Presently we started for the boats. A burly line, with caps reaching
down, and collars reaching up, until everything was covered--ears,
forehead, chin, everything but a peeping place for nose and eyes. I can
still hear the squeak and crunch of snow under foot, and see the glare
of it. We passed a snow-field, where the river-buoys are left through
winter, spar-buoys, gas-buoys, and bell-buoys ranged along now like
great red tops numbed by the cold to sleep.

[Illustration: RIVER-BUOYS ON THE BANK FOR THE WINTER.]

Then they put off in the boats--three open boats--that are sleds as
well, with runners on the flat bottoms and ends turned up in an easy
slant, so that when the broken ice gets too thick for paddling they may
be hauled up to slide over it. This queer method of transit is practised
on the St. Lawrence, by those who dare, during certain weeks of winter
when the river is no longer open nor yet frozen into a solid ice-bridge,
but partly open and partly solid. So it was now.

The first rule of the boats is that every man lay hand to paddle and
work. There are no passengers here but the sick, and they are rarely
taken. Not that the pilots would mind paddling other men across, but the
other men would almost certainly freeze if they sat still. There is no
safety against the blasts that sweep this river, when the glass says
twenty below, but in vigorous, ceaseless exertion.

So there they go through the ice-choked river, swinging their paddles
lustily, every pilot of them, heads nodding under black astrakhan caps,
shoulders heaving, off for home. Now they strike the first solid place,
and the men forward climb out carefully and heave up the boat's nose a
couple of feet to see if the ice will hold her. Then all climb out, and
with dragging and pushing get ahead for a hundred feet or so. See, now
they stop and swing their arms! Already the pitiless wind is biting
through their furs. And think of that poor woman!

Presently they reach an open spot some dozen yards across, and all but
one take places in the boat, the stern man standing behind on the ice to
push off, and then, with nicely judged effort, spring aboard as he gives
the last impulse that shoots her into the river.

From the open space they paddle into a jam of grinding ice-blocks that
hold hard against them, but are scarce solid enough to bear the sledges.
They must work through somehow, poling and fending, to yonder heaped-up
ledge, where up they go ag