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Beyond this refuge was a space of surging water, foam, and ice-mush, too broad for the essay of any human leap. The Big Fork, from shore to shore, was now a tossing, swishing, racing, whirling, and grinding chaos of ice-cakes, churning in an angry flood and hurrying blindly to the Falls. In the centre of his own floe the woodsman sat down, the better to preserve his balance.
Over the frozen surface of the river it flowed and wore at the shore-bound ice-floor. And then, one night, the ice went out. Titanically it went, and noisily, with the crash and grind of broken cakes; and in the morning the river rushed black, and deep, and swollen, its roiled waters tearing sullenly at crumbling banks, while upon its muddy surface heaved belated ice-cakes and uprooted trees.
You saw the stream, at all times, rapid, and now, swollen vastly beyond its ordinary proportions, rushing with ten-fold force, and hurrying, in its channel, with hoarse sounds, the ice-cakes, which, in the emulous race, grated against, and, sometimes, mutually destroyed one another, to drive some under the icy barrier, thence to glide away to the ocean, and to toss others high above the foaming torrent on the collected masses, more gradually to find their way to the same bourne.
Something unruly was rising within him; he felt a sudden need to lay about him; to fight a good stiff battle and shake the warm domesticity out of his bones. Down by the canal they were engaged cutting the ice in order to clear the water. It was already spring tide, and the ice-cakes were drifting toward the sea, but with unbelievable slowness.
However, the structure was strong and there was no question of its ability to hold, even though this chaos of grinding ice-cakes boomed against it with defiant reverberation.
The storm continued all day, and, at last, Akka began to wonder if she and her flock would perish. They were now dead tired, and nowhere did they see any place where they might rest. Toward evening she no longer dared to lie down on the sea, because now it filled up all of a sudden with large ice-cakes, which struck against each other, and she feared they should be crushed between these.
Now and then, from far out in the open water came the grinding and crunching of huge ice-cakes, see-sawing past each other. Once there sounded the reverberating thunder of two icebergs in a duel. "If there were any bears on that ice, they have found by this time that there can be even worse things than men with spears," Sigurd observed, as he listened.
Now are they all broken to pieces in the battle the giants and the water very thickly covered with ice-cakes, the largest of which measure several square rods, which it bears out to the free sea like shattered chains, with grumbling, clashing noises.
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