It was a bitterly cold, overcast winter day when I set out from our cabin located below Oswego Illinois on one of the many islands on the Fox River to check my traps.

Walking cautiously on the new ice I followed my trap line chopping out and retrieving those traps that had frozen into the ice.

I was carrying a bundle of fifteen or twenty traps that I had thrown over my shoulder and I was cold, so very cold. Illinois winters can get that way and what makes the cold even worse is the miserably damp air that seems to penetrate and chill one to the bone.

Perhaps I was thinking about the warm fire that awaited me at home, I don’t know but my thoughts certainly weren’t where they should have been. I became careless when I came to the main channel of the river. This was the most dangerous passage for the swift moving water slowed down the freezing process rendering the ice thin and weak.

Sliding my feet to keep from putting too much weight on the ice I was halfway across when suddenly the ice broke under me with a crack like a gun shot plunging me up to my armpits in the near freezing water.

I was in terrible trouble and yet it could have been much worse. If I had gone through where the water was deeper the current would have swept me under the ice and I would have drowned. Not really a nice way to end a day, or a life.

My father had taught me, “Never, never venture onto the ice without a long pole to act as a safety divice!”

This rule is really quite simply fulfilled for all you have to do is cut a long sapling perhaps twice as long as you are tall and then, holding the pole horizontally at mid point about chest high, if you are unfortunate enough to break trough the ice the pole will catch on either side of the hole and you can use the pole to crawl out onto solid ic

Without the pole it must have taken me several minutes to crawl out onto solid ice. By then I was terribly cold but not really worried at that point because I knew that once I got to shore I could build a fire and once I had fire I would be alright.

By the time I was able to reach shore the wind was blowing, adding its force to the twenty degree temperature and soon my wet clothing was frozen stiff and my hands and feet were numb with cold.

I always carried a brass waterproof match safe but now my pockets were frozen stiff. I used my hunting knife to slice the pocket open and then another problem presented itself. My hands were so cold I couldn’t open the match safe. My hands felt like a couple of dead pieces of wood.

I knew I could make it the five miles to the cabin so I was in no danger of freezing but frostbite was a very real possibility as I started walking through the timber, wading through snowdrifts and over and around deadfalls. I had traveled about half a mile when I came to one of my traps. Caught in that trap was one of the largest raccoons I have ever seen.

Kneeling down my hands were so cold I had to use both hands, I picked up a broken tree branch and raising it over my head I took the life of the raccoon and then, fumbling all the while, I took my knife and slit the belly of the animal and plunged my freezing hands into the animal’s warm entrails.

Up until that point I thought I knew what pain was but I was wrong. I do not believe I have ever known such intense pain as the blood began coursing through my nearly frozen fingers.

As my fingers thawed I was finally able to open the match safe and start a fire and I stayed in that place for several hours, warming myself and drying my clothing.

Before I left that sacred place there in the woods on the bank of the Fox River I skinned out the old raccoon so there would be no waste.

It was experiences such as this that eventually convinced me that I had a debt to pay to the wild and this realization led me to eventually give up the way of the trap and the gun.

That day I turned a potentially dangerous situation into one of survival by utilizing what was at hand but if I had been alert, if I had taken some simple precautions such as crossing at a safer spot on the ice, the incident need never have happened.

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