Tonight I’ll be telling a tale about a star in the sky that everyone has heard of. It’s not the biggest star, or the brightest. But for a long time, it was one of the most important stars in history. It’s a star called Polaris. Or as we know it as, the North Star.

This story comes from a group whose ancestral lands span the high desert of the United States Southwest: the Paiute.

They knew the landscape of the desert intimately, and they read the night sky the way you read a map. Because for them, it was one.

But our story doesn’t start in the sky. It starts with a young mountain sheep who wanted nothing more than to make his father proud.

This is Star Stories with Ian Lauer, where we sit together under the stars and retell ancient stories told about the night sky, and uncover the ancient knowledge hidden inside the world's oldest myths.