One rainy October day, about a decade ago while visiting Horizon Books in downtown Traverse City, Tim Mulherin surrendered to his nagging curiosity about Harrison’s work and purchased “The Woman Lit by Fireflies,” one of his novella collections. That evening, he began reading the first novella, “Brown Dog.” It only took a few pages for him to become a fan of BD, the protagonist who would appear repeatedly in novellas to come as one of Harrison’s central characters. The middle-aged half Finn/half Michigan Chippewa Indian lives by impulse, finds utter joy in trout fishing and six packs of cheap beer, is easily entranced by the opposite sex, and has a nonnegotiable moral compass. For this former warhorse of the white-collar workplace, who would occasionally daydream from his desk of casting for trout in a crystalline northern Michigan river, Brown Dog’s exploits gave him vital comic relief.
