In twenty-five days the eagle’s nest had three baby birds in it and Jeung-Po was glad. One day he heard the mother eagle saying to her three babies:
“I do not know why your feathers are not as mine, and your voices are so different and you are such very little things. I will go and ask my oldest son to come [[149]]here to-morrow, and see if he can tell me why you are so.”
On the next day the eagle’s son came to visit his mother, and he said, “Ah-Ma, I am glad to see my three little brothers, but their faces are not like yours or mine.”
“I know that what you say is true,” said the eagle mother. “I wished you to come, so that we might talk of this strange thing. You are my child, and they are mine, but they are not like you and me.”
“I will see what they eat,” said the eagle son. Then he gave them a piece of meat, but they could not eat it.
“They want rice all the time,” the eagle mother told him. “They will not eat meat.” The mystery was so great that the eagles could not understand.
Soon the strange nestlings were flying with the eagle mother. One day she took them to a pleasant place to play, and on their way home they passed a rice bird who called to them. The mother eagle said, “Do not go with him. Come with me.” But the little ones would not listen. And when the rice bird said, “Chi-Chi,” and flew down to a rice field, the three little ones left the eagle mother and went with the rice bird.
The eagle mother called many times, but her strange children would not come to her. Then she said to the [[150]]rice bird, “Why did my children follow your call and not mine? How did you teach them in one breath what I have not been able to teach them in all their lives?”
And the rice-bird father said, “They are not your children. They belong to the rice-bird mother. She is coming now; see for yourself.”
Soon sixteen rice birds flew near and the eagle mother saw that they were all like her children. The rice bird said, “You see, it is as I told you.”