By MALIA WOLLAN

SACRAMENTO - On the barren airwaves of AM radio in Northern California, between gospel music and traffic updates, Yia Yang can be heard telling his devoted listeners to always be aware of their gun muzzles. A 50 -year- old Hmong immigrant from northern Laos, Mr. Yang is the host of a regular all-thingshunting program on KJAY 1430-AM. The station serves one of the nation’s largest Hmong populations - one for whom the link between hunting and survival is still palpable.

“In Laos a main source of food was wildlife,” said Mr. Yang, who owns a car lot in Sacramento, a city with more than 16,000 Hmong residents.

He said hunting brought back memories of the wilds of Laos, where his older brother, who he said was a soldier trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, taught him to shoot raccoonlike creatures out of trees.

During the Vietnam War, the C.I.A. covertly trained the Hmong to fight, unsuccessfully it turned out, against a Communist takeover in Laos. After the war, many Hmong fled to refugee camps in Thailand. From there, more than 200,000 immigrated to the United States, settling largely in the Central Valley of California and in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

“In Laos, a big part of the traditional role for men was to provide meat,” said Paul Hillmer, a professor of history and director of the Hmong Oral History Project at Concordia University in St. Paul. “The adjustment for Hmong men in this country was getting used to things like private-property boundaries, hunting licenses and regulations.”

So Mr. Yang patiently answers a steady stream of callers from all over the Sacramento Valley, whose questions range from the mundane - Do I need a special license to hunt deer with a bow and arrow? (No, but a hunting license is required, as is a deer tag for archery.) - to the exotic. How, exactly, one hunter wanted to know, was he to deliver the severed head of the black bear he had shot to the State Department of Fish and Game, as required by law. (Present the skull - even if damaged - to a department office or officer within 10 days of killing the bear.)

Captain Roy Griffith, who runs the fish and game agency’s hunter education program and has been an on-air guest of Mr. Yang, said Mr. Yang provided “a huge service to the state.”

In the winter when bear and deer hunting seasons are closed, Mr. Yang’s program is heard less often, but occasionally he does take to the air with talk of hunting wild pigs, ducks and squirrels. “People are calling on the radio asking me, ‘How many squirrels can I bring home?’ ” he said. “I tell them four. Squirrel soup with a lot of hot peppers is very popular.”