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Updated: April 30, 2025
Not for nothing was it, however, that the woodsman had learned to "run the logs" in many a tangled boom and racing "drive." His foot barely touched the treacherous floe ere he leaped again and yet again, till he had gained, by a path which none but a riverman could ever have dreamed of traversing, an ice-cake broad and firm enough to give him foothold.
"Sit still, for your lives." Bentley had thrown his pole over on the ice-cake promptly, and was now bearing down upon it with all the strength of his powerful arms. But the task was beyond him; the ice and the boat clung together, and the ice was reinforced by several other cakes which its checked motion permitted to close with it.
The machine-gun spoke. Bits of ice flew wildly. The mob halted for a moment, then plunged on, still chanting that maddening song. Just at the moment when a massacre seemed inevitable, there came a roar from the right. Turning, Bruce saw the form of a bearded man apparently rising from a hole in a giant ice-cake. At the sound the wild mob halted. "Hey! You fellows!" the stranger bellowed.
They were in no immediate danger now, but to repair the damage done to the shaft and adjust a new propeller, it was necessary that they drag the submarine to the surface of a broad ice-cake. This task was not as difficult as one might imagine. With the aid of ice-anchors, iron pulleys and cables, they without much delay harnessed their engine and finished the job all ship shape.
The flood was thick, indeed, with crunching ice-cakes and wallowing logs and slowly turning islets of uprooted trees and the débris of the winter forest. But fortune so favoured the wolf that he fell in a space of clear water, instead of being dashed to a pulp on ice-cake or tree trunk.
It is a fact that ice is always treacherous and not to be trusted. In the middle of the night the loosened ice-cake on Vomb Lake moved about, until one corner of it touched the shore. Now it happened that Mr. Smirre Fox, who lived at this time in Övid Cloister Park on the east side of the lake caught a glimpse of that one corner, while he was out on his night chase.
The white owl spread his wings and balanced himself on tiptoe, as the ice-cake on which he was perching lurched and rolled. Through all the clamour his ears, miraculously keen beyond those of other birds, caught an agonized squeak from below. The jostling ice had nipped the muskrat's hind quarters.
Suddenly, like a gigantic spring uncoiling, he launched himself forth with a violence that completely up-ended his ice-cake, and carried him over a space of churned torrent to the edge of another floe. Gripping this with his mighty forearms till he pulled it half under, he succeeded in clawing out upon it.
Then, with a sickening jump and turn of his heart, a hope came and shook him out of his stoicism. He saw that his ice-cake was sailing straight for a little rocky islet just above the fall. Two minutes more would decide his fate, at least for the time. He did not trouble to think what he would do on the island, if he got there.
"'Ongyatasse, you have given away your luck! cried Tiakens, whose head was a little light with the blow the ice-cake had given him.
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