Cherokee Marbles on a 1,200-Year Roll : Oklahoma: The game is part golf and part croquet without the sticks, and it can be more habit-forming than cards or tennis.

It was late at night in this place reachable only by graded roads, and it was easy to think about spirits aloft in the woods with the hoot owls.

But in a clearing near this creek in eastern Oklahoma, a wood fire snapped in an iron drum under the trees. Old kitchen chairs were gathered close. And beneath a clothesline strung with light bulbs, figures in coats and hats were playing a game nearly 1,200 years old yet barely known outside an exclusive circle of players.

The game is called Cherokee marbles. To the people of Cherokee heritage who inhabit this hilly country, it conjures images of elderly grandfathers pitching polished stones across hard-packed ground many years ago. It recalls the days when every small church had a marbles course at the edge of the parking lot, until church members realized that some players were never making it back inside to the worship service.

For many residents around here, the game is more habit-forming than cards or tennis. On any given day, the hollows around Little Kansas and Rose and Locus Grove echo with the clackety-clacking sound of “marbles.” Cue balls have replaced the carefully selected and chipped rocks of the past, but the atmosphere of the game--outdoors, amid the forest sounds, the splashing of a nearby creek, the cool wind--has remained unchanged for centuries.

“There’s always a pack of coyotes around here,” said Dennis Snell, 40, an elementary school principal who recently returned to the game for the first time since boyhood and is the youngest in his group of players. “They start yelling, and it’s really neat. There are screech owls in the woods. A place as secluded as this is, you hear the sounds of the night sometimes.”

Overhead on this evening, clouds shaped like human ribs criss-crossed the nearly full moon, clouds that Snell said his daughter, Susan, 7, refers to as “sky bones.” Nearby, four of the seven Foreman brothers--Andy, Charley, Edward and Lee--stood in position around the L-shaped course, faces ghostly in the dim light. Pete Fields had wandered over from his farm, and John Glass arrived in his truck. Edward Foreman’s wife, Lydia, joined in after supper, as did Lee’s wife, Minnie. Sometimes, more than a dozen people drift in and play until long past midnight.

Since about A.D. 800, Cherokee marbles has had this kind of allure. Tribal spokeswoman Norma Harvey said the game, part golf and part croquet without the sticks, is played on a 100-foot-long field dotted with five shallow holes 10 to 12 yards apart. Each player uses one marble and tries to advance through the course by tossing it into the holes and knocking out opponents who try to claim the spots. Although the game offers fresh air, mild exercise and a little competition, it has endured largely as a social gathering, Harvey said, giving far-flung Cherokee families in this rural area a chance to visit.

None of the men and women playing at Cloud’s Creek this night remembered when they first learned Cherokee marbles. They were very young, and some even quit playing for a while as teen-agers or young adults. But later, they found themselves drawn again to the old game, and they play it quietly and good-naturedly in the clearing in the woods, some of the men grumbling that their wives can outplay them.

“Sometimes I get mad at her,” said Lee Foreman, 65, a retired bus driver, about his wife, Minnie, also 65. “She hits a lot better than I do.”

On the other hand, no one seems to care too much who wins. Charley Foreman, 58, added another log to the barrel fire. Pete Fields, 60, rested on a stump. Overhead, clouds rushed by the moon, and Lydia Foreman tossed her ball neatly into hole No. 3.