The pursuit of the big bear Ursa Major by the constellation Bootes the Herdsman is a rite of summer in the Butler night skies.

It actually began in March and continues into the autumn. These two constellations play out this great chase every year in our evening sky. This week look for Bootes and the Bear in the high western sky. They are very easy to see.

Ursa Major, Latin for Big Bear, contains the most famous star pattern in the sky, the Big Dipper.

The Dipper is the brightest part of the Bear, outlining the great beast’s rear end and tail. The rest of the stars in the Big Bear aren’t nearly as bright, but if you have a darker sky look for a skinny triangle that outlines the Bear’s head, and the two faint curved lines of stars that make up the legs.

Right on the Bear’s tail, literally, is the constellation Bootes the herdsman.

With not a whole lot of imagination you can kind of see the figure of a man, but honestly the constellation looks much more like a kite.

At the tail of the kite is Arcturus, one of the brightest stars in the sky and the brightest evening star of summer. Follow the arc of the Big Dipper’s handle beyond the end of the handle and you’ll run right into Arcturus, a red giant star nearly 37 light-years, or 209 trillion miles away.

According to legend, Bootes invented the first ox-pulled plow. Before that, people were forced to till and plow by hand, making for really long days!

Bootes was the son of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture. His father was a mortal man that Demeter fell in love with. Bootes was born, making him a half-god.

The goddess of agriculture placed Bootes with a wealthy farm family, and for the first few years everything was great. The crops were good and the profits were high, but then tragedy struck. Bootes’ foster parents were killed in a mid-winter chariot accident. In their will, all of their money and the farm went to Bootes and his older half-brother. The older sibling served as executor of the will since he was the oldest.

Things would have been okay, except that Bootes’ big brother was nefarious, and then some! About a month after the accident, he took all of the inherited money out of the bank and took off with his girlfriend on a global spending spree.

Bootes was on his own on the farm, broke and unaware that he was half-divine. It was a real struggle. When spring came, Bootes had to do all of the tilling by hand himself since he had no money for hired help.

He kept thinking that there had to be a better way to till the soil. It was a combination of his half godliness, ingenuity, and desperation that led him to invent the plow that could be pulled by oxen rather than a person.

After he worked out all of the bugs, Bootes really had something! Not only was he able to plow his own fields in much less time, neighboring farmers saw Bootes with this new invention and wanted him to build them ox-pulled plows. Word spread even farther, and pretty soon, Bootes had a booming business. He sold the farm and concentrated on his plow business. He was loaded!

As the business got better and better, he was able to take time off to hunt and fish, which he did a lot of before his foster parents were killed.

The gods on Mount Olympus got word of this and eventually it reached Demeter, his birth mother. She was so proud of her son, and she was especially proud of what he did to improve farming because, after all, she was the goddess of agriculture.

When Bootes was getting on in years, Demeter decided to give her son the ultimate reward. She plucked him off the ground and placed his body in the stars as the constellation we see today. Every year Bootes experienced the ultimate hunt, pursuing the Big Bear, Ursa Major. He was elated, making Bootes one of the happiest constellations in the sky.

From now until autumn, Bootes and Ursa Major will sink lower in the northern sky from night to night. According to the lore, when enough arrows pierce the Big Bear in the autumn, it drops even closer to the ground. As the Bear bleeds profusely, the blood falls on the trees and turns the leaves red. That was way before we knew about the role of chlorophyll in leaves.

Ursa Major is one tough bear, though, because every winter he licks his wounds and recovers in time to rise up again in the eastern spring skies with Bootes right on his tail, once again. The great hunt goes on and on and on!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.