Puzzle

Annemarie Hammer of Heidelberg, Germany was frankly perplexed. To the editors of Heute, a U.S.-sponsored, LIFE-like magazine, she wrote: "I don't see how this is possible. Won't you please print the answer to the puzzle?" What baffled her was a reprint of Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoon showing one set of ski tracks passing both sides of a tree (see cut). From Heute's literal-minded German readers came a flood of confident answers. Samples:

>The skier had obviously come downhill on one foot, reclimbed the hill and come down on the other.

>The skier had slipped one foot out of his ski boot as he approached the tree, slipped it back after he passed.

>Two amputees skied down hill clinging to each other, parted as they came to the tree, resumed mutual support thereafter.

A thoughtful Nuernberger suggested that it might be a kind of joke, wrote six pages of tight Gothic script on the philosophy of humor.

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