When other members of his engineering school graduating class went out to build bridges and highways and spaceships, Samuel Arlington Gregory got a job with a handgun designer.

It was a career the twenty-three-year-old Gregory had been pointing toward ever since he had been a little boy and had spent the summers at his grandfather's farm near Buffalo.

Grampa Gregory was a tall man with muscled, sloping shoulders who gave the impression of being built out of tanned weathered leather.

His friends called him Moose and everybody in the small New York town was his friend, because that was the way Grampa Gregory lived his life. He went to church every Sunday and stayed awake. When a neighbor's barn burned down, he was the first to volunteer to help build a new one. He lived by his word and they said in the town that Moose Gregory's handshake could be put into the bank and it'd draw interest.

He was the most middle-American of middle-Americans, except for one idiosyncrasy. He believed that the day was not far off when the Indians who had once owned and inhabited that section of the country would rise up to try to take it back.

"When that day comes, Sammy," he would tell his only grandson, "we've got to be ready. A man's got to defend what's his. You know what I mean?"

"The Indians aren't going to fight with us, Gram-pa," the eight-year-old Samuel Arlington Gregory would say. "There aren't even many Indians left."

Moose shook his head at the small boy. "Don't let them fool you. They're out there." He looked around and leaned close to the boy. "The Mafia's working with them this time. They want the Indians to get it back because they'll be able to take it away from them easier. You know what I mean?"

And young Sam Gregory would nod, even though he wasn't sure what his grandfather meant by the Mafia. The boy had come to hate his summers on the farm. He went because his parents made him go, expecting that it would help build character in the young boy. All summer long, he worked for his keep. He tried to spend as much of that work time as possible around the house helping his grandmother, a warm, cuddly woman whose smell was redolent of biscuits and dumplings and eggs and bacon. His grandfather frightened him with his talk of Indians and the Mafia, and also just because he was a big man in a big man's world. The boy did not take any solace in the knowledge that one day he would be a man and join that man's world. It was his nature to be frightened by the future, just as he was frightened of his grandfather.

And never was he more frightened than on Saturday afternoons during the summer when Moose Gregory would take two rifles, a 30.06 and a .22 caliber, down from a rack in the lightless wood-paneled living room of the farmhouse. The young boy would trail his grandfather out into the woods that ringed the 240-acre farm and that stretched, as dark as pitch, for miles in each direction. No flicker of sunlight seemed ever to have reached the forest floor.

The old man, carrying both rifles under his left arm and a bag of bottles in his right hand, would stop at a small clearing deep in the woods. He would stack a dozen bottles in one end of the clearing, on stumps, in the fork of trees, on an old hollow log. Then he would come back and direct young Sam to strip the .22 rifle and clean it. Sam would take the rifle apart, clean it with an oiled rag his grandfather kept in a waterproof pouch, and then put it back together, all under the old man's intense gaze.

Only then would Grampa Gregory give Sam bullets, .22 caliber long rifle shells. The boy slipped the shells into the ammunition reservoir of the repeating rifle, and then at his grandfather's direction fired at the bottles.

Generally he missed, and his grandfather would kick dirt, and tell him with a chill in his voice, "When the Indians and the Mafia come, you're not going to be much help, boy."

Sam would reload and try again, usually with no better results.

"You're trying too hard," the old man said. "You're holding that rifle like it's poisoned and you're afraid it's catching. You have to make it feel like part of your body. Like it belongs to you and you love it. Like this." And the old man would raise his 30.06 and, seemingly without sighting, pull off a half dozen shots that would scatter bottles and glass chips ten feet high in the air. Young Sam Gregory hated the sharp report of the guns; he hated the sight of the bottles flying; and even though he did try, he could never get the hang of it.

The old man and the boy would stay in the woods until the pocket of his grandfather's red plaid mackinaw, in which he kept a boxful of .22 caliber shells, was empty and then they would trudge back to the house.

And occasionally, the old man would notice that the boy was upset over his failure and he would clap a large hand on his shoulder and say, "Some people ain't maybe cut out for firing guns. But that doesn't mean you aren't worth a lot. Everybody can do good in the world in their own way. That's why we were put here." And young Sam would hope that was the end of the target practice, but next Saturday, the old man would reach up to the living room rack and take down the rifles again for their regular foray into the woods.

As he grew older, the boy began to read all the books he could find on rifles and handguns. With money he earned he bought himself a target rifle. He never learned his grandfather's secret of making the rifle feel a part of his body, but he learned to shoot by using telescopic sights and mechanical tricks. He developed a gadget that would automatically alter the weight of the trigger pull on a gun, so that even if he did jerk it while firing, it would be too late to have any efiect because the bullet was already on its way. Later, he devised a wrist brace to help a marksman hold a heavy handgun without wavering or swaying. He made his own guns.

And all the while, he hated guns and shooting, but something in the back of his mind kept him at it, because he wanted to prove something to his grandfather.

After engineering school, the first thing he invented was a new kind of cartridge, whose slug fragmented. However, unlike other fragmentation shells that scattered in all directions, the Gregory shell fragmented in a steady predictable pattern so that when fired at any target, one of the pieces of slug was sure to take the target down.

It was years since his grandmother had died and Grampa Gregory was living alone on the farm, still working it himself, when Sam showed up one weekend with a box of his new shells and challenged him to a shooting match.

The old man was now in his seventies. He was still big and strong looking, but to young Sam, the smell of death seemed to be on him, the feeling that this giant oak of a man had already been splintered by life's lightning and was just waiting to die.

Wordlessly the two men walked out into the woods. The only concession to the change in age was that on this trip young Sam Gregory carried the bottles.

He set the bottles on the ground, fifty yards from where his grandfather stood. He was careful to space them far enough apart so that none of his new fragmentation shells would take out two bottles at once.

He walked back to his grandfather and started to load the .22 rifle.

"Hold on, son. You ain't gonna clean that piece first?" his grandfather said.

The younger man nodded and took the weapon apart, cleaned it and reassembled it.

He loaded it and stood next to his grandfather.

"Which six you want, Grampa?" he asked.

"I'll take the ones on the left," the old man said. He moved back and sat down on a tree stump, then lifted his rifle to his shoulder and pulled off six rapid shots. Six bottles shattered and the old man looked at his grandson.