I need a hickory tree.

Something with nice shaggy bark. I have to back up against it and start rubbing up and down because THE ITCHING, MY GOD, THE ITCHING...

Sunburn. Oy.

Meanwhile dealing with backed-up data entry, and putting together the next Who Ya Gonna Owl segment. Can anyone here tell me if 'Konopka' is a reasonable name to see in England somewhere? I mostly choose my wizarding names from a list of interesting ones culled from our Chapter database, mixing up first and last names to avoid real-person problems. This doesn't seem like it's worth bothering hp_britglish about.

Le sigh.

In between work, constructing the next Who Ya Gonna Owl? segment, and putting together John's meeting with Mad-Eye Moody after what happened in Hogsmeade, I got to thinking about the Silver Corporal (or, as I call him, SCARY NINJA MOUNTIE). He's got a fairly peculiar weapon:

He belted on no firearm, but he did produce an object... He shook this in his hand. It seemed to come alive. It crawled along his arms and over his hands. It ran out into the teeth of the gale, snapping taut with a serpentine hiss.
A white rope! It was braided of some hard stuff that looked like violin strings. It had the springy quality of a rod of whale-bone.
No ordinary lass rope, this! It tapered a little, somewhat like a bullwhip, but not as much. One end was fitted with a honda in the usual fashion. The other end, the smaller, terminated in a double-edged blade of steel, honed to a razor sharpness.
As though possessed of invisible wings, this blade sped out in the Arctic twilight. It traveled faster and faster, until the eye could no logner follow it. Fully thirty feet distant, a spruce bough thick as a man's arm parted as though by magic- and the strange white rope with its fang of steel was back and coiled around the little policeman's arm before the bough had hardly jumped away in the gale.
It smacked of wizardry. But many things about the Silver Corporal smacked of that.
-"Snow Ghost", p. 145 of Scarlet Riders

I had originally wanted to have someone ask him where he got it, and have him smile and say he bought it by mail-order off 'an Eastern feller, name of Savage'. He shares a creator with Doc Savage, after all. Unfortunately, the chronologies haven't worked out; the Silver Corporal was already at work in the frozen North by 1902 or so (the date of the Fairbanks gold rush and the most reasonable time I could think of for a White girl to be shepherding herds of reindeer through that region). Neither of the stories about him could possibly take place any later than 1919; he's always referred to as 'Northwest Mounted Police', not RCMP (the change in the force's name happened in 1920), and he was clearly well accustomed to working with the white rope. Philip Jose Farmer's chronology of the Man of Bronze sets his birth year as 1901. I don't think even Clark Savage Jr. was that bloody precocious.

Would dearly love to find some other chronologically appropriate pulpy 'Eastern feller' to get the weird-ass rope from. I would rather not Easter-egg the poor man and have him say he got it off a stranger in California by the name of Brown, thanks.