Gary Just sent me this.
The Long Blade on Safari by Gary Lewis.
An experimental combat survival knife and a chance encounter with a black mamba
By Gary Lewis
The quickest way to get branded a greenhorn is to carry a big belt knife on a deer hunt. This was in my mind when I accepted a blade, on loan, to carry on safari in South Africa.
Three days before I boarded the plane for South Africa, I got a call from Jim Allen, of Three Sisters Forge, in Bend, Oregon, a knife maker. He said he wanted to loan me a knife.
It was no trouble to add another tool to my kit. It packed easily alongside my rifle in the case. But this was not just any knife. It was big.
At over 17 inches from tang to tip, it was the longest edged weapon I had carried since I had to cut brush with a machete as a teenager.
There was a moment when one of my partners started to chide me about bringing a big knife, but he stopped when I handed him the blade. Something in his combat training past told him this was no knife to trifle with.
The TSF Field Utility Knife
Jim Allen, the knife’s creator, calls it a multi-use survival tool, designed to chop, cut, pound, trench and pull rope and cord.
If it was easy to describe the blade, we would call it a tanto, with 11.675 inches of 1095 steel with a clipped angular tip and a uni-facial grind.
At .135 inches thick across the back of the blade, the knife had the weight to carry a stroke through a thumb-sized limb on the first try. The angled tip is ground to a chisel point for penetration.
In hand, the knife balanced a little tip-heavy, as a fighting knife should. With over five-and-a-half inches of handle, it is suitable for use with two hands on the grip. The butt is oversized, to accommodate a generously-sized lanyard hole that can do double duty for pulling or for tightening rope.
The handle is clad with black textured linen/resin scales and pinned with .1875-inch I.D. brass tubes. A parachute cord wrap provides extra texture in the hand. The para cord can be removed and the tubes employed for pulling, wrapping, tying and binding.
Cut from heavy-duty Kydex, the sheath is pure utility, with no retention clasps or safety straps. Held in a friction fit, the knife must be forcibly drawn. Designed to be worn handle upright, the sheath can be belt-mounted at the side, at the small of the back or belted to a pack.
The original concept was to mount the knife behind the pilot’s seat in a helicopter or an airplane. In the event of an emergency, the knife is only an arm’s length away, ready for action or to be belted on.
Living on the Edge
No matter how much experience you have, when you go someplace new, you’re a tenderfoot. It takes a few days on the ground to get comfortable, to learn the difference between an nyala track and a waterbuck’s, to spot the biggest ram in a herd of impala or catch the shine of kudu horn in the mopane.
There’s a lot of edge on the banks of the Limpopo. Shaded by fever trees, baobab, acacia and mopane, the river marks the border between South Africa and Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. We would hunt two different regions along the banks of the Limpopo.
Extreme, I thought. But if you’re going to live life on the edge, you’d better have an edge.
Our first hunt was with Shingani Safaris. Riann Vosloo had selected 27-year-old Stehan de Kock to guide us.
In the vehicle, I wore the knife at my side, skipping one belt loop. When we dismounted for a hunt, I slid it around to the small of my back, out of the way of brush.
In the heat of the day, as we stalked antelope from the shade, snakes, particularly black mambas, were never far from our minds. We hoped the cool July nights would keep them in their dens.
Able to reach 20 miles per hour, it is one of the fastest snakes in the world. It is also one of the most dangerous. “If you are bitten, best thing to do,” one professional hunter said, “is to find a tree close to the road and lay down. That way your body won’t bloat before your friends find you. And they won’t have to drag you that far to the truck.”
Black mambas are not black at all, but gray, yellowish or olive green. They are called black mambas in reference to the ink-black mouth and eyes as dark as the grave. One black mamba has enough venom to kill between 15 and 25 people.
Headed down a bumpy two-track in the early afternoon, we were looking forward to lunch and cool drinks.
“Boss! Boss!” The trackers on the back of the truck scrambled. De Kock stood on the brakes and skidded to a halt. There followed a flurry of words, which included ‘mamba.’ De Kock leaped out and grabbed Brian’s 375 H&H from the rack. Around to the front, he pulled up, rifle at his cheek.
The 300-grain Nosler Partition hit the coiled snake in two places.
The black mamba was down but not out. Its coffin-shaped head lifted off the ground, its tiny black eyes sought a target as I spooled it up on the knife. Writhing, it struck again and again, but its nervous system was damaged, if not destroyed.
I finished it with the knife. The blade, which had looked so big back home, could have been ten feet longer.