The Moon, the Innermost Box, and Flight Into Daylight

Encouraged by his success, the boy cries and wheedles again until he is given the box containing the moon as well, which he likewise releases through the smokehole, adding its light to the stars already set loose above. Finally, persistent and seemingly insatiable in his demands, he obtains the innermost and most closely guarded box of all, the one holding daylight itself, the treasure his grandfather values above everything else in the house.

The moment the box of daylight is in his hands, the boy transforms back into his true form as Raven, snatches up the box, and flies up through the smokehole and out into the dark world beyond, carrying daylight away from the chief's house entirely. Flying over the darkened land, Raven opens the box and releases daylight across the world for the first time, an event some regional tellings describe as so sudden and startling that various animals encountered along Raven's flight are frozen forever afterward into the postures, colors, or behaviors light first caught them in. The Haida and Tlingit versions recorded by the ethnographer John Swanton in the early twentieth century differ in various incidental details, including exactly which chief hoards the light and how the deception is discovered, but share this same basic sequence of transformation, adoption, and theft.