Nunnehi

The drum starts somewhere up in the balds, on the high peaks where the timber gives out and the grass runs clean to the summit, and a hunter who hears it will swear it is coming from just over the next rise. He climbs. The drum moves behind him. He turns, and now it is off to the left, or below him, or gone, and the singing that went with it has thinned out into wind. Nobody ever found the dance.

They are the Nûñnë’hï, and the name means the people who live anywhere. English translated that into the Immortals, which is grander and slightly wrong. The Cherokee held them to be a race of spirit people living in the old mountain country of western North Carolina, north Georgia and east Tennessee, with great townhouses inside the mountains: one in Pilot Knob, one under Blood Mountain at the head of the Nottely, one under the mound at Nikwasi where the Little Tennessee runs past what is now Franklin. They were invisible unless they wanted otherwise. When they wanted otherwise they looked like anybody, and that is what makes their stories so unsettling to read. Nothing announces them. A man walks up the riverbank, he is pleasant, he offers you dinner.

That is close to what happened to a boy from Nottely town, and the account survives because a hard-headed, truthful man told it about himself when he was grown. He was ten or twelve, out at the water piling stones into two long walls for a fish trap, when a stranger stopped on the bank and said the work looked heavy and he ought to rest. Come up to my house. There was a house, and a wife in it, and children to play with, and a good dinner, and partway through the meal a man the boy knew perfectly well by name came in and spoke to him, so he settled and slept the night. In the morning his host walked him to a fork in the trail between a cornfield and a fenced peach orchard, pointed him home, and turned back. A little way on, the boy looked over his shoulder. No orchard, no fence, no house. Trees on a mountainside. At home they had been dragging the river for him since noon the day before, and the man he had greeted at dinner had been out in a canoe the whole time, hunting for his body.

The Nunnehi are not the Yûñwï Tsunsdi’, the Little People, who stand no higher than a man’s knee and live in rock caves and turn nasty if you follow their drumming. That distinction was made firmly by the Cherokee who told these stories and it is worth keeping. The Nunnehi are full sized, sociable and largely benign. Four of their women once came down to a dance at Nottely and spent half the night with the young men there, and everyone took them for visitors from another settlement until some men stepping outside to cool off watched them walk to the river ford on a plain open trail and simply stop existing at the waterline. On a small branch running north off Blood Mountain there was a hole in the ground like a narrow well, breathing warm vapour into the cold, and people said it was the smoke hole of a Nunnehi townhouse with a fire going under the mountain. Hunters would stand there in winter to thaw their hands. None of them stayed long.

The most famous thing they ever did was fight. A powerful unknown tribe came up out of the southeast, burning out the lower settlements one after another, and at Nikwasi the warriors put their wives and children in the townhouse and posted lookouts. The attack came just before dawn. They fought hard, they were overpowered, they began to fall back, and then a stranger was standing among them telling the chief to call his men off and let him handle it. Retreating up the trail toward the townhouse, they saw warriors pouring out of the side of the mound as though a door had opened in it, hundreds of them, armed and painted, and it was only then that anyone understood that the Nunnehi had been living under Nikwasi the whole time. Past the edge of the settlement the whole army went invisible. The invaders could see the arrow coming and feel the tomahawk land and never see a hand. They ran southeast along the ridge that divides the French Broad from the Tuckasegee, sheltering behind rocks, and the arrows curved around the rocks and killed them from the far side. Six were alive at the head of the Tuckasegee, sitting down in the open to beg. The place is called Dayûlsûñ’yï, where they cried. The Nunnehi chief told them they had earned it for attacking a peaceful people, and sent them home to carry the news, which was the custom.

Their power is simply this: they are everywhere, they are unseen, they own the inside of the mountains, and no weapon reaches them. Their limit is temperament. They will not be pestered. Traders on the old path near the head of the Tugaloo kept throwing logs and stones into a swept, waist-deep circular hollow in the ground that the Cherokee said was a townhouse, and always found the rubbish flung back out, until one day the logs stayed where they fell and everyone understood the Nunnehi had given up the place and left. The same fragility runs through the greatest of their offers. On the Valley River and the Hiwassee, before the Removal, voices in the air warned of wars coming and invited whole towns to move in under the mountains and the water. The terms were seven days of fasting inside the townhouse and not one shout in all that time. The people of Anisgayâ’yï fasted six days, and on the seventh a roar came down off the mountains and the ground shook and somebody screamed. The Nunnehi already had the townhouse and its mound lifted off the earth. Startled, they dropped part of it, and that piece is the mound at Së`tsï; the rest they carried to the top of Lone Peak, where it stands turned to stone with the people inside it, invisible and alive. Another town went under the Hiwassee, and on warm days when the wind moves the surface you can hear them talking down there, and a fish-drag hauled across that spot always snags in deep water on nothing at all.

There is one more detail, and it is the one that makes them believable. When two of them came to Käna’sta on the French Broad to invite that settlement into Pilot Knob, they were honest about the offer. We do not live forever, they said, and we do not always find game when we go out for it, because the game belongs to Tsul’kalu. What we have is peace, and never having to think about danger. When the Cherokee were forced west in 1838, the sharpest grief among the people of the Hiwassee and the Valley was not the land. It was that the relatives who had already gone in to the Nunnehi could not be taken along.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Nunnehi?

The Nunnehi are a race of immortal spirit people in Cherokee tradition, whose name means “the people who live anywhere.” They live inside the mountains of the southern Appalachians in great townhouses, are invisible unless they choose to be seen, and act as protectors and guides to the Cherokee.

What is the difference between the Nunnehi and the Cherokee Little People?

The Nunnehi are full-sized spirit people who look exactly like ordinary Cherokee when they appear, while the Yûñwï Tsunsdi’ or Little People are knee-high beings who live in rock caves on the mountainsides. Cherokee tellers were explicit that the two are not the same. The Little People are also more dangerous to follow, throwing a spell over anyone who tracks their drumming.

Where do the Nunnehi live?

They live inside the high country of western North Carolina, north Georgia and east Tennessee, with townhouses in the bald mountains where no trees grow. Named locations include Pilot Knob, Blood Mountain at the head of the Nottely River, and the mound at Nikwasi on the Little Tennessee, in what is now Franklin, North Carolina.

What happened at Nikwasi?

An unknown tribe invaded from the southeast and was beating the Nikwasi warriors in battle when hundreds of Nunnehi came out of the side of the mound as though through an open doorway. They became invisible once outside the settlement, so the invaders could see arrows and tomahawks strike without seeing who threw them, and were driven along the ridge to the head of the Tuckasegee. The six survivors were spared and sent home with the news.

Are the Nunnehi dangerous to humans?

No. The Nunnehi are consistently friendly, guiding lost travellers to their townhouses, feeding and resting them, and then leading them home. They can be offended, though, and stories describe them abandoning a place where traders threw rubbish into their townhouse, and throwing stones at hunters who joked about them.

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