Saturday 1 November 2008

Uitaukut Cauyarvigmi

Well, it's the first of November, and that means the start of most Furbearers' season in the Interior. I've been talking to various folks, getting an idea of who's where, and so forth, and I noticed there's a lot of new people in it right now. I think this has something to do with the incredible price of furs - I'm just flabbergasted that prices have managed to remain this high. Someone said it's all the people in SE Asia buying up furs like there's no tomorrow. Weird - I would have thought they'd be luxury goods, and the first to go.

Luckily, most of the new folks are trapping in weird places. Not very good places. For example, apparently there's two guys running lines through Murphey Dome, on the State Land side of it. Yeah, you can get there easily, but you can't get much more awful places to try and find anything. There's a few foxes, but that's it. Because of these `novel` lines, I'm not too worried about the prices going down due to a glut. Nor am I especially worried about over-harvesting the area.

By the by. October was Qaariitaarvik - place for Qaariitaaq, which is yugcetun for Halloween. Qaariitaaq predates the arrival of kass'at to AK, and very closely resembles how we practice Halloween now. Kinda one of those neat cosmic coincidences. It's part of why Halloween is such a thing in the YK.
Now, November is Cauyarvik. Waniwa cauyarviuguq - Now's the time of drumming.
Some people think that the Yup'ik calendar has 12 months, so does the Kass'at, is a big coincidence. But, they're forgetting that there are twelve lunar months in a solar year, so that's how so many people cameup with the same 12-month thing.

And now you know!

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