They dried and dried until they shrank; my children then I beat and slew.
Now, crying, “Kuṭuru, Son, ku!” your mother vainly calls to you.
Kaelē gasē pub daekalā, galē genat waenuwā.
Wēli wēli aḍu-wena turu, daruwan gasalā maeruwā.
“Kuṭuru, pute, ku,”[3] kiyā, ammā a[n̆]ḍa-gasati.
In Cinq Cents Contes et Apologues (Chavannes), vol. ii, p. 228, two pigeons collected ripe fruits and filled their nest with them. During drought which followed they shrank considerably; the male pigeon charged the female with eating them alone, and although she denied it he said, “If it were not that you have eaten them alone how could they have decreased?” and pecked her to death. When rain which fell afterwards caused the fruits to enlarge to their former size, the bird saw it, and felt remorse, and “then began to call his female with plaintive cries.”
In the Arabian Nights (Lady Burton’s ed., vol. iv, p. 117) there is a similar story. A pair of pigeons collected a store of wheat and barley during winter, but when summer came it was shrivelled with the heat, and shrank. The male pigeon charged the hen with eating it; when she denied it he beat and pecked her till he killed her. In the next cold season the grain swelled out again as at first; and the male pigeon, seeing that the hen was innocent, mourned over her, refused food, and died of grief. Sir R. Burton refers also to a variant in the Book of Sindibād, and Kalilah and Damnah.
In the last line of the text of the verse on the preceding page, if Kuṭuru be corrected to Kūṭuru, and if the bird’s cry is to be interpreted, the meaning might be, “[my] falsehood is great, O Son, [and my] guilt.”