Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/990

918 come with fright or found that they were unable to guide themselves in the right direction. Still, though two were loose, they did not desert the man. When the searching parties found him on the following day he was dead, frozen to death, but the dogs with him were alive. One dog, which had not been unharnessed, was mad, however, and had to be killed at once.

Fish are not the only yield of the winter Lakes, for the ice itself is a plentiful crop. The harvest is of good proportion, and the chilly harvesting a large operation. The blocks are floated to the ice-houses down canals of clear water a mile or two in length, and a small army of cutters is busy with the work. With the great cities on the shores, a great deal of this has to be done, but the character of it is not so different—except as to the size of the operation—from the process elsewhere.

As a result of conditions existing on the winter Lakes the ice-crushing ferry-boat has been evolved. In other lands in consequence this has come into use—another example of what was once called "a Yankee invention," and is now named "a Yankee invasion." Russia sent her foremost admiral—Rear-Admiral Makaroff, who recently met his death—to study the ice-crusher Sainte Marie at work between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. No boat of the like—except the Saint Ignace, a smaller predecessor—had ever been seen. Three hundred and five feet over all, able to carry eighteen loaded freight-cars—with a screw at the bow as well as the stern, the first to suck the sustaining water from under the ice so that the boat climbing upon it could crush it down and break it and throw it out of the way. Often two, three, and even four feet of solid blue ice have been broken in this fashion. In Russia ice-crushers are now at work on the Neva, in Lake Baikal, at Vladivostok itself. The Nadesburg and the Ermark and others have been built upon models furnished by the winter Lakes, and in many of the cold parts of the earth ice-crushing boats are now to be found.

For the most of the time and through the greater part of their many square miles of frozen surface the inland seas are deserted and desolate. A deep unbroken silence is over them. A white uniformity of aspect distinguishes them. No living thing moves upon them, or flies above them—except an occasional bird, making the solitude the greater by its solitary contrast. In the imprisoning hand of winter they lie and must lie until the winter is gone. Then, as the change in autumn is great from activity to stillness—almost as might appear from life to death,—in the spring the transformation is as complete. After the trance of absolute inanimation seems to follow new being. With the first sunshine the ice begins to crack. With the first warm breeze of April it is set adrift,—the mad debacle down the Niagara to the wild plunge over the Falls showing best the wonder of the breaking up. Even before the ice is fully gone the freighters have started. The setting out of the first boat is an event of even more importance than the arrival of the last one "through" in the autumn,—as a beginning with its promise is always more significant than any ending with its unfruitful conclusion.

With the "opening of navigation" a new season of commerce has begun, with all it means of losses and failures and hopes and accomplishments. With the "opening of navigation" all the lake cities insensibly feel a new stir and vigor, and show it. Through the winter something of the torpid apathy of the Lakes has unavoidably lain upon them, but with the change in their watery provinces, which are their reasons for being, they change in look and life. The Lakes are the real tributaries of the most of them, and with this dependence on them they relapse and revive with them. "The opening of navigation" is an "open sesame." With it they reach their golden treasure-jars. To be sure, these are only cargoes of golden grain, mighty loads of precious metal if not the precious metals, barges full of "black diamonds," but in value they exceed the output of the most famous mines, and are far in excess of any robber hoard. With the spring the flood begins. The harbors are alive with the moving craft, the docks are stirring with the busy crowds. All is changed. In short, "navigation" is "open," and the life of the Lakes has begun once more.