Skogsrunar iak minni.

Rummaging through my chaotic drawers and the scrap heaps in my attic-turned-home:-) I came across this relic of a bygone past. This is an old knife I made long ago in my old home in the woods (Alas! This time will never come back:-/), in a happier time when life still made some more sense (might be I was young then and had tiny sorrows and now I am not and have not:-)).

I forged this blade under a starlit winter sky, with the sound of owls hooting and wild deer and pigs rustling in the underbrush. The fox was watching the roaring forge in the twilight, and hare and porcupine and the humble mice and the birds of the night were looking on. I forged this blade as a three-layer laminate out of rebar and file steel, and it was one of my first attempts. Thence there were still pine and spruce and pinion trees swaying in a gentle breeze, before the storm "Kyril" laid them low. The blade was mounted several years ago, however, when I had already left my home near the lake, and I made a handle out of reindeer antler with a simple dragon head carving, a copper ferrule, and a runic inscription with a somewhat "pidgin";-) Old Norse motto: "Skogsrunaminni" should mean: "(I) remember (the) forest´s runes". It should be a talisman against the hellish noise and circumstances I now live in, and so far it has succeeded to keep the memory alive, and always will. Other than that, being selectively tempered in an urine concoction after the "Wein artzt" (17something), it´s a mean cutter, too. I still like it, and I will make a new sheath for it. The knife and its message deserve it.

A poem by Nessmuk himself I find rather inspiring;-)

FLIGHT OF THE GODDESS
[Answer to T. B. Aldrich’s “Flight of the Goddess” in Atlantic Monthly, October, 1867.]
I MET your Goddess, a week ago,
In the mountains, a mile above Elk Run.
Sitting where crystal springs out-flow
To ripple away in shade and sun.

She sat by the spring, on a fallen log,
Sulkily leaning against a pine.
And she welcomed me with my gun and dog—
This sweetest maiden of all the Nine.

I was ragged enough—and so was she—
Had we been in the city’s streets to beg.
Her kirtle was rent above the knee—
Shall I ever again see such a leg?

“She was sick of the city,” so she said,
Where all her lovers had played her false.
Leaving her Delphian board and bed,
For an earthly maid, who could flirt and waltz.

She had treated her lovers like a queen,
Dwelt in their attics through heat and cold;
Cheered them in sickness; and wasn’t it mean
To whistle her off for place or gold?

Halleck, her lover in other days,
Had used her worse than a heathen Turk.
Had hung in a counting room her bays,
And taken hire as a merchant’s clerk.

And as for Aldrich—perhaps he’d find
’Twas something more than the muse would stand,
To whistle her coolly down the wind
For a Yankee Goddess with house and land.—

I leaned the rifle against a tree,
And knelt in the pine leaves at her feet
I pressed my cheek to the well turned knee
And prayed—“O Goddess, divinely sweet,

“Come with me to my hut of linden bark,
Well strewn with the fragrant hemlock leaves.
I will be thy deer: be thou my park:
We will rest while the lonely night bird grieves.

“I solemnly swear to never possess
A dollar that I can call my own,
To go an-hungered and ragged in dress,
To love forever but Thee alone.”

She touched my forehead with finger tips
That warmed like a camp-fire’s ruddy glow.
I pressed the peerless hand to my lips—
It melted away like April snow.

“Oh stay,” I cried, with a feeble gasp,
“Touch with thy sacred fire my lines.”
And I strove her vanishing form to clasp,
As she fled and faded among the pines
.
And thus it comes that I love to dwell
Afar from the clamor of busy men.
Where the crystal waters sob and swell
To sweet, low echoes that haunt the glen.

And deep on the night I sometimes hear,
In the soft round tops of the pines and firs,
A rhythmic cadence so low and clear
That I know the song can be only hers.

This is from Nessmuk: Forest runes, under licence of http://www.zianet.com/jgray/nessmuk/forest_runes/ForestRunes.pdf


I find this illustrates why I lean more towards the neo-traditionalistic way of bushcrafting;-)... it´s NOT AT ALL about the gear, primarily, that is, for me any more. And this is the reason, why this is not just a bushcraft techniques blog.