Winter ice-fishing yields trout as fast as the hook can be baited.

Evidence

In the hardest frost, men who fish not for sport, but gain, take their axes and camping blankets, and go up to the hard-frozen waters which lie in fifty places round the park, and choosing a likely spot, a little sheltered from the wind, hack a hole in the ice, and fastening a foot-link to a cotton-wood tree, bait the hook with maggots or bits of easily-gotten fresh meat. Often the trout are caught as fast as the hook can be baited, and looking through the ice hole in the track of a sunbeam, you see a mass of tails, silver fins, bright eyes, and crimson spots, a perfect shoal of fish, and truly beautiful the crimson-spotted creatures look, lying still and dead on the blue ice under the sunshine. Sometimes two men bring home 60 lbs. of trout as the result of one day’s winter fishing. It is a cold and silent sport, however. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 244

Categorization

• SHARE: The image of crimson-spotted trout lying dead under blue ice seen through a sunbeam hole is a niche visual only a fishing or nature-writing friend would savor.
• FICTION: The whole procedure — axe, foot-link, cottonwood tree, maggot bait — could seed a hardscrabble winter-survival scene.