Blade pulled on the red scarf Rafe had knit that winter, then stole her hat, whuffling hot breath through her gray hair, cut short for the impending spring. He was restless in his traces and did not appreciate being harnessed to sledge loaded with sawdust. Rafe rubbed her knuckles in the valley under his jaw. \u201cIt won\u2019t be long now. You know you wouldn\u2019t be any happier if we were on the march through snow, hock deep.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilf joined her, flapping a wax covered board, and fiddling with the stylus tucked behind his ear. \u201cSo Auntie. Doing some heavy lifting today?\u201d<\/p>\n Rafe nodded and continued her scratching. \u201cBlade, here, is. Malingering again, I see.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIs this what you did back in the day?\u201d said Wilf, tucking the tablet under his arm to warm the wax as he blew through his mittens. \u201cOr were you out on the ice with the rest of the young bucks?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I wanted to be was a cutter. But that wasn\u2019t \u2018seemly\u2019 my mother felt. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard the stories.\u201d Rafe glanced at Wilf. That he ignored such an opening, she thought, said that he had, indeed, heard the stories. \u201cI started as a sweeper, keeping the harvest field clear of chips and snow, and then as a gaffer, like young Jole, there.\u201d<\/p>\n Rafe picked up her hat and dusted off the snow. \u201cAnd you, are you sorry you didn\u2019t leave last summer? You could be warming your back under the northern sun, plaguing some other old soldier to tell you the stories of a misspent youth.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt really is all about you, isn\u2019t it. Mother is right. You have no sense of family solidarity.\u201d Wilf made himself stand taller and tested the wax on the tally board with his thumbnail. \u201cAs interesting as your maunderings of ancient history may be, I have stayed to support my young cousin, in his first ice harvest as a gaffer.\u201d<\/p>\n Upriver some of the gaffers were playing at quarterstaves, but Jole poked the end of his pike into the snow that banked the river. He had the height for good leverage, flinging chunks of ice on their way to the shore as they flew into the air, pushed up by the water that filled in the gap when the blocks were released from the floe. He was light enough, though, that without the hobnailed boots, he would go flying to the opposite side of the river with each block he grabbed.<\/p>\n Old Farley waved his flag and Jole moved out onto the surface of the river. \u201cHey! Watch out you kids!\u201d Jole swung his gaff toward a group of sweepers who were creeping toward the men. He had, of course, done the same thing when he was a kid, seeing how close to the cut he could get, jumping on a block of ice as it popped out of its hole, and riding until it stopped, part way to the shore. It was a dare that all kids did. But last year little Pharnam had mistimed his leap and that memory stuck.<\/p>\n The first knife was slid into the hole in the middle of the river. The serrated edge cut smoothly, parallel to the bank. The second side, opposite the first was finished. A team of men cut, on opposite sides, perpendicular to the bank. They would finish together. Jole moved into position, his gaff ready. Mick Jake was opposite him. They would pull the flying block forward as the cutters ducked and slid out of the way. Hale and Mose, at the cut in the middle of the river, would pull the ice forward, keeping pace with Jole and Mick. They braced to catch the ice.<\/p>\n When the sides of the hole were more than half finished there was a sound like the screel of the low strings on a violin played out of harmony. Inchy Foal\u2019s sister, Snicker, Leaped from behind Jole, landed, belly down on the block, as the ice cracked neatly along the marked lines and dropped out of sight. Thunk. Jole\u2019s bugged out eyes locked with Mick\u2019s. who shrugged. Where was the water? And where was Inchy Foal\u2019s sister?<\/p>\n Jole turned toward the shore, locking eyes with Rafe. Her scowl as she stalked onto the ice, Wilf sliding in her wake, made her look rather un-auntie-like. \u201cThere\u2019s dead fish down here!\u201d called Snicker Foal, \u201cfroze solid,\u201d as fish, one after the other, came flying out of the hole to clunk on the ice. \u201cAnd guess where Mare Fisher\u2019s headpiece ended up!\u201d A wedding crown, draped in dried riverweed, came arching out of the hole and clunked on the ice as well. There at the bottom of the river, high and dry but well below the bottom of the ice, standing barely eye level with the bottom of the floe, was Snicker, not a bit winded and quite undamaged.\u00a0 Fish stuck out like flags, in each hand. \u201cThere\u2019s all kinds of junk down here,\u201d she hollered.<\/p>\n A pool of bright light made the girl glow like an angel. Mottled shadows surrounded her as the sun bounced off thickened places in the ice. Toward the ford the river floor sloped up, nearly touching the bottom of the ice. In the other direction the floor sank away into the ice-imposed dusk. The partially cut ice started to crack and Jole and Mick found themselves sitting on ice blocks on either side of Snicker. When they stood up, they found they could see above the ice.<\/p>\n When the boys dropped out of sight, half the people on the ice had turned around and headed back to shore. Under the murmur of the crowd the ice was groaning, driving the people faster than any barked command. The population of Riverside was now about evenly split between ice and shore.