James Mooney's collection of Cherokee myths records that in the beginning, fire did not exist anywhere among the animals, until Thunder sent it down in the form of lightning that struck a hollow sycamore tree growing on an island, where it burned inside the trunk out of easy reach. The animals, cold and eager to obtain it, gather in council to decide who among them is capable of safely bringing the fire back across the water to the rest.
Raven, confident in his strength and size, volunteers first and flies across, but the heat scorches his feathers black as he circles too close, and he returns empty-handed and permanently darkened. Screech Owl tries next, and the smoke and rising ash blind and burn his eyes as he peers into the hollow tree, leaving Cherokee tradition to explain his red-rimmed eyes ever afterward as a mark of that failed attempt. Hoot Owl and Horned Owl fare no better, marked in their turn by soot and ash around their eyes for the same reason.
Mooney recorded well over a hundred such myths from Cherokee informants during his fieldwork in the late nineteenth century, and The First Fire sits among the sacred myths he distinguished from the larger body of animal tales and local legends also included in his collection, a distinction his Cherokee sources themselves apparently drew between stories explaining the fundamental order of the world and stories told primarily for entertainment or moral instruction.