What is a good metaphor in this story?

If the headless chicken has "like" or "as" in it, then it is a simile.

I included a personification (type of metaphor) from the story below.

"There was the fire, snapping and crackling and promising life with every dancing flame. He started to untie his moccasins..."

Two answers here actually: A simile always uses like or as. You can always differentiate a simile from a metaphor in that fashion.

The quote you have here is indeed a metaphor because the literal part of the comparison is "fire" which has "dancing" flames. The fire could not dance; that is something that people do. Therefore, the figurative part of this quote shows that the fire is dancing as people do. In a metaphor, you always have literal and figurative. In this case, you get both the literal and the figurative states which makes this an easy metaphor to figure out.

No it is not a metaphor. Metaphors indicate only the figurative parts. It is the symbol which indicates both the literal and figurative. In that sense, the sentence above is an example of personification. " there was the fire promising life with every dancing flame" : fire can not promise life, so it is personificated; flame can not dance, it is also personificated. When there is personification, we still think about the word's denotative meaning; there is never connotation within personifications. Here, fire is still the fire we know, only with human characteristics.