“Are you warm enough?” she asked him. It was a question she was used to hearing; there was mimicry in her voice.

“If I keep working, I’m warm.”

She nodded. It was that way with skating. She did a little figure eight, the only trick she had learned yet to do, and skated away.

As she left, there was a sound like a gunshot, and some of the skaters cried out, then laughed. The ice deep in the lake was shifting in the sun. The ice harvester listened, trying to tell, from the memory of the sound, where the shifting was. Across the ice, the little girl took her father’s hands and skated backward. The noises weren’t dangerous as long as the air stayed cold; the skaters were right to be unconcerned. He began to work again, cutting and stacking the ice. He had lost time talking to the girl. But she had made him think about swimming, about how the ice he worked so hard to break would melt away in summer until people could move through it instead of over it. He had never learned to swim; if a harvester fell in, it was not his ability to swim that was called on. It was his ability to kick and climb his way out in his heavy clothes, and to keep himself warm. The ice harvester knew he could kick his way out, if needed. He was not a man who would drown.

He worked until the wheelbarrow held what it could, stacked as efficiently as he knew how. He couldn’t let it sit in the sun too long, or the blocks would melt and fuse together. There was one last piece, a good-sized block with smooth edges all around, as smooth as the surface of the lake, and he worked it out with the tongs until his foot slipped, the dark water swallowing his boot and his leg to the knee.

He dropped his weight to the ice then, leaning away from the hole; he inched backward, recovering his leg. He hooked his tongs around one leg of the heavy wheelbarrow, to hold on if the ice broke again. Only then did he feel the dull pain in his ankle from the freezing water in his pant leg and his boot. He was done now, for the day. He left the good, smooth-sided block where it floated, and lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow. The load was heavy, and the single wheel weaved drunkenly ahead of him if he didn’t hold the handles tight.