The Hunter in the Raven Mockers' House

“Well, what luck did you have?”

The young hunter heard the old man ask the question from across the room.

He was lying in a dark corner of the house, pretending to be asleep.

Night had caught him far from home, and he had stopped at the house of an elderly couple who lived near the trail. Nobody was there when he arrived, so he went inside and waited.

After dark, he heard a raven cry outside.

The old man entered and sat beside the fire.

A second raven called.

The man's wife came in.

The hunter knew then whose house he had entered.

Cherokee tradition held that Raven Mockers went to the bedsides of dying people and stole the years those people had left to live.

Now the old man was asking his wife about her night.

She told him there had been too many medicine people watching the sick person she had gone after.

Then she asked him the same question.

“I got what I went for.”

He gave something to his wife.

She fixed the fire.

The hunter began to smell meat cooking.

He opened one eye.

Something that looked like a human heart was roasting on a stick.

The old woman suddenly looked towards his corner.

She thought someone was there.

The hunter closed his eye and kept breathing as though he had been asleep the whole time.

The couple made noises around the fire, trying to see whether he would react.

He did not.

At last the old man came over and shook him awake.

The hunter sat up.

By morning the couple behaved as though the night had been ordinary. They gave him corn mush for breakfast and told him they had not had meat for a long time.

When he left, the old man followed him outside.

He gave the hunter a piece of beadwork and asked him not to tell anyone what he had heard in the house.

At the first creek, the hunter threw the beadwork into the water.

Then he went home and told everyone.

Seven days later, people returned to the house.

The old man and woman were dead inside.