The shaman woman told the author was identified as a shaman when a child because she did everything backwards, sleeping all day and staying awake all night. The author visited her in her remote tent in deep forest. Another girl they met was pleased to have won a prize for her poem about pine needles being her pillow and the forest stream being her wine. I think her poem started with “I am a girl of the Tuva”. It may have been about living in the Taiga? I think it was written in the 1990s. I read it in the first decade of the 1990s. I borrowed it from Plymouth Library in England.
Stump the Bookseller
New format, same book stumper solving.
I cannot remember if the author was male or female, but my hunch is male
And I made a mistake – I read it in the first decade of the 2000s (not 1990s!)
‘I am a girl of the taiga
With ten thousand white reindeer
The green moss is my bed
And the silver stream my tea”
“The Lost Country: Mongolia Revealed” by Jasper Becker, pub 1992