Chapter Ⅴ

The Hunter & the Scorpion

The sky's greatest feud — arranged so precisely that the two enemies are never in the sky at the same time.

Orion — the Hunter

“There is no beast I cannot kill.”

The giant huntsman of Boeotia made one boast too many: he would slay every animal on Earth. Gaia, the Earth herself, answered by sending the smallest of assassins — a scorpion — which stung his heel and killed him.

The gods placed both in the sky, but opposite each other: as Scorpius rises in the east, Orion flees below the western horizon, and only returns when the scorpion has set. The feud is built into the clockwork of the sky — the reason Orion rules winter evenings and Scorpius rules summer.

In the sky: red Betelgeuse at his shoulder, blue Rigel at his foot, the unmistakable three-star Belt, and below it the Orion Nebula — a stellar nursery visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy “star” in his sword.

Scorpius — the Avenger

The smallest killer with the grandest reward.

For one sting, the scorpion received one of the sky's most spectacular constellations — a long J-shaped hook with flaring claws and a raised stinger, lying right along the star-clouds of the Milky Way toward the centre of our galaxy.

Its heart is Antares — anti-Ares, “rival of Mars” — a red supergiant so large that, placed where our Sun is, it would swallow the orbit of Mars. When the true Mars passes nearby, the sky briefly holds two rival red embers.

In the sky: summer evenings, low on the southern horizon. Next door, Sagittarius — drawn as a centaur-archer — aims his arrow permanently at Antares: the sky's insurance policy in case the scorpion ever moves.

Canis Major — the Great Dog

The hunter's faithful hound, with the brightest star of all.

Orion's hound follows at his master's heel, eternally chasing Lepus the Hare below the Belt. Another telling makes him Laelaps, the magical dog fated to catch whatever it chased — set against a fox fated never to be caught. Zeus froze the paradox in the sky.

On its nose blazes Sirius — Greek for “the scorcher”, Arabic al-Shiʿrā — the brightest star of the night. Its dawn rising once announced the flooding of the Nile and the Egyptian new year; the sweltering “dog days” of summer are named for it.

In the sky: follow Orion's Belt down and left to the unmissable beacon. Sirius is bright mostly because it is close: 8.6 light-years, our cosmic next-door neighbour.