By Gabriel- The Last Huntsman

As with many of us in the Beartaria community, we have found the mundane existence of modern Babylon completely unappealing, ungodly, and unfulfilling. As a result, many of us seek to make our way, either by downsizing our footprint in the modern digital world, homesteading our sustenance, or becoming producers. For some of us, however, that also means getting out into the wilderness; far away from civilization, we test ourselves and our bodies to become more like our ancestors of old,  becoming non-domesticated humans. 

In this article series, I will detail at least one part of the wilderness- a popular term coined as bushcraft. Bushcraft seemingly has taken many different names and forms.

For me, it’s practicing basic wood skills such as shelter craft, fire craft, knife skills, axe skills, and other tools, and can even have some hunting or tactical applications.

Though you can write a whole book on bushcraft, as many already have, we’re just going to get into some knife basics for this article. 

Choosing Your Knife

Knives are mankind’s first tool; they are essential for basic tasks, whether processing your food, wood processing, cutting cordage, etc. In addition, knives can be used in a myriad of practical tasks and defensive means. While having a flimsy folding knife can be ok for opening boxes or backyard/vehicle camping, bushcrafting skills require having a solid and reliable fixed-blade knife, ideally full tang, for practical tasks.

You will have to determine if a smaller knife or a larger knife would better suit your purposes. A saying often goes, however, that you can do small tasks with a big knife if you have to, but you can’t do big tasks with a small knife, but having a smaller blade is less weight and easier to conceal. That’s just food for thought. Another consideration is steel choice; I will simplify carbon steel or stainless steel. Knife Nerds is an excellent resource to dabble into all things knife steel. Carbon steel, while generally tougher than stainless steel, can be prone to rust. So if you’re in a coastal environment, it can be hard to maintain. Stainless steel is more rust-resistant and can have better edge-holding capabilities. However, it can be more prone to snapping or chipping during extreme use.

Knife Skills

Using your knife to split wood is known as batoning. This is done by utilizing your knife as a wedge while you use another log (baton) as a mallet to beat the spine of your knife blade through the log. This can be a rather rigorous task on your knife. However, it is sometimes needed to make wood burnable when conditions are wet or when it’s hard to stabilize a log and safely use an axe. In many cases, the wood logs could be wet; however, the wood on the inside will be dryer and more suitable for fire craft. Splitting wood is necessary for ease of burning to cook, keep warm, and many other things.

Making feather sticks with a knife is another handy bushcrafting knife skill. It is done by finely slicing small curls of wood into a bundle. This bundle is perfect for fire tinder. While most small sticks, twigs, and other tinder may be too big or have too much moisture to catch a spark well, the feather sticks can be from a freshly split log that you just have batoned, which should be dryer. Making feather sticks takes time to master, learning what knives work best and what wood works best. The finer and thinner your wood curls are, the better; they will catch a spark or flame easier to start your fire.

Chopping is another handy knife skill to practice. I’m sure many will ask why you would use a knife to chop when you can use an axe. Well, for one, it’s more likely to have a knife on your person than an axe. If you’re hunting, scouting, or hiking, having a solid knife is lighter than packing a knife and an axe. Finally, it can be safer, as having an axe in full swing can be more likely to miss or over-swing. Having a medium to larger knife size will obviously help with the performance of this task. Good ergonomics will help the knife maintain in hand and absorb shock during chopping tasks. 

Striking a ferro rod (ferrocerium rod) is a skill that can help you get a fire going in your wilderness adventures. Firstly a ferro rod is a metal rod that will produce sparks when struck with a flat edge and can last thousands of strikes. So why use it over a lighter? Lighters can be finicky at best; they can get too cold, wet, or drain themselves of fluid. That is a big no-no, mainly when you’re depending on it.

So simply put, Ferro rods are just a survivalist/bushcrafter’s go-to fire-starting tool. Ideally, your knife will have a 90-degree spine on the back edge of the blade. This sharp, flat edge can strike and scrape the ferro rod. However, not all knives have a sharp spine, so having a small scraper or a spare knife may be necessary. In a worst-case scenario, you can use the edge of your knife; however, this is not recommended as it will damage your edge. When using the Ferro rod with your blade, you want to ensure your rod is as close to your tinder bundle (feather sticks) as possible. This will maximize the amount of sparks and heat transferred into those fine wood curls to get a fire going. 

