up, I'll say that--primarily as a
locale, not a man.

I was, as I said before, a colony.

Sometimes I used to wonder how New England really felt about the
Pilgrims. If you think that sounds silly--perhaps one of these days you
won't.

The beginning was some ten years back, on a hunting trip the autumn
after I got out of college. That was just before I started working, as
far off the bottom as I could talk myself, which was the personnel
office in my Uncle John's dry cleaning chain in the city.

That wasn't too bad. But I was number four man in the office, so it
could have been better, too. Uncle John was a bachelor, which meant he
had no daughter I could marry. Anyway, she would have been my cousin.
But next best, I figured, was to be on good personal terms with the old
bull.

This wasn't too hard. Apart from expecting rising young executives to
rise and start work no later than 8:30 a.m., Uncle John was more or
less all right. Humor him? Well, every fall he liked to go hunting. So
when he asked me to go hunting with him up in the Great Sentries, I
knew I was getting along pretty well. I went hunting.

The trip was nothing very much. We camped up in the hills. We drank a
reasonably good bourbon. We hunted--if that's the word for it. Me, I'd
done my hitch in the Army. I know what a gun is--and respect it. Uncle
John provided our hunting excitement by turning out to be one of the
trigger-happy types. His score was two cows, a goat, a couple of other
hunters, one possible deer--and unnumbered shrubs and bushes shot _at_.
Luckily he was such a lousy shot that the safest things in the
mountains were his targets.

Well, no matter. I tried to stay in the second safest place, which was
directly behind him. So it was a nice enough trip with no casualties,
right up to the last night.

We were all set to pack out in the morning when it happened. Maybe you
read about the thing at the time. It got a light-hearted play in the
papers, the way those things do. "A one in a billion accident," they
called it.

We were lounging by the campfire after supper and a few good snorts.
Uncle John was entertaining himself with a review of some of his
nearer, more thrilling misses. I, to tell the truth, was sort of dozing
off.

Then, all of a sudden, there was a bright flash of blue-green light and
a loud sort of a "zoop-zing" sound. And a sharp, stinging sensation in
my thighs.

I hollered. I jumped to my feet. I looked down, and