The moon is imagined as a youth, the brother of the sun and the reckoner of the months for the mountain calendar. The blemishes on his disc are read as the enduring stain of a domestic quarrel in the sky, when his sister struck his face; some tellings make him the pursuer and the sun the pursued. Like the sun he is periodically imperilled by the sky-dragon, whose swallowing of the moon was answered on earth with clamour to compel the beast to loose its prey.