Billacree Woods

Billacree was a coal miner, a tall tale figure with exceptional bad luck, usually only half his fault, and exceptional good luck, what with his ability to survive one tale of intricate disaster to another.  In the shadow of the mountain, a Billacree is either a sob story of exceptional, terrible happenstance.  Sometimes you tell them for laughs, sometimes for sympathy, and sometimes they're just lies set to get you out of trouble.  No one is really expected to believe a Billacree, though there is a strong cultural pressure among Charry Mountain folk to let one slide, if it's any good.  Except if the listener is your mama.  She's under stronger expectations to tack your hide to the woodshed wall just for trying that out on her, independent of what you actually did.

Anyway, Billacree was a coal miner.  Not for most of his life, but he gets remembered as such because that's what he was expected to do and not doing when he died.  The actual mechanics of the tale, well, Billacrees, especially the ones starring their namesake, are like shaggy dog stories, so the telling depends on the teller and how dirty is too dirty for the company.  Sufficed to say, it involved a mine-damp, a lamp, and a number of other improbable, often sexual, usually scatological things and ended up blowing most of the mine so high into the air that it made a cloud that settled on the animals in the surrounding forests and stained their fur, no shit, black as coal.

Billacree forests are usually hemlock, pine and spruce, fairly dense and pretty small.  The largest continuous Billacree forest in the region is maybe a hectare, which is respectable some places, but Big Charry is all forest and swamp where the mountains don't rise too high and most of them don't.  Animals local to these forests display almost universal melanism, a trait which runs through all vertebrate animals, reptiles, birds, mammals, amphibians, even fish that live within the confines of the woods.

These animals are good luck for you if you see them briefly, for when Billacree got blasted, his luck got blasted, too and rubbed off on the animals of the forests where his cloud touched ground.  If you see them for a while, if one starts coming around, or if Heaven and the Powers forbid, you kill one, that's not so good.  Actually, it's pretty bad.  Likewise, lingering in the forests or taking anything from them is bad luck, but there are shrines where you can go along the borders of the forest closest to travelled routes to leave your woes and hard luck behind.