Bear Tales
Published on Jul 21, 2006 at 10:36 am.
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Filed under constellations, skywatching.
In the northern sky this time of year is the constellation Ursa Major. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, it is high in the northern sky, and up pretty much all night. A bit south of the equator is is low in the northern sky, and up only for a while during the night. If you are too far south, then you don’t see it at all. Ursa Major is Latin for “Big Bear,” and that is what this constellation is supposed to be: a big bear. However, I, like most people that I know, look at Ursa Major and immediately think mainly of the seven brightest stars in the constellation. These stars make an unmistakable pattern in the sky that is one of the first patterns that anyone learns, and it is one of the few that most everyone that I meet knows. Here in North America, these stars are almost universally known as the Big Dipper. Four stars make a box shape that is the bowl of the dipper, and the remaining three are its handle. However, this is only part of the whole constellation of the bear. In particular, it is the back end of the bear. Unofficial groupings of stars like these are called asterisms, rather than constellations. The term constellation only refers to 88 official constellations recognized by astronomers. The official list was decided in 1933 by the International Astronomical Union. 66 of these date back to the Romans. Ursa Major is one of those 66. However, all of the constellations, not just the 66 Roman ones, are named in Latin. Though in the past, constellations were mental pictures made of the stars, modern astronomers don’t think of constellations as patterns in the sky, anymore. Instead, we think of the constellations as regions of the sky. The entire sky is divided up into the 88 official constellations. Now, before this time, every group of astronomers had their own set of constellations, most being the same, but some not. So, this cleared up a lot of confusion. Also, all sorts of cultures around the world have made constellations out of stars in the sky. They are generally not the same, and sometimes not even the same groups of stars that make up the constellations. There are lots of ways of taking the same set of stars and imagining pictures out of them!As I said, the Big Dipper is only part of Ursa Major. This group of seven stars is really very easy to spot, and so many groups of people over the years have made it a constellation of its own. For example, many of the people of sub-Saharan Africa regarded these seven stars as a Drinking Gourd. In parts of Africa, a hollowed gourd could be used to scoop water for drinking. These areas of Africa where these stars were considered a gourd were where many people were taken to be slaves in the Americas, a sad note in our history. These Africans brought with them many aspects of their culture, including some of their lore. Much of that was lost, but the seven stars of the Drinking Gourd were so easy to spot and recognize, that it was no wonder that they remained. As I said, even today, this is one of the first patterns that people learn, and one that sticks with them. Well, the youngsters learning the stars from their elders had never seen a gourd. However, they had seen metal dippers used to scoop water from barrels to drink. So, the Drinking Gourd became the Big Dipper.But, from the tale, it is obviously going to be an American asterism. Indeed, in parts of Europe those seven stars had been seen as a Wagon or a Cart. The four stars making the bowl of the dipper were the actual vehicle, with the other three being the handle with which it is pulled. Other parts of Europe, particularly near Britain, saw this as the Plow, or more correctly, I suppose, the Plough (the British spelling). The four stars that we regard as the bowl of the dipper were the blade of the plough and the other three were it’s handle. Think of a horse-drawn plow to get the picture of the plough. (Now if that isn’t a weird looking sentence, with both the American and British spellings of a word in it! Probably those of you with a better literary sense than I are cringing right now!)
But, as I said, this part of the sky has been seen since ancient times as a bear. How the Romans got a bear out of the stars of Ursa Major is sort of interesting. What is more interesting is that these stars also seem to be a bear in a number of North American Indian nations. This is baffling to me, since there is nothing even bear-like in these stars! I seldom see a bear, even though I know that one is there. The bowl of the dipper is the hind quarters of the bear. His hind legs extend from what we’d think of the bottom of the bowl, and his front extends well past the front of the bowl. The handle of the dipper is often portrayed as the bear’s tail. Huh? Bears don’t have long tails. Well, the Romans were notoriously anatomically inaccurate with their constellations. H. A. Rey (author of Curious George) wrote a book some years back in which he formed new, easier to see patterns of the constellations. He turned the bear around, and made the handle the nose of the bear. It really looks more like a bear that way. (Actually, Rey’s book is a fantastic introduction to the sky for anyone wanting to learn enough to be able to go out and recognize some of the things that you see.)
But what do we make of the American Indians seeing a bear in the same set of non bear-like stars? There have been several theories. One idea is that this implies some interaction between Europe and the Americas. We know that the Vikings made it to the American mainland, so perhaps they brought stories of the sky with them. Or perhaps the earliest post Columbus explorers and settlers brought European constellations with them. Native Americans could have picked up on these stars being a bear then, and then they could have incorporated that into their own tales. Most of these early Europeans coming to America didn’t really care what the people already here thought. By the time that people started to take not of Native American star lore, the idea of these stars being a bear might have already become part of that lore. And, naturally, there is always the way out there weird ideas that people come up with, like a group of aliens that look like bears visted both Europe and North America from stars in that part of the sky. OK, I just had to toss that one into the mix. As hard as it is to believe, I have actually heard that! Of course, I’ve heard lots of crazy things. (I might do a blog entry sometime on some of the wilder things that I’ve heard. Hmm, I haven’t done one like that in a while…). But, trying to figure out how these stars got to be a bear in North America is a bit beyond my expertise. I’ll leave it to others.
