The little people
At a Glance
- Central figures: The Yunwi Tsunsdi (the Little People) of Cherokee tradition - small beings who live inside mountains and along riverbanks; also the hunters, children, and lost travelers who encounter them.
- Setting: Cherokee tradition (southern Appalachian Mountains - present-day western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and northern Georgia); the stories are part of a broader cycle of accounts about spirit-beings who inhabit specific places in Cherokee country.
- The turn: A hunter follows drumming sounds deep into the Nantahala gorge and finds the Little People dancing beside a fire at the base of a cliff, and they offer him food.
- The outcome: The hunter eats and dances with them through the night, but when he returns to his village he discovers that seven years have passed and his family has mourned him as dead.
- The legacy: Among the Cherokee, the Yunwi Tsunsdi remain part of living tradition - certain rocks, waterfalls, and mountain coves are recognized as places where they dwell, and people leave small offerings and avoid disturbing these sites.
The drumming came from inside the rock. That was what the hunter said later, when he could speak again, when he had language for what had happened to him. He had been following a buck down the gorge of the Nantahala, late in the day, the light already blue between the laurel thickets, and the buck had vanished the way deer do - one step behind a hemlock and gone. He stood still. The drumming started.
It was not human drumming. It was too fast, too light, like a dozen small hands on a water drum no bigger than a fist. The sound came from below the trail, down where the river cut between wet black rocks, and it pulled at him the way smoke pulls at a moth.
The Yunwi Tsunsdi
The Cherokee say there are three kinds of Little People. The Yunwi Tsunsdi who live in the rock faces and under waterfalls are the ones most often met. They stand no higher than a man’s knee. Their hair is long and reaches the ground. They wear it loose or braided, and they dress as Cherokee people dress, only smaller - deerskin in the old days, later cloth. They are not spirits exactly. They are persons. They eat, they dance, they talk, they have families. They have towns inside the mountains, whole settlements that no full-sized person has ever seen in daylight and reported back.
Some of the Little People are kind. They find lost children in the woods and guide them home. A child wanders off from the village, spends a night in the forest, comes back the next morning clean and fed, saying small people took care of him. The parents know.
Some are mischievous. They steal corn. They braid horses’ manes into knots. They throw pebbles at people walking alone at dusk, and when the person turns around, no one is there.
Some are dangerous. Not cruel - dangerous. They have their own laws, and a person who breaks those laws, even by accident, pays for it. The first law is this: do not speak of having seen them for seven days after the encounter. If you speak of it before the seven days pass, you will die. The second law: do not follow the drumming unless they invite you. The third: if they offer you food, know what you are agreeing to.
The Nantahala Gorge
The hunter went down the slope. He could not have said later whether he chose to go or whether his feet simply went. The laurel closed over the trail behind him. The river noise grew louder, then quieter, as though the water had been asked to hush. He came around a boulder and saw firelight.
They were dancing in a circle beside the river. A flat rock shelf jutted out over the water, and they had built a fire on it no bigger than a cooking fire for one person, but the flames were bright and steady despite the mist off the river. There were maybe forty of them. They were small. The tallest came up to the hunter’s thigh. Their drumming filled the gorge, and the rhythm was nothing he recognized from any stomp dance or any ceremony he had attended.
One of them - a woman, her hair dragging on the wet stone behind her - looked up at him and smiled. She held out a bowl. It was a small bowl, carved from tulipwood, and inside it were blackberries. They were the darkest blackberries he had ever seen, and they smelled like summer, though it was late autumn and no berry had hung on a vine in two months.
He took one. He ate it.
Seven Years in a Night
He danced with them. He could not remember later whether he had shrunk or they had grown, but they were the same size once the dancing started. The drum rhythm entered his chest and stayed there. The fire did not diminish. The river ran quiet beside them. He danced until his legs should have given out but they did not give out. The woman with the long hair danced beside him and sometimes spoke, but her words were in a language he could almost understand - Cherokee, but older, as though the words had not yet worn down to their common shapes.
When the fire finally sank and the drumming stopped, the Little People walked one by one into the face of the cliff. The rock opened for them the way a curtain opens, and closed behind each one. The woman was the last to go. She looked back at him. She did not wave or speak. She stepped into the stone and was gone.
The hunter climbed back up the gorge. The laurel had thinned. The trail looked wider than he remembered, more worn. When he reached the ridge, the trees were wrong - tulip poplars stood where he remembered chestnuts, and the chestnuts were dead, grey trunks with no bark. He walked to his village.
The Village He Returned To
His house was there but the roof had been repaired with different bark. A woman he did not know sat outside it, scraping a hide. Children he had never seen played in the yard. He asked for his wife by name. The woman stared at him. She said that woman’s husband had gone into the Nantahala seven winters ago and never come back. She said the wife had mourned for a year and then married again. She said the children were from the second husband.
The hunter sat down on the ground outside his own house and did not speak. People gathered. An elder recognized his face - older now, they said, though to him only one night had passed. He told the elder what had happened. He told it within the seven days. Whether he did not know the rule or could not keep it, the accounts do not say.
He was dead within the week. Not from violence, not from sickness anyone could name. He lay down and did not get up.
The Places They Keep
The Cherokee still know where the Yunwi Tsunsdi live. Certain rock faces along the Oconaluftee River. Certain coves in the Great Smoky Mountains where the laurel grows too thick to walk through. The base of waterfalls where the mist never clears.
People leave offerings - tobacco, sometimes food, sometimes a small carved figure placed on a rock ledge and left without looking back. Children who wander off and come home safe are not questioned too closely about where they slept or who fed them. Stones found arranged in small circles on a riverbank are left alone. If drumming comes from inside a cliff on a night when the mist sits heavy in the gorge, a person with any sense walks the other direction.
The Little People do not explain themselves. They do not need to. The mountains are theirs. They were there before the Cherokee arrived, the Cherokee say, and they will be there after.