In New Hampshire: Splotched in the Woods

Charles Gaines, the head gunman, gave a brief demonstration of how to drink beer through a camouflage head net. Then, raising the net to expose his face, he told his congregation of thugs that the day's shootings would be conducted according to the honor system. Zapped personnel were to assume that death was instantaneous. They were to expire without comment, and of course without any post-mortem cannoneering at the enemy. Judges would be available to settle torts among defunct contestants, but we who were about to play the National Survival Game, he said sternly, were to do so with a sense of fairness.

Gaines is 40, a big, fit, trustworthy-looking fellow. We listened to him uneasily as we stood in a grown-over field in North Sutton, N.H., wearing pistols, camouflage suits, face paint and desperate grins. He said he wanted to emphasize one thing: that despite criticism—here he looked a bit sheepish, and since there were a couple of wives present as spectators, it wasn't hard to guess the source of the criticism—we were not about to indulge in "fascist behavior in the woods."

Not all of us were certain of this. Earlier, as we had made a rendezvous under a highway bridge, local people had slowed their pickups and then accelerated smartly. I have been eyeballed by my fellow New Hampshiremen while dressed for jogging and tennis, but today's stares had conveyed more than a little sociable contempt. To earn the revulsion of decent citizens was satisfying, certainly, and well worth the trouble of smearing one's face with forest-tone greasepaint. But now that fun was over, and it was time to go into the woods and shoot one another.

We had already practiced with our Nel-Spot pistols, blasting away from about 30 yds. at a large sheet of plywood. The Nel-Spots are as big and heavy as .45 automatics, and just as deadly looking, although actually they are not a great deal more dangerous than water pistols. They use a carbon-dioxide propellant cartridge to fire a paint-filled gelatin ball about the size of a child's marble—.68 cal., someone estimated. The Nelson Paint Co. of Iron Mountain, Mich., developed the pistol to give stockmen and foresters a tool for marking cattle or trees from a distance. Shoot a steer on the flank with a Nel-Spot, and you color-coat him with a splotch of red or blue or yellow the size of a fried egg. easily recognizable at shipping time.

The mischief-making possibilities of this splendid sidearm may have occurred to an occasional rancher's son, with dire results for rooster weather vanes and passing semitrailers. But the Nel-Spot fell among major-league upsetters of the peace last year in Gaines' Newbury, N.H., living room. He and his friends were jawing enjoyably about whether a city man, adept at taxi-dodging and expense-account padding, could possibly have the survival skills in the outback of a hardened countryman. Hayes Noel, 40, a trader on the floor of the American Stock Exchange in Manhattan, took the hell-yes position. The hell-no side was defended by Gaines, a novelist (Stay Hungry, Dangler) and writer for outdoor magazines, and Bob Gurnsey, 39, a New Hampshireman and sometime ski-shop owner.