This is a recent commission for my favorite blacsksmith JE Forge, where I do hammering and stuff as super-junior apprentice blacksmith. Joe ships his strikers (what is a striker? video) wrapped in greeting cards for packaging, so he figured, why don’t we print our own?

We did a community craft sale one of these recent Saturdays too, which was conveniently located right across the creek at the old one-room schoolhouse. So glad that there’s still a part of California that has this kind of thing it’s not all strip malls and high-rise apartments yet. Joe sets out at two miles an hour in a little tractor, with a mini forge, a small anvil and an enormous anvil post, ready to do some demonstrations for the kids at the school. I roll out there a bit later, after posting a no-doubt-awful Saturday Morning joke to a certain website, and Joe’s like ‘oh by the way I forgot x’. I say no problem, I’ll just jump the creek and grab x, back in a jiffy. Thus began the first of fifteen trips of jumping the creek because x or y or z was needed. A wrench. Some bearing grease. Dutch ovens. Pick something. As I’m hopping the creek over and over again, I start to notice my surroundings, like, under my feet as I’m leaping over the water there’s this white ghostly shape…and it slowly dawns on me that I’m starting at a spinal column.

This has got to be the creepiest thing ever, as my brain is trying to catch up. First I recognize the spine, then the skeletal head with at least one eyeball still in it’s socket, a jumble of bones. I was never so glad to see antlers in my life. It’s not a person, I tell myself, people don’t have horns. But now I’ve discovered why the buzzards were camped out by the creek yesterday, there’s a dead deer in the water. Can’t leave it there, I think, but I don’t want to dive into the rotting mess immediately, this is going to take thought how to lever it out. Joe’s waiting on his skyhook.

Meanwhile, back at the schoolhouse, Joe is doing a brisk trade, lighting things on fire, swinging hot metal around on his bouncy little anvil. He’s picked up a cadre of very interested young men, who camped out hungrily around the little forge, exactly like lone wolves trying to join a pack. So Joe has all kinds of projects on his list of things he’s got to make that day, but all those things were boring stuff like campfire irons, or s-hooks, and since he’s got an audience he says ‘why not make a knife!’ You know, like you do, with this teetering forge and tink-tink little two pound hammer. He’d just picked up some free hoof rasps from a local horseshoer, and there’s this 18 inch rasp. Joe is a genius with metal and strong as a bull, so it takes him about six heats, and all the sudden the 18 inch rasp has become a 24 or 26 inch sword. Jim Bowie would have liked the size of this knife. Not to be outdone, I volunteered to grind it, because we’ve got secret grinding techniques, so the 10-14 jumps across the dead deer in the creek were me holding a smoking-hot sword for dear life in tongs, praying that I don’t drop it or it doesn’t get splashed and warped or cracked by the shock of the cold water. In the end, we did everything but the handle, and I took that thing to a 600 grit polish in under an hour and a half. Sword level unlocked. It sold to one of the eager young wolves, and jump 15 was to get a piece of hard burl black walnut and some copper wire for him so he could finish the handle himself. While Joe is demonstrating to him how to make rivets out of copper, I decide to tackle the deer. It was a big deer, for California.

It must have been in the water for a few days, but not all that many, because there was a lot of flesh still attached, it was waterlogged, rotten, heavy and it stunk like one of the worst smells I’ve ever experienced. It also splattered me good. I got it out of the water though, now I don’t have to worry about the cat poisoning himself by drinking downstream. As I trudge up the bank, soaked, reeking like satan, freezing cold and utterly exhausted, I realize that the audience has moved from the schoolhouse to our house. Joe is busily showing tools to a group of kids, and is working out with their very nice mother, who is wearing a very stylish felt chapeau, how to get a blacksmithing class going for them. Here I am covered in brains and embarrassment and she is politely making small talk with me as her sons are racing around looking at farm implements. I’m mortified and stinking, and she was very gracious and kind. I’ll be in better shape for the blacksmith class though, Joe’s getting everything together so that we can run two forges and anvils at a time. I love working with kids, once they see how hot the iron is, the seriousness of their expression, and then the joy that comes when they realize they can bend the steel like butter. It’s great to see, it’s like imparting the ancient knowledge of a magical guild. Come to think of it. That’s exactly it. Well, that’s my Saturdays. Pure magic.

we all know what Xander does on Saturdays.



