The Great Yellow-Jacket

Cherokee legend...

A long time ago, the people of the old town of Kanu'ga'la'yi on Nantahala river, in the present Macon County, North Carolina, were much annoyed by a great insect called Ulagu. Large as a house, it used to come from some secret hiding place and snap up children and carry them away. It was unlike any other insect ever known and the people tried many times to track it to its home, but it was too swift to be followed.

They killed a squirrel and tied a white string to it, so that its course could be followed with the eye, as bee hunters follow the flight of a bee to its tree. The Ulagu came and carried off the squirrel with the string hanging to it, but darted away so swiftly through the air that it was out of sight in a moment. They repeated the operation with a turkey, then a deer ham, but nothing worked. At last they killed a deer and tried again. This time the load was so heavy that it had to fly slowly and so low that the string could be plainly seen.

The hunters got together for the pursuit. They followed it along a ridge until they saw the nest of the Ulagu in a large cave in the rocks below. On this, they raised a great shout and made their way rapidly down to the mountain and across to the cave. The nest had the entrance below with tiers of cells built up one above another to the roof of the cave. The great Ulagu was there, with thousands of smaller ones, that we now call yellow-jackets. The hunters built fires around the holes, so that the smoke filled the cave and smothered the great insect and multitudes of the smaller ones, but others which were outside the cave were not killed, and these escaped and increased until now the yellow-jackets, which before were unknown, are all over the world. The people called the cave Tsgagunyi "Where the yellow-jacket was", and the place from which they first saw the nest they called "Atahita" "Where they shouted" and these are their names today.