The Cosmic Hunt

At the world's beginning the great cosmic elk Kheglen came down from the upper world at dusk, caught the sun on her antlers, and carried it away into the sky-taiga, plunging the earth into darkness. The hero-hunter Mangi — half man, half bear in the oldest tellings — took up his bow and pursued her on skis across the snowfields of the night sky. He gains on her through the night; toward dawn he strikes, and the sun is torn free to rise again. But the elk is reborn, the theft renews, and the chase never truly ends: the four stars of the Dipper's bowl are Kheglen, the three stars of the handle are Mangi's ski-track (or Mangi and his companions), and the yearly turning of the Dipper around the pole is the great circuit of the hunt. The Milky Way is the trail of Mangi's skis.

The Sámi sky is one vast frozen hunt. The elk Sarvvis (the constellation around Cassiopeia and Perseus) flees eternally from the hunters: Favdna, who aims with his bow — the bow is the Big Dipper itself — and his companions, the skiers Gallabartnit, sons of the old Ski-runner. Favdna sights along his arrow every night, and every night he holds his shot: for behind the elk stands Boahjenaste, the North Star, the pillar-nail that holds up the sky, and if his arrow flies wide and strikes the star, the heavens will tear loose from their nail and fall, and the world will end in fire. So the hunt hangs forever at the instant before the kill — the tension of the drawn bow is the tension that keeps the sky standing.

The four stars of the Dipper's bowl are the great bear; the three stars of the handle are the hunters who chase her — the robin, the chickadee, and the moosebird in the Mi'kmaq telling; three brothers in the Haudenosaunee telling, the second carrying a pot to cook her in, and beside him, if your eyes are sharp, you can see the pot itself: the little star Alcor. All spring and summer the hunters chase the bear around the northern sky. In autumn they finally overtake and wound her: her blood falls to the earth and reddens the leaves of the maples, and her fat, rendered in the pot, is the first snow. The bear's skeleton lies on its back through the winter — the Dipper low on the horizon — while her spirit enters a den beneath the stars, and in spring she emerges reborn, and the hunt begins again, world without end.

In the traditions of Chukotka and the Bering Strait, a great wild reindeer runs the circuit of the northern sky, pursued by a hunter — sometimes on skis, sometimes driving a dog-sledge whose team strings out behind him as a line of stars. The chase turns with the seasons: when the reindeer runs high, the herds on earth are restless; when the hunter closes in autumn, the slaughtering season begins below. Neighbouring Koryak and Yupik traditions on both sides of the strait tell the same pattern with local game — reindeer giving way to caribou on the American side — and it is precisely this chain of small, continuous local substitutions, unbroken from the taiga to the tundra to Alaska, that convinced researchers the hunt walked across Beringia with the hunters themselves.

Callisto, companion of Artemis, was loved by Zeus and transformed into a bear — by jealous Hera, or by Artemis in anger, or by Zeus himself to hide her. For years she roamed Arcadia as a beast with a woman's mind. Her son Arcas grew into a hunter, and one day, meeting the great she-bear that came toward him with terrible recognition in its eyes, he raised his spear to kill her. Zeus stopped the spear-cast at the last instant and swept mother and son into the sky: she as the Great Bear, he as Arctophylax, the Bear-Keeper, who follows her around the pole forever. Hera, denied her revenge, exacted one condition from the sea gods: the Bear alone of all constellations may never bathe in Ocean — and indeed the Great Bear never sets below the horizon, circling the pole eternally, pursued and unresting.