In New Hampshire: Splotched in the Woods

By John Skow

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.

These old friends and adversaries had once made the national press with a backyard decathlon, one of whose events required contestants to dogtrot through the intricacies of a croquet course, portaging a full-size canoe. But while the decathlon was amusing, it was not fully satisfying in terms of life-or-death savagery. The symbolism of the Nel-Spot, on the other hand, was red in tooth and claw. Someone mentioned seeing an ad for the pistol in a magazine, and it was instantly clear that opportunities for misuse were endless. The three of them roughed out the National Survival Game almost instantly. There would be a forested tract of about 100 acres and up to twelve competitors stalking one another through the underbrush with Nel-Spots. The first assassin to collect a flag from each of the four flag stations would win, provided he escaped being shot.

Everyone had an emphatic opinion about the new game. Virtually all women and quite a few men pronounced it sicko or macho-childish, or both. Almost all the remaining men, including a considerable number who were not gun fondlers, wanted to try it. After press reports of the first game, held in New Hampshire last summer, appeared, strangers began calling up Gaines and his friends to ask where they could play. After some early problems with insurance ("You want liability coverage for what?), they began selling kits at $145 each, consisting of the Nel-Spot, a holster, a supply of CO2 and paint pellets, a set of rules and nofog protective goggles.

Now there was talk of regional competitions, leading to a national tournament from which one gifted stalker and marksman would emerge unsplotched. Most of the contestants on hand the day I played were middle-aged prospective dealers who were thinking of setting up commercial game centers on their own land. Wayne Hockmeyer, 43, who runs a river-rafting business on the Kennebec, had come from Maine. Jerry Campbell, 36, a fur trapper, had driven in with a friend from Perth, Ont. Robert Curtiss, 39, who works in real estate for a subsidiary of AT&T, came from Cranford, N.J., despite a protest from his horrified boss.

We were to play a team game, on a narrow, forested, hilly 20-acre plot several hundred yards long. We split into two seven-man squads, put on our goggles, tied on red or yellow armbands and entered the woods. Our enemy was a quarter-mile away. Gaines and another man would defend our yellow flag. A single freelance scout would head out by himself to do what damage he could, and four of us would range as an attack squad to capture the opposing red flag. I loped off with the attackers, a middle-aged gun-control advocate in a camouflage shirt, knocking the brush aside with my pistol.

Through a gulley and up a rise: almost instantly the broken terrain overcame the coherence of strategy. I could see one of my team members, then none. Then a figure appeared in a clearing 15 yds. away, wearing a red armband, firing at a target I could not see. I shot, heard the figure say "Eccch, you got me," in a conversational tone and saw a yellow stain from my pellet on his shirt. Feeling quick and clever, I ran on in a crouch. In a stand of small trees, too skinny for good cover, a red player and I caught sight of each other and began to shoot. The pistols made phutt, phutt noises. I could see the paint pellets spin past me, although they were too fast to duck away from. My fourth or fifth shot hit the red player, who said "Aaaargh!"the way comic-book villains used to do when they got bopped by Captain Marvel, whom I now felt myself to resemble.

That was the key to the game's unexpected lightness of mood. This was an acted-out comic book, adult cops and robbers. It certainly did not carry the brutal symbolic weight of fantasized murder. When Hockmeyer, the Maine riverman, shot me as I was about to grab the red flag and glory, I said "Ooog, good shot" and immediately felt slow and stupid, not quick and clever. But that was the extent of it; I didn't feel dead.

After lunch--I sat next to Hockmeyer--I watched the second game as an observer. Scott Smith, 25, a young marksman from Cambridge, N.Y., lay doggo behind a fallen tree and picked off five red marauders as they attacked his yellow goal. A very long period of woods noises and bug bites followed. Then, less than 15 min. before the game's 2-hr, limit expired, Smith slipped away into the brush. More woods noises; then with 30 sec. to go, Smith crashed into view with a captured red flag and sagged to the ground, chest heaving. He had knocked off the last remaining red defender and won the game. From the woods around, players he had splotched earlier stood up and cheered. Then all of us went to see whether there was any more beer in the ice chest. --By John Skow

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