I was thinking you grip the snout.
It is pretty long - more like a staff than a walking stick in length. The top part is purely decorative.
Malthus do you have pictures from different stages of its construction? Would you start a thread talking about how you made it, including how you picked up the techniques you used? That is just too many kinds of cool.
I had a stick. Painted it with chrome paint, so it looked like metal. Carried it around for months. I think I was 16 or 17, though.
I had many a stick in my girlhood–sticks were more or less the whole point of getting a Swiss Army Knife.
I’ve been happily introducing my two-year-old granddaughter to sticks the last couple of weeks. Yesterday we fished all afternoon and evening and she was quite happy digging in the dirt with her stick. And yes, she already wants to keep them and take them home.
Thanks. 
I don’t have other pics made during construction.
Basically I just uprooted a maple sapling and carved the roots for the head of the stick with a jack-knife. I sawed the tines off of a cast deer antler I found lying around, carved sockets in the stick, and glued them in. I found a couple of malacite beads and nailed them in as eyes.
As for what to carve, it just sort of evolved as I carved it. The roots looked kind of like a dragon’s head, so I just made them look more like what they already looked like. Since I like swirly abstract patterns, I used those.
It’s pretty easy to do, if you have a lot of time - carving maple is hard, as it is a very hard wood.
I fashioned myself a stick on nearly every camping trip.
I had many sticks, and never put an eye out. Mum lied!
No, but quite often on woodland hikes, I would try and find a decent walking stick upon entering the wood. During the walk, it got trimmed to fit, side branches broken off, the top smoothed out, etcetera. During the walk it served all purposes of The Stick. At the end of the walk, I threw it next to the path in the hope that someone else would use it. There was no use, or room, for a Stick in my apartment.
When we lived up in Friday Harbor I found a stick around the marina. I thought it was plastic, but it ended up being fiberglass. My hands were burning for a good three days from that damned thing. Since then I’ve always gone strickly organic for any such sticks.
Exactly. You don’t want a stick that’s too long because then it’s a pole. A pole’s good too but it’s different from a stick. A stick is about waist high and a pole is about shoulder high. If what you had was in between you had to give it the weapon test. You start a fight with your brother and use it as a weapon. If you hold it with one hand and swing it like a sword, it’s a stick. If you hold it with two hands and swing it like a quarterstaff, it’s a pole.
I never had a stick as a child but as a late teen for a few years after campout I had a walking stick (staff? it was six feet, not terribly straight, twice as thick at the base as the tip, debarked and detwigged/debranched) kicking around my bedroom for no apparent reason, and then after that I found myself in possession of a three foot long piece of straight green bamboo as thick as my pinky (I don’t know where I got it) that was perfect for turning the lights on/off without leaving my bed. Also for poking things (and people) in the room as needed.
Based on this thread, though, I’m not sure either of those counts as a “stick”.
There is an elemental connection between the stick and the pocket knife. Unless you cut your stick with your pocket knife, it is neither truly a stick nor truly yours. It is, at best, a borrowed twig.
Hey, give me some credit. I’m moderately certain that the bamboo was outright stolen.
And the walking stick was definitely cut, and rather a lot - but I think the pocketknife was borrowed. I don’t recall owning one.
Seconded.
I’ll drag out my Dremel. I won’t copy yours. I’ll make my own, “in the style of” Malthus. 
It precluded me from needing to keep one. I could just find a new one each time I set out.
Two truly womderful things, one in each hand, each begging for contact with the other.
And a boy (sometimes a girl) happy to oblige.
I don’t want to be a kid again, but most often it was good.