"Back in January, upon hearing that Thompson Falls Sen. Greg Hinkle had proposed a new state law that would legalize the use of atlatls for big-game hunting, I sent a note to my editor, proposing that I find someone to teach me that ancient technique of dart-chucking.

"You and a spear," my editor wrote back. "What could go wrong?"

A month later, my mind flashed back to her rhetorical question as I sat at the base of a small pine tree, stuck tighter than a bug on a pin, squalling like a baby in mortal agony.

That truism hit home for me in early February, while having dinner with my brother-in-law. Apropos of nothing, he mentioned that his art teacher at Salish Kootenai College, Jay Laber, was into building and hunting with atlatls.

Two weeks later, I found myself in Laber's studio in Pablo, pondering a table laid over with various atlatls that Laber had made out of everything from a knobby hawthorn branch to a Louisville Slugger baseball bat.

Laber, recognized widely for his recycled-metal sculptures such as the one of an Indian on horseback that stands outside the Adams Center on the University of Montana campus, first got into atlatls about four years ago, after his cousin gave him a replica of a 3,500-year-old atlatl.

Since then, Laber has incorporated atlatl-making into a Reservation Arts class he teaches at SKC. As a registered member of the Blackfeet Tribe - which acknowledges atlatl hunting as a traditional fair-chase means of hunting - he has also hunted and killed deer with an atlatl on the Blackfeet Reservation."

Get the Story:
Joe Nickell: Montana law moves to legalize ancient spear-throwing art (The Missoulian 3/11)