Each fall, the Cherokee once burned the leaves off the mountainsides to gather chestnuts, and smoke drifted through these valleys. Cherokee tradition, recorded by James Mooney and still shared publicly by the Eastern Band, says something else watched for that smoke. Boone tells the old story of Spearfinger, the stone-skinned one, and why nobody at a fall camp wanted to walk to the spring alone.
Your friend went down to the spring for a drink. Somebody's walking back now, sitting down at the fire beside you. Are you sure it's your friend? James Mooney put this one in print in nineteen hundred. The story goes that every fall, by old custom, the Cherokee went up into the mountains and burned the dead leaves off the slopes, so the chestnuts would lie bare on the ground for gathering. Smoke rose all through the hills. And something was watching for that smoke. They called her Spearfinger. She was an old witch with skin as hard as stone and one long bony finger, sharp as an awl, and she could take on any shape she pleased. What she ate was human livers. When she saw the autumn smoke go up, she knew there were people out in the mountains, and she crept close, hoping to catch one alone. So nobody at the fire could ever be sure. Somebody goes down to the spring. Somebody comes back. Your friend, or her, wearing your friend's face? In the end the people trapped her in a pit. Their arrows broke on that stone skin like kindling. Then a chickadee lit on her right hand, and they understood. Her heart was hidden in that fist. They aimed there, and that was the end of Spearfinger. Ever since, the people have called the chickadee a truth teller. Now, the old telling never puts her on this road by name. It only says she ranged these mountains wherever the streams head up, always hungry, and the dark passes of Nantahala besides. You'll have noticed how many streams head up along this road. When somebody I'm with walks off alone into the trees for a minute, I don't say much till they step back out. Then I look at their right hand before I look at their face.
Photo: NPS · Public domain