Two Fast Runners:
I love stories like this, where you find out why a certain animal has this feature or doesn't have this feature. These kinds of stories allow for an entirely new perspective. I could make up a different story for how the deer and the antelope lost these different anatomical features. Or I could use a similar story with different losses of body parts.
(Female antelope, web source: Wikimedia)
The Camp of Ghosts:
This is definitely the story. This is a long, beautiful folk tale about a man's journey to get his beloved back. I think there's a lot of potential here to transform this from a simple folk story to a haunting drama about a couple who is lost too soon. There are many precarious points in this story, where the entire fate of the couple and their relationship depends on the man not opening his eyes or the man and woman not sweating off every impurity or other odd things such as those. I think this causes the audience to sort of hold their breath and wait for something bad to happen. For me, what ended up happening is not what I foresaw and it seemed to be a little anticlimactic. Of all the little mistakes that would knock the entire process off balance, it was her not immediately heeding his will? Blech. I think this seems to be out of place in the narrative that this man loved his wife so deeply that he would literally travel where no man has gone to retrieve her. I'm imagining altering the ending of the story. I don't see a nice, soft, happy ending however. There's a lot of grief and sorrow to tap into here that could be taken to other levels. Off the top of my head, I see something going wrong with the original journey to where the man also passes away and is lost in the camp of ghosts, and is to remain there forever. I see the reunion of the couple to be terribly bittersweet, as they were both quite young and had a very young child that was left behind. To bring a very haunting ending to it, they could be trying to manage their new life in this "beyond" world, when they are notified of a new arrival to the camp: their infant son.
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