Posts Tagged → sword
Is sitting in a box actually hunting?
Hunting season is cold, and getting outside to seek deer or bear or really any other wild game animal requires a person to put up with some level of discomfort. You can put a lot of effort into hunting, and still come up empty handed. So to up the odds of escaping the attention of deer and bear, some hunters created hunting blinds up in trees. The least difficult ones were railroad sikes driven into a tree to be used as a ladder, and we would hoist ourselves up onto a stout lower limb, and there wait for a shot at a passing deer.
The truly old tree blinds from the 1930s and 1940s were ridiculously frail, made of random assortments of surplus lumber; practically death traps as soon as they were nailed up to living trees. The better old fashioned tree stands would usually be put on what we called an “Indian tree,” where someone a long time ago had deliberately bent over and caused a tree to grow parallel with the ground.
When the horizontal bent limb was at least a foot in diameter, enterprising hunters would find creative ways to attach a stable platform, usually reached by a dangerous rickety wooden ladder made out of woods trash and nails. Platforms ranged from plywood to rough cut boards, some with railings and tattered old olive drab canvas and maybe a stool. Deluxe versions had some sort of roof or covering to keep rain, snow, and sunshine off of the hunter. These elevated hunting blinds were usually eight to ten feet up off the ground, and if the rickety blind did not fall down and kill you, the hunter, then you could usually use it to kill a deer. Despite requiring skill just to stay in them, these blinds were always in demand, and elders got first dibs.
Here I am talking about the American Northeast, and Pennsylvania, specifically. Not about India, where the elevated machan gave hunters of dangerous game not only an opportunity to shoot before being detected by tigers and leopards, but a chance to get in at least one more shot or even a stabbing blow with a spear before the claws and fangs were at your throat.
Fast forward fifty years, and now elevated blinds are everywhere. But they are not like the old rickety kinds jimmied onto trees with long spikes us older guys fondly recall. Witness the rise of the elevated box blinds, which are light years ahead of the rickety wooden tree stands in use when I was a kid. These new ones look like Martian landers, and are sold along the side of RT. 15 from Duncannon to Williamsport, as well as anywhere farm machinery and grains are sold, or even in Amish farm yards.
These modern elevated hunting blinds are airtight, have windows that open and close, and safe ladders or steps made of treated lumber of metal. They are downright sophisticated, and one farm lease I know of has propane heaters in all of their elevated “huts” where guys literally cook their breakfast while waiting for a deer to show up out one of the sliding windows. Some of them are big enough to hold a whole family, and indeed these are like little remote hunting cabin outposts, where everyone from Pap to the youngest kids can comfortably take a poke at a deer from a steady rest with plenty of quiet encouragement around them.
The question is, Is this elevated box blind business actually hunting?
My four-plus-inch-thick 1987 Random House Dictionary (the resilient if lonely, unknown cornerstone of our written culture) says Hunt: To chase or search for game or other wild animals for the purpose of catching or killing.
How much chasing or searching do you see going on from the ubiquitous elevated box blinds?
Not a lot. Well, none. Shouldn’t hunting involve actual pursuit and physical exertion? Don’t we need to earn our kills?
Go on YouTube or Rumble, and you can watch hundreds of “hunting” videos of hunters sitting in elevated box blinds, overlooking crop fields and power lines. These hunters usually have a long period of self-discussion to their camera about what they are looking for, any shots taken and misses they have had, etc. They have tripods and bipods, heaters, shelves with food, windows, and are generally protected from the punishing elements that mark hunting season.
The most dispiriting of this video genre has little kids holding forth, as if experienced adults, about the relative merits of various bucks caught on cell camera trail cams that very morning, and whether or not any of them are good enough for our young camerman.
And so I think we have to ask if this elevated box blind is not really hunting, then is it good for hunting? If maintained as a hunting method after their first one or two confidence building kills, the little kids are for sure being ruined by this stuff. Because it is not reality.
People who think that hunting season solely involves sitting in one spot all day, especially an enclosed and elevated spot, and then stiffly climbing down to either bitch about the lack of deer or worse, to boast about one’s prowess whacking “the big one“, are not hunters. They are shooters. If they have at all practiced target shooting before season, and they have some huge Hubble Telescope mounted on their Million Magnum Blastem Rifle, then surely they can make that three hundred yard shot on some unsuspecting deer eating dinner in a crop field.
Sorry to be negative about this, but we are losing our souls to these elevated blinds. Yes, they make hunting season more comfortable, and they make ambushing and surprising our quarry easier, but they are really dumbing down and whittling off our hunting instincts and skills, our woodcraft that separates us from the flatlander slobs who have no self reliance abilities. Hunting is not supposed to be easy, or comfortable, it is supposed to test us and make us earn the trophies we kill.
In Europe and Asia, hunting was used until the 1800s by warriors to hone their combat skills. Nothing like dismounting your horse to face off at ground level with a mean 4,000 pound Gaur or a ferocious 1,000 pound wild boar, armed with a stout spear in hand and a short sword at your hip. Back then, hunters were tough. As were our own American Longhunters on our frontier.
