But a shaman: A.S. Milovsky, "Tubiakou’s Spirit Flight." Natural History, July 1992.

walk away from the spirits: In a dialogue between 18th Century Danish missionary, Poul Egede, and a Greenland angakkoq (shaman), the angakkoq (A) asks the missionary (M) "if he knows that the northern lights are the souls of the dead playing soccer in the sky with the head of a walrus. M responds that he can tell who will go to heaven and who to the bad toornaarsuk, the devil. But A interrupts: 'You know nothing about heaven, you have never been there, I haven't seen any of your tracks.'" I Kleivan, "A Dialogue Between a Shaman and a Missionary in West Greenland in the 18th Century: The Sociology of a Text." In, J. Pentikäinen, Shamanism and Northern Ecology. Berlin, Germany, 1996.

a flight of metaphors: "These animal transformations represent an aspect of the trance journeys undertaken by shamans, which may involve, as the shaman understands it, flying through the air or diving below the sea. Thus the symbols of birds may be suggestive of shamanic flight or those of fish may speak of quite a different sort of aqua-adventure." M & S Aldhouse-Green, The Quest for the Shaman. New York, 2005. "The spirits of the shamans used to visit the skies, possibly at the level of the clouds, but whether above or below them I am not absolutely sure. It is certain, however, that when they were on a kind of flight known as ikiaqqiijut (between layers) they did not go high in the heavens, but rather travelled somewhere below the level that aircraft fly today." G.A. Kappianaq. In, Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut. J. Bennett and S. Rowley, Editors. Montreal, 2004.