Not all Native Americans have the same bear stories for these stars. One that I like is a story that has it being a bear pretty much like the Roman one, with a long tail. According to this tale, the bear was watching a fox one winter day. This was before bears hibernated in the winter, and when they had long fluffy tails. The bear observed that the fox would carefully walk out onto a frozen lake, and then use his teeth and claws to chip a hole in the ice. He would then lower his long fluffy fox tail into the water. A fish would come along and nibble on the tail thinking that it were some sort of strange weed. The fox would quickly pull his tail out of the water, and the fish would come along with it. The fox then would eat the fish. Well, the bear saw all of this and thought to himself, “If Fox can do this, then so can I, for I am Bear, and I am much better than Fox.” So the bear went out onto the ice and punched a hole in the ice. He then lowered his long fluffy tail into the water. Sure enough fish came to nibble. But, the bear thought to himself, “I am much bigger and hungrier than Fox. One fish won’t do for me. I had better leave my tail in the water until several fish come along. Then, I’ll pull it out and eat them all!” Well, soon, the bear lost feeling in his tail. When he tried to sit up to find out what was wrong, he found to his horror that the water had frozen back, and now his tail was trapped in the ice! He pulled and pulled, until finally he pulled loose, but his tail had come off and was still embedded in ice. That is why bears don’t have tails, and after this horrible incident, bears now hibernate all winter so that they don’t have to go through this again. (Of course, I am not sure how they could, since they don’t have tails any more.) Anyway, this tale tells a moral lesson to youngsters: don’t get greedy. Or perhaps, it just tells them not to sit in freezing water.
Not all Native Americans had the same stories. Another tale is that of three Indians hunting a bear. The stars of the Dipper’s bowl are the bear. The other three are the braves hunting the bear. As the sky rotates through the night, the stars of the bear always leads the hunters. They are always chasing the bear. But, every year in the Fall, they get close enough to the bear to wound him with a spear. The bear then bleeds, and his blood spills from the sky onto the trees, turning the leaves red and orange. But the bear always escapes, and the braves always keep after him. Of course, the relative spacing and positions of the stars don’t really change, but I guess that might take the fun out of the story.
And, while I am at it, I may as well relay a bear tale told to me by a park ranger with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. This has nothing to do with stars, but it appealed to my warped sense of humor. You see, my ranger friend was telling me of a friend of his who was a park ranger up in Colorado. This Colorado ranger frequently led park visitors on a nature hike through the park. Well, this park had bears in it. These bears really didn’t want much to deal with people, and if they heard people coming then they’d just walk away, so you never saw them. However, you didn’t want to walk up on one of them and surprise it. So, they issued little bells to the hikers. They made noise as they walked, and the bears would hear that and go somewhere else. I guess that the nature walk must have focused on plants, since pretty much any wild animal would go somewhere else when a group of tourists came through. The plants were stuck. They couldn’t run away. Anyway, as they were doing their tour, they came upon some bear scat (a polite way of referring to the material that had passed through their digestive track). Anyway, the ranger pointed it out, and told the visitors that this was bear scat, and it looked fairly fresh, so a bear must have been in that immediate area not long ago. Well, as often happens with my students, there just had to be one of the tourists who would catch some notion and not let it go, making a pest of himself. Well, on this tour, there was this one guy who wouldn’t let the ranger get away with just saying that it was bear scat so a bear had been there. He wanted to know what kind of bear. Well, the ranger explained that you couldn’t really tell from the scat. There were two main types of bears in the park, though, black bears and grizzly bears, so it was probably one of them. Well, the tourist wouldn’t let it go. He insisted that the ranger tell him what kind of bear it was. The ranger patiently explained that both grizzly bears and black bears eat pretty much the same things, so you can’t tell from the scat what kind of bear it was. The size of the scat might give a clue, but that wasn’t reliable either. You simply can’t tell from the scat what kind of bear left it. Well, the tourist still wouldn’t let it go, and the ranger really wanted to get on with the tour and not stand around discussing bear droppings! So, he finally gave in and said that he’d investigate. So, he took as stick and poked at the scat, stirred it up a bit, and then pronounced that it was a black bear. As expected, the tourist still wasn’t satisfied, and he wanted to know how the ranger knew that it was black bear and not grizzly bear. “Well, ” the ranger said. “It is easy. There are no bells in it.”
-Astroprof
