It seemed to him that there was no air at all. Fish Bone turned around in the coffin and lay on his side, imagining how he was about to kick the bucket here and how he would be found in the coffin all crooked up with his fingers spread apart in the attempt of scraping the coffin, with his bulging eyes and his protruding tongue. These thoughts frightened him. At the threshold of death, recollections of the past started to come to his mind slowly attracting his energy to the nether world.

Lying in the coffin Fish Bone felt that this had started moving. He heard the splash and murmur of water around him. He realized that he was drifting, drifting along the river of life. He remembered how Svyatogor had narrated about the existence of the world of Pravi, from which the souls of descendants come to our world, the world of Yavi and also how this river carries us away to the lower world of Navi, the land of the ancestors. Indeed,  we all drift along this time-river from the past to the present and from the present to the past.

Suddenly the coffin hit something and Fish Bone fell out of it and found himself in the ‘valley of deadly shadows’. All around him he could see dry leafless trees with no bark, they were so decrepit that they could fall at any moment. On top of one of them sat a Div bird, chirping some unnatural sounds. Not far from the shore one could see a hamlet made of huts standing on poles. The huts had neither windows nor doors and people’s shadows were drifting around them as if unconscious, merging with the surrounding twilight.

The shadows started to float in his direction and,  among them, he saw his own father.

His farther recognized him.

“How ‘re you doing, pa?” asked Fish Bone in surprise. “Do devils torture you, torment you in their pans for your sins?

“No, son,” he answered. “It’ s all rubbish, invention of the priests, don’t believe it. They invented this to frighten people and to keep them in religious slavery. Yet, the Bible does not write anywhere about tortures, this is a later invention. My sin has been that of not understanding that my life was just a dream, thoughts about the past and the future…and a forever elusive present.”

“And how do you live now, what are you doing after death?” asked his son.

“I sleep. I have different dreams. Before I used to think that dreams were nothing, just nonsense, but now I know that they are real life and that ordinary life is just a defective dream. I am never bored in my dreams, there is always something new there, whereas people’s life on the earth is very plain, dull and monotonous. There is nothing sweeter than having dreams in your sleep; try to understand it, son.”

Another coffin landed on the shore and broke open. A girl in a wedding dress came out of it and Fish Bone understood she had died young, unmarried: she had been  put into the coffin in the bridal veil, so that she could find a bridegroom to be wedded to in the nether world. Some shadows approached the girl. Amongst them were her dead relatives, who led her to the ‘town of the dead’. Nearby back to front carts with square wheels moved on.

Soon the shaman found himself in his father’s house, where he also met his other relatives. All around were shabby, broken objects: plates with holes in the base, a table with two legs, a half spoon.

“How long will you be staying here for?” Fish Bone asked his father.

“We’ll be here until the memory of us on the Earth dies out.”

“And then?” asked the son.

“And then we’ll set off into eternity along the starry river, the Milky Way, and from there move on to the future to be incarnated on Earth again: everyone is incarnated from the future and then delivered into the present and, afterwards, having delivered their due people disappear into the past.”

“And what is the future?” asked Fish Bone.

“Like the past it is also a dream and eternity is sleep without dreams. Soon it will be your turn to die” said the father “then I’ll come to you in your sleep, call you and you’ll get to know all this by yourself”.

At that moment Fish Bone remembered how once they were skiing with Altai Kum in the taiga. Going out of the thicket they had found themselves on a sunlit clearing. Altai Kum had drawn on the snow a bow with an arrow and a tended bowstring.

“This is the bow of Tengri Khan,” he had explained and he had drawn him stretching the bowstrings.

“He is aiming at his wife, the Earth Goddess, Umai. He makes her pregnant with this arrow. The arrow is the soul of life, its feathering is the soul Aiy, its point the soul of Kut, its shaft the souls Bos, Tes and Syur. Umai gives the physical body to every man and every creature, and this is why Tengri is the God of eternity, the archer, and Umai the target. His bow is held from two sides: on the right by Ulgein and on the left by Erlik, who also participate in the conception of humans. After death the souls fly back to their creators.

