Dudugera

by Dr Anthony E. Smart

 
The leg child who became the sun, in Papuan mythology. One day a woman who was in a garden near the ocean, seeing a great fish playing in the surf, walked out into the water and played with it. Some time later the woman’s leg, against which the fish had rubbed, began to swell and become painful, until at last she had her father make a cut in the swelling, out of which popped a baby. The child, called Dudgera, grew up in the village, but his aggressiveness made him unpopular with the other boys. Fearing for his safety, the woman brought her son to the huge fish, who seized Dudugera in his mouth, and swam away. Before departing with his father though, Dudugera warned his mother and her relatives to take refuge behind a great rock, as he was about to become the sun.