Photograph of a positive lightning strike by Dean Gill. Source: Link.

the boy who held lightning

Down on Earth's surface, there was a boy named Lyle who was adopted into his family at a very young age, but was treated horribly and forced to do all the dirty work of his house. After years of putting up with the treatment, Lyle decided one day to run away from home and live on his own in the deep, dark woods nearby. He ran and ran all day to get as far away as possible from his family until the sun sunk below the horizon and the sky became dark. Figuring rest would be good for him, Lyle climbed high into a pine tree and nuzzled into a forked branch near the top.

Once Lyle was within inches of sleep, a booming noise startled him awake and he saw a large figure within the tree next to him. The figure reached a hand out to Lyle and told him that he had seen the poor treatment he received from his family and to follow its footsteps into the sky above.

Doing as the figure said, Lyle followed in its footsteps and soon they were thousands of feet up in the sky! Once they reached their destination and stopped walking, the figure gave Lyle a bow and twelve arrows while explaining that there were evil spirits prowling about the sky and that it was up to Lyle to find them and get rid of them. Since the arrows bestowed upon Lyle were from a good spirit, he would be able to kill the evil spirits as long as he hit them and their power was not stronger than that of the arrow.

Again doing as the figure said, Lyle searched far and wide for the evil spirits. One night he finally spotted one and immediately shot at it, but quickly realized that its power was too strong for his arrow to kill it, so Lyle left it and continued searching for a weaker evil spirit. Down on the Earth's surface, however, people were amazed to see a single flash of lightning illuminate the sky as Lyle's arrow traveled towards the evil spirit.

This scenario played out ten more times, leaving Lyle with only a single arrow to do his job. The weaker evil spirits feared him because they knew his arrows were lethal, but powerful evil spirits were able to shape-shift and therefore did not fear him as much. This was especially true of the Chief of Evil Spirits, whom Lyle spotted one night and decided to shoot his final arrow at. Thinking that getting rid of the chief would prove he was capable of his job, Lyle released his arrow and it flew right towards his target. The chief, however, quickly changed himself into a sturdy rock and the arrow simply bounced off of him and fell below to the Earth's surface.

Being angry that he would dare shoot at him, the chief shouted a curse that would turn Lyle into the trail of his last arrow. Since his final arrow simply fell to Earth's surface after being reflected off of the chief, Lyle could only be seen as a single strike of lightning extending from the clouds above to the ground below from then until forever. This is how cloud-to-ground lightning came to be in the natural world.

Author's Note: This story was based on The Lone Lightning, edited by Katharine Berry Judson, which is a myth passed down through the Native American Ojibwa tribe who originated from the region near Lake Superior. This seems to be a creation myth, which explains the origins of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes that happen during stronger thunderstorms. I had to read through the story a few times to fully understand what was happening, but I thought viewing lightning as the trail of an arrow rather than a single, continuous object was such a creative way for the people to view it, so I decided to rewrite it in a more modern way that made reading it easier. By adding more background and explanation to the story, it is not as hard to understand why and how the main character, Lyle, ended up in the situation that he did. I also switched up the ending a bit by making the arrow bounce off of the chief and falling to the Earth's surface from the clouds rather than sticking into a crack in the rock that the chief turned himself into so that the explanation of the Lyle becoming a cloud-to-ground lightning strike made more sense.