What does 'Dipper' mean here?

Stove is the past tense of stave, meaning to smash holes into something. It's transitive, meaning that it can only be used in reference to an object, and the implied object from the previous sentence is the blackness, which the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) staves with stars, figurative holes in the heavens. It's an archaic word and used with a lot of artistic license here, as expected of Cormac McCarthy.

The Big Dipper is one of the most popular constellations (set of stars in the sky).

The Dipper is definitely referring to the constellation Ursa Major, which is also commonly known as the Big Dipper or just the Dipper. Stove here is a verb, a very uncommon and archaic usage, i believe, referring to the meteor shower (the aforementioned Leonids) making it look as if the Big Dipper was bursting into pieces.

“Dipper” is the Big Dipper, the brightest stars in the constellation [Ursa Major](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Major), the Great Bear, or The Plough. A “dipper” is an old word for a container to scoop water with. A pot with a long handle. The tricky bit is the “stove”. “Dipper Stove” is not an English idiom, in fact I think it’s unique to this passage of Blood Meridian. My best guess is that “dipper stove” is imagining the Big Dipper as a pot sitting on a stove, so the dipper stove would be the area of sky underneath (south) of the Dipper. there are very few bright stars here (it’s a “hole in the heavens”) and shooting stars from the Leonids meteor shower often [pass through](https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/leonid-meteor-shower-to-the-rescue/) this part of the sky.

This. A better-referenced version of roughly what I was going to say.

Stave is an archaic verb meaning to smash or punch a hole in. Stove here is the past tense of stave. The reference to the Leonids (annually occurring meteor shower that appears to come out of the constellation Leone (lion) indicates Dipper refers to a constellation. There are two by this name, Big Dipper and Little Dipper. The big dipper is part of Leone so probably that one. I would take the sentence to mean the handle of the Dipper punching through the Leonids.

The narrator was looking for darkness in the sky but couldn't find it. There was a meteor shower (the Leonids) and the Dipper, as in the Big Dipper (Ursa Major), pierced the darkness. Get used to obscure references with Cormac McCarthy.

Others have answered your question. I'll just chime in that this is very archaic language. No one would speak like this in real conversation

*"Blood Meridian"* by Cormac McCarthy is not written in standard English.

If it makes you feel better, I'm a native English speaker and I had to read it several times to figure out what they meant. If my husband weren't such a mythology and astrology nerd, I'm not sure I would have figured out that it was referring to the Big Dipper constellation.

If you are learning English, I would not recommend that you try and read Cormack McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. This is a challenging work for fluent English speakers and It only gets harder from here. If for some reason you must persist, I would strongly recommend you do so with a companion piece, like “Notes on Blood Meridian”

Looks like astrology to me. I guess it means The Plough (the asterism of the brightest stars in Ursa Major) but beyond that, it’s meaningless.

As they're talking about stars, could they possibly be talking about the constellation The Big Dipper? Never heard it called Dipper Stove before, but it has many names (it's The Plough in my country anyway), so maybe that?

Blood Meridian is a tough read for even native speakers. McCarthy does some weird stuff. This is more poetic feel and sense than proper grammar. His writing is amazing but he’s an absolute master playing at the limits of prose.