Monday 25 November 2013

What does the fox say?

Photo: Rodrigo Fernández, 2010. Source: Wikimedia

Last week I participated in quinoa sowing in Chivay. As most farmers all over the world usually do, they talked about the weather. We are in the second half of November and it should start to rain soon, yet there is not rain in sight yet.


Pedro, one of the men who helped working the land, said that the rain would be scarce this season. He has observed how certain plants have flowered early; they are desperate because they know that the rain will be late and scarce. ”Nature knows”, he said. Another sign is that the seagulls that usually fly up the river with message of rain haven’t been seen this year.

Most of the farmers I have talked to in Chivay so far, say that the weather and climate is changing. “Earlier the seasons were respected”, the leader of the Water User Organization in Colca Valley (Junta de Usuarios Valle del Colca) told me; but now, it rains when it should not rain and the frost comes at unexpected times.

According to Pedro, earlier farmers used to know how to anticipate and prepare for the year to come. People knew how to read the earth and the plants, and would listen to the birds and animals.

Don Pedro is a leader in his community and has been active in various social organizations. When I interviewed him in October 2011, he talked about the Andean fox, known as zorro in Spanish and atoq in Quechua. The fox appears as a protagonist in many Andean stories, often as a trickster and often interacting with other animals like the condor, the puma or the guinea pig. Anthropologists have also used the figure of the fox in their writings, like José María Arguedas ("El Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo"; as a metaphor for the people in the highlands and people on the coast) and Catherine Allen, who analyses the role of the trickster fox in stories (Foxboy: Intimacy andAesthetics in Andean Stories).

Pedro was, however, the first person I heard talking about the actions of the real-life fox and its significance for humans’ ability to predict the weather in Colca Valley. He said: “In these months (September, October) the fox cries in the hills, and when he is choking - ka-ka-ka, that means that it will be a bad year. And when [his crying is] clear, then it will be a good year. The animals manifest themselves; the plants manifest themselves, so then the Andean man observes, reads, and knows what will happen and anticipates.”

Today, however, most people don’t know how to predict and prepare. Pedro blames a loss of culture and knowledge. But also the new climatic changes that implies sudden changes in temperature and humidity makes it harder to anticipate and prepare than it was before.


The nights are colder and the days hotter. As Florencia, one of my female friends in Chivay – farmer, artisan, and market vendor – put it: “It is like the sun is getting closer to the earth”. The day we worked the fields and sowed quinoa seeds was also extremely hot, and the heat made it hard to work – I at least got exhausted by picking stones and old weed under the burning sun.

On that day, there was no snow to be seen on the surrounding mountaintops Ampato, Sabancaya, Hualca Hualca and Mismi, which are known to be “glacier-topped volcanoes”. A couple of days after the sowing, there were some precipitation, but only on the mountaintops, not on the fields.



This picture is taken today – Sunday 24 November – and if you look carefully, you can get a glimpse of some tiny white stripes on the top of Hualca Hualca. Sabancaya is still without any snow. 

Until the rain arrives, the farmers have to irrigate their fields with water from the canals bringing water from the mountain springs.




People still say that the rain will probably arrive for the fiesta for the Virgen of the Inmaculada Concepcion 8 December. Time will show whether don Pedro is right. And we should be listening carefully: What exactly does the fox say?


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