A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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čakča
Čakča is autumn in Sámi, the language of the Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, and it is one of eight named seasons rather than one of four. It falls roughly across October and November. The ground hardens, the first lasting snow arrives, the reindeer come down to autumn pasture, and the rut begins, when the bulls fight and the herds re-sort themselves.
Etymology
The word is Sámi, and its relatives are in Finnish and Estonian rather than in Norwegian or Swedish. What it carries is the shape of the calendar around it. The eight seasons are winter, spring-winter, spring, spring-summer, summer, autumn-summer, autumn, and autumn-winter, and čakča is the seventh. Four of the eight are compounds, which means the transitions are named as seasons in their own right rather than as the ragged edges of other ones. Čakča sits between čakčageassi, autumn-summer, and čakčadálvi, autumn-winter.
Notes
The calendar is organized around what reindeer do, and therefore around what herders must do.