The star husband

At a Glance

• Central figures: Two young women - unnamed in most tellings - who wish on stars and find themselves married to Star People in the Sky World; one husband is young, the other old.
• Setting: Arapaho and Cheyenne tradition (Central Plains), with closely related versions told among the Ojibwe, Pawnee, Crow, Blackfoot, and other peoples across a wide geographic range; the story moves between an earthly camp and the Sky World above.
• The turn: The women are warned never to dig deep into the floor of the Sky World, but one of them digs and breaks through, opening a hole that reveals the earth far below.
• The outcome: The women lower themselves on a rope of sinew back toward the earth, but the rope is too short; one woman falls to her death, while the other - pregnant with a star-child - survives and returns to her people.
• The legacy: The surviving woman’s son, Star Boy, becomes a figure in further cycles of Plains hero stories; the hole in the sky floor persists in some tellings as a way of explaining the passage between worlds.

The two of them were lying on their backs outside the camp, looking up. It was midsummer and the grass was warm beneath them. The fires had burned low. Everyone else had gone to sleep.

One woman pointed at a bright star near the horizon. She said she wanted that one for a husband. The other woman laughed and pointed higher, at a dim star almost directly overhead. That one, she said. That is the one I want.

They slept where they were, in the open, with the grass around them.

Waking in the Sky World

When the first woman opened her eyes, the grass was gone. She was lying on a hard surface - packed earth, smooth, pale as bone. The sky was not above her. She turned her head and saw a young man sitting near her, watching her with a face she did not recognize. He was handsome. His clothes were white and well-made, sewn with quillwork she had never seen before.

The second woman woke nearby. Beside her sat an old man. His hair was thin and white, and he moved slowly, but his eyes were sharp. He smiled at her.

The young man said: you wished for us, and we heard you. You are in the Sky World now. We are your husbands.

The first woman looked at her companion. They had meant it as a game, lying in the grass, pointing at lights. They had not meant it as a promise. But here they were. The camp was gone. The earth was gone. The sky spread not above them but around them, and the ground they stood on was the floor of the sky itself.

The Star Husbands’ Camp

The Star People lived much as people lived below. They had lodges. They gathered food. The young husband hunted; the old husband sat and talked and told stories. Both women were given digging sticks and told they could gather roots from the floor of the Sky World, which grew thick with turnips and prairie turnips and other plants that pushed up through the hard pale ground.

The old husband was kind but strange. He knew things before they happened. The young husband was quick to laugh but sometimes vanished for days, and when he returned he would not say where he had been.

The women worked. They dug roots. They learned the paths of the Sky World, which were not like paths on earth - they curved and doubled back and sometimes ended at nothing.

One instruction came from both husbands, together, spoken the same way: do not dig too deep. Take the roots near the surface. Do not push your digging stick down past the length of your forearm.

The Forbidden Hole

The woman married to the old man obeyed. She dug carefully, pulling roots from the shallow ground, shaking off the pale dirt.

The woman married to the young man did not. She was restless. The Sky World was beautiful but it was not hers. She missed the smell of the grass, the sound of the river near their camp, the voices of her family. She dug deeper each day. She wanted to know what was under the floor.

One morning, alone, she drove her digging stick down hard. It broke through. Pale light came up from the hole, and then she heard it - wind. Real wind, from below. She got on her knees and looked down through the opening.

Far below, impossibly far, she saw the earth. She saw green. She saw the winding line of a river. She saw the dark dots of a camp - her camp, her people, going about their lives as if she had never left.

She pulled back from the hole and sat with her hands in her lap for a long time.

The Rope of Sinew

She told the other woman. Together, in secret, they began to prepare. They saved strips of sinew from the meat their husbands brought. They braided the sinew into a rope, working at night when the Star People slept, hiding the coils under a lodge-skin.

The rope grew slowly. They could not tell how long it needed to be. The earth had looked very far away.

When the rope seemed long enough - it filled both their arms - they went to the hole. The woman married to the young man had kept it covered with a flat stone. She moved the stone. The wind came up again, and the smell of grass.

They tied one end of the rope to the digging stick laid across the hole. The woman married to the young man went first. She was pregnant by then - her belly was round and heavy - and she climbed down hand over hand, the sinew cutting into her palms.

The rope was not long enough.

She hung at the end of it, swaying, the earth still far below her. She could see the tops of trees. She could see the river. But she could not reach the ground.

The second woman climbed down after her. She was lighter and faster. She reached the end of the rope and held on beside her companion. They hung there together, the wind pulling at them, the sinew creaking.

The Fall and the Return

The rope held for a time. Then the sinew at the top began to fray where it pressed against the edge of the hole.

The second woman lost her grip. She fell. She fell a long way. She did not survive.

The first woman held on. The rope swung. She wrapped her legs around it and pressed her face into the braided sinew and did not look down. Something caught her - some versions say a hawk, some say the rope simply held until people below saw her dangling and came with blankets and poles and brought her down. She reached the earth alive.

She returned to her people carrying a child fathered by a star. When the boy was born, he was different from other children. His skin had a faint light to it, visible at dusk. He grew fast. He did not speak until he was ready, and when he spoke, he spoke clearly.

The people called him Star Boy. He knew things about the sky that no one else knew - where the stars moved, when the weather would change, which seasons were coming. His mother never told him about his father, but he looked up often. He stood outside the camp at night, alone, studying the sky with an expression no one could read.

The hole in the sky floor was never filled in. Some say it is still there, covered with a flat stone that shifts sometimes in the wind.