CANTON – By the heat of a late-night November campfire, four members of a modern-day order of pilgrims described the wildlife around their “fort,” this area in which they love to hunt, and what it means to be an Ancient One.

As the one known as “the Captain” talked of the critters he’s seen in this small wilderness alcove near Livermore, he was asked if the golden eagle of which he spoke, a bird that is rare in the East, might not have been a juvenile bald eagle.

The Captain said he was certain it was not. And the one known as “Nitwit” defended his friend, and explained, as he did, the unique bond that brought the four Ancient Ones together around the fire.

“We’re the only juveniles here,” Ray Hamilton cracked. And with a sudden edge of seriousness, the 48-year-old postal worker put his elbows on his knees, his head closer to the fire, and added as he looked up, “We all have Peter Pan complex.”

Like the Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth, Mass., the Ancient Ones come together as a means of survival. Not for their survival, but for the history they strive to preserve, that period in our nation’s past that led up to the American Revolution, an era that the Ancient Ones have been trying to better understand for almost 20 years.

Who were the people of the Meadowview settlement who lived in Canton before 1840, as told by the tombstones in the cemetery there? Who lived in the tiny, worn, nearly falling-down farmhouse hidden in the woods where the Ancient Ones camp? And who was Samuel Simmons, the Revolutionary War soldier who died in 1835 and whose grave lies in the hidden, hilly plot near there?

While such questions about their predecessors puzzle them, “Captain” Vance Brown, Ray “Nitwit” Hamilton, Sandy “Packrat” Smith and Fran “Firecracker” Buzzell have no doubt who they are.

The Ancient Ones, all of the 120 or so members, are strict muzzleloader hunters who convene at different times during the year in period dress to relive that time in history – from Colonial times up until about 1840 – when black powder guns were the chief firearm used, and when bagging a deer meant more than using semi-automatic rifles and high-powered scopes. It meant patience, marksmanship, and an ability to read the signs of nature.

The Ancient Ones sometimes gather to re-enact history for the public, but these performances are done more for their own enjoyment than anything. They don early American clothes, gather in Colonial campsites and taverns, and give themselves strange nicknames as they cloak their identities and travel back in time.

“Sometimes when we see each other in our normal clothes, we don’t recognize each other,” Brown said.

But during the fall, the Ancient Ones gather together to hunt with the classic single-shot, black powder guns that take as much as a minute to load – and offer no guarantee of firing.

A special one-week December muzzleloader season was established in Maine in 1985, although many Ancient Ones used the primitive firearms during the regular November firearm season before that.

The Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife reports that just 2 percent of the 11,000 licensed muzzleloader hunters in Maine tagged a deer last year.

Muzzleloaders make the hunt more difficult because they take longer to load and require greater accuracy.

The guns are loaded not at the breech, near the trigger, but near the opening of the barrel, where black powder and a round lead ball are pushed down with a ramrod. The powder charge is ignited when a piece of flint or a cap creates a spark that finds its way through a pinhole into the gun.

Ed Stubbs, president of the year-old Maine Muzzleloaders Association, said regardless of the odds, deer hunting with a muzzleloader is so much more satisfying, because it is similar to the kind of experience our forefathers had.

And Stubbs has gotten just one deer in 15 years of hunting with his flintlock gun.

But not all muzzleloader hunters feel this way.

Many if not most of the 11,000 licensed muzzleloader hunters who take advantage of the extra weeks in December are trying to get the deer that eluded them during the regular season.

Most use a more modern muzzleloader, the in-line caplock rifle, which has a scope and an ignition system within the gun, which makes the weapon more apt to fire because it is water-proof, even though it uses black powder, or variations of the charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter mixture.

Rick Lozier, who works in the gun department at Van Raymond’s Outfitters in Brewer, said that the modern in-line muzzleloaders have become so popular since the muzzleloader hunt was extended two weeks in 1995, that now the store almost exclusively carries in-line muzzleloaders.

“Unfortunately, what we see is a lot of black powder sales at the end of the regular season by those who panic and want a black powder gun so they can hunt,” Lozier said.

