“Fire Feather”

“I need to clear my fusil,” Joseph Brown said when he returned to the station camp at dusk. The woodsman stepped to the edge of the clearing, and facing away from the canvas shelters took aim at a rotten pine trunk. “Looked like a fire feather,” one of his hunting companions said as he sliced a slab from a bear roast. Swamp Hollow, Old Northwest Territory, in the Year of our Lord, 1792.