ASTANA: With the prototypal start of snow on the windswept steppe lands of eastern Kazakhstan on Saturday (December 5), hunters saddled up and rode, eagles on their arms, on the day when tradition says the labour season begins.
The sudden downfall masks rocks and hills with a sparkling bedding of snow, making it easier for the men to follow animal tracks -- and, when the time is right, release their giant golden eagles into the expose to snatch up foxes and rabbits.
In modern-day Kazakhstan, labour with eagles is being revived as a climb by enthusiasts of every generation, who travel crossways this vast country to move in tournaments same the digit held on Saturday in the Chengelsky Gorge, near the eastern abut with China.
\"My ascendant taught me, I taught my son, and today I'm teaching my grandsons,\" said Baurzhan Yeshmetov, a 62-year-old man in an embroidered velvet tunic, his raptor alert heavily on his arm.
Nearby his two grandsons stood in costume, each with his own smaller warmonger on his arm. Yeshmetov, when not hunting, puts on his city clothes and works as a taxi driver in Kazakhstan's financial hub of Almaty.
Hunters ofttimes gather in the icy hills on the Kazakh abut with China -- far from cities same Almaty, bustling with luxury cars and wi-fi cafes -- to determine whose raptor is the best.
The Kazakh raptor is indeed digit of the world's fiercest, with a wingspan of 6.6 feet, razor-sharp talons and the ability to dive at the speed of an impart train -- up to 190 mph.
During the Saturday tournament, a panel of juries watched with unsmiling faces from a hilltop as hunters, clad in large fox-fur hats, unleashed straps and sent eagles into the air.
Nearby, villagers, wrapped in layers of change and fur against the icy wind, prepared kebabs in open-air barbeque stands, sending plumes of blue respiration drifting crossways the hills.
Loudspeakers blared Kazakh folk songs and tourists, some looking discover of locate with their binoculars and fluorescent outdoor gear, stared in awe from a distance.
Many in Kazakhstan see raptor labour as a symbolisation of their nation's wandering past and a being to an oft-romanticised era before these steppes turned into a geopolitical tract between competing regional powers same country and China.
Two decades of exploding economic growth that followed Kazakhstan's independence from Moscow's conception in 1991 hit also created a curious generation of young Kazakhs whose search for a new identity has led them to look to this older labour tradition.
\"Now the art of raptor labour is being taught in schools and some young people hit started to verify up the climb of raptor hunting,\" said 2008 endorse Makpal Muptekekyzy.
As a woman, she is thin in the climb of raptor hunting, but has become a favourite competitor in topical contests, with her enlarge accumulation and classic Kazakh beatific looks.
Called 'berkutchi' in Kazakh, professional raptor hunters number only about 50 in Kazakhstan -- a vast commonwealth that has used its oil wealth to alter itself from a sleepy Soviet backwater into a recent consumer society.
Some locals see the revitalisation as a quantity to physique the topical traveler industry.
\"We are starting to restore this activity, because it's our heritage, it's digit of our national sports, and besides, for tourists it's a very foreign kind of sport\", said topical businessman Sakhin Abdikalliev.
For the hunters themselves, the stick with an raptor carries a coercive mystique which haw even support to restore humanity's relationship with nature.
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