They sing in my head even now... What a wonderful storyteller-poet Kipling was." --Michael Morpurgo, Guardian 'Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was.' Have you ever enquired why the elephant has such an enormously elongated nose? Are you confused by a cat's contrariness? Have you ruminated on the wrinkles of a rhinocerous? Or speculated how the leopard got its spots? Rudyard Kipling wondered about all these things too, and in this marvellous collection of stories he imagines how the animals became 'just so'.