A 90 mph fastball with a fist-sized rock will probably do some damage <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

There's supposedly some fairly strong evidence that hand-thrown rocks were used for warfare by some South Sea island tribes, so probably they also hunted in this fashion. I daresay few of us could manage a 90 mph toss but even half that speed might be enough to bring down (or at least stun) a medium sized animal. And while throwing rocks will likely earn you the disapproval of your neighbours, throwing a baseball will garner, at most, ridicule. <img src="images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

One technique that I have never seen discussed, even in Peter Goodchild's "Survival Secrets of the North American Indians", is one that my brother accidentally discovered when he was a teenager (and a keen birdwatcher). We were camping in Nova Scotia (around the Cape Blomidon area on the Bay of Fundy, IIRC) and there was a long beach, fairly deserted except for a large colony of sandpipers. As we walked along the beach, the sandpipers hopped ahead of us, maintaining their "fight or flight" distance. Naturally, the farther we walked, the more closely packed the birds became. Eventually, wanting to see them fly, my brother picked up a small stone and threw it at them. (He was probably in his early teens, not an athlete, and didn't throw it very hard.) The birds took to the air, except there was one which was unable to fly. We caught it and put it in a box, intending to nurse it back to health. Continued walking, the birds (which had returned and alighted further down the beach) continued hopping away from us, and my brother repeated the rock-tossing. Again, one of the birds was unable to fly and we picked it up and put it in the same box, rather puzzled as to what would cause two birds to have broken wings. Suddenly the penny dropped; while the odds against hitting a bird on the wing with a casually tossed stone were astronomical, the chance of hitting one when there were a couple of hundred of them taking off simultaneously was pretty much 100 percent.

Had we been hunting, we could easily have bagged enough to feed a large family without breaking sweat; especially with two of us, we could have started at opposite ends of the beach, walked toward each other, and then flung a handfull of stones into the midst. I'm sure we would have bagged at least a dozen on our first try, with minimal effort. I simply can't believe the Micmac didn't do this routinely, unless there's something about shorebird meat that makes it unpalateable.

Btw, we did nurse the two injured birds back to health - with the grudging assistance of a renowned local birdwatcher, who pretty clearly thought we were a pair of unprincipled savages and had no scruples about telling us so - and released them a week later. <img src="images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />