the darkness, she sought out the bird and milked it again. Then she took the calabash of milk to her children, who drank it all and asked for more.

“You may have more tonight,” she said. “From now on, there will always be such milk for you.”

* * *

The children were delighted with the fresh supply of such delicious milk. Every morning they drank their fill, and their parents finished off the rest. With all the milk they were getting, the children began to grow larger and sleeker, and their skin shone with good health.

At the end of a month, the children began to be inquisitive about the source of the milk.

“I don’t understand how we get such sweet milk from our cows,” the girl said to her mother. “They have never given such milk before.”

The woman smiled, and said nothing.

“Perhaps you have a secret cow somewhere,” suggested the boy.

Once again the mother said nothing. She did not want to tell her children that what they were drinking was bird’s milk, as she had heard from her father that children did not like to think they were drinking milk from birds. If they stopped drinking the milk, then they would surely lose all the fat which they had put on and which made them so much admired by everybody else in that place.

The girl went to her brother that evening and said that she had a plan. The next day, they would put a small bowl of the milk outside and wait to see which animals came to drink it. In this way they would know where the milk came from and their curiosity would be satisfied.

When their mother gave them the calabash the next day, the girl poured a little of the milk into a bowl and gave it to her brother. He slipped out of the hut and put the bowl down at the edge of the bush. Then the two of them watched, waiting for the first animal to drink the milk.

A hyena walked past, sniffed at the milk, but did not drink it. Then there came a baboon, who peered into the bowl, but did not touch the milk. The baboon was followed by a rock rabbit, which also showed no sign of wanting to drink the milk. At long last, a bird landed near the bowl, and soon had his beak dipped in the milk. After him there came more birds, until the bowl could not be seen for the fluttering of wings about it.

“That is bird’s milk we have been drinking,” the boy said. “Now we know.”

The children were keen to see the bird from which their parents were obtaining the milk, and so they hid in a place where they could watch their mother as she came out of her hut in the morning. They both saw her go to the empty hut and look about her before she opened the door. Then they saw her come out again with the calabash in her hand and they knew immediately that the bird was being kept in that hut.

“We shall go and see the bird when our parents are in the fields,” the boy said. “I have heard that birds which give milk are very colourful.”

That afternoon, as the man and the woman were in the fields, the two children crept up to the bird’s hut and opened the door. Once inside, they looked about nervously and it was a few minutes before they saw the bird sitting in his corner. The bird watched them suspiciously. He had grown used to the man and his wife, but the children were unfamiliar.

The children approached the bird and looked closely at him, while the bird stared back with its dark eyes, and blinked.

The boy looked at the bird’s feathers and shook his head.

“It is sad,” he said. “The bird has lost all the colour from his feathers.”

When it heard this, the bird looked down at his own feathers and sighed.

“It is because I have been kept in here for so long,” the bird said to the boy. “I have not seen the sun for many weeks.”

The boy shook his head.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“If that is so,” said the bird, “you should take me out into the sunshine for a few minutes. A short time in the open air would restore all the colours to my feathers.”

The boy and the girl agreed to do this for the bird. Carefully they lifted him in their arms and took