Ilatsiak - 12

“I was very ill when I was young, and I remember very little of my early days. Maybe I was about your age when I nearly died.” Ilatsiak told Patsy. They were sitting in the sunshine once again looking out over the sea ice. “Several shamen tried to cure me, but everything they tried, failed. My parents were sure that I would die. Everyone was sad because I was always known as the ‘gift child’. My parents had had no children of their own and I had come to them as a special gift. Later they got other gift children, but I was their first one. It was a hard time for everyone because there was little food and the weather was constantly stormy making it hard to hunt. Finally, my parents were told that my sickness would affect everyone, and many would die as others had in the past. They told me to leave the camp one morning and to walk towards the sun. If I was to live, the sun would cure me, otherwise I would die. The sickness I had was came from the east where the sun appeared each day and only there could it be cured.”
Patsy listened to Ilatsiak talk on and on. Some of the words he spoke and the complex way he would construct his sentences made it hard to follow. Patsy wanted to interrupt with questions, but Ilatsiak just ignored him. He was almost talking out of a dream. At first Ilatsiak said he could remember nothing more of his childhood. But as they talked, Ulotsaq was ministering to a sick boy in the camp, and Ilatsiak slowly began to fade this new story into the one from his own childhood. Patsy became confused and later wasn’t sure which story was which. One was here and now and the other seemed to come from a place beyond the old man’s conscious mind. Even his voice seemed to become somewhat hollow sounding and distant. Patsy wondered whether the stories were from this world or Ilatsiak’s spirit world. They seemed to be so mixed in the old man’s head.
Ilatsiak finally seemed to focus on his own story and told of how he had wandered into a sun fog which lay across the flat snow covered beaches south of the family encampment, the sun a blurring disk in his feverish eyes. He stumbled about for what seemed to be days, falling now and then into the snow where he lay asleep for hours, only to begin wandering deleriously once again, here and there, without direction or destination. Finally, even though all ideas of time or place had been erased from his mind, he slowly realised that he was on the ground, on a gravel ridge, high above the surrounding landscape. He was waking up in the moonlit darkness, his fever gone. He felt new and almost refreshed and was aware that he would live! Not certain at all where he was, he simply began walking in a direction chosen only because it seemed to be a good choice at the time and for no other reason. He could recognize nothing in the featureless landscape. Every view seemed identical. He just had the feeling inside that he was headed back to the camp and his people. As the sun’s glow on the horizon began to fade at the end of the third day, Ilatsiak saw snowhouses directly ahead. He began to run towards them and recognizing his father’s dogs, knew he was safe and back home.
Ilatsiak chuckled to himself as he told Patsy how the people, seeing him so well and obviously recovered after being so near death, created considerable talk among everyone in the camp. This was unheard of, they claimed. They were still mourning his death and now here he was among them, alive and well once again! Everyone wondered secretly how was this possible?
As the account of his recovery spread from place to place, more and more people began to refer to Ilatsiak as having special powers and that he might be a shaman in the making. “People are foolish, sometimes.” calimed Ilatsiak. But, too them, it was clear that the spirits favoured him and were beginning to work through him. Within a few years, whether he desired it or not, the story of his miraculous recovery spread slowly, but surely, turning him into a powerful shaman in the eyes of many people. Ilatsia frowned. “ I was always the same person. I never could see myself living apart from the others. “I wasn’t a shaman, I only wanted a family and to live like everyone else.”