Hello everyone. This is Woody in the Woody Shop.

Being Friday and all, I thought I’d tell you another story.

Last week we started these Frontier Stories with Jim Bridger — Old Gabe — a fellow who could tell a tale with the best of them.

This week’s story is different.

For one thing, Hugh Glass didn’t have to make his story any bigger.

It was already almost impossible to believe.

In 1823, Glass was traveling through what is now South Dakota with a party of fur trappers known as Ashley’s Hundred.

He was an experienced frontiersman — a hunter, trapper and scout — and while moving ahead of the party one day, he surprised a grizzly bear with two cubs.

The bear charged.

Glass fired his rifle, but there wasn’t time to reload.

So he reached for his knife.

What happened next was less a fight than a mauling.

The grizzly tore into him, breaking bones and ripping open his back, shoulder and scalp.

Glass fought back with his knife while the other men rushed in and finally killed the bear.

When it was over, the bear was dead.

And everybody figured Hugh Glass soon would be too.

The party tried carrying him.

But they were moving through hostile country, Glass was slowing them down, and there seemed little chance he would survive.

Eventually two men were left behind with him.

Their instructions were simple:

Stay with Glass until he died.

Bury him.

Then catch up with the others.

They waited.

Glass kept breathing.

They waited some more.

Glass kept breathing.

Finally, convinced they were putting themselves in danger for a dying man, the two took his rifle and other belongings and left him behind.

They later reported that Hugh Glass was dead.

There was just one problem.

Hugh Glass apparently hadn’t gotten the message.

He woke alone in the wilderness.

Badly mauled.

Unable to walk.

Without his rifle.

And roughly 200 miles from Fort Kiowa, the nearest place where he might find help.

So Hugh Glass started crawling.

There are parts of the story that have grown with the telling over the last two hundred years. Exactly what he ate, precisely which route he followed and some of the more colorful details are hard to separate from legend.

But the remarkable heart of it is true.

The man survived.

He crawled.

He dragged himself.

Eventually he managed to stand.

Then walk.

He ate whatever he could find along the way and followed the Cheyenne River toward the Missouri.

Weeks after being left for dead, Hugh Glass reached Fort Kiowa.

Alive.

And, as you might imagine, a little irritated.

Because Glass remembered the two men who had left him.

And he remembered something else.

They had his rifle.

Now, this is where Hollywood usually knows what to do.

Hugh Glass tracks down the men who abandoned him.

There is a reckoning.

Revenge is served.

Roll credits.

The real story is better.

Glass did go looking for them.

But in the end, he killed neither man.

One was young enough that Glass apparently chose to forgive him.

The other had joined the Army, putting him beyond the sort of frontier justice Glass had in mind.

Glass eventually got his rifle back.

And then he did something perhaps even more remarkable.

He went back into the mountains.

After everything that country had done to him, Hugh Glass returned to the frontier and lived another ten years as a trapper and hunter.

Which brings us to the knife.

Because if there was ever a Frontier Story that called for a substantial knife, I’d say this is it.

We started with our White Skunk Camp Knife and stretched it to a full 11 inches overall.

A broad 1095 high-carbon tool steel blade.

Hand-tooled work along the spine.

Richly figured antique white oak scales.

American Red liners.

A patriotic mosaic pin.

And a rugged handmade top-grain leather loop-and-ring sheath built to carry the whole thing.

Nothing delicate about it.

Nothing fancy just for the sake of being fancy.

It looks like a knife made for somebody who intends to make it home.

So we called it:

THE SURVIVOR

They left him for dead.
He had other plans.

I’ve spent most of my life making knives, and one thing I’ve learned is that you never really know what somebody’s going to ask of one.

Most days, hopefully, it isn’t much.

Cut some rope.

Dress a deer.

Make kindling.

Open lunch.

And if you’re lucky, that’s about as exciting as it gets.

But men like Hugh Glass lived in a world where the difference between what you had with you and what you wished you had with you could get mighty important mighty fast.

I suspect Glass understood that better than most.

And while I surely hope nobody who owns The Survivor ever has to prove quite as much with theirs as Hugh Glass did...

it ought to be comforting knowing there’s a whole lot of knife there if you need it.

Next Friday, another story from the frontier — and another knife made to remember it by.

Until then, keep your knife close, your friends closer —

and if a grizzly shows up, maybe keep an eye on both.

— Frank