…The bears of these parts were ferocious…
(Male, 40’s) I think I should mention that I’ve never actually been ice fishing, that it just looks like an excuse to drink yourself silly while freezing your ass off. However, I am nearly 100% certain that ice fishing isn’t supposed to be done like this.
“…this water was so cold that I would freeze to death nearly instantaneously…”
I was visiting a buddy’s cottage. The house itself wasn’t much to look at but it was right on a lake and he was a big fisherman so he considered it a sportsman’s paradise. I was there to go ice fishing. It was dark and all the snow was blue since it was lit by the moon. There was my friend, his adult son, myself and another guy. All we had to do was walk down to the end of his front yard and there was the lake. The view was unbelievable: towering pines lined the edge of the lake all around except for the place where it emptied into an even larger body of water.
Now is where things were strange. The ice for instance was sometimes solid, sometimes liquid, dangerously liquid. So though you could cast from the shore, one of the guys was designated to be a lookout for waves. Every seventh wave or so was unnaturally big and would have splashed the shore and any fisherman standing there. I was told that this water was so cold that I would freeze to death nearly instantaneously, long before I could make it back to the house.
The spotter served another purpose as well, which was to keep an eye out for bears. The bears of these parts were ferocious yet particularly lazy. They would wait for fish to be caught and then they’d attack, devouring the catch and the fishermen as well. Sure enough, after a few minutes, I looked up through the intense static-y snow and there was a huge bear lumbering at us across the lake. This happened at the same time that waves were also crashing on the shore. The spotter sounded the alarm. I dropped my fishing rod and turned toward the cottage but my every movement was slowed as if frozen. My footsteps sunk into the snow. The bear reached out its nasty paw and mowed down one of the others. Then another fell to its claws. Only I and one other reached the threshold of the door and at that instant, I woke up.