Ernest Hemingway

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES
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CHAPTER I

THEY started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the dark­ness, so you could not see, but only hear him; the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter’s two, or more, guns, were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Some­where, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.

Four of the boats went on up the main canal toward the big lagoon to the north. A fifth boat had already turned off into a side canal. Now, the sixth boat turned south into a shallow lagoon, and there was no broken water.

It was all ice, new-frozen during the sudden, windless cold of the night. It was rubbery and bending against the thrust of the boatman’s oar. Then it would break as sharply as a pane of glass, but the boat made little for­ward progress.

“Give me an oar,” the shooter in the sixth boat said. He stood up and braced himself carefully. He could hear the ducks passing in the darkness, and feel the restless lurching of the dog. To the north he heard the sound of breaking ice from the other boats.

“Be careful,” the poler in the stern said. “Don’t tip the boat over.”

“I am a boatman, too,” the shooter said.

He took the long oar the boatman handed him and reversed it so he could hold it by the blade. Holding the blade he reached forward and punched the handle through the ice. He felt the firm bottom of the shallow lagoon, put his weight on the top of the wide oar-blade, and holding with both hands and, first pulling, then shoving, until the pole-hold was well to the stern, he drove the boat ahead to break the ice. The ice broke like sheets of plate glass as the boat drove into it, and onto it, and astern the boatman shoved them ahead into the broken passage.

After a while, the shooter, who was working hard and steadily and sweating in his heavy clothes, asked the boatman, “Where is the shooting barrel?”

“Off there to the left. In the middle of the next bay.”

“Should I turn for it now?”

“As you wish.”

“What do you mean, as I wish? You know the water. Is there water to carry us there?”

“The tide is low. Who knows?”

“It will be daylight before we get there if we don’t hurry.”

The boatman did not answer.

All right, you surly jerk, the shooter thought to him­self. We are going to get there. We’ve made two-thirds of the way now and if you are worried about having to work to break ice to pick up birds, that is altogether too bad.

“Get your back in it, jerk,” he said in English.

“What?” the boatman asked in Italian.

“I said let’s go. It’s going to be light.”

It was daylight before they reached the oaken staved (...)

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