“But they must be my children,” said the eagle mother. “I can not understand this, for I never had children like them before. My other children were like me and they never behaved in this way. But I will take them home again and feed them, and when they grow older they may become like me and the others of my family.”
“It will never be so,” said the rice bird. “I am sure of that. You need not hope that these children will ever be eagles. You see they do not eat meat, they eat rice. They know the rice bird’s call without being taught. They do not speak the same dialect that you speak, nor sing the same songs. They are surely rice birds and you can not keep them longer in your home.”
The eagle mother tried again and again to call her children and they only said, “Chic, chic,” which meant [[151]]that they would not come. She waited long, but they refused to go with her. Then she chided the rice birds and said, “You are a bad company, and you have tempted my children to join you. Why do you not tell them to come home with me, their mother? If you do not cease your evil actions, I shall eat you or drive you away.”
The eagle mother flew away alone to the mountain, and she sat on a great rock and waited long for her children to come home.
The night came, but her little ones did not return. In her heart the eagle mother knew they were lost to her. All the dark night she cried aloud in her grief. In the morning she hunted long, but she could not find them. She said to herself:
“This is a strange and dreadful thing that has come to me. I remember that I once heard a quarrel-bird say that some of her children had left her in this same way, and she believed some bad boy had changed her eggs. For she had six yellow children in her nest, and when they could fly they went away with the yellow song birds. She found her own children one day in a camphor tree. I wish that I might find my own children.”
Just then she met the quarrel-bird mother, and she asked her, “How did you find your own children?” [[152]]
And the quarrel-bird mother said, “I was passing by the camphor tree when I saw the little ones alone, and I asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ And they said, ‘Eating nuts!’
“ ‘Do you like nuts?’ I asked.
“ ‘Oh yes, very well.’