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Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books is a collection of animal stories for 9 year olds that puts both of his Jungle Books together, wolf-boy and all.
It starts with a baby. One warm evening a little boy who can only just walk wanders into a wolves' cave and laughs up at Father Wolf. Shere Khan the tiger wants him. Mother Wolf says no (and she means it).
That boy is Mowgli, and his stories run right through both books. Baloo the bear tries to teach him the Law of the Jungle, and Mowgli sulks off with the monkeys instead. He goes to live in a village, where Messua wonders if he's the son a tiger took from her. Later there's a terrible drought, wrestling matches with Kaa the python and a pack of red dogs. By the last story he's nearly seventeen and the Jungle's songs are saying goodbye.
In between come stand-alone stories, often where children find their favourite. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a mongoose washed out of his burrow by a flood and taken in by an English family. In The White Seal, Kotick is born pure white on a beach of fighting seals. Ten-year-old Little Toomai's family have driven the old elephant Kala Nag for generations. Her Majesty's Servants starts with a camel flattening a man's tent, then he lies in the rain listening to the army's animals chat. Purun Bhagat swaps being a Prime Minister for a holy man's begging-bowl. The Undertakers has a crocodile, a crane and a jackal grumbling on a riverbank. And Quiquern follows Kotuko, a fourteen-year-old Inuit boy, and the puppy named after him as hunger comes to the ice.
It's worth knowing what kind of read this is before you hand it over. The animals talk in thee and thou and the sentences are LONG. The stories start after a long introduction for grown-ups. Most are set in British-run India and told from the British side, and some lines show it. There are deaths on the page too. Shere Khan is trampled in a buffalo stampede Mowgli plans (then Mowgli skins him), Father and Mother Wolf die, and the Red Dog fight is a proper battle where many wolves are killed.
A sensitive reader might find the wolf deaths hard. If you've got a confident reader who loves animals, or one happy to share it at bedtime, the jungle will probably swallow them whole. Who could resist a black panther as a best friend?
For more Kipling animals in a much sillier mood, try his Just So Stories. A whale swallows a sailor who won't stop dancing, and Kipling talks straight to "Best Beloved" the whole way through.
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