The reindeer of these remote wastes also have a hankering for Amanita muscaria. When they eat it they become stupefied and stagger around. If a reindeer is killed at this point, the meat will pass on the intoxicating effects of the Amanita muscaria devoured by the animal -- but this is merely one part of a strange menage a trois involving human beings, reindeer and the mushroom itself. When they dine on certain mosses and lichen, reindeer also develop an insatiable passion for urine, their own and that of humans; so much so, Russian anthropologist Waldemar Jochelson reported in 1905, that men urinating in the open ran a real risk of alerting the sensitive sense of smell of reindeer in the vicinity and being run down by them galloping towards him from all sides! For reindeer, pee-stained snow is a delicacy (it takes all sorts to make a world).
The Koryak, and doubtless other tribes, made use of this strange fact by carrying sealskin containers they called "the reindeer's night-chamber," in which they collected their urine. This was used to attract reindeer who were proving difficult to gather into the herd. But there was another value in human urine: the active constituents in Amanita muscaria remain intact even when passed through a person's bladder. "The Koryaks know this by experience, and the urine of persons intoxicated with fly-agaric is not wasted. The drinker himself drinks it to prolong the state of hallucination, or offers it to others as a treat," Jochelson observed. "According to the Koryak, the urine of one intoxicated by fly agaric has an intoxicating effect like the fungus, though not to so great a degree." Filip Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swedish prisoner of war in the early eighteenth century, reported seeing Koryak tribespeople waiting outside huts where mushroom sessions were taking place, waiting for people to come out and urinate. When they did, the warm, steaming tawny-gold nectar was collected in wooden bowls and greedily gulped down. The Amanita muscaria effect could apparently be recycled up to five times in this manner, and, remarkably, was less likely to cause the vomiting often associated with the direct ingestion of the mushroom itself. (cont.)
