who wrote the classic children’s book, The Jungle Book. This poem precedes the first chapter of The Second Jungle Book, How Fear Came. In this poem Kipling describes the unspoken “water truce” between all of the animals in the jungle, predator and prey, during times of drought:
“The stream is shrunk—the pool is dry, And we be comrades, thou and I; With fevered jowl and dusty flank Each jostling each along the bank; And by one drouthy fear made still, Forgoing thought of quest or kill. Now ‘neath his dam the fawn may see, The lean Pack-wolf as cowed as he, And the tall buck, unflinching, note The fangs that tore his father’s throat. The pools are shrunk—the streams are dry, And we be playmates, thou and I, Till yonder cloud—Good Hunting!—loose The rain that breaks our Water Truce.”
This poem evokes imagery of animals of all kinds coming to a source of water and coexisting for a brief time, even enjoying each other’s company.
Glenn Bartley
Glenn Bartley is a Canadian wildlife photographer from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada who is best known for his intimately close and vibrant photographs of bird species that are notorious for eluding capture in a photograph. Bartley earned a MS in Ecological Restoration, yet has forged a decades long career of photographing birds on multiple continents, a passion that first began in his childhood. He uses a variety of Canon lenses and a tripod to obtain his crisp, frozen-in-time photos.
Stephen Green-Armytage
Stephen Green-Armytage is a photographer who is well-known for his published photo books such as Extraordinary Pigs, Extraordinary Chickens, Extraordinary Pigeons, among others. Green-Armytage poses his animal subjects in dramatic studio lighting and a vacuum of space that allows their beauty to dominate his photographs. His chickens may be comically flamboyant with their wild plumes of feathers, but the viewer can’t help but appreciate each chicken’s one-of-a-kind appearance.
