Holy fence post, Batman, what a controversy.
Enough has been said about the Skookum Bush Tool so that I don't have much to add, so I'll just concentrate on some of the stranger arguments seen here.
If you notice what the American frontiersmen used, the designs often look a tad different, and for various good reasons - they were used by a highly adaptive people who crossed and conquered a real frontier.
I have a feeling American frontiersmen used what they used largely because they felt they needed a knife that could easily double as a defensive sword-like weapon in case of trouble. Traditionally, Scandinavians have used axes instead of knives for that role.
Some of these guardless, pointy designs touted as the 'ultimate survival knife' seem to be worshiped by those who think 'bushcraft' is one giant wood carving session, but have killed game animals of any real size animals only infrequently, if ever. Yet, I've even seen some people who seem to smugly hold the opinion that you really don't 'know what you're doing' unless your knife has not even a finger guard.
Fresh blood is about as slippery as motor oil. I tell people to do this: Go buy a whole, raw chicken, cover it liberally with olive oil, then, with olive oil all over your hands, take your 'bushcraft' knife and skin it, then butcher it. That's only a small animal that's already been gutted and cleaned. Yeah, in a pinch, you might get it done just fine with that 'bushcraft' knife, especially if you work slow enough and are careful. However, do it on a regular basis for weeks or months under much more rugged conditions on animals that are not pre-cleaned from the supermarket and those espousing those types of knives will be singing a different tune.
Real 'bushcraft' is about sustainable living in the bush, and without the support of some form of agriculture, you simply don't do that without regularly killing and disassembling animals for food and useful materials.
You know, I'm writing this as a person who's done a lot of hunting, moose, bear, hare, birds, pretty much anything you can hunt in this here land, and I come from a family of hunting lovers. And I, like most hunters in Finland, have nearly always used a guardless, simple puukko for hunting purposes, and done very well indeed. Somehow, in my experience, blood doesn't get all over the place unless you make it so, and blood, while slippery, is hardly so slippery that you couldn't securely grip your knife, assuming the handle isn't made of olive oil, too.
I don't particularly mean to offend, but people in Scandinavia were living in the "bush", off the land, using guardless puukkos for all purposes including hunting before the white man ever stepped foot on the American continent. Men were hunting bears here when the American natives had never even seen a white man. The Scandinavian, guardless knife design works very well for nearly all purposes, including skinning dead things. It was designed to do so, since steel wasn't available in great quantities, limiting the availability of dedicated tools. And indeed Scandinavians didn't just appear here - this land had to be conquered by man also, and that was done using the previously mentioned Scandinavian-styled blades.
'Almost'? FYI, the last time I saw a real Scandinavian take apart a caribou, do you know what he used???
He used a Fallkniven Thor, which has a 10" bowie style blade and a full handguard.
Sounds like you met a Scandinavian that was either a show-off, stupid, or just in love with big blades. I don't know about you, but a 10" knife wouldn't be my first choice for taking apart anything except another human being.
Many of those 'bushcraft' practitioners in their crowded, little European countries, by an large, don't practice really living off the land. They go out and have themselves a smoke filled arts and crafts session. Some are quite good at it, but lets call it what it is.
Ouch, I can just feel the hate for crowded, little European countries all the way over here. Yes, many European "bushcraft practitioners" are just into it for having some relaxing time ten minutes away from the city. But you can't honestly claim that it is any different over there. American "bushcraft practitioners" in general are hardly living off the land, either...
Have you noticed something common with the real puukko design that almost all of these 'bushcraft' knives don't have? Look at the handle. While most of these 'bushcraft' knives, like the Mears design, have a conventional, western style handle with no handguard, these puukko knives have a tell tell flare, a bulb, at the back of the handle and you tend to hold it far differently, especially under slippery conditions.
I've also seen a lot of Scandinavian knives with handguards and fingerguards. Not putting in a handguard or fingerguard greatly simplifies the construction of a knife, especially if you have limited tooling, hence one of the reasons for the way some traditional designs evolved. So that doesn't make it the best just because some use it out of habit. The puukko's greatest advantage is that it is very convenient to carry.
The Sami leukus have a larger handle butt than other puukko-styled knives simply because the sheaths are particularly deep (for retention, of course), and if the end of the handle wasn't fat, there would be no way to get the knife out of the sheath easily.
The reason fingerguards are omitted from most Scandinavian knives is because they get in the way of proper holds for precise work, with wood working in particular, period. And the greatest advantage of the puukko, at least as understood by Scandinavians, is its flexibility for multiple purposes.
Look at it this way, our early frontier had a lot of Scandinavians arrive here. Yet, the puukko knife style kind of vanished when it hit the US frontier.
And that couldn't possibly be because the puukkosmiths stayed in Scandinavia, and in America no-one was all that good at making puukkos, but many American smiths offered their own designs and readily sold them to Scandinavians as well?
As Ebbtide put it: use whatever you like, with all the fingerguards you could possibly desire, but do realize there are other designs that also do in fact work very well.
Plus when we were climbing knobs so much sweat was coming off of me it actually corroded the but cap to where after cleaning the worst of it off you can barely read the etch:grumpy:
