title: Echoes of Distant Thunder
author:  Frank P. Slaughter 
description: A lifelong resident of Michigan, Frank has spent many enjoyable hours sailing on the Great Lakes and flying over them as a private pilot. He is a gun corporal in the Battery D first Michigan Light Artillery reenactor group, produces a weekly radio show on Interlochen Public Radio and lives in the country with his wife Maurine and their three terriers.
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  THE SOUND OF THUNDER
  
  Wilbur Smith
  
  Four years of travel in the road less wilderness had battered the wagons.
  
  Many of the wheel-spokes and disselboonu had been replaced with raw
  
  native timber; the canopies were patched until little of the original
  
  canvas was visible; the teams were reduced from eighteen to ten oxen
  
  each, for there had been predators and sickness to weed them out. But
  
  this exhausted little caravan carried the teeth of five hundred elephant;
  
  ten -tons of ivory; the harvest of Sean Courtneys rifle; ivory that he
  
  would convert into nearly fifteen thousand gold sovereigns once he
  
  reached Pretoria.
  
  Once more Sean was a rich man. His clothing was stained and baggy,
  
  crudely mended; his boots were worn almost through the uppers and
  
  clumsily resoled with raw buffalo hide; a great untrimmed beard covered
  
  half his chest and a mane of black hair curled down his neck to where
  
  it had been hacked away with blunt scissors above the collar of his
  
  coat. Bu