Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Nov 26/01) - Did you see the full moon last night," asks a friend in Rene Fumoleau's poem Moonlight.

The Lutsel K'e writer has the narrator answer with a daunting series of scientific facts and asks in return, "Did you know all those data?"

The night sky reveals a breathtaking annual Leonid meteor storm, the best astronomers say, since 1966. - Merle Robillard/NNSL photo

"I didn't know any," is the reply.

"So, do you know anything about the moon?"

The friend answers, "Oh yes, it is so beautiful and mysterious."

Long before science and technology explained the stars and the planets, it was the imagination of humankind that threw light into the universe.

On Sunday the 18th, between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m., I threw myself on my back on the middle of a frozen lake and gazed longingly at the skies. I craved the innocence of my imagination. I wanted magical shooting stars.

But I, like other hyper-informed people throughout the world, gazed at the "Leonid storm." We knew that we were watching the Earth crash through the meteor debris of the comet known as 55P or Tempel-Tuttle. Scientists even search in this debris for the source of organic life on Earth.

The American professor Hubert A. Newton discovered the 33-year cycle of the Leonids, about 150 years ago, by searching through ancient texts. As early as 585, Arab, Chinese and European observers wrote about the Leonids. Imagine the accounts, the descriptions, and the explanations.

Just as the Earth, not the sun, once occupied the central place in this galaxy, Leonid storms sparked wonder, curiosity, even terror in the hearts of witnesses. As recently as 1883, some believed Judgement Day was upon us on this "night of raining fire."

Closer to home, geographically and temporally, Yellowknives Dene Elder Mike Francis has a gentle notion. He grew up in the community of Enodah on the North Arm of the Great Slave Lake. He still maintains the cabin his dad built out there.

As a young boy, he spent many winter evenings staring up at the night sky.

"Our Elders used to look at the stars to tell time. In the old days when one shot across the sky they said it meant one person died and two were born," says Francis. "I've seen many shooting stars. When I saw one cross the sky I used to think that it was God making the star go place to place. I just figured the stars had to move, just like our people were always on the move." Lying on my back, listening to myself breathe in the frigid air, as I ached for another time, I set aside all that I knew. I stilled my mind and threw my spirit out into the sky. And for a moment, I felt I could speak to the shooting stars, and say as Fumoleau's friend had, "You are so beautiful and mysterious."