FOREST LIFE. 143 



out fire and without comfortable sustenance. Detaching his 

 horses, and covering them with their blankets, if he be loaded 

 with hay, he allows them to feed from the load during the night, 

 while, muffled in his coat, he burrows deep in the hay, altern- 

 ately lulled and aroused by the tinkling of the horses' bells and 

 by the howling of the hungry wolf. Sometimes the treacherous 

 ice parts beneath his horses, and the swift current carries them 

 under, hiding them in a moment and forever from his vision. I 

 recollect the occurrence of the following thrilling event. It is 

 customary to travel on ice as far as it makes on the rivers and 

 streams, taking to the shore to pass the open and rapid sections, 

 and then returning to the river and traveling as before. Re- 

 turning homeward, after a trip into the woods with a load of pro- 

 vision, just at nightfall, might have been seen a span of fine horses, 

 measuring oil' their ten miles an hour with the ease and fleetness 

 of reindeers, upon the smooth surface of one of our eastern rivers 

 far up in the interior. With vision circumscribed by the gath- 

 ering darkness, and misjudging his position, the driver, quietly 

 seated upon his sled, failed to see the danger in season to check 

 the speed of his horses, when suddenly he plunged into one of 

 those open places in the river where the water ran too rapidly to 

 allow it to freeze. A few rods below the ice closed over again, 

 beneath which the current swept with fearful rapidity. With 

 the teamster still floating upon the half-sunken sled, the horses 

 swam directly down with the current to the edge of the ice be- 

 low. The moment they reached it, the noble creatures, as if con- 

 fident of clearing the chilhng element at abound, simultaneously 

 reared, and, striking their fore feet upon the ice, their hinder parts 

 sank in the deep channel, and, falling backward, they were swept 

 beneath the ice, together with the sled attached, and were drown- 

 ed, while the teamster alone escaped by springing from the sled 

 before it went under. 



When a team breaks in whore the water is stagnant, a delib- 



