Songbird watched it as she sat on the ground with her knees drawn up and her hands propping her chin. Very gravely she decided that the crow was getting fatter.
For several months she had cared for it. Some accident had happened to its upper bill and half of it was gone, so the crow had not been able to pick up food from the ground or eat anything solid as the others could do when they pecked very hard. It had been almost dead from starvation when Songbird noticed it lying in the camp. She had driven away the other children who were teasing it with sticks.
Her father had shown her how to fix soft food in a deep bowl so that the poor crow could thrust its entire beak down deeply to eat the moist mixture. So day after day it came to the tepee, knowing it would find food. The meal finished, it always bobbed and stalked around, repeating its cry, "Caw! Caw!" until at last it flapped its glossy wings and darted high above Songbird's head. But even when almost out of sight she could hear it calling to thank her and say that it would come again the next day.
When she picked up the bowl to return it to its proper place, as Quannah had taught her to do, a beautiful fawn, with skin like brown velvet dotted with small white spots, leaped from the side of the tepee as though it were trying to frighten her. Its nose sniffed the empty bowl as it stood poised on slender legs and stretched its graceful neck. Songbird tipped the bowl. The fawn licked it perfectly clean. Then its pink tongue touched the little brown hand that held the bowl, and Songbird, looking into the beautiful dark eyes, stroked the soft nose.
The fawn waited at the entrance of the tepee until she came out. It kept pace with her to the place where Moko, the Picture-maker, lived. She was a very wonderful old squaw with pure white hair. It was her work to paint pictures on the backs of dried buffalo robes.
One side of these robes was always covered with brown, thick hair, while the under side, dried and stretched very smoothly, had to be painted carefully with colours made from roots, berries and earths, mixed in a way that the old Picture-maker alone understood. Moko did not like any one to watch her at work, but Songbird was always welcomed. The child would sit for hours wondering at the magic way in which Moko made figures of Indians on ponies, sometimes chasing buffaloes, hunting antelope, or possibly a camp with warriors walking about the many tepees.
"Who showed you how to make pictures, Moko?" asked Songbird.
"The Great Spirit," replied the Picture-maker, and Songbird pondered over the answer. The painting Moko was now doing was the most wonderful of all that Songbird had ever seen. The robe was the largest buffalo hide that any Comanche had ever owned. Quannah had killed the enormous beast with just one arrow, and the meat had provided food for many days. Now the hide, cured and dried, was being painted for him, and Songbird knew that some day it would be given to her to keep.
The picture showed a lot of Indians fighting white men. The Indians could be easily told by their war-bonnets. All around the edges, the robe was bordered with the fighters, but in the very centre was an Indian boy riding a swiftly running pony. In his arms was a little girl. Songbird knew that the boy was Peta Nocona, and the girl in his arms was Preloch, the white child who had afterward been the mother of Quannah and of Prairie Flower.
"Why do the brothers of my father's mother war with us?" she asked at last, for the question had been puzzling her a long time.