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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 57 offshore, Sweet and the other fishermen had their darkhouses. Fishing was slow that morning. It was close to noon before a trout slid into sight under the ice hole where Sweet kept vigil. He maneuvered the wood minnow away and eased his spear noiselessly through the water. Stalking his decoy, the trout moved ahead a foot or two, deliberate and cautious. When it came to rest directly beneath him, eyeing the slow- moving lure with a mixture of hunger and wariness, he drove the spear down with a hard, sure thrust. The steel handle was only eight or ten feet long, but it was attached to the roof of the shanty by 50 feet of stout line. When Sweet felt the barbed tines jab into the fish, he let go of the handle, and the heavy spear carried the twisting trout swiftly down to the reef 30 feet below. After the fish ceased struggling, Sweet hauled it up on the line. When he opened the shanty door and backed out to disengage the trout, he noticed that the wind was rising and the air was full of snow. The day was turning blustery. Have to watch the ice on a day like that. Might break loose alongshore and go adrift. But the wind still blew from the west, onshore. So long as it stayed in that quarter, there was no danger. About an hour after he took the first trout, the two men fishing near him quit their shanties and walked across the ice to his. "We're going in, Lew," one of them hailed. "The wind is hauling around nor'east. It doesn't look good. Better come along." Sweet stuck his head out the door of his shanty and squinted skyward. "Be all right for a spell, I guess," he said finally. "The ice'll hold unless it blows harder than this. I want one more fish." He shut the door and they went on, leaving him there alone. T hirty minutes later Sweet heard the sudden crunch and rumble of breaking ice off to the east. The grinding, groaning noise ran across the field like rolling thunder, and the darkhouse shook as if a distant train had passed. Sweet had done enough winter fishing there to know the terrible portent of that sound. He flung open the shanty door, grabbed up his axe and the trout he had speared, and raced across the ice for the snow-clouded timber of Crane Island. Halfway to the beach he saw what he dreaded: an ominous, narrow vein of black, zigzagging across the white field of ice. When he reached the band of open water, it was only ten feet across, but it widened perceptibly while he watched it, wondering whether he dared risk plunging in. Even as he wondered, he knew the chance was too great to take. He was a good swimmer, but the water would be numbingly cold, and he had to reckon, too, with the sucking undertow set up by 100,000 tons of ice driving lakeward with the wind. And even if he crossed the few yards of water successfully, he would have little hope of crawling up on the smooth shelf of ice on the far side. He watched the black channel grow to 20 feet, to 90. At last, when he could barely see across it through the swirling snowstorm, he turned and walked grimly back to his darkhouse. He had a stove there, and enough firewood to last through the night. He wanted desperately to take shelter in the shanty, but he knew better. His only chance lay in remaining out in the open, watching the ice floe for possible cracks and breaks. He turned his back resolutely on the darkhouse, moved to the center of the drifting floe, and began building a low wall of snow to break the force of the wind. It was slow work with no tool but his axe, and he hadn't been at it long when he heard a FROZEN TERROR