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horse chestnuts. Then you get a piece of strong string. An old shoelace is good, if you have an old shoelace. Thread the string through the horse chestnut, tie a couple of good hard knots on the bottom of the string so that the horse chestnut slides to the bottom of the string and stays there.
    All you need is the one string, and the reason why I suggested a shoelace is because from time to time you’re going to have to put a new horse chestnut on the string, and the stiff tip on a shoelace makes the threading easy.

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    We called the game killers. I am told that they play it in England and call it conkers, and somebody once told me that some places in England they play it with snail shells, too, but I don’t know anything about that.
    Let’s say you find another kid, and either show him how to get a horse chestnut and thread it on a string, or let him get his own string and lend him a chestnut to start with.
    You choose up for who goes first. The one who loses holds the end of his string with the horse chestnut dangling
down. Say you’ve won the choosing up: you take the end of your string in one hand, the chestnut in the other. (All through this book, I’ve been saying right hand and left hand, but since a lot of you are left-handed, I’m just going to say one hand or the other from here on. When I was a kid I was left-handed, and now I’m more or less right-handed, so I know how confusing it can be.) The idea is to swing your killer down so it hits the other kid’s. It may take you a while to get the idea, but it’s not hard to do.
    Then you hold up your killer and he gets a shot at yours. The idea is to break his killer. After a certain number of shots, you’ll see a crack in his killer, or in yours, or in both. You keep on until one breaks, so that it can no longer stay on the string. Sometimes it happens that you bust your own killer in hitting his; that still means you lose. The kid who has the killer left on the string, no matter how it happens, is the winner. That’s the game. Now if your killer breaks his, it’s a one-killer. If it breaks another one of his, or one of another kid’s, it’s a two-killer, and so on.
    I can’t be sure about this next part, but I think that if a one-killer busted a six-killer, it then became a seven-killer. All I can remember for sure is that once I had a forty-killer.

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    If you get tired of this game, and still have some horse chestnuts left, you can make what we called bolas . That’s a Spanish word, and Mitch read somewhere that in Argentina, instead of a lasso, the gauchos, the Argentine
cowboys, used bolas . Theirs are made of rawhide and metal balls, but we made ours of horse chestnuts and string. You get three horse chestnuts and fasten each one of them to a string, oh, about two feet long. Put the string through and tie it on around so that the horse chestnuts will stay at the end of the string. Now take the other ends of the string and tie them all together.
    Now, if you will take this by one horse chestnut and whirl it around your head and let it go so that it’s aiming at a tree, when you hit the tree with any of the horse chestnuts the string will wrap around and so will the other horse chestnuts. The gauchos used them to wrap around the legs of cattle to hold them, instead of a lasso. What animals you use them on is your affair.
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    I’m not sure that we called these next things bull-roarers when we made them as kids, but I’ve since found out that’s what they’re called. I’ve also found out that they make them in many parts of the world, and in some primitive tribes, they’re used by the grownups to scare devils away. We just used them to make enough noise to drive grownups away.
    These are a cinch to make. You need two pieces of wood and a piece of string. It really doesn’t matter what
size you make these either, but a good size to start with is one