The Akha have a number of healers in their culture, my mother in law for one is a spirit woman, a Gneeh Pah as the Akha refer to them.

A Gneeh Pah always works together with the Peeh Mah, or other elder in the village, teh Boeuh Maw or the Dzoeuh Mah.

But there is one other less known worker in the Akha community and this is the Shah Mah. Mostly the Akha say that Shah Mah's can only be born. They don't learn their work, they are not called after birth to the work by the powers that be, rather they are noted for it from birth and it becomes somewhat clear to all those around.

I heard of them and what they could do but I never saw one until........ the day that it came up in a discussion with some elders and they told me the name of the village where there was a Shah Mah, very rare, but that there was one, and that is when the story got real interesting.

But before I could find him, he found me. My wife went to the hospital and while we were there, I saw this Akha woman with a broken leg and this man was there, an Akha man, and he had a plastic soda pop bottle, one of those litre and a half one in his hands, full of water, and he was doing something, and her leg was there in a cast.

I right away figured out that he was doing a ceremony for her leg, to heal it. But that is not what gripped me most, what gripped me most was his EYES. They were enough to make you take a second look. Very very different. I talked to him, and then it came out that HE was the Shah Mah that I had been told about.

The short of it, I told him I would go to his village. There was a problem he wanted me to look at.

When I got to the village, I met his mother, a very strange look, and then I went in the house, and there was his father, on his bed against the wall. As it were Nebuchadnezar. He had a huge mane of black as night hair, he snarled at me when I walked in and tried to leap about, he had a tin food pot and he beat it on the floor.

His son told him to be quiet.

They had taken him everywhere, no one could help. And the story went like this.

Years before, seven years to be exact, their father had not come home from the jungle in the afternoon. So in the evening the sons went to look for him and after a long hike into the forest they found him.

Now I might preclude this by saying that the Akha see spirits, and they sure believe in them, good ones and bad ones that will do you harm. Some christians say they do, but not really, cause they don't like it then when the Akha claim the same thing.

So there they saw their father, he had cut down a tree and was laying as if in a sleep. Sitting on the tree were three spirits. They were talking in very angry excited voices. The two insisted that they kill him, the father, instantly. The third disagreed and said that they should let him live. But when the sons came they got disturbed and left, and so they gathered up their father and helped him home. From that day on he was like this, the most wild person a person had ever laid eyes on.

I thought deeply about it, and said that I would come back, but I had no idea what to do, and I had never seen anyone with an idea do anything, so I couldn't actually insist what the way forward was.

They said he tossed around, growled a lot like that, but never hurt anyone. In the years that went by when I was so often dragged off over this or that killing it wasn't often that I could always get back right away on a case, and the years did slip by and when I got back, they said that their father had passed away two years before. Mother and sons were still alive, and I wondered all what had gone on there.

Reminded me of the time, that I was resting just before I passed off to sleep, thinking about the day, letting the fatigue in my body slip into all the places it belonged, feeling tired but alive, maybe just got back from a long drive over days and bad roads. The hut was quiet. It was quite a distance to the next hut, and up the hillside there was the Akha cemetary. In the jungle. My wife was there, she wasn't sleeping heavily yet, the hut was dark, the kids were asleep, I was looking for the tell tale sign of a cobra in the bamboo roof, cause it happened, when suddenly, between our hut and the cemetary there was a angonizing gasping wail, like a dead person heaving up out of a grave, or walking there on the road.

Since my wife talked about these things and she sensed that I doubted her, I said to her, "Did you hear THAT?"

To which she replied that she did of course, and I said that it sure wasn't near anyone's hut but our own, and it sure wasn't a normal sound that normal humans made. She insisted that the dead got up and walked around at night, even sometimes in the day, well who could know that there was no truth to it.