Akela (The Jungle Book) Akela (The Jungle Book) Akela ( / "Akelā" also called The Lone Wolf or Big Wolf) is a fictional character in Rudyard Kipling's stories, "The Jungle Book" and "The Second Jungle Book". He is the leader of the Seeonee pack of Indian wolves and presides over the pack's council meetings. It is at such a meeting that the pack adopts the lost child Mowgli and Akela becomes one of Mowgli's mentors. "Akelā" means "single or solitary" in Hindi and Urdu. Kipling also calls him the "Lone Wolf: Kipling portrays Akela with the character of an English gentleman. This is shown
Rudyard Kipling in London. On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) were married in London, in the "thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones." The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place. Henry James gave the bride away. Kipling and his wife settled upon a honeymoon that would take them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then on to Japan. When they arrived in Yokohama, Japan,