How smoking saved my life

I almost got killed this week. I went for a very early morning walk in a New Hampshire forest, in the icy rain. Black coat, black hood, black trousers. And so the hunter saw this hunched, awkward, shambling black beast, stumbling over sodden logs, and immediately raised his rifle to his eye and cocked the trigger. One thing, and one thing only, saved me. The armed cracker, looking through his telescopic lens, thought to himself: ‘Hey, it’s a bear — but it’s… smoking a cigarette?’ And so, at the last second, refrained from pulling the trigger.

I had this brush with death related to me, with great glee, by the people who ran the bed and breakfast where I was staying. I’d been quite oblivious. Word had got round the village quite quickly about this deranged Englishman wandering through the birch and maple in the teeming rain at ten to seven in the morning, apparently pulling off a remarkably accurate bear impersonation right in the middle of the state’s official bear season. My hosts were outraged less on my behalf than because of the fact that the bloodthirsty hick with his rifle didn’t have a licence to shoot bears. That could get him into big trouble, I was told, by means of consolation. Thank Christ I smoke, then.

And praise the Lord too that my choice of cigarettes is Superkings, which are very long and thus more clearly visible. They were the reason I was taking a walk in the woods, in fact. You can’t smoke in New England within about a mile of anywhere people might be, and so I took to the forest for my first gasper of the day, thinking this would be about the only place I could do so without offending their recently acquired sensitivities. I was wrong about that, too, though.