Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/553

Rh unmindful of the warning, and presently they observed that they were rising little by little into the air, and one exclaimed, 'Do not look back for something strange is taking place.' One of the children disobeyed this warning and looking back became a falling star. The other children reached the high heavens safely and now we see them in the star group known as the Pleiades."

Another Indian legend relates that "seven brothers once upon a time took the warpath and discovered a beautiful maiden living all alone whom they adopted as their sister. One day they all went hunting save the youngest, who was left to guard his sister. Shortly after the departure of the hunters, the younger brother discovered game and set off in pursuit of it, leaving his sister unprotected. Whereupon a powerful buffalo came to her lodge and carried her away. The brothers returned and in dismay found that their sister had been taken from them. They immediately went in pursuit of her, only to find that she was confined in a lodge in the very centre of a great herd of fierce buffaloes. The younger brother cleverly tunnelled beneath them, however, and rescued his sister, and hastened homeward with her, where her brothers hedged her lodge about with a very high iron fence. The buffaloes, enraged at the escape of the maiden, attacked the seven brothers, and battered down the fence, only to find that the maiden and her brothers had been carried upward to the sky out of their reach, and there they may be seen in the clustering Pleiades."

The Shasta Indians of Oregon have the following legend concerning the Pleiades:

"The Coyote went to a dance with the Coon. On his return home he sent his children after the game he had killed, and when they had brought it in, he prepared a grand feast. The youngest child was left out, and in anger went to the Coon's children and told them that the Coyote had killed their father. The Coon's children revenged themselves by killing all the Coyote's children, 27