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The spiny murex
Discusses the clouds.

After Kanati's boys had let the deer out from the cave where their father used to keep them, the hunters tramped about in the woods for a long time without finding any game, so that the people were very hungry. At last they heard that the Thunder Boys were now living in the far west, beyond the sun door, and that if they were sent for they could bring back the game. So they sent messengers for them, and the boys came and sat down in the middle of the townhouse and began to sing.

At the first song there was a roaring sound like a strong wind in the northwest, and it grew louder and nearer as the boys sang on, until at the seventh song a whole herd of deer, led by a large buck, came out from the woods. The boys had told the people to be ready with their bows and arrows, and when the song was ended and all the deer were close around the townhouse, the hunters shot into them and killed as many as they needed before the herd could get back into the timber.

Then the Thunder Boys went back to the Darkening Land, but before they left they taught the people the seven songs with which to call up the deer. It all happened so long ago that the songs are now forgotten - all but two, which the hunters still sing whenever they go after deer.1

1 Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee, Dover edition, first published in 1995, is an unabridged and slightly altered republication of the work originally published by the Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., in 1900, as part of the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1897-98:in Two Parts - Part I.

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