So our dear friend down the road calls to say there is a cougar calling that they think is close to us, so I break out my Mini 14 and shine the flashlight uphill, no cougar but I fired three quick rounds toward a 15 gallon barrel I have near the top of our property and after the last round was fired I saw some kind of loop of burning material about a foot long flying through the air, thinking that that was strange at the time I came back inside and refilled the magazine and then went outside to look up hill and saw that there was a small fire burning. At that I came back inside and grabbed a small fire extinguisher and strapped the rifle over my shoulder, cougar could still be around, walked up the hill to the fire, which was about 100 yards up the hill and had grown to about a 10 foot circle. By the time I got there I was really wiped out, still healing from the 2018 congestive heart failure, said a quick prayer to God for strength, pull the safety clip from the extinguisher and put out the flames, which ran the extinguisher out, after which I grabbed an old tree branch, broke in in half and beat the coals with it as well as stepping on an area that caught fire again. Meanwhile my wife didn't know where I went, she thought I'd gone over to our friends place and called there and since I wasn't there he came over to our place, I yelled at him to bring a shovel and he came up and helped me knock down as much a we could, but we could see that there was a lot of smoke coming up from around an old rotted stump, thankfully he had brought a two way radio with him and he told my wife to call the fire department. When they showed up they said it was a good thing because the fire would probably flare up and brought up a hose from their truck and dumped 300 gallons on the burn area and told me to check it out tomorrow. This all happened from 9:00 to 10:00 PM and while some of this was going on my friend Tom said he kept hearing things going on in the woods around us. Starting a fire with 55 grain copper covered FMJ bullets may never happen again, so from now on I'll probably stick to a shotgun, less likely to ignite anything that far away. An interesting thing is that when the much younger fire fighters came up the hill, they were huffing and puffing, so I didn't feel so bad being able to do what I did. Anyway the whole thing made me realize just how easy a fire can start with so much dried out pine needles and broken down rotted wood around. I'm going to do some research to find out what caused that glowing string of whatever it was that started that fire, it looked like a fuse that had burned all at once.
