During the nights I listened to the ice booming on the lake. During the day when I used to fetch water from the hole in the lake, I began to see how subtle changes in the temperature and the wind affected the thickness of the ice. I heard a lot of wind and came to like the difference between wind through spruce, wind through balsam, wind through bare poplar, wind through red oak, wind through marsh grass, and wind through dead cattails. I saw what wind and sun did to old moose tracks and deer tracks and squirrel tracks and rabbit tracks and fisher tracks and marten tracks and fox tracks. I once crossed a pond to check my traps, and when I crossed back ten minutes later, seven sets of timber wolf tracks had crossed over mine.
David Treuer, from Trapline: An Ojibwe Man’s Search for Identity on the Canadian Taiga
When ice settles and cracks on the Great Lakes, it sounds like a distant cannon going off.
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