Retold from: Cherokee folk tales

Cherokee tales are stories of an Indigenous people from the mountains of the southeastern United States, about clever Rabbit, Possum and other animals.

The Cherokee have lived in the Appalachians since long ago, on the lands of today’s Georgia, Tennessee and both Carolinas. Their tales often explain why the world is the way it is: why an animal has such a tail or such a voice. The greatest prankster and trickster in these stories is Rabbit.

We retell them from the records of the American ethnologist James Mooney. In the late 1880s he worked among the Cherokee in the mountains of North Carolina, listened to old storytellers and in 1900 published the book “Myths of the Cherokee”, which gathers more than a hundred tales.

The site already has the tale “Why Possum’s Tail Is Bare”, about Possum, who boasted so much about his fluffy tail that Rabbit and Cricket decided to teach him a lesson.