Fishhead: The Darker Tales of Irvin S. Cobb by Cobb Irvin

Author:Cobb, Irvin [Cobb, Irvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallel Universe Publications
Published: 2016-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

JANUARY THAW

From where he sat, day after day, with his broken leg propped on a padding of pillows, the young Englishman could look out of his bedroom window upon what the citizens of the village proudly called Sugar Loaf Park.

The worthy burghers had reason for being proud of their Sugar Loaf Park. If their boasts were to be credited, there was no other town in the northern chain which had a winter playground to match this town’s winter playground. Search the district through and where else but here, they asked, could you find so perfect a combination of climate and altitude, of natural setting and provided facility for enjoying cold-weather sports? Pointing out that for the past three seasons both of the hotels and all of the boarding places had been crowded as never before and that this season the crowd was the biggest yet, the claimants answered their own eager inquiries.

The young Englishman was newly come to the States, as he, being English, called them, and this was his first visit in this part of this state, but, speaking for himself, he conceded he could not imagine a finer picture of Arctic beauty than the one which his window-casings framed for him. He had, as you might say, a front seat for the show. The small house where he was lodged stood on a ledge of a steep declivity, with Finger Peak rearing up behind it, and far down below at the foot of the slope, Twisted Pond lying in the mouth of a narrowly enclosed clove which wound off and away through its skewed cleft between two neighbor-mountains toward Saranac and the larger lakes.

Because of this situation the invalid had a perfect view of the hillside. The slide for the coasters began at a point directly in front of him, and by turning his head he could follow it, with its slick paving of smoothly joined ice blocks and its steep walk-back to flank it, as it ran abruptly down like a ribbony strip cut from the selvage of a glacier.

Opposite him also, but somewhat farther distant, was the take-off for the ski-jumpers, a tousled nubbin of a knoll jutting out over the slanted drop of the land. Down yonder, where perspective brought the walls of the ravine together with a sharp V, the cleared rink for the curlers’ game showed like a gleaming target in the notch of a gun-sight.

All about, up and down the slope, back in among the ranked evergreens and out on the glary open, in fact, nearly everywhere one looked, were the figures of men and women and animals and like creations, all done in snow. Some of them were mere crude white clumps and some, being more ambitiously modeled, purported to represent whole family groups or famous characters in history or horses or dogs or deer or what-not.

This Annual Exhibition of Snow Statuary, to quote the grand language of the publicity printed in the city papers and in the home weekly, was a distinctive feature of the village activities, a fancy which each fall was widely advertised.

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