332 MYTHS OK THK CHEROKEE [kth.asn.i-j 



liiiii thi'V i;m toward hiiii slioutiny. "•Ilcrc lu' isl He is not drowiiod 

 or killed in the niountaiiisl " Tliev told him thev had been lmntin<;- liim 

 ever since yesterday noon, and ask(Ml him where he had been. "A 

 man took me over to his house just across the ridge, and I had a tine 

 dinner and a yood time with the children," said the l)oy, " I thought 

 Udsi'skala here" — that was the name of the man he had seen at dinner — 

 "would tell yt)u where I was." Rut I'dsi'skala said, " I haven't. seen you. 

 I was out all day in my canoe hunting you. It was one of the Nuiiue'hi 

 that made himself look like me." Then hi.s mother said. "You say 

 you had dinner there ( " Yes, and I had plenty, too," said the bo}'; but 

 his mother answered, "There is no house there — only trees and rocks — 

 but we hear a drum sometimes in the 1>ig bald above. The people 

 3'ou saw were the Nunne'hi." 



Once four Nunne'hi women came to a dance at Nottely town, and 

 danced half the night with the young men there, and nobody knew 

 that they were Nunne'hi, but thought them visitors from another set- 

 tlement. About midnight they left to go home, and some men who 

 had come out from the townhouse to cool oS watched to .see which way 

 they went. They saw the women go down the trail to the river ford, 

 but just as the}' came to the water they di.sappeared, although it was a 

 pkin trail, with no place where they could hide. Then the watchers 

 knew they were Nunne'hi women. Several men saw this happen, and 

 one of them wa,s Watford's father-in-law, who wa.s known for an honest 

 man. At another time a man named Burnt-toV)acco was crossing over 

 the ridge from Nottely to Hemptown in Georgia and heard a drum and 

 the songs of dancers in the hills on one side of the trail. He rode over 

 to see who could be dancing in such a place, hut when he reached the 

 spot the drum and the songs were behind him, and he was so frightened 

 that he hurried back to the trail and rode all the way to Hemptown as 

 hard as he could to tell the story. He was a truthful man. and they 

 believed what he said. 



There mu.st have been a good many of the Nunne'hi living in that 

 neighborhood, because the drumming was often heard in the high lialds 

 almost up to the time of the Kemoval. 



On a small upper branch of Nottely, running nearly due north from 

 Blood mountain, there was also a hole, like a small well or chimney, in 

 in the ground, from which there came up a warm vapor that heated all 

 the air around. People said that this was because the Nunne'hi had a 

 townhouse and a tire under the mountain. Sometimes in cold weather 

 hunters would stop there to warm themselves, })ut they were afraid to 

 stay long. This was more than sixty years ago. but the hole is probabh' 

 there yet. 



Close to the old trading path from South Carolina up to the Chero- 

 kee Nation, somewhere near the head of Tugaloo, there w'as formerly 

 a noted circular depression about the size of a townhouse. and waist 



