The Bear that never sets

Hecate's mother was Asteria, whose name means “the starry one.” When Hesiod lists the gifts Zeus gave Hecate, they reach across the whole world: “a share of the earth and the unfruitful sea,” and then, “She received honour also in starry heaven.” So it seems right to begin these stories in the sky, with one of the oldest night crossings anyone wrote down.

Odysseus had been trying to get home for years. The war he sailed to was long over, his ship and crew were gone, and for seven years he had been held on a far island by the goddess Calypso. When she finally let him go, she gave him a bronze axe and showed him where the tallest trees grew. He spent four days cutting timber and building a raft with his own hands. On the fifth day he pushed off alone.

Before long the island had dropped behind him, and there was nothing ahead but open water. When night came he didn't sleep. He sat at the steering oar and watched the sky: the Pleiades, Boötes slow to set, the whole sky wheeling over the sea.

One group of stars never went down. The Bear turns in its own place, keeping watch on Orion, and it is the only one that never dips into the ocean. Calypso had told him to keep it on his left as he sailed. So every night he found it, and every night it was where he had left it.

He sailed that way for seventeen days. On the eighteenth, the mountains of a new country rose out of the haze, like a shield laid on the misty sea. It wasn't home yet, but it was land, and he had found it by the one light that stayed in place.