Notches are another bushcrafting knife skill that is good to learn. It is essentially cutting a notch in various shapes to allow cordage to be held in place for constructing many things in the wilderness. Notches can be used to build tent stakes, fire spits, shelters, and even wild game traps. Notches can be carved directly using the knife or with a knife and baton. Though there are several notches, the few fundamental ones are the square notch, v notch, and stake notch. They may seem self-explanatory; however, carving these can take a measure of skill with your knife.  Square notches can be done by simply partially cross-batoning your knife into the wood, then doing so again, a short distance from the first, and twisting your knife- this will pop the excess wood. Stake Notches are achieved by partially cross-batoning and carving the extra wood with your knife toward your baton mark. V notches are done by cutting a ‘V-shaped groove into the wood.  

Then, one of the oldest knife skills is probably out there, processing animals or vegetation for food. People have been using knives to kill and butcher their livestock and wild game or cut up their humble veggies since humanity’s beginning. As we return to our roots, having these knife skills can make things much more manageable and save you money. 

Knives will perform numerous tasks, better or worse, based on their grind, edge geometry, and thickness. That said, I have found that a full flat grind (shown on the knives pictured above) is ideal for food prep and butchering, though a high saber grind works well too. 

 As I’ve stated, knives are one of mankind’s primary tools. We will always have a place to use a blade, especially as we separate ourselves from this fruitless modern world. These are just a few simple knife skills necessary for bushcrafting and wilderness adventures. The easy way to practice and master knife skills is to get out there and try to have fun. As you enjoy yourself, you’ll find ways to make things happen. Always check out my content on my Youtube channel, Beartaria Times app, and Instagram at The Last Huntsman. Feel free to follow up and message me with any questions. Finally, be prepared both physically and spiritually. God bless and carry on. 

By: Camera Bear

A high-trust community is a beautiful thing. The value and benefit it can bring your life to be part of one is unparalleled by anything outside of a strong, close family. These communities historically include religious networks, churches, tight-knit neighborhoods, sports leagues, and school communities.

In our case, we have built one in a place where it was generally unheard of to be high trust—the internet. Since its inception, which many of us remember in our lifetime, forming relationships with people online has been taboo and not recommended. For much of my lifetime, they never went beyond gaming groups, message boards, and random chatrooms.

In recent years, as more and more of our lives occur online, they have become more common, but many people remain hesitant and skeptical. Then came the Unbearables, formed around an exiled comedian with a webcam, a loud mouth, and a penchant for pushing society’s buttons. We all know the story; if you don’t, I encourage you to watch the three documentaries at BuildingBeartaria.com.

It was a slow build, with most interactions happening in the live chat of daily streams and a few isolated group chats across the realm and web. As the world shut down and shut in during the events of 2020, we escalated at the encouragement of that same sailor-talking, and now conspiracy theory-touting comedian, and many of us began to meet in person for the first time.

At the same time, The Beartaria Times was created, first with a news website whose mission was to report the good, true, and beautiful things happening in our community. That quickly led to the creation of the Beartaria Times Community App. The Beartaria Times community is a separation from the savage comedy and societal breakdowns. Here we can detach from the commentary on clown world and have a place for solutions, not complaining, where we are not engaging in controversy or any of the mainstream paradigms like left vs. right, where a diversity of opinions, backgrounds, religions, and ideologies could agree on a trajectory for their life without conflict where they might differ. We leave that all at the door when we enter the castle walls. After several years we have had many new people who have heard of this philosophy and embraced our principles, that have joined the app and the community and have never heard one of those comedians’ livestreams.

This app gives us all a place within the castle walls to share our lives and families outside of the degenerate wasteland of mainstream social media, away from the data collection and the world we wish to separate from. It has led to countless marriages and children being born, business relationships, meetups, Builder Buddies, and an unimaginable amount of knowledge, advice, and support being shared across the realm.