In fact, with the extension of the December season came a dramatic increase in muzzleloader permit sales from about 9,500 in 1997 to 11,500 in 1998, according to DIF&W.

Brian Stan of Lamoine said he didn’t get his muzzleloader two years ago because he’s a student of history. He acquired it because after he started hunting deer, he got “skunked” one year, and didn’t want that to happen again.

Since then, he’s shot a deer each November, and so has never hunted with his new muzzleloader.

“The extra week would be a blast if I don’t get a deer,” Stan said. “For most guys, all they want to do is get the meat.”

For most of the Ancient Ones, however, there is only one way to hunt. And this belief unites them.

“There are probably 30 of us who are real close, like brothers and sisters,” Hamilton said of the Ancient Ones. “We’re there for each other. We’ve dressed [in our Colonial clothes] for funerals.”

Last Saturday, three of the Ancient Ones helped each other prepare breakfast as the dawn sky was growing dark pink near their camp, not far from the Androscoggin River. Then they went their separate ways to track deer.

Hamilton went off toward the Ancient One’s rendezvous site, where they meet each spring to camp in primitive tents, and where he found deer tracks in places where the white-tails had fed on acorns.

“There are deer here. We’re just not seeing them,” he said after waiting on a hill with his .54-caliber caplock Hawken rifle and calling deer for more than an hour.

But as much as the muzzleloader hunters love the fall season, they play the part of primitive firearm experts all year long.

Education is something many of the Ancient Ones do. And few do it as well as Brown, a fifth-grade teacher of 33 years at Frankfort Middle School.

Brown recently had his class to his Meadowview camp, where he’s building a replica of an old fort, to have the children re-enact with him the times when there were pirates and Pilgrims, and to teach them how the first settlers survived.

Buzzell said the schoolchildren survived well, eating 4 dozen eggs, 4 pounds of bacon, and 4 pounds of hash browns.

“Hey, fighting French soldiers is tough stuff,” Brown said of the foreign militia, who were played by other Ancient Ones.

But while the Ancient Ones teach about the era muzzleloaders came from, the exact history around the guns is not something they understand as well. In truth, few historians are clear on how widespread the use of muzzleloaders was before the Revolutionary War.

According to Michael Bellesiles of Emory University in Atlanta, only in the Civil War did Americans generally acquire and become familiar with guns. Bellesiles writes in his book “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” that in the late 1700s, few frontiersman even had muzzleloaders.

Bellesiles did a search through more than 1,000 probate records from frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania during that time and found that only 14 percent of men owned guns.

Still, muzzleloaders were used in the Revolutionary War from 1775-83. And at the Maine State Museum in Augusta, that is the lesson taught.

Jon Bailey, the museum educator, said while he isn’t sure, he suspects the guns were used little in hunting, because they were slow and awkward and presented difficulty even to the Colonial infantrymen.

This much is clear. The flintlock muzzleloader was the premier gun used before the Revolutionary War. Then the more reliable, but short-lived, caplock was used for another 30 years before the introduction of the breechloader rifle, the model used today.

But for the Ancient Ones, reliving the past as they understand it has as much to do with honoring our forefathers as it does with, well, playing cowboys and Indians.

“We believe the Ancient Ones that have gone before us are watching out for us,” Hamilton said.

Around the campfire Saturday, Smith asked Brown to tell the story of how the Ancient Ones got their name, and, as if hearing if for the first time, Smith leaned closer to the resident bard to hear better the story that is now nearly 20 years old.

It was at one of the first rendezvous in Maine, Brown said, when the various muzzleloader hunters, who had dressed as soldiers and settlers, began to trade. As they did, he said, one solider looking for a rifle part turned to a man in a Revolutionary War uniform who had just approached the gathering.

“He said, ‘Gosh, that uniform is so good. I’ve never seen a uniform so good.’ He turned around, and when he looked back, the Revolutionary War soldier was gone,” Brown said, and looked around wide-eyed. “They were out in the middle of a field. There was nothing. The man looked and said, ‘That one was too [realistic]. He must have been an Ancient One.”‘

Deirdre Fleming covers outdoor sports and recreation for the NEWS. She can be reached at 990-8250 or at dfleming@bangordailynews.net