First ice

The lake froze properly on the ninth. For a week before that it had been making up its mind: a skin of ice in the morning, open water again by noon, the reeds along the shore wearing a rim of frost that never quite reached the middle.

You can hear the difference before you see it. Open water has a sound even when it is still. Ice has none, and then, when the temperature drops fast after dark, it has a great deal — long booming cracks that travel from one shore to the other and seem to come from under your feet.

Nobody here walks on it for the first fortnight. The rule I was given is ten centimetres of clear ice for a person on foot, and you measure rather than guess. There is a hand auger in the shed for exactly this, and a pair of ice picks on a cord that you wear round your neck and hope never to use.

By the end of the month there will be ski tracks across it and a line of small holes where somebody has been fishing. For now it is simply a new, very flat field that was not there last week.