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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RinConRon who wrote (58947)	5/3/2007 11:28:02 PM
From: ManyMoose	Respond to of 90947

Here's my take on this issue: (from the Jan/Feb issue of Bugle, the official journal of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation rmef.org Mau-Jones Sporting Goods had Ruana Knives on display two doors down from the great Bob Ward’s store on north Higgins Avenue where I did most of my drooling. I was twelve. Two month’s pay earned feeding a horse burned my leg through my jeans. Fifty years ago, I bought my Ruana. My Ruana has been part of my life ever since. She hangs now on the antlers of my first buck, a three point muley that I bagged in Mailbox Gulch while in the company of my father, my friend Bill, and his father, the legendary mountain man Bud Moore. Ruana is a good knife, not a large one—perfect for the tasks she has performed over the years. I carried her on every hunt, every backpack, every fishing trip, every trapping expedition, and many a day at work in the woods of nine different states. Oh yeah, she has blood stories to tell. Elk stories. The 7 x 6 bull she cut in the storied Bitterroots was too big for my nine foot family room and moldered away in the yard awaiting a cathedral ceiling that came too late for glory. She worked smaller bulls and a few cows too. I kept only one rack, a five point Oregon elk suitable for a retirement home without a cathedral ceiling. But this isn’t a story about elk, it’s a story about a knife. In 1960 I brought Ruana to high school speech class in a paper sack along with some kindling and a tin can. My assignment: “give an effective sales talk.” I took Ruana and opened the tin can with her. Then I sharpened the kindling sticks the way I had learned from Bud Moore to make pegs for my marten trap line, and shaved kindling the same way I did for campfires and warming fires on my hunts. Ruana got an A for that speech, and I found my footing for life. It breaks my heart that a youngster today would be thrown up against the wall and interrogated like a terrorist for such a stunt. Times change. I found her true value thirty years later when I thought I had lost Ruana. My young son Adam and I cross-country skied into the mountains of Oregon one Sunday. We stopped for lunch, where I shaved kindling for our warming fire the same way I had done in that speech class. We returned home. Securing for the night, I looked down and saw her empty sheath. I wracked my brain trying to remember where I had last seen her. At work the next day I frantically waited for quitting time so I could mount my search. I strapped on my skis and started back up the trail, following our trace in the dark by flashlight. I broke a sweat, dreading that I would not find her but hopeful that I would. Arriving at our lunch fire, cold dead now, I swung the flashlight around. Steel winked at me in the dark! There she was, patiently awaiting my return, stuck in the snag where I built the fire. She fairly leapt into her sheath on my belt, and we returned joyfully home through the snow. Last year I took her to the Ruana workshop in Bonner with the thought of having her restored to new finish. I took her out and showed her to the men there, members of the Hangas family that now operates the shop with the very same tools and methods that Rudy used half a century ago to fashion my knife. “If I were you, I wouldn’t touch that knife,” one said. “It has an ‘S’ designation, a rare stamp signifying it was tempered in salt water.” Then he offered me twenty times my two months’ horse feeding wages for her. “Nope,” I said. “If you can afford to wait, you might dig up my bones to see if she was buried with me. Otherwise, she will be in service.”

To: RinConRon who wrote (58947)	5/4/2007 4:37:48 PM
From: Ichy Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

I have often sat down with my father to eat apples. In my youth 3 or 4 apples and Perry Mason made for a good night. My Dad would use his Knife and my Brother and I each used our own, it was just how we ate apples. I didn't know my Dad had lost his front teeth and had a plate, in my family we ate apples with knives. And it is funny, they just don't taste as good if they aren't in those neat slices. When i started to do landscaping I discovered those large Olfa knives. I can walk up to a shrub and slick it up so it looks freshly barbered in 2 minutes with an olfa knife. I hate branches that stick out at eye level so I can slice them back out of the way as I walk by cutting a lawn. I have 7 of them, one in each car and others in various places and tool boxes. But the one I like best is my brothers, he is a computer geek so he carries a knife rather discreetly in his pocket all the time, one of those red ones. When he has to wear his suit, he always takes his pocket watch, he has a knife on his watch chain...... I have 6 of those damned watches and not one of them has a nifty knife with it.