Sky Woman Falls Through the Hole in the Sky

There is a hole in the sky.

It was not always there. In the world above — the sky world, where people live in a way that is both like and unlike how they live below — the great Tree of Light stood at the center of everything, luminous, its roots going deep into the sky earth. The people of the sky world arranged their lives around this tree. Its light was the light that held the world together.

Then a man had a dream that the tree should be uprooted.

Dream commands are obeyed in the sky world. The tree was uprooted. And where the tree had stood, there was a hole.

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A woman — Aataentsic, Sky Woman, the one who is pregnant with the world’s future — comes to look at the hole. She is curious the way that the most important people in stories are always curious. She leans over the edge, holding onto the roots of the uprooted tree, and she falls.

Or she is pushed. The versions disagree.

Either way, she is falling through the hole in the sky, falling into the dark and the cold and the vast emptiness between the sky world and the endless water below.

She falls for a long time.

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The water creatures see her coming.

They are birds and animals who have been living on the surface of the primordial water since before any land existed. When they see the figure falling from above, they convene quickly. They decide: she must not hit the water. Something must receive her.

The birds — the ducks and geese and herons — fly up and catch her on their wings, bearing her slowly downward. But they cannot hold her forever. The turtle comes forward. The turtle offers its back. The birds lower Sky Woman gently onto the turtle’s shell.

She is safe. She is on a turtle’s back in the middle of endless water. She is pregnant.

The turtle says: I will not be enough. You need land.

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The animals dive.

One after another they go down to find the bottom of the primordial ocean and bring up earth. The loon dives and comes up without earth. The duck dives and comes up without earth. Finally the muskrat dives — the smallest and least impressive of the divers — and is gone a very long time. When it surfaces it is barely alive, nearly drowned, but in its tiny paw is a small amount of earth.

Sky Woman takes the earth and places it on the turtle’s back and begins to move in a circle, walking clockwise, dancing. The earth spreads. It grows under her feet with each circuit, spreading from the small handful outward, getting larger and firmer until it is enough to stand on, then enough to walk on, then the continent.

Sky Woman gives birth on the new earth.

Her daughter grows up and gives birth in turn to twin boys — one who is creative and makes the world habitable, one who is destructive and makes it dangerous. Between the twins, the world becomes what it is: both generous and difficult, both tended and wild.

Sky Woman planted the seeds she had taken from the Tree of Light before she fell.

Corn. Beans. Squash. The three sisters that will feed the people for all generations.

The turtle still holds.