[This entry likely appeals only to the deep-diving combat thinker. It is best read in conjunction with Combat Archeology: Surface Mining & The Amber Problem. That link also has freebie video.]
We open with an anecdote to illustrate one of today’s two points.
Two trappers, one old one young, wound up hunting and travelling together for a season. The younger respects the elder’s wisdom and know-how and keeps an avid eye on all that he does. He treats this season as one of intensive study. He watches how the old man cuts for sign, where he places traps, where he skips traps in areas that seemed fertile ground at first glance. He even subtly tries to imitate the old man’s series of odd rolling movements that he performs after he alights from horseback and just before they head off to trail game. In short, whatever the old man does, he does. He has a thirst for knowledge.
But in the beginning, he asks few questions, a bit of pride and all that.
As the relationship matures, he ventures questions and receives cogent and canny answers about reading sign, choosing camps sites, hiding your own sign, and myriad other things. Finally, one morning after a long ride through a snowclad coulee, the two are going through their pre-hunt ritual of slow rolling movements.
He finally asks, “So, is this series of movements something you picked up from your time living with the Crow?”
The old man answers, “No.”
“Is it a bit of tolling to lull game?” [See this blog for the lowdown on Tolling and another version of today’s lesson on misinterpreting.]
“No.”
“Then, if you don’t mind me asking, why do we do this?”
“I have bad hips; I don’t know why you do it.”
And that slight moral reveals one side of today’s combat lesson.
The young trapper was smart and attentive, but perhaps so tunneled on his own cache of knowledge and looking for significance in everything he sees, he rendered labels and meanings where none might exist.
What does that have to do with lumberjack savate?
We must never forget that we are receiving testimony from witnesses seeing things through their own cache of experience [or inexperience.]
Say, we are backwoodsmen with a knowledge of what savate is, and know it is of French derivation. If we come across Quebecois speaking lumberjacks who let some kicks fly during a scrum, we are likely to report it as, “Ah, I am seeing the French influence. They do savate.”
Could be….
Could also be, we are seeing the influence of a Cornish miner who drifted North to chop wood for a season and in the midst of a fight he tossed in some purring. Others saw it worked and they did it to.
Could also be, we are seeing lumberjacks adding the kicking aspects they saw amongst Cheyenne and other tribes.
It is often the witness that gets to label what he sees, rightly or wrongly. Perhaps we will come across the diary one day of a venturesome Chinese man who left his family in Hunan to come to the States to work on the railroad. He witnesses a lumberjack fight, observes the kicking and records, “These woodsmen know kung fu.” [Not an unsound proposition considering the mingling of populations, but you get my drift.]
We must recall that friends of Texas Ranger Frank Hamer assumed he learned savate because of his propensity to kick. They assumed Savate because, well, savate has kicks. They had read or had heard of savate and put two and two together.
According to Hamer himself, he just kicked because it worked.
Like the young trapper we must be wary to make broad or concrete connections where none may exist. Things are often far less “formalized” then we may think, particularly in the time period we are focusing on and in such remote pockets of lineal influence.
Yet another reason why, “Oh, lumberjack savate? Cool! If I study today’s savate I’m in good company.”
Yes, perhaps, you will be in good company, but don’t assume too much from a small amount of evidence. The story often takes more digging and, in many cases, is more interesting than that first glance.
[For more Rough& Tumble history, Indigenous Ability hacks, and pragmatic applications of old school tactics historically accurate and viciously verified see our RAW/Black Box Subscription Service.]
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