“A Twig Snapped”

A pearly-white object interrupted the returned white captive’s still-hunt. Two halves of a clam’s shell rested in the grass beside the watering hole. More shells, some broken with teeth marks, lay nearer the water. “The work of an ambitious raccoon,”  the woodsman whispered. Then a twig snapped in the cedar trees to the west… Old Northwest Territory, in the Year of our Lord, 1795…