Death breaks the arrow as Ivan breaks a needle, keeping the life of Kashchey, in Russian fairytales. Aiy goes up to Tengri, Bos like a bird flies to Ulgein, Tios like a fish swims to Erlik, Sur like a cloudy man’s outline floats to the God who had sent it to Earth charged with His predestination - each person has the specific predestination to serve on the Earth either Erlik or Ulgein, Tengri or Umai, Dzayan or Yaiyk - Kut like a deer goes to the descendants of the dead person’s clan: normally the Kut of the dead ancestor would enter either the first-born or to the strongest in the family.

As Fish Bone pondered over the new knowledge on souls that had just been revealed to him, Altai Kum skied further in the taiga with his disciple running close behind him. In the evening, when after the hunting they had returned to the tchum, Altai Kum had showed him his tambourine and had exposed its inner side to the youngster.

“Here, you see, the drum is Tengri’s bow, its copy. Of course, if the drum is the bow well... then this is the bowstring” he said pointing at a string made of animal sinews, pulled out so that it would connect to the right and left sides of the drum. “Here, this is the arrow” he said, pointing at the handle connecting the upper and the bottom side of the drum: the handle bore the shape of a human, the drum’s owner.   

“But, this is not an arrow, it’s a human figure!” said Fish Bone.

“This is because the arrow is a creature, in this case a man, who possesses all these souls. In old times people used to say that the arrow was Tengri’s phallus with which he had made Umai pregnant. You see how many symbols of a single phenomenon there are?!” The old man had burst into laugher. “Here is the map of the world, drawn on the inner part of the drum, depicting all we talked about.”

At the bottom end was a river with a boat drifting along it.

“This is the time-river,” explained the old man “and the boat is a person traveling along the river from the future to the past.”

At the top end was the Milky Way, full of stars.

“This is the river of heaven, along which humans, after their death, travel from the past across eternity to the future.”

At the left side one could see the Moon, the world of Erlik or nether world whereas at the right side were represented the Sun, the world of Ulgein or world of the future. The shaman explained.

“The Souls of different people develop in different ways” he continued, whilst looking at the tongues of flame dancing in the fireplace and then attentively at Fish Bone.

“Some people are remembered well past their death, the memory of them lives much longer that they do, some people only live in the past, in this case they develop Tios, which lives for long in the world of Erlik after death. However, there are also some people whose ideas live well past their death, but are realized a hundred or more years later. These people look at the future, they are full of plans, projects and dreams. Their Bos lives for long, going after death to the world of Ulgein.

There are shamans who perform kamlanie, flying in their doubles both in dreams and in reality. This develops their Sur, which after death lives for long with the God who sent the shaman to Earth. After their physical death often these shamans appear on this planet or in people’s dreams as a whirlpool moving anticlockwise, rush across the planet and do their deeds.

Strong people, who do big deeds, have a strong Kut soul, which not only feeds all the other ones, but also can do many other things in this life. It dwells in people’s deeds and property so that whatever they own can become for them a source of strength. Even other people could be empowered by these objects and strengthen their Kut.  Those who realize that life is ephemeral and that all that comes from the world of dreams turns again into dreams (memory), dream in a state of alert and remain aware of themselves in their dreams, develop the Aiy soul and after their death they go to the world of Tengri. As for  shamans these will stay there forever, as they have managed to separate their Aiy soul from their exterior sleep.” At that, the old man had become silent. He had sat by the fire, had taken the homuz and started to play a melody in such a way that it felt as thought each different soul could be heard through it. Fish Bone, on his part, had been sitting by the fire, looking at the picture on the drum and thinking of the souls’ pathways: this reminded him of the three paths as from Russian fairytales. Now he knew that the left path led to the past, the right to the future and the straight one to eternity. Through the eyelike soul of Aiy these three paths are connected with three sisters: the one-eyed sister from the lower world of Navi, the two-eyed sister from the world of Yavi and the three-eyed sister from the world of Pravi.

