Bursts the water, pure and free.”
The plant spoke to him, and told him to cut off some of its roots and take them to his home in the settlement, and the next morning to chew them and “go to water” before anyone else was awake, and then to go out again into the woods, and he would kill many deer, and from that time on would always be successful in the hunt.
The corn plant continued to talk, teaching him hunting secrets and telling him to be always generous with the game he took, until it was noon and the sun was high, when it suddenly took the form of a woman and rose gracefully into the air and was gone from sight, leaving the hunter alone in the woods. He returned home and told his story, and all the people knew that he had seen Selu, the wife of Kanati. He did as the spirit had directed, and from that time was noted as the most successful of all the hunters in the settlement.
MYTH THIRTY-FIVE.
The Nunnehi and Other Spirit Folks.
The Nunnehi or Immortals, the “People who live everywhere,” were a race of spirit people who lived in the highlands of the old Cherokee country and had a great many town-houses, and especially on the tops of the bald mountains, the high peaks where no timber grows.
They had large town-houses on Pilot Knob, and in Nik-Wasi mound, in what is now Macon County, North Carolina, and another in Blood Mountain, and at the head of Nottely river in Georgia. They were invisible excepting when they wanted to be seen, and they looked and spoke just like other Indians. They were very fond of music and dancing, and hunters in the mountains would often hear the dance songs and the drum-beating in some invisible town-house, but when they went toward the sound it would shift about and they would hear it behind them or away in some other direction, so that they could never find the place where the dance was.
They were a friendly people, too, and often brought lost wanderers to their town-houses under the mountains, and cared for them there until they were rested, and guided them back to their homes. There was a man who lived in Nottely town who had been with the Nunnehi, when he was a boy about twelve years old, and this is the story he tells.
One day, when he was playing near the river, shooting at a mark with his bow and arrows, until he became tired, and started to build a fish-trap in the water. While he was piling up the rocks in two long walls, a man came and stood on the bank and asked him what he was doing. The man said, “Well, that is pretty hard work, and you ought to come and rest awhile; come and take a walk up the river.”