One of my favorite traditional Cherokee stories, told more or less as I remember it.
Fox and Rabbit used be friends, a long time ago. One time they were walking around looking for game, and Fox spotted a cow. "Look at that cow" he said to Rabbit; "I bet I can shoot it". He lifted up his gun and shot it through the heart.
Now, Fox and Rabbit were standing over by their dead cow, and Wolf came along.
"Whatcha got?" asked Wolf (stupidly, because anyone could see it was a dead cow).
"Dead cow" replied Rabbit.
"How ya gonna cook it?" said Wolf, drooling a little.
"Dunno" said Rabbit, looking over at Fox. Fox just shrugged.
Rabbit wasn't really very interested in the cow, but Fox and Wolf were getting hungry and wanted to cook it up. Rabbit had an idea. "Hey Fox," he said, "See that red over in the west? That looks like fire. Why don't you go get us some so we can cook this cow?"
Fox was pretty eager to get some fire, so he took off. He trotted and trotted, and every time he thought he was about to get to the big fire that was making the sky so red, he'd get to the top of a rise and it'd be off beyond the next one. Finally, the red light died down, and discouraged, he turned to go back.
In the meantime, Rabbit and Wolf were chuckling about Fox's stupidity. Wolf had a great idea... they would take the carcass and cache it up in a tree, but first they would cutoff the tail and stick the stump-end in the ground, so the tassel was sticking out. When Fox returned, he saw the two of them looking glum and shuffling their feet.
"What happened here?" he cried, "where's our cow?"
Wolf looked sidelong at Rabbit and told Fox, "We went to get some wood, and when we came back this old cow had buried itself." He pointed at the tail-end sticking up out of the ground. "We don't know how to get it out."
"I'll pull it out" said Fox, and he grabbed hold of the tail and pulled and pulled with all his might, until suddenly *POP* the tail came out of the ground!
"Look what you've done!" yelled Rabbit, "We'll never get it out now!"
"Yeah, might as well leave it" agreed Wolf.
Dejected, Fox went home, and Wolf and Rabbit had a good laugh at his expense. Then Rabbit wandered off, because he wasn't really interested in the cow anyway, and Wolf had himself a nice big meal. He had to eat it raw, though, because no one ever did get any fire to roast it with.
Ain't I a stinker?
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