You want to actually hunt? Go do a deer drive like the BNB Outdoors kids, or with The Hunting Public guys. Or take a quiet, slow still hunt woods walk like John does at Leatherwood Outdoors. These hunts take skill and effort, which is the heart and soul of the chase. Everything else is just a hands-on video game at this point. No thanks.
A deer taken while still hunting two weeks ago, with open sights. Don’t look too closely, it was hit between the eyes.
Checking nearby cell cameras to see where the deer are while sitting in a blind…
Not picking on anyone here, but you boys can do better than this
Calling Elon Musk, we have landed on Mars
Life and Love of the Knife
Since God created us humans, either in one quick master stroke or through a series of evolutionary steps (I don’t know which one and I don’t really care, because God is all powerful and can do anything He wants, and all we puny humans can try to do is figure it out as we muddle along), we have had a love affair with sharp edges. Blades, that is, which give our amazing but soft and weak hands the ability to cut, slice, stab, and pierce dangerous foes and animals, and render them into delicious roasted brontosaurus steaks. As Mogli says in “A Jungle Story,” his antagonist, the massive male tiger Shere Khan, may have his big teeth, but “I have my own tooth,” a sizeable steel knife blade affixed to a sturdy and dependable handle, with which Mogli is indeed a significant foe to all who would eat him.
To humans, the knife in all its forms – skinning blade, meat slicing blade, spearing blade, or stabbing sword blade – is our tooth, claw, and fang. It is our defense, a lifeline, and third arm in a world where most of the critters we have hunted, eaten, and clothed ourselves with often have a mouth full of knives as well as heads and hooves adorned with sharp and pointy edges, any one of which is instant doom to us. As a brief visit to the dinosaur and modern reptile exhibits in any respectable museum will show, we humans inhabit a world where history has had most of our battles and warfare with men and beasts alike determined by who had the bigger, faster, longer, sharper knife blade.
The Pleistocene is where modern humanity and our knives and spear blades came into Yin and Yang fusion, resulting in the extermination of even the largest and most dangerous of wild animals. And well into the 20th century, men everywhere across the planet daily adorned themselves with blades both practical and beautiful. In a world that is still always dangerous, blades have always represented us humans, and men in particular, as both useful and dangerous.
So is it any surprise that even today, in our sickly society filled with Toxic Femininity, men, particularly men, still have a love affair and deep personal connection with knives and blades of all sorts? It’s almost spiritual. Knives and sharp blades have been our constant companions since our species gained consciousness, and knives have been all that stood between us and death for over a hundred thousand years. Often in a hunter-gatherer society, a good knife is all a man needed to live a comfortable life. Nowadays, we habitually carry small pocket knives by Case so that we can accomplish small home chores easily. Serious blade length reduction! How far we have fallen! Are we still men, armed only with our tiny folding pocket knives?
I say yes, we are.
Because like so many millions of others, I am a masculine man and a not a Low T feminized and pathetic freak of self-loathing nature, and because I am an outdoorsman, and because I am against being or feeling helpless and defenseless, I use sharp blades all the time. A sharp edge is always on me or near me, so that a threatening saber toothed cardboard box can be quickly broken down and put into the recycling bin. That always makes my woman feel like the tipi is properly sorted out. Like thousands of generations of men (M-E-N of nose, ear, and back hair variety) before me, my appreciation and love of the knife has resulted in a life of the knife, and I celebrate that. It keeps me thoroughly human.
If you are a guy (born a man with a penis) or a practical woman (a human born with a vagina and female reproductive parts), or even someone caught in between both genders and yet nonetheless afflicted with a strong streak of self preservation and practical ability, I strongly suggest carrying the largest and most robust blade you can legally and practically use every day. Or just get some CutCo knives for your kitchen. It will make you feel like a million bucks, at night your hands will naturally paint beautiful primitive cave art on the walls of your basement, and you won’t ask yourself where that innate skill suddenly came from….because you will be acting organically like a natural and properly kitted out human being. These things naturally flow from one to the next.
Just be careful not to get too carried away with this knife thing. Buying knives easily becomes a habit or even an addiction. All for the right reasons, of course. It is hardwired in us.
My buddy Irv has a knife problem. As an electrician, he has many opportunities to seriously test all kinds of pocket knives and knife steels. But he yearns to strap a dozen sheath knives on and prowl the woods. He has significant back hair, too, because he is a man.
Two original Stone Age tools. A flint hide scraper (top) and a chert butchering knife from Upstate New York
A very small slice of the hunting knives we have at our reach here, including a matched ivory micarta handled pair of Randall copies for my son and I by Perry County maker John Johnson each complete with over-the-shoulder baldrics and belt sheaths.
Pronged spears and sharp arrows (sharp blades on flying sticks) from about twenty thousand years ago. Still the best hunt around.
Super cheap WalMart special faux Damascus steel Japanese style kitchen knife is still very sharp and an an incredible tool
USA-made CutCo, definitely not a cheap kitchen knife, with excellent blade steel and bombproof handle material. Highly recommended.
Most of the knives in our kitchen. All CutCos except for two Old Hickory high carbon blades at either end. Old Hickory is an excellent USA-made kitchen knife at a very low cost that can easily be an outdoor knife