57 pages • 1 hour read
Rudyard KiplingJust So Stories
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Middle Grade | Published in 1902A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Stories 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 7 Summary: “The Beginning of the Armadillos”
In “the High and Far-Off Times” (28), the Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog was friends with the Slow-Solid Tortoise. They lived on the banks of the Amazon River along with the Painted Jaguar, who “ate everything that he could catch” (28). When he ran out of things to eat, the Painted Jaguar went to his mother, who told him how to eat hedgehogs and tortoises. His mother patiently explained that one must drop a hedgehog into the water so it would uncurl, and the tortoise should be scooped out of its shell with a paw.
One evening, the Painted Jaguar finds the Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog and the Slow-Solid Tortoise on the bank of the river. They cannot escape the Painted Jaguar, so the Tortoise pulls himself into his shell, and the Hedgehog curls into a ball. The Jaguar repeats his mother’s advice, but he isn’t sure which animal is which, and the Hedgehog and the Tortoise confuse him. They ask if he is sure he remembers correctly; perhaps he should “uncoil a Tortoise” by “shell[ing] him out of the water with a scoop” (29). They refuse to tell him who is the Hedgehog and who is the Tortoise, but the Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog tells the Painted Jaguar that he can scoop him out of his shell. The Painted Jaguar is sure this means he is the Tortoise, so he tries to scoop the Hedgehog out, but his paw gets filled with prickles.
Frustrated and confused, the Painted Jaguar turns his attention to the Tortoise, who continues to twist the instructions from the Jaguar’s mother until he becomes convinced that he isn’t really a Tortoise and that he should drop him into the water. The Tortoise obliges, jumping into the river and swimming away. He swims down the river until he reaches the Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog, and together they listen to the Painted Jaguar roaring for his mother.
The Painted Jaguar’s mother patiently explains again how to eat the Hedgehog and the Tortoise and gives him some tips on telling the difference between the two animals. The Hedgehog and the Tortoise listen with growing concern. They worry that the Painted Jaguar will surely remember his mother’s instructions this time. The Tortoise laments that the Hedgehog cannot swim, and the Hedgehog laments that the Tortoise cannot curl up.
As they anxiously listen to the Painted Jaguar reciting a rhyme to identify tortoises and hedgehogs, they decide to teach each other to swim and curl into a ball. The Tortoise guides the Hedgehog into the water, and the Hedgehog unlaces the Tortoise’s backplates to practice curling up. As they practice, the Tortoise notices that the Hedgehog’s prickles are “melting into one another” (32), resembling a pinecone, and the Hedgehog notes that the Tortoise’s backplates are beginning to overlap.
The Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog and the Slow-Solid Tortoise practice their exercises until the morning, and when the sun comes up, they both look “quite different.” Covered in new scales, they head down the river to “surprise” the Painted Jaguar. The Jaguar doesn’t recognize them, and when they tell him they are the Hedgehog and the Tortoise from the night before, “his eyes turned truly cartwheels in his head” (33). He hurries off to find his mother, explaining what happened. His mother insists that “a Hedgehog is a Hedgehog, and can’t be anything but a Hedgehog; and a Tortoise is a Tortoise, and can never be anything else” (33). When she sees the strange creatures, she decides to call them “Armadillos” until she learns their proper name and suggests that her son leave them alone. He follows her instructions, and the new creatures are still called Armadillos today.
Story 8 Summary: “How the First Letter Was Written”
In “a most early time” (35), a Neolithic man called Tegumai Bopsulai lives in a cave with his wife, Taddimai, and daughter, Taffia Metallumai, whose name means “Small-person-without-any-manners-who-ought-to-be-spanked” (35). Tegumai’s daughter, who goes by the nickname Taffy, loves spending time with her father. They cannot read or write, but the family is very happy.
One day, Taffy and Tegumai go fishing. However, Tegumai breaks his spear and doesn’t have an extra. Taffy offers to run back to the cave for a replacement, but Tegumai worries she will fall into the beaver-swamp, and sets about mending the broken spear. Taffy laments that they cannot write and send a message home for a replacement. As Tegumai works, a Stranger-man appears. He belongs to the Tewaras tribe and speaks a different language, but Taffy reminds him of his own daughter, and he smiles at her.
Taffy thinks she can send the Stranger-man back to the cave for her father’s spear and explains the situation to him. Tegumai is so absorbed with his repair that he doesn’t look up. The Stranger-man, who understands nothing Taffy is saying, thinks that Tefumai must be an important Chief because he doesn’t look at him and that Taffy must be “a very, very wonderful child” (37). He gives Taffy a large piece of birch bark to demonstrate the peace in his heart, but Taffy thinks he wants directions to her cave. She takes the Stranger-man’s shark tooth necklace to draw with. The Stranger-man is shocked because the shark’s tooth is magic, and anyone who touches it without permission should “swell up or burst” (37). Taffy, however, is fine, and he thinks she and her father must be very important people indeed.
Taffy uses the shark’s tooth to draw on the birch bark, showing her father fishing with the broken spear, which she accidentally draws stabbing him in the back, then the arrival of the Stranger-man, the path through the beaver-swamp, the cave with her mother and the new spear, and finally the Stranger-man bringing the spear back. She includes the replacement spear plenty of times so the Stranger-man won’t forget. Watching her draw, the Stranger-man thinks Taffy is asking him to summon warriors for a great battle. He takes the drawing and runs off.
Meanwhile, Tegumai finishes mending his spear and returns to fishing. He asks Taffy what she was doing, but she tells him it is a surprise. The Stranger-man continues on his way until he finds Taffy’s Cave. He shows the drawing to Taffy’s mother, who thinks it shows the Stranger-man attacking her daughter and husband. Taddimai and the other Neolithic ladies sit on the Stranger-man and fill his hair with mud. Then, they summon the chiefs, who decide that the Stranger-man should lead them back to the scene of the crime before they execute him.
