Comment
Recorded from
Vasilij Shalugin
in 1990. The story describes the traditional method of treating jaundice (icterus) referred to in
Yukaghir as
SaqalEdajl 'yellowing'. According to some authors the Yukaghirs did not have this disease, but it was
widespread among the Yakuts.
Translation
(35-1) Sometimes people become yellow.
(35-2) There is such a disease.
(35-3) Either the liver gets bigger, or more bile comes. Because there is more bile, the people become all yellow.
(35-4) Some of these people are cured, some of them die from the disease.
(35-5) The people used to walk around, talking, exchanging the news here and there, and asked "how shall we be cured from this disease." They learnt it.
(35-6) By some people, either Evens or Yakuts, it was treated. The people were cured.
(35-7) They used to take the ill person to where they live on the lake, to the place where there were many pikes.
(35-8) They used to take the ill person there, set up a tent, put him under the bed-curtain, and open it in order to treat him. They used fish and feed him.
(35-9) Some of them put a fish trap or a net there and fished for pikes.
(35-10) It should be neither a very big, nor a very small pike. It should be a medium-sized white pike.
(35-11) They used to do the following.
(35-12) They took the ill person there and went up to the water together. They brought him and unwrapped the blanket. While he was sleeping, they greased his body with the living pike.
(35-13) After that they hold the ill person for some more time, rubbing, hitting, beating and moving him.
(35-14) When he came to himself, the people would do it quietly one after another, so that the illness finished.
(35-15) So that person used to come to himself.
(35-16) Then they finished rubbing his body, his breast and his stomach with the pike.
(35-17) When they finished, they took him with their hands to the water.
(35-18) There they checked him.
(35-19) If he got yellow, they removed him. If he didn't get yellow, they did it the second and third time.
(35-20) When they finished, they checked that person.
(35-21) Eight days later his body used to get white and blood used to appear here and there, his face bled. Then the man used to recover from the disease and they used to say: "From now on you shouldn't hunt for pike. It shouldn't be your food.
(35-22) Never eat it.
(35-23) If you eat it, you will die the very same hour".
(35-24) So they said.
(35-25) Many people were cured like this.
(35-26) Now some people tell how they used to treat it.
(35-27) This is the end.
Glosses