In the 1980s and early '90s, I did contract work for the Buck Knives Company custom department .

The first series I did for them featured a Gross Ventre (pronounced grow-vawn) Indian named Holding Eagle. I loved the expression in his eyes.

I scrimmed 60 of these knives. Notice the "Fisk" signature (above)  has not fully developed yet. I came up with the stylized "Fisk" when I did this series, and refined it into what it looks like now by the time I finished them.

Above: about 1/6 of the series.

Below, one of the 60 series in a retail case in San Diego in 1986. They sold like this for $799.

Below: A page from the Buck Custom catalog. They featured a line of three standard skinners (small, medium, large) with standard Indians on them that I scrimmed. The small a large skinners are shown here.

Below: When I first talked to the Buck Custom shop about doing work for them, they gave me a couple pictures of scrimshaw as examples of what they might want, and asked me to scrimshaw something like them as an example of my work. One the photos was of a racoon, shown below right, along side the scrimshaw I did on the left.

Above: This was a custom order for the Hawaiian State Seal and image of King Kamehameha on a Buck 110 folder.

Below: I don't remember exactly how many two-knife sets of this series of American Bison knives I scrimmed in 1987 on medium skinners and the 110 folders.

Below: This was for the Buck family, showing the four generations of Buck men--Hoyt (far right) who started the company, his son Al, who was alive at the time, his son Charles, and his son, Chuck. A few years later, the company had the idea to have me scrim 100 of these for their 100th anniversary of knifemaking. I said I would do it, and even made a copy of the original as a prototype. It didn't break my heart when they changed their minds; it would have been extremely challenging to do 400 of these tiny (about 1/2" tall) faces and make them look like the real people every time.

Below: I recently (2007) ran across this Buck Custom large skinner with Damascus blade that I scrimmed, for sale at a knife collector's site--price: $12,000. The scrim is of two moose.

Below: Buck employees sometimes got  their dream knife as a special reward. One had me put mastodons on the handle of this custom Bowie.

Below: I don't remember how many of these I did in late 1992. Buck folders for ...the Safari Club?

Below: While doing custom jobs for Buck customers, my work sometimes went to the dogs.