A Cherokee Legend

In the South, there once were people who owned a corn mill, where they ground corn into meal. Several mornings, they discovered that some of the meal had been stolen at night. Upon inspecting the ground, they found the tracks of a dog.

Determined to catch the thief, they kept watch the next night. Just as suspected, a dog came from the North and began eating the meal from the bowl. The people sprang out and whipped the dog. Howling, the dog ran back toward his home in the North, leaving a trail of meal falling from his mouth.

This created a white path in the sky, which we now call the Milky Way. The Cherokee continue to refer to this cosmic trail as Gi`lï’-utsûñ’stänûñ’yï, meaning “Where the dog ran.”