Occoneechee, the Maid of the Mystic Lake

by Robert Frank Jarrett

While he was looking across he saw an old man walking about on the opposite ridge, with a cane that seemed to be made of some bright, shining rock. The hunter watched and saw that every little while the old man would point his cane in a certain direction, then draw it back and smell the end of it. At last he pointed it in the direction of the hunter’s camp on the other side of the mountain, and this time when he drew back the staff he sniffed it several times as if it smelled very good, and then started along the ridge straight for the camp. He moved very slowly, with the help of the cane, until he reached the end of the ridge, when he threw the cane out into the air and it became a bridge of shining rock stretching across the river.

After he had crossed over upon the bridge it became a cane again and the old man picked it up and started over the mountain toward the camp. The hunter was frightened, and felt sure that it meant mischief, so he hurried on down the mountain and took the shortest trail back to the camp to get there before the old man. When he got there and told his story the medicine-man said the old man was a wicked cannibal monster called Nunyunuwi, “Dressed in Stone,” who lived in the Nantahala mountains, and was always going about thru the forest looking for some hunter that he might kill and eat him.

It was very hard to escape from him, because his cane guided him as a dog, and it was nearly as hard to kill him, for his body was entirely covered with a skin of solid rock. If he came he would kill and eat them all, and there was only one way to save their lives.

He could not bear to look upon a woman, and if they could bring to the path seven married women, that the sight of them would kill him, and they would rid themselves of him. So they ran swiftly and brought quickly as many women as they could find, and placed them along the trail, and when the old man came, he saw one woman standing near the trail and the very sight of her made him sick and he cried out, “Yu, my grandchild, I hate the sight of woman!” He hurried past her and in a moment he saw the second woman standing as he had seen the other, and he cried out again, “Yu! my child; I hate the tribe of women, and he hurried past her, and he continued along the trail until he came to the seventh, and by this time he had become so much enraged that he fell down almost dead. Then the medicine-man drove seven sourwood switches through his body and pinned him to the ground, and when night came they piled great logs over him and set fire to them, and all the people gathered around to see. Nunyunuwi was a great adawehi and knew many secrets, and now as the fire came close to him he began to talk, and told them the medicine for all kinds of sickness. At midnight he began to sing, and sang the hunting songs for calling up the bear and deer and all the animals of the woods and mountains.

As the blaze grew hotter his voice sank lower and lower, until at last when the daylight came, the logs were a heap of white ashes and the voice was still. Then the medicine-man told them to rake off the ashes, and where the body had lain they found only a large lump of wadi paint and a magic Ulunsuti stone. He kept the stone for himself, and calling the people around him he painted them on the face and breast with the red wadi, and whatever each person prayed for while the painting was being done, whether for hunting success, for working skill, or for long life—that gift was his.

MYTH THIRTY.

The Hunter and Dakwa.

In the old days there was a great fish called the Dakwa, which lived in the Tennessee river where Toco creek comes in at Dakwai, the “Dakwa place,” above the mouth of Tellico, and which was so large that it could easily swallow a man. Once a canoe filled with warriors was crossing over from the town on the other side of the river, when the Dakwa suddenly rose up under the boat and threw them all into the air. As they came down it swallowed one with a single snap of its jaws and dived with him to the bottom of the river.

As soon as the hunter came to his senses he found that he had not been hurt, but it was so hot and close inside the Dakwa that he was nearly smothered. As he groped around in the dark his hand struck a lot of mussel shells which the fish had swallowed, and taking one of these for a knife he began to cut his way out, until soon the fish grew uneasy at the scraping inside his stomach and came up to the top of the water for air. He kept on cutting until the fish was in such pain that it swam this way and that across the stream and thrashed the water into foam with its tail. Finally the hole was so large that he could look out, and found that the fish was resting in shallow water near the shore. The Dakwa soon became so sick from the wound that it vomited the hunter out of its mouth, and he with the others made their escape to Tellico, but the juices in the stomach of the fish made the hair fall from the head of the hunter so that he was bald ever after that.