Extra Credit Reading Notes: The Lost Light (Alaskan Legends)

This reading is to help me find more stories for my project. I'm currently searching for a story for the Department of Mysteries, where my character encounters a magical object of some sort. For the below story that I took notes on, I was thinking I could write about my character finding the sun/moon in the DoM and having the story be about some characters trying to restore the sun.

In The Lost Light, the sun disappears and a group of people goes to search for it. They ask around and travel for a while, and eventually learned that there is a woman who keeps the sun and moon in her house. The temperature continues to drop and they start to run out of food (which gives a great feeling of anticipation and a little bit of anxiety to the reader). They go to five different places and the same sequence of events are repeated at each place:

1. They run out of food and become cold.
2. They meet a community that gives them food.
3. Someone tells them that there is a woman at the next place they are going to who has the sun and moon. 

Finally they come across a woman named Itudluqpiaq who gives them a "small ball." A man in the group refuses it and asks for the larger one. The woman gives it to him and they take it outside to tear it up. Daylight comes out of the ball and the weather becomes warmer. It turns out that if they had taken the smaller ball, they would have gotten light but the weather would have stayed cold--the small ball was the moon. 

I really liked the sequence of events in this story, although I feel like it was a bit anticlimactic. I might change some details in it to make it a little more interesting. 

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Bibliography: The Lost Light, from the Alaskan Legends unit. Story source: Myths and Legends of Alaska, edited by Katharine Berry Judson (1911).

Image Information: The Sun by Lima Andruska from Flickr