I have been to meetups across the country and made some of the best friends I have ever had through this community and app. The difference this has made in my and my family’s lives, materially and spiritually, cannot be put into words, and I pray that I am giving some fraction of that back to the community.

However, a community and app like this can be taken advantage of, which brings me to this article’s purpose. In a place where we are so generous and willing to help in any way we can, including financially, infiltrators and fakes can occur. In a place where we believe everyone shares the same basic morals and values, some people who do not can slip in.

But I don’t want us to become skeptical of the whole group or withhold our generosity because of a few bad apples. The app can be used to build genuine lasting relationships. You can put in the work and time to build a presence and a reputation.

If, in a time of actual need, you request help, you will be more likely to receive the support you need if you have put in that time. My advice is to be humble and discerning. Not only in how you may seek help in any form but also in how you give it. Could you potentially donate to a fundraiser that misled you? Maybe, but you will be rewarded for your generosity while the dishonest party will surely reap what they have sown.

Another example could be applied to the singles group. Some people there may not share and uphold the values of the overall group. Again some bad apples may slink in, but don’t throw out the whole group because of them, take a page out of that nightclub comedian’s book and use your personal ban hammer to block anyone you deem unsuitable for communication. Put in the time and use your better judgment before taking any significant steps.

The Beartaria Times Community and App are a fantastic place to detach and elevate from mainstream society, make lasting friendships and build a future together. It is a high-trust community you can benefit from and find value in for a lifetime. However, that does not just come to you automatically upon arrival.

Put in the time and work; you will see what I mean.

By: Ukrainian Bear

This article was first printed in our very first issue of The Beartaria Times Magazine, Origins, A Revealing of Legends

Ever since I was a little boy, I had been a curious little hobbit. Always getting lost trying to find something, whether it’s a wooden sword at a toy shop or a game of chess played by a couple old guys at the beach while my family frantically searches for me. I’ve always been searching, curious to look farther, and walk further. I think we all do this, to one degree or another. 

Growing up as a child in Ukraine it seemed that everyone could do everything.

My grandfather worked in a chemical factory, served in the Soviet Army, learned to fix elevators to get cheaper rent, ongoing he fixed his own van to transport church goers from village to village, put in plumbing and radiant heating in the church that he had built from the ground up. My father is a musician by trade, fixes instruments of all sorts, knows how to work with sheetrock, independently learned 3 languages apart from Russian and Ukrainian which he fluently knew, repairs tiny electrical work found in most audio and video instrumentation, alongside my grandfather built up the same church they had been working on for 20+ years. 

All the other members of the church I attended in Ukraine were just as talented. I guess I didn’t fall too far from the tree knowing how to use a medical ultrasound machine, take care of the handicapped, drive a tractor trailer, climb and take down trees with a chainsaw attached to my hip, learning to fix my chainsaws, tuning my own piano, and carving wooden bowls and little sculptures. The list will probably continue to grow, but I think my curiosity does have its limits. Even so, I didn’t come by my skills in one day and not without help.

Due to varying circumstances I had been living between America and Ukraine for a majority of my life. As such, I was able to come to understand the subtle and not so subtle differences between the cultures, as well as what makes its people what they are. In a high trust society, you can be certain a man will properly perform for a hired task, but in a low trust society you can only trust yourself to fix something, because someone is always looking to cheat you out of something, somehow.

Fundamentally, Ukraine is a low trust society where the people seem to have a wide range of skills. While they are poor, the low income breeds creativity with available tools. Low trust is created by the level of sin acceptance, which in turn creates struggle that is fertile ground for skill growth. It’s almost like a sine wave. The more sin acceptance there is in a society there will also exist an equal or proportional counter wave of skill necessity. 

To put it in other words, the more people give in to sin, the more there arises an equal need for those individuals who can compensate for the skills lost to indulgence. This is not to say that having an immoral society is a good thing because it breeds industriousness, but that there is simply a greater need for people to be able to survive in their created environment. The way I explain the difference in culture is this: if an American stops at a red light and no one is around, he will wait until it turns green to go, but a Ukrainian will keep driving through a red light even if there are cars around. Morality starts with daily small, insignificant decisions. 

