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64 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S slowly healed. But the hospital was still two days away. Toward noon Brunson and Laway and I trudged back from our fruitless errand, never suspecting how close we had come to a dramatic rescue of the man who had been sought for five days in the greatest mass search that lonely country had ever seen. L ewis Sweet crept on over the ice all that day. His progress was slow. Inside the heavy socks, he could feel fresh blisters swelling on his feet. They puffed up until he literally rolled on them as he walked. Again and again, he went ahead a few steps, sat down and rested, got up, and drove himself doggedly on. At times he crawled on all fours. He detoured around places where the new ice looked unsafe. Late in the afternoon he passed the end of Crane Island, at about the spot where he had gone adrift. Land was within reach at last and night was coming on, but he did not go ashore. He had set his sights on Cross Village as the nearest place where he would find humans, and he knew he could make better time on the open ice than along the rocky beach of Sturgeon Bay. Late that day, Sweet believed afterward, his mind faltered for the first time. He seemed to be getting delirious, and found it hard to keep his course. At dark he stumbled into a deserted shanty on the shore of the bay, where fishermen sometimes spent a night. He was still seven miles short of his goal. The shanty meant shelter for the night, and in it he found firewood and a rusty stove, but no supplies except coffee and a can of frozen milk. He was still carrying his trout, but he was too weak and ill now to thaw and cook it. With great effort, he succeeded in making coffee. It braced him, and he lay down on the bunk to sleep. By morning he was violently ill with cramps and nausea, perhaps from lack of food or from the frozen milk he had used with his coffee. At daybreak he tried to drive himself on toward Cross Village, but he was too sick to stand. He lay helpless in the shanty all day Monday and through the night, eating nothing. Tuesday morning he summoned what little strength remained and started south once more, hobbling and crawling over the rough ice of Sturgeon Bay. It was quite a walk, but he made it. Near noon of that day, almost a week to the hour from the time the wind had set him adrift on his ice floe, he stumbled up the steep bluff at Cross Village and called to a passing Indian for a hand. Alone and unaided, Lewis Sweet had come home from the lake! When the Indian ran to him, he put down two things he was carrying: a battered axe that had been dulled against the iron ladder of White Shoals Light, and a big lake trout frozen hard as granite. n Editor's Note: "Frozen Terror" originally appeared in the January 1951 issue of Outdoor Life. Ben East (1898-1990), author of nearly 1,000 stories and six books, was outdoor editor of Michigan's Booth Newspapers for 20 years before serving as Outdoor Life's Midwest field editor from 1946-1966 and senior field editor from 1966-1970. East once said that of his hundreds of stories for Outdoor Life, "Frozen Terror" was his favorite. that day, and the hours went by uneventfully. Fresh blisters kept swelling up on his feet, and he opened and drained them as fast as they appeared. He cooked and ate three good meals, and at nightfall he climbed back to the lens room, went outside in the bitter wind, and swung his oil rag beacon again for a long time. He did that twice more in the course of the night, but nothing came of it. B y Saturday the lake still held him prisoner. That night, however, the wind fell, the sky was starlit, and the air still and very cold. When he awoke on Sunday morning, there was no open water in sight. The leads and channels were covered with new ice as far as he could see, and his knowledge of the lake told him it was ice that would bear a man's weight. There was no way to tell if he would encounter open water before he reached shore. Nor did it matter greatly. Sweet knew his time was running out. His feet were in terrible shape, and he was sure the search for him had been given up by this time. This was his only chance, and he'd have to gamble on it. In another day or two he wouldn't be able to travel. If he didn't get away from White Shoals today, he'd never leave it alive. How he was to cross the miles of ice on his crippled feet he wasn't sure. He'd have to take that as it came, one mile at a time. His feet were too swollen for shoes, but he found plenty of heavy woolen socks in the lighthouse. He pulled on three or four pairs and contrived to get into the heavy rubbers he had worn over his shoes when he was blown out into the lake on Tuesday. When he climbed painfully down from the crib that crisp Sunday morning and started his slow trek over the ice toward Crane Island, he took two items along: his axe and the frozen trout he had speared five days before. If he succeeded in reaching shore, they meant fire and food. They had become symbols of his fierce, steadfast determination to stay alive. So long as he kept them with him, he was able to believe he would not freeze or starve. N ow an odd thing happened, one of those ironic quirks that seem to be Destiny's special delight at such times. At the very hour when Sweet was climbing down from the lighthouse and moving across the ice that morning, three of us were setting out from the headquarters of Wilderness State Park, on Big Stone Bay on the south shore of the Straits ten miles east of Crane Island, to have a final look for his body. Floyd Brunson, superintendent of the park, George Laway, a fisherman living on Big Stone, and I had decided on one more last- hope search along the ice-fringed beach of Waugoshance Point. We carried no binoculars that morning. We left them behind deliberately to eliminate useless weight, certain we would have no need for them. Had we had a pair along as we snowshoed to the shore and searched around the ice hummocks on the sandy beach, and had we trained the glasses a single time toward White Shoals Light—a far-off, gray sliver rising out of the frozen lake—we could not possibly have failed to pick up the tiny black figure of a man crawling at a snail's pace over the ice. Had we spotted him by nightfall, we could have had him in a hospital, where by that time he so urgently needed to be and where he was fated to spend the next ten weeks while surgeons amputated all his fingers and toes, and his frozen hand and feet