Not from ‘quail’
‘Spotted, speckled’, a horse word in Chinuk Wawa, doesn’t come from the French word for the bird ‘quail’.
That would be something like Michif’s aen padree, I’m guessing, if the story were true. (I.e. from French la perdrix, cognate with ‘partridge’, which is how my Montana mother referred to quails sometimes.)
Hmmm: quail are a recently introduced species in Chinuk Wawa country (image credit: Wikipedia)
Standard French for ‘quail’ is feminine, la caille.
In any event, it seems unlikely that a horse-color word in Chinook Jargon would come from a small bird.
A small bird that may have been absent from Chinuk Wawa country at the time the language was taking form.
The Jargon word, likʰay, is surely and sensibly from the French adjective for ‘multicolored, spotted’, used as a masculine noun (‘the spotted one’ i.e. cheval ‘horse’), le caille.
FYI. I mention this because the ‘quail’ story shows up in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary.
