PRINCETON HHH HASH #478.4 Date: October 23, 1994 Weather: Rain Venue: Hopewell Time: 2:25 (top five for length) Historical antecedents: #221.4, 4/30/89, Postage Paid sets in West Amwell - Who was Bambikiller? #345.4, 1/26/92, Solo sets "In Search of Bruno Hauptmann", #374.4, 8/19/92, Big Nut sets an abandoned hash. Hysterical antecedents: None Set By: Hand Solo Hashers: LRF, Steve Smith, Rojo, Big Nut, Geezer, Wacko, 006, The Milkman, Milkman'sroomie First to Cooler: Joe Burns Description, polemics, comments and lies: Life is Cheap in the Land of the Pheasant Pluckers "Watch out for the pheasant pluckers", said Solo sourly, as the rain poured relentlessly down on the luckless nine assembled at the entrance to the dismal Sourland Mountains Preserve in Hopewell. The body of Opus the Penguin, cruelly crushed by Solo's bike, lay nearby, and all the omens were bad. One feared that those pheasant pluckers were not likely to be pleasant phuckers. It wasn't only the omens that were bad as the intrepid group made its way along looooooog Solo straights, finally entering the woods with great relief. What a mistake! It was a woods filled with evil sights, smells, and if one could have heard anything over the pounding rain, sounds as well. It wasn't only the hideous mud pools that burbled miasma, but the unseen carcasses of innumerable former denizens of these woods that made the greater assaults on our olfactory systems. Half decomposed bodies were found on the trail, their nature hidden by the millions of hideous maggots seething around them. Strange arrows were found in trees, fearful harbingers of the fate of anyone so foolish as to become lost. And it was clear that it would be oh so easy to become lost in these dreadful woods. No benign copse of trees was this forest; rather it appeared to our dripping eyes as a darkening and malevolent field of boulders, stretching unchanging in all directions. The group stayed together, marking each precious checkmark as the treasure it surely was, with caution increasing as the gloom descended with the rain. And so it was that the inevitable happened. The evil woods snatched Big Nut from our midst like some plump morsel, like an enormous cashew. Too fearful to search, too frightened to wait, the group could only continue its random walk among the boulders until at last there was an opening and hope sprang forth like a green spring shootlet emerging from the murk. But no; hope was premature and the woods merely debouched onto that which Solo had warned us of; the lair of the Peasant Puckers. And a cruel sight it was; cage after cage, each with its captive future dinner gazing out at us with the deadened, hopeless eyes of one who has reached beyond the limits of avian endurance. The group recoiled, staggered by a vision of such boundless despair. We circumambulated Kamp Pleasant, fearful of meeting one of the Pluckers and becoming an instant Pluckee. As we crept through the dank forest, each of us speculated silently on the fate of poor Big Nut......What of those arrows? Those cages? Those maggots? Then rescue! Another road, the appearance of the arch criminal Solo, and a final woods plunge before emerging onto the marge of Amwell Lake at something past the two-hour mark. There was only one final body, a recently extinguished goose at the edge of the pond, to remind us of our narrow escape, and of Big Nut's terrible fate. Refreshed by the end of the rain as much as the beer, we searched without success until darkness finally fell. A phone call to The House of Yuan was met with silence. Had the whole family been plucked from the earth? Were they all languishing in those cheerless cages? Most important, were we never to be treated to Wen Qi's dumplings again? Next Hashes: Sunday, October 30, 2 pm, The Village Idiot sets in Deepest Deptford. Meet at the Usual Place. Sunday, November 6, 2 pm, Delay Lllama sets?? Sunday, November 13, 2 pm, Deja Merde sets?? Sunday, November 20, 2 pm, Likes It sets?? Sunday, November 27, 2 pm, Wrong Way sets?? Sunday, December 4, 2 pm, Big Nut sets??