<\/p>\n To Rafe’s eye there was no real danger. The hole left by the sawed out block was nearly four feet thick, as thick as Inchy Foal was tall. The uncut ice was still a foot thick, and would support the weight of a single person, but probably not a crowd. Rafe could see his sister, Snicker, still in possession of her two fish, hauled out of the hole by her agitated mother, and hear the constant flow of squabble.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can just drop those stinking sturgeon right there.\u201d Ma Foal didn’t bother to look up at her daughter, but made a grab for the catch.<\/p>\n \u201cThey’re frozen, Ma. We can have them for supper.\u201d Snicker might tower over the rest of her family, but she was no match for her mother’s low center of gravity on ice.<\/p>\n \u201cI’m not cooking any dead fish found lying in the mud at the bottom of the river.\u201d Ma Foal snatched the fish and flung them aside.<\/p>\n \u201cBut Ma, is it a river if there’s no water?\u201d Snicker strained against her mother’s grip to retrieve the fish as they slid back toward the hole. Knees locked tight and the leather soles catching on the ice, Snicker countered her mother’s weight, as she was drag irrevocably to land.<\/p>\n Rafe was impressed by the question, and the girl’s tenacity. As mother and daughter struggled to shore, Jole thriftily picked up the fish and tucked them in his pack. Rafe smiled at her nephew and stepped onto the ice followed closely by Wilf.<\/p>\n By the time she reached the hole, the balance of people were on shore. Old Farley and one of the other cutters had dragged a ladder out and the early scavengers were using it to explore the river bottom. Jole and Mick were back, poking around the junk. Rafe herself did not descend, but rather walked around the opening, scrutinized the treasure seekers and considered.<\/p>\n The amount of junk poking out of the frozen mud was astounding. How much had been washed from upstream? Surely someone would have tried to pull out the wagon, and yet there it lay, crates still tied on. Other things, the crown, the ironware, things heavy enough to have sunk directly to the bottom, must have come from Riverside. She recognized the white of bones emerging from a gap between two tree length timbers. A logging effort had clearly supplied the wood. The river had left them fetched up under a rocky ledge.<\/p>\n Rafe shook her head. The Foal girl was right. It was hard thinking of this as a river without the water flowing under the ice. Deep as the riverbed was, it seemed more like a ravine. It did not even evoke one of the dry wadis in the north, that always anticipated a flash flood. How long had the river been empty?<\/p>\n Old Farley and his crew were moving toward the logs now. \u201cWe can use some of this timber to make braces for the ice. That will let us widen the hole.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe already lost one block. How we going to keep the next one from dropping to the bottom?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t lose nothin\u2019. That’s what these timbers will be for. We can make rails and drag the ice to shore. We\u2019re going to need every scrap of ice we got. If the river is gone, who can say what\u2019ll happen to the well.\u201d<\/p>\n Rafe recognized the tone of a man who no longer needed to present a patient face to his crew. She’d reached that point herself before she rode out of Graven’s Guard for the last time. She called down to the men, \u201cSun’s gone. You haven’t got even a half hour’s light.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, then,\u201d said Old Farley, \u201cthere’s plenty of time to get Marlon to help. He’s got brains enough for three of these louts.\u201d He clapped his hands together and dusted his hat on his thigh. \u201cThat will do.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBefore you come up,\u201d Rafe shouted down, \u201ccheck out those bones wedged up there under the bank.\u201d<\/p>\n Old Farley sent Jole and Mick off to take a look. \u201cI doubt it\u2019s one of ours. I don\u2019t know anyone has gone missing, except maybe you, in the last forty years. Maybe the driver of that wagon, there.\u201d<\/p>\n Then he turned to Wilf. \u201cLook, boy. You go tell your Da that I want a word with him. And your Uncle Ducky as well. And maybe that Molly.\u201d As Wilf hustled off he turned back to Rafe. \u201cYou\u2019ll stay a bit, aye? I\u2019d just as soon make sure no one got the idea to go prospecting for treasure in the night.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a revision, augmented and edited, of a section published last year. Rafe rolled her shoulders and cracked her back as she stood at the edge of the ice, leaning on Blade, to watch the developing … Continue reading ![\"Scraping-Ice-for-Cutting\"](\"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Scraping-Ice-for-Cutting.jpg\" "\\"Scraping-Ice-for-Cutting\\"")
<\/a>Rafe rolled her shoulders and cracked her back as she stood at the edge of the ice, leaning on Blade, to watch the developing circus. It had started yesterday when Old Farley drilled pilot holes and declared the river frozen enough to start gathering ice. The cutters pushed their saws along lines marked with sawdust, making their cuts to the three-quarter depth that Old Farley had determined. Drovers lined up, sledges blanketed with hay and sawdust, ready to haul the blocks into the ice house.<\/p>\n
\nJole skated on his feet with Mick and the rest of the men, up to the edge of the hole. Children dashed ahead. They could hear the ice block rocking. The cutters swore.<\/p>\n