Bushcrafting With Class

Full function field knives that look good doing it.

- David Jaye

Bush crafting is not a new skill for humans, in fact in the hundreds of thousands of years since we became human, we lived by and perfected bush crafting skills.

However, it was the invention of the knife that revolutionized the way we survived in the bush. Almost every culture has refined the knife to best fit their environment and suit the needs presented by the world around them. In areas of dense jungle, the machete is the go-to knife for moving through thick growth. The Gaucho, who live by herding cattle in the Pampas of Argentina and mountains of Patagonia, rely on a large Punal, similar to a French knife. In the mountains of Nepal, the kukri, said to have been introduced by the armies of Alexander the Great, has been used for ages to perform daily tasks with finesse.

The knife is in a state of continual refinement, as witnessed in these five extraordinary examples from custom makers of today, who have built on the past to help move knife making and bush crafting that much further toward the future. But to improve, we must look at the foundations.

For reliable information on the foundation of a good bush crafting knife, I had to look no further than two of the men who helped define it in our modern age, Mors Kochanski and Ray Mears.

Lessons from Mors Kochanski

I met Mors Kochanski a few years back and recently contacted him to get his ideas on bush crafting knives, firsthand, for this article.