Tegumai and Taffy are surprised to see the Stranger-man return with the entire tribe. Taddimai, who thought her husband was dead, is relieved to find both Tegumai and Taffy unharmed. Confused, Taffy insists they release her “nice Stranger-man” (40). Although she doesn’t “feel quite comfy” (41), she explains her encounter with the Stranger-man and interprets her drawing.
There is a moment of stunned silence, then the Chief starts to laugh. The Stranger-man joins in, followed by the rest of the tribe. The Chief announces that Taffy has “hit upon a great invention” (41) that will one day be called writing. They will create letters and learn to read and write so that they can “always say exactly what [they] mean without any mistakes” (41-2). The Chief orders the women to wash the mud from the Stranger-man’s hair, and they adopt him into their tribe.
The narrator explains that, to this day, most little girls prefer to draw pictures and spend time with their father instead of learning to read and write, just like Taffy.
Story 9 Summary: “How the Alphabet Was Made”
A few weeks after the incident with the spear, Taffy and Tegumai are fishing again. They pause for lunch, and Taffy announces she has “a secret surprise” (44). She asks her father to make a sound. He chooses “ah,” which reminds Taffy of a carp-fish with its wide-open mouth, so she draws a shape resembling it. She tells her father that when he sees that symbol outside or on the wall of their cave, it will be as if she jumped out to surprise him. Together, Taffy and Tegumai refine the shape until it resembles the letter “A.”
Excited, Taffy asks for another sound. Her father says “ya,” which is a “mixy noise,” so they make a new shape for the “y” sound, based on the tail of the carp-fish and link it to the “ah.” Soon, Tegumai is excited too. They begin thinking of sounds in their language and drawing shapes that remind them of the sounds: A round egg for “o,” a slithering snake for “s,” and so on. Tegumai announces they have “found out the big secret of the world” (46). To prove his point, he writes “yo,” which means water that isn’t safe to drink. He asks Taffy what she would do if she saw those symbols beside a pool of water, and she replies instantly that she wouldn’t drink it. Tegumai could send her a message without having to be there to say it.
Delighted with their discovery, they refine their letters until they can write a whole sentence. The next morning, there is a message for Taffy telling her the water is running out. She worries that the “picture-sounds are rather a bother” (50); her father isn’t even home and can still tell her what to do.
The more they draw the individual pictures, the simpler they become, making it faster and easier to write out messages. Over thousands of years, the alphabet went through numerous interpretations and detours, but eventually “got back into its proper shape” (51) that Taffy and her father had created.
Stories 7-9 Analysis
“The Beginning of the Armadillos” is similar in many ways to “How the Whale Got His Throat.” Both feature large, rather fearsome predators with voracious appetites that are outsmarted by seemingly weaker creatures, suggesting the triumph of intelligence over brute strength. While the Painted Jaguar is a dangerous hunter, his dependence on his mother and inability to remember basic facts about his prey give him a childlike innocence that makes him significantly less threatening.
Similar to the story of the Leopard and the Elephant’s Child, the Tortoise and the Hedgehog are in real danger of being eaten, yet there is no actual violence or fear. The fight between the Jaguar and his prey becomes a battle of wits rather than claws and blood. The Tortoise and the Hedgehog survive because they can outsmart the Jaguar, but also because they come together to support one another. They teach each other their defense mechanisms until they become indistinguishable. The Jaguar and his mother are so alarmed by the animals’ transformation that they decide it is better to leave them alone entirely, illustrating how sharing and learning new things can make us stronger and more likely to survive.
The following two stories, “How the First Letter Was Written” and “How the Alphabet Was Made” are unique in the collection because they don’t feature animals or describe how features of the natural world came to be. Instead, they examine early human society and tell the story of human inventions like letter-writing and the alphabet, adding a new dimension to The Lasting Consequences of Actions. They are also unique in that they both feature the same characters, namely a family of cave dwellers.
“How the First Letter Was Written” is primarily a story about the dangers of miscommunication. It shows how certain methods of communication, like drawing pictures, can be interpreted in many different ways. To Taffy, her drawing clearly shows her father’s broken spear and the Stranger-man going to retrieve the new spear from their family’s Cave. However, the Stranger-man is convinced that Taffy’s picture shows a large battle coming and that she needs him to summon their tribe’s warriors to fight. Taffy’s mother has yet another interpretation, seeing “as plain as the nose on [the] Stranger-man’s face” (39) that the drawing shows him frightening Taffy and killing her father. Luckily, Taffy can explain the mix-up, but the tribe is on the verge of executing the poor innocent Stranger-man, illustrating just how deadly miscommunication can be.
“How the Alphabet Was Made” continues the story of Taffy and her father as they develop the alphabet. Taffy is the first to think of creating a picture that represents a sound, but her father is the one to recognize that they have discovered “the big secret of the world” (46). They engage in a joyful back-and-forth of discovery, both dancing excitedly, as they create letters and write the first words and sentences. The loving bond between Taffy and her father mirrors the relationship between the narrator and Best Beloved, which in turn mirrors the relationship between Kipling and his own daughter. It celebrates the love between father and daughter, presenting it as a bond that has existed even from the earliest years of human society.
Taffy’s stories also show that young girls played a key role in the development of humanity. The chief of her tribe praises her picture-letter as a “great invention” that will one day change human society, and she is the one to present the very first letter of the alphabet to her father. Her stories show the young Best Beloved, who listens to the narrator’s stories, that she can grow up to make important contributions to the world, just like Taffy.
Related Titles
By Rudyard Kipling
