Rabbit Shoots the Sun

Now let’s travel up from Central America into Northern America. Today, North America contains the countries of Canada and the United States. But back in ancient times, tribes of people roamed all through this big continent.

Way, way up north, where the weather is very cold, ancient North American people hunted and fished to survive. It was too cold to grow crops, so they lived by trapping the animals all around them—seals, polar bears, birds, and caribou. (Caribou are like elk or antelopes.) They gathered and ate the special kinds of mosses and lichens that grow in the cold north. Some of the bravest even went out onto the icy seas in boats that were made out of skins. They fished and chased whales. A whale could provide enough meat for an entire village. And its blubber, or fat, made good oil for oil lamps.

In the middle of North America, ancient tribes grew corn and wheat. They followed the huge herds of buffalo that roamed around from meadow to meadow. They ate buffalo meat (the tongue was one of their favorite parts!). They used buffalo skins for clothes and for blankets and tents, and sharpened the buffalo’s horns into knives. Tribes who lived near the oceans and rivers also fished and trapped.

The ancient North Americans didn’t settle down in one place and own houses. Instead, they lived like nomads. They moved from place to place, eating whatever the land could give them. They didn’t make written records, or leave great stone buildings behind them. Instead, they left us stories that were passed down from fathers and mothers to children for hundreds and hundreds of years. Many of these stories try to explain something about nature. “Rabbit Shoots the Sun” tells us why rabbits are so timid:

t was the hottest day of summer. The rays of the sun beat down on the ground and turned it brown and dry.

Rabbit had been trying to find water all day. Every puddle he came to was dried up into hard, black mud; even the stream had trickled away into dust. His throat was sore and dry. Even his eyes were dry! He sat down in the middle of the dry stream bed and yelled up at the sun, “Stop shining! Stop drying everything up! We need to cool off!”

But Sun paid no attention to Rabbit. He went on shining. The ground kept right on drying up, and Rabbit got hotter and hotter and thirstier and thirstier.

“Sun needs to learn a lesson,” Rabbit grumbled. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll take my bow and arrows and go east, to the place where the Sun comes up every morning. And when Sun puts his head up tomorrow morning, I’ll shoot him!”

Now, in those days, the Sun did not rise slowly, coming up over the edge of the world a little at a time. Instead, he jumped up into the sky with a great bound. And Rabbit knew that he could shoot an arrow directly into the middle of the Sun. So he grabbed his bow and arrows and loped off towards the east. As he ran, he sang:

Rabbit, great Rabbit, Rabbit, enemy of the Sun. The Sun will learn my strength. Ho! Rabbit is coming!

When he reached the edge of the world, he sat down under a tree and waited. The sky grew dark. Rabbit waited all night long with his bow in his hands.

In the morning, Sun sprang up over the edge of the world. He laughed out loud and stood looking around him. At once, Rabbit jumped to his feet and shot an arrow straight into Sun’s center.

At once, the arrow ripped a great hole in the Sun. Fire poured out all over the world. The tree above Rabbit’s head began to smoke and crackle. The grass at his feet went up into flames. Rabbit’s fur began to scorch. In a panic, he threw down his bow and arrow and ran away. As he ran, he called out,

Rabbit has shot the Sun! Fire is over the world!Watch out, watch out for the flames, Ho! The fire is coming!

“Over here!” a little voice called.

Rabbit looked and saw a tiny green bush. At once he jumped beneath it, buried his head beneath his paws and put his nose into the ground. The fire swept over him with a huge roar. When it had died away, Rabbit put his nose out from underneath the bush and looked around him. The fire was gone, but the world was brown and burnt. And the bush was no longer green. Now it was yellow, scorched by the fire. We still call it the yellow bush, because although it is green when it first grows, it turns yellow when the sun sweeps over it.

Rabbit crept quietly away. To this day, Rabbit runs and hides when the light of the sun falls over him. As for the Sun, he was never as bold as before. Instead of leaping up over the edge of the world, he creeps carefully up, little by little, looking all around him for Rabbit and his bow.

Note to Parent: Most of our detailed knowledge of South, Central, and North American native peoples dates from medieval times. The Mayans, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Native American tribes of North America, and the native peoples of South America will be covered in more detail in the second volume of The Story of the World, since in most cases their civilizations reached their highest points after AD/CE 400. This chapter is a first introduction to the Americas and highlights (slightly out of chronological order) the most memorable tribe of each of the Americas in order to lay a foundation for later learning.

The Nazca civilization flourished around 200 BC/BCE. The Olmec civilization flourished between 1200–900 BC/BCE (roughly corresponding to the Assyrian expansion, the Greek Dark Ages, and the New Kingdom of Egypt).