Working The Trapline — Survival On The Scout With ’Hawks & Boarding Axes

“We are not machines, and we cannot be pinned down by algorithms.”

— Tom Langhorne

Had coffee with Craig Rullman and Erik Dolson on Tuesday, during which we confronted the inflection point represented by AI and its capability of rendering truth and reality impossible to discern — and thus irrelevant. Fun stuff. AI will force us all onto reservations if we let it, and we’ll end up like Crazy Horse, with a bayonet run through the kidneys.

Yeah, I know. Don’t let it ruin your day.

Here we’ve got the esteemed Tom Langhorne launching a new project expounding on wilderness philosophy, eschewing the machine faith and seeking the authentic expression of our souls. This is a companion to Langhorne’s work on historical Scottish Highlander bushcraft, survival and martial arts. This channel offers campfire philosophy that provides aid and comfort in the face of the Rise of the Machines.

It’s  good, practical stuff. Langhorne recognizes that we can’t realistically escape living in and working with technology — he does, after all, make his living as a YouTuber. This is about living in the world as it is. He offers up two key protocols:

1. We must understand ourselves better than any algorithm could.

2. Keep one foot in the dirt.

Good stuff and worth your time.

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Quixotic Mainer recounted his visit to the Whydah Pirate Museum in Cape Cod. His account was so vivid that I thought I should include it in a post:

On the outside, the museum looks like you might be walking into a kitschy ambush, a nondescript warehouse with a couple of wooden pirate statues that would look at home on a mini golf course. However, once you’re inside it’s amazing, and smells overpoweringly of salt water, as many artifacts are still preserved inside it and are slowly being removed from layers of sea muck.

You’re greeted by the Whydah’s bell, cleaned up enough that you can read the inscription on it. The display goes deep into the ships background as a slaver, with all it’s inherent ugliness revealed, which contrasts strongly with the free and polyglot pirate crew.

[Sam] Bellamy quotes adorn the walls, he was really roughly eloquent. They found quite a large number of pistols and cut down muskets, most of French make. The barrels were mostly gone, but the stocks and rammers looked like you could get new ironware and build kit guns out of them. Look up Sun King pistols, very fine weapons! The pistols, they said, were almost all double loaded.

One smallsword hilt, its blade rusted away, really struck my heart because it looked almost identical to an Italian gripped foil I started fencing with. They had a great number of the ship’s cannon, which were mix and matched from various prizes.

The galley’s cast iron stove, ship tackle, both of the toilets, and sundry tools and ammunition were there too. Very interesting was the Spanish silver, very roughly formed coinage. Some of the coins are fixed in a display with a narrow slot so that, if you wish, you can actually touch pirate treasure!

I came away dreamy and star struck, as big doses of history often leave me. They are very insistent about no photography, so I regrettably have no pictures. But isn’t an inspiration to take out the kayak, burn powder and rewatch Black Sails better?

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This, of course, made me think of boarding axes. As one does…

OK, so I get a charge out of seeing boarding axes in the spotlight in Black Sails. Don’t make it weird.

The boarding ax was the maritime cousin of the tomahawk, and served similar functions — a day-to-day tool and a fearsome melee weapon. The boarding ax tended to be a little longer in the haft and sometimes larger and heavier in the head than the tomahawk, but they weren’t standardized, and some are virtually identical to their woodland counterparts.

Scalawag Tactical offers a modern boarding ax that looks pretty badass.

 

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The Scout Rifle concept is one of those things that riflemen love to discuss, analyze, debate and debunk. It’s a concept that obviously has appeal for today’s Frontier Partisan.

Inevitably, in the post-GWOT era, when the AR platform has become by far the most popular rifle in America, the question arises as to whether you can create a semi-automatic Scout Rifle. Technically, no — the Scout is, by Jeff Cooper’s original definition, a bolt-action rifle. But things do evolve, and this feller, who has built his kit around the Scout concept makes a case.

This one’s for the real nerds….

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This fine feller encamped in front of our back door — the one we use — for over an hour.

I engaged him in a monologue on my preference for European mounts. He was unmoved.