Feathered serpent - Cherokee

It is about a man that we know from history that crossed the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, spent a year and from there the Hawaiians brought him to the west coast of Central America. When he came here he was a young man and when he left he was very old. During the time that he was here he travelled all over
North, Central, and South America. Whenever we would ask this man his name, he never would tell us, but asked us to give him a name, and for this reason he has many names and the name I will use in this story is the most common one.

We have a good physical description of this man, he was about 5'10, he had brown hair with reddish gold highlights, and it is said his eyes were grey like the sea just before a storm. AS he travelled though out the America's, he would spend a year with each tribe and from there he would visit the smaller tribes that lived around, and it was his custom as he went among the various tribes to select 12 men to whom he would teach the new way too, and when he was gone it was for these men to teach the people.

In that long ago time, when he walked among us, the Cherokee people were known as the serpent people and they lived in now what is <st1:country-region><st1:place>Honduras</st1:place></st1:country-region>, and they were a sea going people. We watched him to know what to call him, we found that he had many strange powers, he could walk on the water, he could stop even the hurricane, he could quickly learn the languages of all the people he came among, he would speak to the animals and they would understand and respond and he had the power to heal the sick and raise the dead.

In that long ago time, one of the things that impressed us most about this man, was that he could control the elements which we feared the most. And so he is called the feathered serpent because the feather is a symbol of the wind and the serpent is the symbol of the water. While many stories from tribe to tribe are so similar, that is hard to tell if it is different happenings, but this story, this is the Cherokee story and is theirs alone.

And this is what the old men told me when I was a boy, and they had it from the old men when they were boys, so it has always been told back to the happening. In the long ago time when the feathered serpent walked among us, their came a time where he was worried in his mind what the future held for us. He was so worried that he got up and began to walk in the night and those men that he chose to be his followers; they too got up and followed him from a distance to see that no harm came to him. And as he walked in the moon light through the woods, he came to a clearing and there in the moon
light lay a baby deer and it was obvious that this child of the forest had long been with out its mother and the man spoke to the deer and said, little silver spotted baby, where is your mother?

And the little fawn looked off in one direction and the man motioned for him to follow and together they walked into the woods and after a time he came upon the body of the mother deer lying there in the moon light, she was dead, cold, torn, bloody, she had given her life to a mountain lion to save her baby.

There in the moon light the man knelt down and began to stroke the body of that mother deer and as he did this thing, a strange and wonderful thing began to happen, for her heart began to beat, she began to breath, and the wounds closed up, she stood on her feet and let her baby nurse.

When his followers had seen this thing they came up to the man and began to scold him, saying you are wasting your powers on the animal people and when the real people need your help the power will all be gone, and then he began to teach them with these words, of any good, there can never be to much. The more you use this power the greater it shall become and I say to you that doing good is the will of my father, the saving of this little child of this
forest is as important as the saving of a nation, so long as you don't have to choose between the saving of them, and I say to you again, doing good is my fathers business.

Roger Clinch Cherokee Story teller