The First Fire

James Mooney's collection of Cherokee myths records that in the beginning, fire did not exist anywhere among the animals, until Thunder sent it down in the form of lightning that struck a hollow sycamore tree growing on an island, where it burned inside the trunk out of easy reach. The animals, cold and eager to obtain it, gather in council to decide who among them is capable of safely bringing the fire back across the water to the rest.

Raven, confident in his strength and size, volunteers first and flies across, but the heat scorches his feathers black as he circles too close, and he returns empty-handed and permanently darkened. Screech Owl tries next, and the smoke and rising ash blind and burn his eyes as he peers into the hollow tree, leaving Cherokee tradition to explain his red-rimmed eyes ever afterward as a mark of that failed attempt. Hoot Owl and Horned Owl fare no better, marked in their turn by soot and ash around their eyes for the same reason.

Mooney recorded well over a hundred such myths from Cherokee informants during his fieldwork in the late nineteenth century, and The First Fire sits among the sacred myths he distinguished from the larger body of animal tales and local legends also included in his collection, a distinction his Cherokee sources themselves apparently drew between stories explaining the fundamental order of the world and stories told primarily for entertainment or moral instruction.

The council next sends two snakes in turn, the blacksnake Uksuhi and the little snake Guku, each of whom manages to reach the tree but is blackened trying to enter the hollow trunk, an origin Mooney's account gives for the coloring of the racer and the black snake among Cherokee tellings of the animal world's markings. With every larger and stronger animal having failed in turn, the council is left without an obvious candidate willing to risk the fire's heat again.

It is the small Water Spider who finally proposes a solution none of the larger animals had considered: rather than trying to carry a burning branch directly, which had scorched every previous attempt, she spins a small bowl, a tusti, from her own thread, fastens it to her back, crosses to the island, places a single coal inside the bowl, and carries it safely back across the water to the waiting animals, who are able to share and spread the fire from that single coal without further loss. Mooney's collection situates this tale as one of the sacred myths explaining the origin of the physical and natural order the Cherokee lived within, distinct from the purely entertaining or moralizing tales also recorded in the same volume.