my pants were
peppered with about a dozen little holes like buckshot. I didn't have
to drop my pants to know my legs were too. I could feel it. And blood
started to ooze.

I figured, of course, that Uncle John had finally shot me and I at once
looked on the bright side. I would be a cinch for a fast promotion to
vice president. But Uncle John swore he hadn't been near a gun. So we
guessed some other hunter must have done it, seen what he had done and
then prudently ducked. At least no one stepped forward.

It was a moonlight night. With Uncle John helping me we made it the two
and a half miles back down the trail to Poxville, where we'd left our
car and stuff. We routed out the only doctor in the area, old Doc
Grandy.

He grumbled, "Hell, boy, a few little hunks o' buckshot like that and
you make such a holler. I see a dozen twice's bad as this ever' season.
Ought to make you wait till office hours. Well--hike yourself up on the
table there. I'll flip 'em out for you."

Which he proceeded to do. If it was a joke to him, it sure wasn't to
me, even if they weren't in very deep. Finally he was done. He stood
there clucking like an old hen with no family but a brass doorknob.
Something didn't seem quite right to him.

Uncle John gave me a good belt of the bourbon he'd been thoughtful
enough to pack along.

"What was it you say hit you, boy?" Doc Grandy wanted to know, reaching
absently for the bottle.

"Buckshot, I suppose. What was it you just hacked out of me?"

"Hah!" He passed the bottle back to Uncle John. "Not like any buckshot
I ever saw. Little balls, or shells of metallic stuff all right. But
not lead. Peculiar. M-mph. You know what, boy?"

"You're mighty liberal with the iodine, I know that. What else?"

"You say you saw a big flash of light. Come to think on it, I saw a
streak of light up the mountainside about that same time. I was out
on the porch. You know, boy, I believe you got something to feel
right set up about. I believe you been hit by a meteor. If it
weren't--ha-ha--pieces of one of them flying saucers you read
about."

Well, I didn't feel so set up about it, then or ever. But it did turn
out he was right.

Doc Grandy got a science professor from Eastern State Teachers College
there in Poxville to come look. He agreed that they were meteor
fragments. The two of them phoned it in to the city papers during a
slow week and, all in all, it was a big thing. To them. To me it was
nothing