“Hey, there, come back here with that ax. Think I can scratch a hole through the ice with my finger nails?”
“I guess perhaps you might have some trouble, seeing the ice is probably two feet or more thick,” Bob laughed as he turned back. “But I’ll help you and then I can cut the boughs while you are fishing.”
The cabin was only a few feet from the shore of the lake and he quickly followed Jack who, with a shovel, was already on the ice. Fortunately the wind had swept the surface of the lake with such violence that there was but little over a foot of snow on it.
“I wonder if this old lake is froze solid all the way to the bottom,” Bob grunted, as he straightened up after some ten minutes of vigorous chopping. He had cut down all of two feet and still there was no sign of water. He would chop a minute or two and then Jack would shovel out the chunks of ice. They knew that the ice froze pretty deep on the lakes of Northern Maine, but even they were surprised when they were obliged to go still another foot before the ax cut through to the water. Once through, it was but the work of a minute to enlarge the hole sufficiently to allow a whale, as Jack laughingly declared, to be pulled through.
“What are you going to use for bait?” Bob asked as he started back toward the cabin with the ax.
“The only thing we got is that beef tongue,” Jack replied, as he pulled the small can from his pocket.
“Go as light as you can on it,” Bob called back. “I want a bite of it for supper in case you don’t get any fish.”
“Huh, not a supposable case at all,” Jack declared indignantly, as he opened the can with his knife and proceeded to bait the hook with a small bit of the meat.
“Here’s hoping they like tongue as well as I do,” he thought as he lowered the hook into the water.
For fully fifteen minutes he crouched over the hole without even a nibble, pulling the line up every few minutes to see if the meat had fallen off.