Two hundred people were coming Saturday to fish the ice off Pickerel Point, and Orvin Haugen, eighty-two, walked into the bait shop to tell the young man running the derby that the same ice had killed his brother.
The young man's name was Brady Nordquist. He was twenty-six and ran the bait shop his father had left him, and the derby was his idea. Two hundred anglers had signed up. There were prizes. A local TV station was coming from Duluth.
"Mr. Haugen, I'm sorry about your brother," Brady said, and he meant it. "But we drilled the point Tuesday. Fourteen inches. Every hole. You could park a truck on it."
"Fourteen inches where you drilled," Orvin said. "Not where you didn't."
Orvin had grown up on the north shore of Loon Lake, outside a town called Kettle Ridge, Minnesota. His father had fished the lake through the ice for forty winters. So had Orvin.
In January of 1961, his older brother Arne, who was nineteen, walked out onto the ice off Pickerel Point at dusk to check a tip-up. He never came back. They found the hole in the morning, a dark round patch of open water in the middle of solid ice, not far from shore. They never found Arne.
His father's pocket watch had been in Arne's coat. Orvin had lent it to him that afternoon because Arne's own watch was broken.
Orvin was seventeen. He had spent most of his life since then learning why.
The reason was springs.
Loon Lake was fed from underneath by cold springs that came up through the gravel bottom. Most of them were out in deep water, where they did no harm. But there was one under Pickerel Point. Orvin had found it in 1962, the winter after Arne, with a weighted line and a thermometer. The water coming up there was a degree or two warmer than the lake around it. Just enough to eat the ice from below.
The rest of the lake would freeze fourteen inches thick. The ice above the spring would freeze three inches, and look exactly the same from the top.
Except it didn't. Not quite. Orvin's father had taught him the colors. Clear black ice was the strongest. White ice, full of air, was weaker. And gray ice, dull and wet-looking, was ice that was melting from underneath.
You had to know where to look.
He drove down to the bait shop Thursday morning with a hand-drawn map.
"The spring's right here," he said, putting his finger on the paper. "Two hundred yards off the tip of the point. It moves a little, year to year, but it's always in that bowl. If you put two hundred people and their trucks on the ice there Saturday, somebody's going to find it."
Brady looked at the map. He looked at Orvin.
"Mr. Haugen, with respect," he said. "That was sixty-five years ago."
"Springs don't retire," Orvin said.
Brady sighed. "I'll put out some cones."
Friday morning, Orvin walked out onto the ice off Pickerel Point alone.
He was eighty-two, with two new knees and a heart doctor in Duluth who would have been very unhappy. But he had cleats on his boots and a long ice chisel in his hand, the old kind called a spud bar, with a heavy iron blade on the end. His father had made it in 1948. Orvin had carried it on the ice every winter since 1961.
He walked slowly. Every few steps, he drove the spud bar down hard into the ice in front of him. On good ice, it rang. A sharp, clean chunk, like an axe biting oak.
Off the tip of the point, he found Brady's orange cones. Four of them, in a little square, about the size of a living room. They were in the wrong place. They were sixty yards too far east.
He kept walking.
Two hundred yards off the point, in the bowl where the spring had always been, the ice looked like ice everywhere else. Covered with a thin dusting of snow. Smooth. Perfectly flat.
Orvin knelt and brushed the snow away with his glove.
The ice underneath was gray.
He stood up and drove the spud bar down in front of him.
It did not ring. It went through with a soft, wet thunk, and black water welled up around the iron.
He marked it with his own flags, red ones on wooden stakes, in a wide circle. It took him two hours. When he was done, he walked back to shore and drove to the bait shop.
Brady was outside, loading a truck with prize coolers.
"I found it," Orvin said. "Three inches, maybe less. I flagged it."
"Mr. Haugen, I appreciate it," Brady said. "I really do. But I can't move the whole derby. The sponsors are set. The TV people are coming at nine. Half the county parked on the point last year and nothing happened."
"Last year was a cold year. This year the ice came late."
Brady wiped his hands on his jeans. He looked tired and young and worried.
"I'll tell people to stay out of your flags," he said. "That's all I can do."
Saturday morning was bright and windless and five below zero. By eight o'clock, the ice off Pickerel Point was covered with people. Pickup trucks and four-wheelers. Kids on sleds. Portable fish houses, dark green and blue. A man selling coffee from the back of a van.
Orvin sat in his pickup on the shore with the heater running and his father's spud bar across his knees, and watched.
At ten, the TV crew arrived. They set up near the shore, with a camera on a tripod. A young reporter in a red parka began interviewing Brady.
At ten-twenty, Orvin saw a kid on a four-wheeler.
He was maybe twelve. He was riding fast, the way twelve-year-olds ride, looping around the fish houses, kicking up snow. Then he swung wide, out away from the crowd, and headed straight toward the red flags.
He did not slow down. He was looking back over his shoulder at his friends.
Orvin was out of the truck before he knew he had moved, shouting, the spud bar in his hand, his new knees forgotten.
The four-wheeler hit the first flag and knocked it flat. Then it was inside the circle.
And Orvin heard the sound he had been hearing in his sleep for sixty-five years. A deep, groaning crack that rolled under the lake like a barn door slamming somewhere beneath his boots.