They saw the boys still dancing around the town-house, 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 town-house—all but one, whose mother managed to pull him down with the gatayusti pole, but he struck the ground with such force that he sank into it and the earth closed over him. The other six children circled higher and higher until they went up to the sky, where we see them now as the pleiades, which the Cherokee still calls “Anitsutsa” (the Boys).
The people grieved long after them, but the mother whose boy had gone into the ground came every morning and 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 now call the pine, and the pine is still of the same nature as the stars and holds in itself the same bright light.
MYTH FOUR.
The Milky Way.
Some people in the South 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. He 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 calls to this day Gili-utsunstanunyi, “Where the dog ran.”