After my mother divorced my father  for whatever her reasons may have been and then remarried an American, I went on to grow up in Virginia as an 8 year old boy. There I was taught that I should work for my money and not have it handed to me like the rest of my friends around me at the time. So, I decided to take my family’s push lawn mower around the neighborhood and cut people’s grass. I was fairly successful and the people I did the work for were happy. Nothing like the smell of fresh cut grass in the summer. 

When a very large snow storm hit Virginia and we had the week off from school. I took the opportunity to take all the shovels I had and recruit my friends to shovel people’s driveways. I just wanted people to have a clean driveway and spend time with my friends. We made quite a bit of money that day, but what I remember the most, even to this day, was how I was treated by the very last family that let us shovel their driveway. 

They were a very nice older couple and they had given both my friend and I a cup of hot chocolate. The steam coming from the cup on a background of white snow and shaky wet hands was the best time I ever had. Working with a purpose and being appreciated for it. It’s pure, simple, and true. Couldn’t hide or cheat your way out of a shoveled driveway. 

My teenage years didn’t lend themselves to having an abundance of diverse practical skills. Due to difficult circumstances in my mother’s life, she decided to send me back to Ukraine to live with my father and grandparents. I effectively didn’t know Russian or Ukrainian at that point, so having to go to high school right away, I had a lot of catching up to do. This difficult circumstance was just another opportunity to grow, and I did. 

In the Ukrainian high school I attended, I was taught to be a linguistics and history major focusing on the English language, Ukrainian history, and WWII. I went to school 6 days a week, had multiple college level courses in biology, physics, chemistry, and literature; and most of my nights were spent studying these subjects. Most if not all the people in my class would go on to be political analysts, working for embassies, or occupying some part of government. These are the things we were being trained for. 

After 5 years invested in strenuous studying, this seemed fine to me. My grandfather said I would make a good ambassador someday, because of my character. Dealing with people, paperwork, and time constraints is all I had been doing, so it made sense to me at the time. 

It was not until I returned to America, where I had spent a good portion of my preteen days, that I began to change my views on what I wanted to do with my life. While I wanted to make a positive difference in people’s lives, I found that working in politics was not the way I wanted to do it. 

Having watched both of the important men in my life work with their hands, it did not seem foreign or beneath me to go work for a fence installation company to meet certain ends. I worked for the company for a brief 6 months, in which time I learned to install different kinds of fencing material. I’m certainly not a professional by any means, but I can put in a simple vinyl or wood fence post. 

It is odd at times how life can take you down turns you would not expect. The very same man that hired me to install fences, guided me towards getting into the medical field. He told me that I should try it and that it would suit me, as it would have “been a shame to waste my intelligence” on simply putting up fences. After this I signed up for an EMT class at my local ambulance department where I eventually got my license. Having realized that I couldn’t earn much being an EMT, I decided to go to college and become an ultrasound technician (sonographer). Since I needed a steady job and wanted to pay for the program in full without incurring debt, I worked for a couple from my church that needed help with a family member that had several handicaps.

Thanks to the skills and license that I acquired prior as an EMT, I was able to get the job and have gained not only a steady income, but life-long friends, people that care and are good. To think back, it may have seemed that it was a waste of time to get my EMT license and I could have done something better with my time, but everything happens for a reason by God’s grace. As my grandfather would say, “There’s no such thing as just a coincidence”. Everything and everyone has their purpose. 

I worked a full year while going to college taking my prerequisite classes. Earned all the money I needed for the program and was off to the races. I got accepted into a Diagnostic Medical Sonography program, which only accepted 12 students every year out of 100 applicants. I continued to work weekends at my job and went to school interning at various hospitals as part of the program. I was offered a job my first year in the 2 year medical program, which was unheard of. I told my program director that I had an interest in becoming a Surgical Physician Assistant. Per her recommendation, I spent a semester in a cadaver course, where I figured out that my skills with the scalpel were quite good. My program director was well connected in the medical field and desired to help me achieve my dream. She certainly had the means to make my aspirations come true having worked for Yale and being the top OB/GYN sonographer in the state, if not in the country. She had all the connections necessary and I had the drive, as well as the talent, to achieve this goal I had in mind. 

