A daughter runs from her pursuers, prays in her extremity, and lifts from the ground as a bird: this is the shape the motif promises, the human body giving way to the dove's white flight. Yet on our shelf the promise is oddly hard to keep. The German witness filed at this address, tale one hundred and thirty of Grimm's Household Tales (collected 1812–1857; this translation 1884), tells of One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes and their wonderful tree — and in its served pages no one becomes a dove at all. The transformation the number names has to be sought elsewhere.

It survives, faint but real, in two places. In the Library of Apollodorus (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE), the three daughters of Anius — "Elais, Spermo, and Oeno" — could conjure oil, corn, and wine from the earth; pressed to feed the army at Aulis and fleeing the work, they "prayed to Dionysus, who turned them into white doves", and so, the note adds, it became a sin ever after to harm a dove in Delos. But this reaches us only through the editor's note appended to the text, not in the narrator's own voice. The clearer image lies in The Metamorphoses of Ovid (completed about 8 CE), where, passing "the Cartheian walls of ancient Cea," the poet recalls how the father Alcidamas "was destined to wonder that a gentle dove could arise from the body of his daughter" — the change told in a single line of a catalogue of marvels.

So the dove-shape is present but everywhere glancing: absent from the German tale that carries its number, buried in an editor's note in the Greek, and given only a passing verse in the Latin. The daughters vanish upward before we quite see them go. What is it about the dove — grief, flight, or innocence — that so many fathers are left staring after?