Morning all. This seems like a good sentence for the day. I pick them at random from a box and assign them their days for the year every December so this one was assigned it’s day last year. This week I have been pulling out sentences and assigning them to days for next year. I try not to think too much about it as I want them a random as can be, but somedays just match. As the world feels iced over this morning, this suits. so let’s get started.
I am going to spend the rest of my day wondering what they put into the lake. This will bother me. There will be notes.
Thursday, December 21st: The ice cracked.
The ice cracked. The sound was sharp in the cold air. It echoed painfully against the ears and sounded unnatural. ‘Ice shouldn’t crack when it is this cold.’ Carl thought. The sound was one he generally only heard during spring thaw. ‘And even then it isn’t as sharp.’
Carl thought the sharpness might actually be due to the cold. The cold air felt thinner and sounds often sounded sharper in the winter. As he turned towards the sound, Carl thought about the cold and winter and sound. It was coming from the lake. He turned his steps towards the path leading down to the now frozen lake and he wondered if the sounds were louder because there were fewer sounds in the winter. Most of the birds had gone. There were a few like the great owls that hunted the small burrowing rodents. They heard the scratching the mice and voles made in their snow tunnels as they searched for food and plucked them out of their icy embrace.
The glide of the owls was silent but the flap of their wings was almost as loud as a thunder clap. ‘That might be because of fewer things moving,’ he thought. The grazing deer went further down the mountain to scratch through the shallower snow. Those hunting the herd moved as well. There were days when Carl was the only thing moving about and most days he stuck to his cabin.
There was another sharp crack.
He winced. The winter was well advanced and the silence that pressed so hard the first few weeks had become typical. He was accustomed to it and knew that when spring arrived it would come back first with small sounds of life, getting his ears accustomed to more sound before the full cacophony of summer.
‘Not right,’ his brain thought.
The thought added caution to his steps and made him wary. There was a spot a short ways off the trail. It provided a glimpse of the lake, but kept him sheltered. He used it sometimes to watch the animals at the lake side. It was more sheltered in the summer when the forest was lush and thick, but even now the evergreens would provide enough cover for him to be concealed from anything below.
Deciding he wanted to see what was going on before whatever was below saw him, Carl stepped from the path and into the woods. He moved carefully, stealthily. Long ago he learned to make himself as silent as the hunting owls. While he was certain his steps were as loud to them as their flapping wings concussing the air was to him, he doubted there were many other creatures up here who would take notice.
Carl eased himself through the trees, careful not to snap the small twigs that reached for him. He was a shadow in their midst, a ghost passing through. Carl reached his place of watching. It too was strange in the winter as it was usually the summer creatures he watched at the watering hole, the lake serving most of the mountain’s wildlife.
There were forms on the lake. They used hand signals to communicate and they were using a tool to crack into the ice. Carl watched as they cracked a hole and dropped something into the frigid waters below the deep ice. When it was in the lake, they replaced the chunk they took out and poured water along the edge to obscure the edges. The water froze quickly in the cold winter air and soon the ice looked unbroken. Their task complete, the heavily bundled forms gathered their tools and moved away from the lake. They were moving fast, heading down the mountain and away from the wilds.
Ten til Midnight 