The Ice Cutter and the Frozen Lake | A Cozy Victorian Sleep Story | Soft British Voice, No Music

Cutting, from the first hard week of the frost to the last of the cold. Keeping, from the last of the cold to the warm months, with both doors shut between. An inland lake has been shut with ice since the hard weather first set in, and the flat ground behind it carries one low rise of earth and nothing else. Old snow lies about on it in thin patches, and between them the surface is bare and grey. No town stands in sight of the water, and the far shore shows no light and never has. Set into that rise there is a brick ice house. Earth is heaped over the dome of it, so that only a doorway and a swell of ground show from outside. Behind the doorway a low passage goes straight in under the earth, with a door at each end of it, and past the inner one the floor stops and a round brick well opens below. The season's ice is built up in that well, course above course, with straw over the whole top of it. One of the two doors is always shut, because the thing that spoils a stack is outside air. Alongside it stands a hut of one stone room that faces the lake. It holds a stove, a table, a bench, a bunk, and a tub of water by the fire that would set solid without it. A small lamp is left burning on the sill, and from far off it is the one lit thing anywhere. In front of the bank a rectangle is set out on the sheet, and that rectangle is the field. Those lines are grooves only, drawn in with the marker, and none of them goes through. They are laid in daylight and they are sawn in daylight, and for the whole of the dark they sit there untouched. A plank way climbs the bank, field to doorway, iced over so that a block will come up it under the tongs at a walk. One cutter has worked this lake for six winters. She cuts through the daylight and stays with the house afterward, because a stack settles and a field fills in whether anybody is there or not. The whole station is settled inside the opening minutes: the tools in off the sledge and dried, the stove made up, a tin of oatmeal put at the side of it to thaw, and a first walk down the passage to look over the top of the stack. Cold weather makes the remainder of the work, and none of the rounds falls at a fixed hour. Fine loose snow drifts into the scored lines of the field and is drawn out of them with a long scraper, one groove at a time, down and back. Chaff is run between the stack and the brickwork with a scoop, and worked into the joints between blocks with two fingers, loose and never tamped. The plank way is watered from a can in two thin coats with a wait between them, so that the two set as one surface. The saw is filed and set at the bench, tooth by tooth, and stood back in its corner for the morning. Away from the bank the sheet goes. It runs off under the ice and returns from the middle of the water, and it does that oftener, and from further off, the further into the night it gets, because a sheet takes up while it cools. Least at dusk, most at the finish, and never back to where it began. Nothing at this station is done for the night it is done in. The whole of the trade is one season put away for another, and the well comes up course by course through the winter to be opened in the warm months. Near the end the last four blocks come off the bank one at a time, down the passage and into the well, and the straw is worked down flat again at its edges. Ninety minutes, start to finish. Somebody speaks for the opening hour and a bit past it, and after that nobody does. The rest belongs to a hard still night on a frozen lake: the sheet out on the water, going oftener and from further off as the hours go by, and a stove held low in a stone room. Music has no part in it. Play it quietly. Nothing in the back half of it comes up to meet anybody. Chapters 0:00 The Shortest Part of the Year 4:08 The Passage Shut at Each End 19:16 The Scraper Down Every Groove 37:21 Work Done for Another Season 50:58 The Lake Has Finished 1:00:27 A Thickness That Will Not Alter No mid-roll ads after the 30-minute mark. Sleep safely. Narration is AI-assisted. Story, world, and sound design are original works by QUIET OUTPOST. The earth is over it and the straw is flat on it, and nothing about it alters before the summer. Previous night: The Lockman on the Winter Canal    • The Lockman on the Winter Canal | A Cozy V...   All nights:    • Cozy Victorian Sleep Stories | QUIET OUTPOST