G )   J U N E , 1 9 4 3   -   T H E   O R A C L E ,   C H U ’ U H K

While Peter was in Chu’uhk, word of the flying-take-apart-white-devil spread to the Chakamak, King of the Buryat tribe, who decided he wanted to meet this apparition for himself. The manner in which this message was conveyed to the village was recorded by Peter as follows:

“Dawn. I am awakened by a loud grunt outside my tent. It is one of the village elders. Apparently I have been summoned to see the King of his people. It is a long arduous journey across high mountains. Do I accept this invitation? Still groggy, I croak affirmative. He walks off and I slink back under my filthy pile of rags. Later in the morning, the grunt sounds again. This time the elder tells me that the King has been informed of my acceptance and eagerly awaits my presence. The speed of this response piques my curiosity - can it be that the village possesses a radio transmitter? I convince the grunting elder to show me how such messages are sent. He leads me outside the village and up a small hill to a squalid little shack. Inside, a pasty-faced youth sits cross-legged on a rude wooden podium, wrapped in a great many yak-hair blankets. On his head are the most astoundingly huge pair of antlers I have ever seen. Two attendants are required to support this prodigious load. This youth is apparently the village transmitter and oracle; the antlers are used to pluck messages and divinations from the air. ‘Those are special horns,’ the village elder informs me. ‘They must come from a violent beast who is both a leader and shaman to his herd.’ He goes on to tell me that the shaman of the village lures the shaman reindeer by feeding it his own urine, which is hallucinogenic. He then selects a youth in the village who seems to have an affinity with the beast; this youth must then be wed to the reindeer in an elaborate marriage ceremony, which culminates in the murder of the animal. The newly crowned oracle serves until he reaches adulthood, at which point he returns to society and a new one is chosen. Appalled, I stumble back through the mud to my tent, but this grisly vision dances in my head and I cannot sleep.”

A few days later, mounted on a reindeer and appointed with a special guide, Peter departed for the chieftain’s settlement in the distant flatlands of Buryatia. Still fixated on the marriage between man and reindeer, Peter could not bring himself to look the beast in the eye, lest he feel “some strange stirrings of an unnatural seduction.”