ICE SHANTY

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The subzero wind chill had never bothered Homer Adler.  Days like this, walking across a frozen lake, icy snow crunching under his insulated boots, were an annual longing.  The only cold he felt was from the wintery wind biting at the bridge of his nose and around his eyes through the single hole of his white knit balaclava.  It even made his eyes water a bit, but he really didn’t notice.  He had his mind set and eyes focused on the portable nylon ice fishing shelter ahead of him.  It was a far cry from the permanent wooden shanties he remembered as a kid near Clear Lake, scrap lumber thrown together, built on oak runners and drug on and off the lake by a rope pulled with a snowmobile.  The modern contraption ahead of him made its way onto the lake folded up like a camping tent, held in a similar nylon zipper bag that he towed onto the lake in a black plastic sled.  It came as a set, along with a gas-powered auger for making and cleaning out the ice holes. 

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He’d been on the lake for four hours, since daylight, with four crappie already cleaned, fileted, double bagged, and frozen in a red plastic cooler inside the tent—a natural freezer was one of the few perks of ice fishing.  Into his second thermos of French roast coffee, which he had tucked under his arm, he opened the zipper to the tent and crawled back inside the shelter.  He could feel the faint warmth of the portable propane heater near the base of his foldable nylon chair, another part of the ice hut package.

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He set his thermos down near the fishing gear and contemplated pouring a cup of coffee before he noticed the hole had iced back over.  He poked at it with a twelve-inch crowbar that he had brought along to chop and loosen the ice in situations like this, but his hour away fetching coffee had created more than a desirable amount of hardened slush, so he decided to abandon the crowbar and fire up the power auger.  Having retired two years ago, and now at sixty-seven on a handsome pension and six-figure investment returns, he saw no need to work too hard.  After setting the choke and one pull of the cord, the smoke and smell of exhaust from the oil-mixed fuel consumed the confined area.  He let the engine run a minute on high idle, then let off and put the tip of the auger down onto the circular area of the hole.  Once the auger was positioned straight up and down, he pressed on the throttle and held the contraption in place.  Shaved ice curled up around the auger blade and to the side of the freshly cleaned hole.  It didn’t take long to get through the foot and a half of ice, since it was mostly new, slushy shavings and not completely frozen hard, but the engine drowned out and he felt a pull on the auger.  Homer clenched his teeth and tried to out power the pull, but he’d definitely hit a snag.  Probably a tree limb, he thought.  “Or somebody’s damned Christmas tree,” he said aloud. “Bastards.”  He decided not to fight it anymore and flipped off the power switch.  He attempted to pull the auger out, but it wasn’t budging.

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“Well hell,” he said, wondering how he was going to remedy the situation.

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He let go of the auger slowly and leaned over until he was sure it wouldn’t fall. He took off his gloves and coat and laid them on the chair, then rolled up the sleeves of his thick, johnny collar sweater and got on his knees.  The cold of the ice quickly penetrated the layers of thermal knit and brown duck denim over his legs, but that was nothing compared to the knifing cold of the water and ice shavings when he reached into the hole to feel for the snag on his auger bit.  Once he reached the end of the bit he was perplexed by the feel—the texture of hair and not the woody substance that he expected.  He retracted his hand quickly and felt a shiver throughout his body.  Thinking now that it was probably a dead animal carcass, he was no less motivated to rid himself of the problem and get back to business.  Since the snag was more complex, he decided to use the auger as leverage to pry up whatever it was hooked to and cut it loose with a knife. 

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He dried off his forearms and hands on his pant leg then cupped his numb hands over his mouth and blew hot breath into them, then put them in front of the heater to warm them up more.  After pushing his sleeves back down he retrieved a sportsman’s knife from his tackle box, unfolded the blade then set it down by the hole.  He grabbed ahold of the top of the auger and pulled it up as high as he could until the resistance was too much, then laid it down and pried upward with all the force he could muster.  Once the end of the auger started to reveal itself through the slushy ice shavings, so did the long, tangled hair that had curled up inside the auger, connected to brown, red, and water-soaked flesh, and the half-closed eyes of a human skull.  A dizzying tingle turned his stomach.  He dropped the auger and fell backward into the vinyl walls of the tent, nearly tipping it over on its side.  It took less than five seconds for him to gather his wits and exit the shelter, balaclava still on his head, leaving his gloves and coat behind as he ran clumsily across the frozen lake toward his car.