Feels like a lifetime

The 14th of May is a big deal to me. That’s when I mark two significant events — I first set foot on The Mountain on this date in 2021, and it was one year ago today that my sweet girl Scout, Miss Smudge and I took up residence in the cabin for good.

An inescapable sense of rightness, of belonging, makes it feel like I’ve never lived anywhere else.

Yes, I’ve worked my ass off. But I wouldn’t be here without the help, generosity, sweat and, in some cases, courage of neighbors and friends. I’m grateful beyond words.

I live in the moment. Bring on tomorrow. Life is good.

*Smudge and I spotted seven whitetails in the down-Mountain pasture on our way to Flippin this morning.*

*The deer were joined by a lone wild turkey.*

In a fit of fashion sense this morning, I decided that the paracord tether I’d created for that canary-yellow Victorinox Fieldmaster the other day just “didn’t go.” The pattern and color were all wrong for the knife.

I went digging through my stash for a knife that didn’t clash.

What I found was another Victorinox, albeit a very different knife (pictured, below). You may never have seen one of these, so I’ll explain.

As you may know, Victorinox supplies the Swiss Army with its issued pocketknife and has for 135 years. Beginning in 1961, that knife — offered commercially as the Soldier model — became a 93mm Alox-scaled design, with four basic tools in two layers.

In the mid-1970s, the German Armed Forces (or Búndeswehr) approached the company with a design for its own pocketknife. It was a departure from the Swiss version — 108mm closed length, different blade and different tools but still a traditional oblong esthetic.

It was first fielded in 1976. Victorinox, the company that made SAKs, now also made GAKs.

After issuing that design for 25 years, the Búndeswehr wanted a new folding knife and again awarded the contract to Victorinox. The design differed radically from anything the Swiss company had ever produced.

The resulting commercial variant, known as the One-Hand Trekker, was (and continues to be) wildly successful. The Swiss Army itself adopted the design as standard-issue in 2008.

My own Búndeswehr is an early production model with an elliptical thumbhole and a low-profile liner lock. (The hole was made more circular and the lock tab larger five years after the knife was introduced.) It features six tools in three layers.

Think of it as a larger Farmer (my favorite 93mm Alox model) with the addition of a Phillips screwdriver tool. Many folks consider the Búndeswehr/One-Hand Trekker to be the perfect bushcraft pocketknife, and I don’t disagree.

To give you an idea of the knife’s relative size, here are a few images of it next to a 91mm Fieldmaster.

It’s a very manageable package.

The Búndeswehr/One-Hand Trekker does a few things differently than most slipjoints and folders. Most apparent is the edge — it’s a chisel grind, beveled only on one side. The “combo edge” (part serrated, part plain) places its serrations uncharacteristically at the front, and those serrations account for two-thirds of the cutting edge.

The blade really doesn’t come to a point, either.

Last — and you’d probably have to be a knife knerd to get this — the liner lock is backward (or it feels that way, at least). That is, disengaging it requires pushing the liner tab in the opposite direction from virtually every other knife with such a mechanism.