Jon- No problem, there are no "dumb" questions if a person is learning.
A trapper can sell fur through 3 different outlets. "Country" buyers:
The first is the "country buyer" or a local person who buys wholesale. They are like scrap yards, a guy brings their items in and you get money (or a check that day). The advantages are a trapper gets money right away and may be riding the day to day speculative bubble and actually sell at a higher price than what might be paid at an auction months away. The downside, imo, is that year in, year out, a person will get less for their fur going country than selling retail at the international auctions. A person can also do less work if they want to because a trapper can sell to a country buyer the whole unskinned animal (called "on the round" or carcass), sell it skinned out but not fleshed of fat and other tissue attached to the actual skin (called "in the grease"), or skinned. scrapped, and dried (called "put up" or "finished"). Some country buyers have mobile operations where they'll send agents out from home base and have routes to buy fur. "Gronewald" mentioned in the Trapperman forum is probably the largest country buyer in the US and covers much of the Midwest out of their small town Illinois base. Being a country buyer can be a very risky adventure and the number of them have been going down over time. Sometimes they make out like bandits and other times if they're not careful it can be financial ruin. The bottom line for a trapper is that he is selling wholesale to a country buyer.
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