Now comes star nights when the stars lean so close that the tall peaks of the Great Smokies have to fold over to keep from bumping them. The Great Bear is down on the horizon and the Little Bear hangs by his tail from the North Star. To the South is Orion the Hunter and almost overhead are the Pleiades. To most of us the Pleiades are known as the Seven Sisters, but not to the Cherokee who have their own story as to their origin.
As old Runaway Swimmer, the greatest of the Cherokee storytellers, used to tell the story, it happened a long time ago when the world was new.
There were seven boys who used to spend all their time down by the townhouse playing the gatayusti game, rolling a stone wheel along the ground and sliding a curved stick after it to strike it. Their mothers scolded, but it did no good. So one day they collected some gatyusti stones and boiled them in the pot with the corn for dinner. When the boys came home hungry, their mothers dipped out the stones and said: “Since you like the gatayusti better than the cornfield take the stones now for your dinner.”
The boys were very hungry, and went down to the townhouse, saying “As our mothers treat us this way, let us go where we shall never trouble them anymore.”
They began to dance, some say it was the Eagle dance, and went round and round the townhouse, praying to the spirits to help them.
At last their mothers became afraid something was wrong and went out to look for them.
They saw the boys still dancing around the townhouse, and as they watched they noticed that their feet were off the earth and that with every round they rose higher and higher in the air.
They ran to get their children, but it was too late, for they were already above the roof of the townhouse, all but one. And this one’s mother managed to pull him down with gatyusti pole, but he struck the ground with such force that he sank into it and the earth closed over him.
The other six boys circled higher and higher until they went up to the sky, where we see them now as the Pleiades, which the Cherokee still call Anitsutsa – The Boys.
The people grieved long after them, but the mother whose boy had gone into the ground came every morning and every evening to cry over the spot until the earth was damp with her tears. At last a little green shoot sprouted up and grew day by day until it became the tall tree that we call now the pine. And the pine is of the same nature as the stars and holds in itself the same bright light.
Old Swimmer, great Cherokee story teller, also had a story about the how the Milky Way came to be. Some people in the south, he said, had a corn mill in which they pounded the corn into meal. And several mornings when they came to fill it they noticed that some of the meal had been stolen during the night. They examined the ground and found the tracks of a dog. So, the next night they watched and when the dog came from the north and began to eat the meal out of the bowl, they sprang out and whipped him. The dog ran off howling to his home in the north; with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call “Gili-utsunstanunyi – Where the dog ran.”