Dear Julianne, Here's the report I promised you on the "Teenage Mutant Ganja Tuttles". Let me start by saying that any fancied resemblance of this story to any real persons, places, or events is purely coincidental. These incidents transpired over thirty years ago, and memories may have been corrupted. It all started innocently enuf. Steve H”hlenmeier said that a group from CCNY (City College of New York) Outing Club was coming to cave with us (us being the Union College Outing Club) that weekend. Since I was the only one with no classes Friday afternoon, I was the obvious choice to open up the Outing Club cabin, as well as to flag the trail in from the road at the bus stop. I should have refused. My idea of a good time definitely does not include riding on any bus. But it was only thirty miles in the farting, roaring monster. I told the station master to expect a Trog Tuttle & associates on the bus from New York City, and hiked out to the cabin. The raccoons had been partying on the food someone had carefully locked in the cupboards, but otherwise it was the same old Outing Club cabin. I had no idea of whom I was supposed to host. All I knew was CCNY and "Trog" Tuttle. I had visions of some hulking Neanderthal with a Brooklyn accent. So when this little elf with an enormous backpack and a guitar appeared on the porch and announced, "Hi. I'm Troglodytie Tuttle," she was not at all what I was expecting. "Are you all there is?", I asked. "Oh, the rest of the Hole Gang will be here eventually. Even city kids aren't likely to get lost along a trail sandwiched between Schoharie Creek and Terrace Mountain. But they will think it a long ways. I just went ahead; I wanted to collect some botanical specimens anyway." She then started pulling weeds out of her backpack. "And what fine Egadolinia hypercriticum you have growing here. I'll check for novel alkaloids when I get back to my laboratory." Eventually seven other collegiates could be heard shouting and thrashing in the brush. CCNY had arrived. They all recovered from their adventure while Trog and I climbed up to the spring to turn on the cabin water supply. She found more funny looking weeds with incomprehensible names. "Do you have any witches around here? I'm doing ethnobotany research, and the best place to look is in the witches' gardens. I've already produced three commercial pharmaceuticals and a lot more that don't have commercial value. Medicinal plants might make a good cash crop here too. Schoharie County needs some alternative sources of income. You could grow ginseng on this hillside." Trog must have covered a half mile for every hundred yards, running here and there and looking at every weed and bush. "Don't you ever slow down? You will be too worn out to go to Knox Cave tomorrow," I asked in hope of getting a rest break. It is a long climb to the springhead. "I don't need to rest. I don't carry around a hundred pounds of excess baggage like you do. It's an advantage, sometimes, being a mutant." I wouldn't have called her a mutant, but rather the result of the dwarves frolicking with the pixies, but I hadn't really looked too closely at her hands yet. It was only after we were back at the cabin and she was playing with her guitar that it became apparent that Trog had six fingers. Later that evening she let me play her guitar. It was, after all, an ordinary guitar. It was simply that she wasn't as short on fingers as I was. But the flute was hers alone. I got part of the story while trying to fall asleep. I don't know if she ever slept; she was chattering away when I finally passed out, and she had collected another pile of weeds and caught enuf fish for breakfast for all of us when I woke up. But the flute was what saved her fingers. She had been born in the Venezuelan Highlands, while her parents were living with the Younawhacchahuzzie tribe, studying their birds and medicinal plants. These primitive indians would have reacted to cutting the extra fingers off from a baby the same way as they would have reacted to cutting off her head. Trog was seven by the time she even saw her first western type medical doctor, who, of course, wanted to make her normal for a price. But, the flute. But how can this girl play her flute if you mutilate her hands? We eventually got everybody together and took off to spend the day crawling around in Knox Cave. But sometimes it is helpful to be mutant, or at least to be only four feet tall. Trog acted the same in the cave as she did on the mountain, covering about five times the distance as I did. Only this time she didn't find any new plants to collect. Just little bottles of mud from here and there. Sunday afternoon, we all went back to Schenectady, where the CCNY crowd washed off the cave mud as best they could, and boarded the great farting roaring iron monster for the Great City. Later I was to receive an invitation to visit Trog in New York City, see her father's laboratories and botanical gardens at Hempstead, and meet some of her bizarre family. I got a chance to go "sewerlunking", which is what cavers do when they have sewers but no caves. Some of these kids had actually moved into an apartment they had built in an unused subway tunnel. But that's another story.