The path seemed to be laid out before me. Go to college, study hard, preserver through late nights to come out the other end with a job that I could be proud of doing, because I knew that I was making a difference in people’s lives. Continue to work hard as a sonographer while saving money to pay for the next and final step, which would be the operating room, the pinnacle of American medicine. To be the man that could save another person’s life by sheer technique and comprehension of human anatomy. In my eyes this was a good path. 

Around the year 2016, I had begun to notice subtle changes in American culture and attitude towards life. It appeared more indulgent, more accepting of sin, and less accepting of the truth. People seemed to complain more than they acted. Almost suddenly it became acceptable to go through a red light when no one was looking. But someone is always watching, even if you don’t see or acknowledge Him. The penalty for sin is death. 

There had been many things that I encountered in the medical field that did not make sense to me. Why is it that even though America has the best healthcare system, the population is one of the unhealthiest? Why does a plastic (butt and cheeks) surgeon get paid more than a surgeon who can put together a leg that’s been ripped apart by a chainsaw? How can a doctor go from one room consoling a woman who just lost her 4th in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby, then go to another room where they plan the dismemberment of a healthy baby, as if the previous experience did not occur? The inconsistencies were all far too familiar. These things cannot last long under their own weight. I told several people whom I knew that there was a change coming to America. Most told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, some just silently listened. 

Around this time I found the comedian Owen Benjamin, who was talking about all the things I had been seeing, while no one else was. Interestingly, it was also around this time that I had a chainsaw accident that would propel me into a better future. I had to take 6 months off from my medical program and it was during this time that I intensely studied how to properly operate and fix chainsaws. I also learned how to climb trees and cut them down with various rigging equipment.

I thought I might want to go on to be a lineman as I learned to climb and found that I needed a commercial drivers license (CDL) to even be considered for an apprenticeship at a local union. I signed up with a local CDL school, paid in full to get into a fixed rate, because I saw the value in this and knew changes were coming. I don’t know why I did all these things at the time. It certainly seemed insane to my family at the time. I just had a feeling that this was important and the right thing to do.

Then 2019 hit everyone like a ton of bricks. I realized that I had to let go of my dream of becoming a surgeon. It was painful because I knew I could do it, but at what cost? Where do you stop and when? This was it for me. I knew now was the time to act, because the times are changing and so must I. All the hours spent on YouTube learning to climb, cut, and fix had finally begun to pay off. My medical program was following the lead of everyone else in the medical community, turning away from logic and reason. I knew there was no going back and that I couldn’t, with a clear conscience, work in the field. 

I finished the program in 2020 and got that paper I had worked so hard for. But I was already looking towards where I was going next. I saw many streams of ideas, like streams of invisible ribbons laying above my head, which I could grab on to. All leading further ahead into an unknown future, but with faith I am less fragile and can stand against the persistent winds of trial.  Now I have my class A CDL and am currently clearing 3 acres of land for a friend of mine who wants to build a farm. This same friend also got me in contact with his brother who works for a crane company and I am in the process of getting a job there. Drivers and climbers are needed everywhere. There are plenty of open positions for the taking. All most people ask for is that you be honest, not drink, not do drugs, and show up on time.

While I was able to attain these skills and walk these paths, they would not have been possible without the generosity of people like my father and grandmother who sacrificed much of their time and money to put me through high school, my grandfather who spent many late nights talking with me about life and how a man ought to be, and the kindness of many strangers whom never knew me, yet shared their life with me. In a like fashion, I deal generously with what I have to others. It is better to give than to receive and it is good to help those you do not know, because even some have catered to angels. These acts are pleasing to God and such sacrifice He enjoys. 

For those seeking to find a skill or to grow, my advice would be to seek the truth. You will be provided the skills and tools necessary to walk further than those who are not. It is my sincerest hope to be a humble reflection of the light that is poured into me, for what is a man without God and Jesus Christ? I hope it is yours as well.