Hello, my lovelies!
I’ve taken a break from permanently traumatizing squirrels, planting crops, processing my household god to its summer abode, and honestly doing a bang-up job setting my life on fire (yes, again, because everybody needs a hobby) to write you the next installment of The Constellations, which you can read here.
So, you know.
It’s been a pretty normal May for me, thus far.
“Canis Minor” context
You can read “Canis Minor” on its own, but it exists in a larger universe, and my intent is for it to be read after “Boötes” and “Canes Venatici.”
Yes, I know I said the stories in The Constellations would be a max of 1,500 words, and they’d be stand-alones, not interconnected.
Whatever.
I’m forced to admit that I am extremely attached to Boötes, Erigone, Cyrene, and all their four-legged friends, so much so that I couldn’t let a constellation connected to Boötes go by without writing another Guardian of the North story.
It’ll be quite a few letters of the alphabet until there’s another constellation connected to Boötes by ancient myth.
Someone asked me if Boötes can talk to all the animals. No- just Callisto, who is no ordinary bear, in keeping with the myth associated with Ursa Major.
If you read this story and thought, “Hmm, I wonder why Dustin Lee sounds like he’s been reading Zane Grey?”, then you’ve really answered your own question just by asking it. (ZG famously didn’t write people or plots; he wrote places, and, damn, did he describe the everloving boy howdy out of them.)
I have, in fact, been reading Zane Grey the past week: To the Last Man. ZG can be hit or miss as you work your way through his oeuvre at random (I’ve read about thirty of his novels), but this was one of the good ones. I’d say it’s a solid 4/5 classic western.
The myth
Pretty much everything you need to know has already gone into the blog posts for “Boötes” and “Canes Venatici.”
Canis Minor is sometimes considered one of Orion’s hunting dogs, along with Canis Major.
…. and that’s it. What a waste of myth space.
Fortunately, there’s a better option.
The most important thing, for current purposes, is the myth about Icarios, Erigone, and Maira, so I’ll give you a brief recap.
Icarios [an alias of Boötes in my stories] was taught how to make wine by Dionysus. Icarios, apparently of a generous nature, hitched up his oxen and went on the road to share this new drink with others. He gave some to a few shepherds, who went ahead and got dead drunk. Their sober friends assumed Icarios had poisoned them, and murdered him. Icarios’ faithful dog, Maira, ran back howling to his daughter Erigone, and dragged her by the hem of her skirt to her father’s body.
Erigone kills herself out of grief. Maira kills herself out of grief.
Suicides all around!
Icarios is placed in the sky as the constellation Boötes by [insert deity here] [no, really, take your pick- the ancient sources sure did]. Erigone is Virgo, and Maira is Canis Minor.
So, I finally did get around to using the piece of the myth where Maira comes to get Erigone and drag her to Boötes by the hem of her skirt.
The constellation
Canis Minor (which the Greeks called Procyon) is an old constellation, one of the 48 listed by Ptolemy.
Procyon translates as something along the lines of “before-dog,” which makes sense, since the constellation rises before Canis Major.
Nowadays, Procyon is restricted to being the name of the brightest star in the constellation; it’s one of the top ten brightest stars in the sky, and also one of the closest, at 11.4 light years away.
New poem dump
Poetry’s a funny thing- beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and even I am never quite certain if that’s what I’m seeing when I read my poems over.
Nonetheless, if that’s your bowl of clam dip, I’ve posted a number of poems for your enjoyment.