A week later, about the first of April, the ice below Lake Pepin began to move.
There is something mysterious in the spring break-up of a big river. A warm, south wind begins to melt the snow. So rapidly it vanishes from open fields and from south-facing bluffs that you wonder where it went. But in the woods the white covering lingers for weeks. After several days of warm weather, the unbroken ice on the river is covered with a few inches of water, but there are no signs of a break-up. Still the slush and water on the ice is the sign that the sleeping river is awaking.
Over night the creeks have become swollen, their turbid floods rush into the river, whose icy covering although still two or three feet thick has lost the brittleness and strength of winter. The creeks and brooks and countless bubbling, gurgling rills creep under the ice. With a slow, but resistless power, the power of a hydraulic press, they lift the frozen mass from its moorings on shore. The sleeping river yawns and stretches itself; the ice begins to move, slowly at first, then rapidly. The river is awake, alive once more. In a day or two, the great rafts and masses of ice have passed south, the river is open; it is spring.
“Friends, it is time to move,” Barker observed next morning. “In a day or two our camp will be flooded.”
Within a few hours everything was packed. Barker and Tatanka each handled a paddle, Bill took his seat in the stern to steer, while little Tim, wrapped in an Indian blanket, watched for hidden snags from his seat in the bow. Meetcha, who had come out of his log about two weeks before, was allowed to remain with his four-footed friends in the woods. Tim had become convinced that they could not take him along any farther.
When evening came, they had left the long lake far behind them and now carried their large canoe up on high land at the mouth of a spring brook several miles below the quiet little river town of Minneiska, White Water.
There was no time to set up a tent. The travelers raked together a bed of dry leaves, spread their blankets over them, rolled themselves into other blankets, and used their tent-canvas as extra covering.
“Boys, make a night-cap out of your handkerchiefs,” Barker advised the lads, “for the morning will be biting crisp.”
While they were eating breakfast next morning, they saw a flock of cranes, real cranes, not the common blue herons of our marshes, rise from a sandbar. With a spiraling noisy flight, they arose against the face of the high bluff and disappeared over the timber, six hundred feet above the river.
“Where are they going?” asked Tim. “Why don’t they fly north up the river!”