Ofi Tohbi i Hina
A white dog stole a bag of meal from a hunter living up in the sky. In running with it across the heavens, the sack became untied. The meal was thus scattered leaving a broad white trail which from that day has been known as the white dog’s road.
(from “Choctaw Stories” in the Henry S. Halbert Papers)
Published in agreement with the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
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Parallel Cherokee myth
The Milky Way
Some people in the south had a corn mill, in which they pounded the corn into meal, and several mornings when they came to fill it they noticed that some of the meal had been stolen during the night. They examined the ground and found the tracks of a dog, so the next night they watched, and when the dog came from the north and began to eat the meal out of the bowl they sprang out and whipped him. He ran off howling to his home in the north, with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day Gi’li’-utsun’stanun’yi, “Where the dog ran.”
(from James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee {1902} 259)