One day the Creator was resting, sitting, watching some children at play in a village. The children laughed and sange, yet as he watched them, the Creator's heart was sad. He was thinking: "These children will grow old. Their skin will become wrinkled. Their hair will turn gray. Their teeth will fall out. The young hunter's arm will fail. These lovely young girls will grow ugly and fat. The playful puppies will become blind mangy dogs. And those wonderful flowers--yellow and blue, red and purple--will fade. The leaves from the trees will fall and dry up. Already they are turning yellow." Thus the Creator grew sadder and sadder. It was in the fall, and the thought of the coming winter, with its cold and lack of game and green things, made his heart heavy.

Yet it was still warm and the sun was shining. The Creator watched the play of sunlight and shadow on the ground, the yellow leaves being carried here and there by the wind. He saw the blueness of the sky, the whiteness of some cornmeal ground by some women. Suddenly he smiled. "All those colors, they ought to be preserved. I'll make something to gladden my heart, something for these children to look at and enjoy."

The Creator took out hs bag and started gathering things: a spot of sunlight, and handful of blue from the sky, the whiteness from the cornmeal, athe shadow of playing children, the blackness of a beautiful girl's hair, the yellow if the falling leaves, the green of the pine needles, the red, purple, and orange of the flowers around him. All these he put into his bag. As an afterthought, he put the songs of birds in, too.

Then he walked over to the grassy spot where the children were playing. "Children, little children, this is for you," and he gave them his bag. "Open it; there's something nice inside," he told them.

The children opened the bag, and at once hundreds and hundreds of colored butterflies flew out, dancing around the children's heads, settling on their hair, fluttering up again to sip from this or that flower. And the children, enchanted, said that they had never seen anything so beautiful.

The butterflies began to sing, and the children listened smiling.

But then a songbird came flyhing, settling on the Creator's shoulder, scolding him, saying, "It's not right to give our songs to these new pretty things. You told us when you made us that every bird would have his own song. And now you've passed them all around. Isn't it enough that you gave your new playthings the colors of the rainbow?"

"You're right," said the Creator. "I made one song for each bird, and I shouldn't take what belongs to you."

So the Creator took the songs away from the butterflies, adn that's why they are silent. "They're beautiful evn so!" he said.

--Retold from various sources