Jack rummaged in the tall, wooden cabinet his father had made eons ago, trying to find the folding saw his children had given him for Christmas. He was gathering items he always took for the annual trek to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area with his two brothers.
After several fruitless searches into the back of the cabinet, he gave up and returned to sit on the high stool he left by the window that framed a view of his wooded backyard. Comfortably ensconced on the stool, he gazed into the trees fifty feet away.
After staring for twenty seconds or more, the trees slowly blurred as his mind wandered. He soon immersed himself in a memory of when he was eleven walking on the old railroad bridge behind their family home.
Straddling the long, wooden planks, separated by three-inch gaps, the walk across the bridge had always frightened him. The drop was forty feet to the Red Cedar River below, and the water rarely froze as it flowed quickly through the narrows squeezing through the mini gorge it had cut out long ago. Ancient stumps could be seen hiding just below the water's surface along with the occasional flash from a rock bass as it flipped sideways while swimming through the thigh deep water.
He stopped his progress and looked up when he heard frantic yelps coming from the direction of the still semi-frozen river two hundred yards away. The thirty-foot river banks, which sloped gently to the water's edge on both sides of the river, were still mostly covered in snow. On the river, slits in the ice revealed tiny ripples on the water's surface that had been manufactured by a cold, ten knot breeze whistling through the miniature gorge.
