The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details:
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is $300 $250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
At Thanksgiving my son and I walked our property lines. The terrain is horrible. Just black bear here but still, they never really hibernate because it just isn't cold enough here and in the winter, as food gets more scarce they hang around the cabin. We have a bunch of dens about 1/2 mile away from the house on a tall ridge. Because of the season, most of the acorns were gone. Black walnuts and buckeyes were all over the ground. We saw tons of purple scat containing large masses of fox grape seeds. As we came down the mountain, we found bunches of fox grapes everywhere that had fallen attached to their stems (unusual). These were just dried out enough to look like plump raisins. He and I started snacking on them and they were super sweet like the sweetest raisins I had ever eaten. We always watch to make sure we don't just run up on a bear or (heaven help us) get between a sow and her cub. Never saw any that day, just lots and lots of very fresh grape loaded scat. We finally got tired of the grapes and laid the bunches down along the line in a spot we knew. The following day, I took the grandboys up the mountain the other way. They wanted to see and try the semi dried fox grapes. The pile we had left were gone and we could find no additional bunches on going up. So sometime between noon the day before and about 10AM that morning the bears had been there and gotten all that we left or that were obvious. I think, particularly in the South where bears never truly hibernate, they can be anywhere almost anytime. Watching and being prepared to give them wide berth or a dose of "lead therapy" if necessary is a good idea. We enjoy having them around. They rarely damage anything and we try to get our neighbors to leave them alone at least on our mountain. No one around here has any decent recipes for the meat and I have discussed it with most of the long time bear hunters nearby. But black bears are omnivores. They can be incredibly sneaky and quiet. I have one neighbor they will climb up a 20 foot 6"x6" post to his deck, cautiously walk between over 100 potted plants, flowers and ferns, often making use of his rail around the deck to get across them and steal all the birdseed. Then he retraces his steps along the deck, goes back down the post, takes a bath in the pool formed by their artesian well, and leaves cool and satisfied. We have video and pictures from game cameras of all this. Be wary! They are!