The brothers wove a hut of branches to shelter their sister, and every day ten of them went out hunting in the forest, and ten of them stayed at home to care for her. But one day it chanced they all wished to go hunting together, so they put their sister up in a high tree where she would be safe from the beasts of the forest, and then they went away and left her there alone.
The twenty brothers went on and on through the jungle, farther than they had ever gone before, and so came at last to an open space among the trees, and there was a hut.
“Who can be living here?” said one of the brothers.
“Let us knock and see,” cried another.
The Princes knocked at the door and immediately it was opened to them by a great, wicked-looking Rakshas. She had only one red eye in the middle of her forehead; her gray hair hung in a tangled mat over her shoulders, and she was dressed in dirty rags.
When the Rakshas saw the brothers she was filled with fury.
She considered all the jungle belonged to her, and she was not willing that any one else should come there. Her one eye flashed fire, and she seized a stick and began beating the Princes, and each one, as she struck him, was turned into a crow. She then drove them away and went back into her hut and closed the door.
The twenty crows flew back through the forest, cawing mournfully. When they came to the tree where their sister sat they gathered about her, trying to make her understand that they were her brothers.
At first the Princess was frightened by the crows, but when she saw there were tears in their eyes, and when she counted them and found there were exactly twenty, she guessed what had happened, and that some wicked enchantment had changed her brothers into this shape. Then she wept over them and smoothed their feathers tenderly.
After this the sister lived up in the tree, and the crows brought her food every day and rested around her in the branches at night, so that no harm should come to her.