After bidding farewell to his father and relatives, Fish Bone returned to the life river to travel in the coffin-shrine further into the world of eternity: Slavi.  As he came up to the river he saw an ugly old man and  a just as ugly old woman - Mor and Mara - moving against the current of the river towards the world of Earth. They roamed in the world to give misfortunes, grief, illnesses and death to the living; they aimed at bringing them closer to old age, and lead those whose time was over to the world of Navi. On Earth, however, lived also some people who Mor and Mara spared and destroyed more slowly and unnoticeably than others, to whom they would even give some good turns, like taking with them to the nether world some of what they had on Earth. Amongst those were Mor’s and Mara’s magicians and servants, as well as those who by chance made deals with them or participated in their deeds: grave diggers, washers of the dead, mourners and others. In addition, Mor and Mara were the protector patrons of all those who created weapons of death, whom obviously they liked immensely.

On the coffin, as on a boat, Fish Bone then traveled into eternity, along the starry river, the Milky Way. Soon everything disappeared: he, the coffin and the river and this is how he realized that he had entered eternity. There existed only emptiness and light, emptiness and peace. He did not know how long this lasted, may be a second, may be a century yet, at some point, Fish Bone reappeared in the world with his coffin.

Now he came to the world of the eternal creation of the future: Pravi that resembled the  description of paradise: bright sky, inextinguishable sunshine, everlasting plants and flowers everywhere – amazing  flowers! Divine music pervaded everything. Fish Bone approached a nearby palace and, upon entering it, he saw some heaven creatures, either Gods or their angel-helpers, who labored on manufacturing new kinds of butterflies, birds and flowers.

“Now I see who creates all that,” exclaimed Fish Bone.

“Yes, you see the great laboratory of nature” confirmed a voice from nowhere. “Projects of new kinds of plants, animals and people are made here. Later they are embodied on Earth, bringing about a new future.”

In another palace he witnessed the process of manufacturing future intellects of different kinds: new Einsteins, Edisons, Beethovens, Pushkins to be embodied in the world of Yavi. These were charged with the task of accepting the knowledge given them from the world of Pravi and, in turns, giving it to Earth ‘s new future.

Fish Bone was very interested in understanding what humans were made of. Suddenly a mystical voice explained:

“Humans are a temple consisting of four parts: the left side is the feminine and it pertains to intellect; the front side is the personality that enters into them from the outer world and that which is shown to others; the back side is the essence, what a person really is, which is revealed only in some extreme circumstances: in the forest, in jail or at war. The main goal of every human being is that of accomplishing his essence as only then he can see who he really is. The path to the holy of holies, that is, the essence of the temple, passes through three niches of the temple: feelings, intellect and personality. Above the central niche stands a bell tower from where people are called to the temple.  In the left chapel of the temple one can see scenes of infernal tortures. In this chapel is also a Holy Grave.” Then the shaman heard this voice continue: “All these things represent where emotions could lead people and are meant to make them want to come back to reason by installing into them a sense of fear of God”.  

At this point, Fish Bone remembered how Altai Kum had once told him a similar story:

“There is a world’s mountain,” he had said once as they walked through a forest and had seen in the distance the outlines of the Belukha: “On that mountain is a big tree as tall as the distance between  Earth and Heaven, this is the World tree. Four rivers flow from under the tree and they all converge into the ‘ocean of the chaos of death’. These represent four diemntions of worldly people:  intellect, feelings, imagination and sensation, whereas the mountain in essence is nothing else but people’s body.”

The time came when Fish Bone, traveling in his coffin-boat, left the world of the eternal future, to move in the direction of the transient present.

Soon he became once more aware of himself as he was lying in the same coffin, in which Svyatogor had buried him so that he could undergo the great mystery of traveling through time and experiencing his death. Lying there he suddenly remembered the idol of Svarog that Svyatogor had once shown him.

At that precise moment everything became clear to him: the idol’s head was Svarog, the world of eternity or Slavi, his body (body of whom Fish Bone or Svarog) contained three parts: upper, lower and middle , corresponding respectively to  the worlds of future, past and present. The idol had a tetrahedral form and each side showed four subdivisions of the upper, lower and middle worlds:  feelings, intellect, personality and essence. In total there were twelve parts, as in the horoscope.

And suddenly Fish Bone realized what that number meant.

Birds sat on the clearing. He lay on the grass and began to sneak up to them preparing to attack them as in an ambush. Suddenly he thought that recently he had been a human and that right this minute he was turning into a cat: the essence of the ancient rite of transformation suddenly unfolded to him, he had transformed into his totem, he had become it.