The woman who married the moon

At a Glance

• Central figures: Two sisters, unnamed in most tellings, one of whom marries the Moon; the Moon himself, who appears first as a shining disc in the sky and then as a man.
• Setting: Algonquian tradition, most commonly associated with the Cree and Ojibwe peoples of the northern Great Lakes and subarctic regions; a world in which the sky is a country one can reach and the celestial bodies are persons.
• The turn: The younger sister wishes aloud to marry the Moon, and the Moon hears her and takes her up to his country in the sky.
• The outcome: The woman breaks a prohibition against digging too deep into the sky-ground, opens a hole, and sees the earth far below; she attempts to descend on a rope but cannot reach the ground and is left suspended between worlds.
• The legacy: The story accounts for why certain stars hang low and solitary in the night sky, and it remains a cautionary narrative told among Cree and Ojibwe peoples about the cost of wishing for what belongs to another world.

The two sisters were lying on their backs in the grass, watching the sky. It was late summer and the mosquitoes had quieted for the night. The older sister pointed at a bright star and said she would marry it. The younger one looked past the star to the Moon, full and close, and said she would marry the Moon instead.

She said it the way a girl says a thing she half means. But the Moon was listening.

The Moon Comes Down

In the morning the younger sister woke in a lodge she did not recognize. The walls were pale, and the light came from everywhere and nowhere. A man sat across the fire from her. He was fine-looking, with a broad quiet face and light behind his eyes. He told her he was the Moon. She had asked for him, and he had brought her up.

She looked around. The lodge was comfortable. There was food - dried meat, berries, roots she did not know. Outside, the sky-country stretched flat and white in every direction, like a frozen lake without shores. The ground was soft underfoot, almost like moss, but when she pressed her hand into it, it gave strangely, as though something hollow lay beneath.

Her husband treated her well. He brought her food. He was kind. He told her she could go anywhere in the sky-country and do anything she wished, with one exception. She must not dig into the ground. Not with a stick, not with her hands. She must not dig.

She agreed. For a time she was content.

The Digging Stick

The sky-country was quiet. There were no rivers, no animals, no other people. The older sister was not there. No one was there. The Moon left each night to cross the sky - that was his work - and came home in the morning to sleep. The woman was alone for long stretches.

She walked. She gathered the sky-berries, which tasted thin and sweet and left her still hungry. She sat and looked at the white ground. She thought about the earth below her - the smell of cedar smoke, the sound of water moving over rocks, her sister’s voice. The sky-country had no smell. It had no sound except wind that did not seem to come from anywhere.

One day she found a digging stick near the lodge. It was just lying there, as though the sky-country had grown it for her. She picked it up. She turned it in her hands. She put it down.

The next day she picked it up again.

She told herself she would dig only a little. She pressed the stick into the soft ground and pulled up a clump of sky-moss. Beneath it the ground was darker. She dug further. The darker layer gave way to something thinner, and through the thin place she saw blue. She dug more. The hole opened.

Below her, impossibly far down, she saw the earth. She saw green. She saw the silver thread of a river. She saw smoke rising from a camp that might have been her own village. The wind from below hit her face and it smelled like pine and wet stone and everything she had left behind.

The Rope

She could not stop looking. She went back to the hole every day, widening it carefully, hiding her work with sky-moss when the Moon came home. She began to make a rope. She pulled fibers from the sky-plants and twisted them together the way her mother had taught her. She worked on it whenever the Moon crossed the sky. The rope grew longer. She did not know how long it needed to be.

The Moon noticed something had changed in her. She was quieter. She did not meet his eyes. He asked her if she was well. She said she was. He asked if she had been digging. She said she had not.

He left that night to make his crossing, and she tied the rope to a stake near the hole and lowered herself through.

Between Worlds

The rope was not long enough.

She hung in open air, the sky-country above her, the earth below, and the rope’s end in her hands. The ground was still far beneath her feet - she could see the tops of trees, small as moss. The wind turned her slowly. She could not climb back up. Her arms burned. She called out but there was no one to hear her in that empty space between the sky and the earth.

Some versions say the Moon found the hole and looked down and saw her hanging there. He called to her to climb back. She could not. He could not reach her. He stood at the edge of the hole in the sky-country and watched.

Some versions say he cut the rope. Some say he wept first. Some say he did neither - that the rope simply gave way because sky-fiber was never meant to hold the weight of someone trying to return to a world she had left.

She fell.

What Remained

In some tellings she died. In others she landed in the top of a tall tree and climbed down, bruised and changed, and found her way back to her village and her sister. In others she became something else on the way down - a star, hung low and alone in the space between the sky and the treeline, visible some nights and not others, belonging fully to neither world.

Her sister, the one who had wished to marry the bright star, never left the earth. She married a man from the village and had children and grew old near the river. She looked up sometimes at the sky and wondered.

The Cree and the Ojibwe told this story in winter, when the nights were long and the Moon was close. A woman who wanted what she could not keep. A husband who gave her everything except the one thing she needed, which was the ground under her feet. A hole in the sky, and a rope that was not long enough. The space between what you wish for and where you belong is not always a distance you can cross twice.