I was recently discussing low-tech hunting with a weekend woodsman who is a bow hunter and is investing in an atlatl. This seems to be in anticipation of a nationwide ban on firearms, which I think is still about 12 to 16 years off. He asked me if I knew anything about a rabbit stick. The only thing I know about a rabbit stick proper is what I saw in the movie Missouri Breaks with Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, in which the later uses a rabbit stick [a cave man’s throwing star] on a rabbit and later a human.

When I was 13 years old I moved to a rural portion of Western Pennsylvania. The half dozen boys in my age bracket who ostracized me [me having an unsettling habit of attacking those who leveled an insult at my pubescent ego complex] informed me that they did not venture into the woods they called ‘bush’ [a small wooded valley with a creek] as opposed to the civilized woods they rode motorcycles in on the south face of the hill, except as a group armed with air rifles or bats. The reason for this was ‘a pack of wild dogs’.

That is all I had to hear to send me off in the woods alone to make primitive weapons with my pocket knife and search out these mangy hounds—which I hoped were wolf size and would be worthy opponents—for a nasty primordial battle. The few dogs I ran into either wanted to be petted or took one look at me and ran for civilized territory where humans wore more than cut-off shorts and did not carry sharp sticks and knotty clubs. I did bag some small animals and ran off a few teenagers from other neighborhoods.

The weapon I used to hunt rabbits, once I found out that spears were impractical for something so small and hunkered down, was a simple throwing stick. Honestly, it was designed with large canines and humans in mind. But since none of these enemies ever materialized to fulfill my psychotic teenage battle fantasies, I contented myself with rabbits, and targets made of carpet stretched over a wooden frame. Years later in a Baltimore City park I made and cached a few after being stalked by some young muggers, who I had driven off with a combat knife. Not wanting to be arrested for the knife, I decided to seed the park with Stone Age ordinance: two throwing sticks and a short thrusting spear, and kept the knife at home after it had been used to construct its replacements.

I used pine and maple saplings, preferring a length equal to that from my elbow to the tip of my middle finger. [A cubit] For birds and squirrels I liked one a little thicker than my thumb. For the hoped-for canine and human enemies I chose shafts almost as thick as my wrist, making it a good slash and thrust club too. The lighter model could brain birds and squirrels. The heavier one could penetrate matt carpeting from three paces with penetration ranging from 1-6 inches and having as much to do with the rotation as the range, making it really erratic. The range was similar to a tomahawk, but you could get twice the hits on targets that were moving or not paced off. The weight is centered since both tips were sharpened for a three-inch taper.

I injured one rabbit with a light model, and my dog finished the job. I broke another rabbit’s back with the heavier stick. Since I was not allowed to hunt like the locals and was feeling bad about my dog taking all the heat for the rabbit killing, I quit hunting and murdered targets instead. I would like to say I can report on this simple weapon’s efficacy against hood rats, but those punks stopped trailing me from the bus line after I pulled that 10 inch gravity blade on them.

The heavier version is essentially a two-pointed club. If Charles ever gets my time machine fixed I’ll take it back and try it on some unsuspecting hominid and let you know how it goes…