Quinn told you the honest scientific truth about the balds — those strange grassy mountaintops nobody can fully explain. Now let me tell you the OTHER truth, the older one, the one the Cherokee told long before any scientist scratched his head up here. Because they had an answer, and it's a better tale than anything in a textbook.
The way the old story goes, there was once a monster — some tell it as a great winged creature, some as a giant stinging thing — that lived up in these mountains and preyed on the people, snatching children right out of the villages. The people prayed to the Great Spirit for deliverance, and the Great Spirit struck the creature down with lightning and killed it. And then, so that such a horror could never hide and creep up on the people again, the Great Spirit cleared the trees off the highest mountaintops — scoured them bald — so that from the villages below you could always see the summits, and nothing could ever lurk up there unseen. That, the old people said, is why the tallest peaks stand bare to this day: they are watchtowers, cleared by the hand of the Great Spirit.
And there are other haunts up in this high country. The Cherokee told of Spearfinger — a terrible being with skin of stone and a long, sharp forefinger of rock, who roamed these ridges and the Nantahala, and who was awful fond of the livers of those she caught alone. A story to keep children close to the fire, and travelers off the high balds after dark.
Now — I trade in tales, not testimony, so believe what you like about monsters and stone witches. But I'll tell you this: stand alone on one of these bald summits at dusk, with the wind moaning and the fog coming up out of the hollows, and the notion that these bare peaks were cleared so something could always be seen coming... it doesn't feel quite so far-fetched up there. The mountains keep their old stories. Up on the balds, they feel awfully close.
Photo: Brian Stansberry · CC BY 2.5
