drafty mountain hut

The swelling river was belching on a high key, from ten to eleven. Quite a musical cracking, running like chain lightning of sound athwart my course, as if the river, squeezed, thus gave its morning’s milk with music. A certain congealed milkiness in the sound, like the soft action of piano keys, — a little like the cry of a pigeon woodpecker, — a-week a-week, etc. A congealed gurgling, frog-like. As I passed, the ice forced up by the water on one side suddenly settled on another with a crash, and quite a lake was formed above the ice behind me, and my successor two hours after, to his wonder and alarm, saw my tracks disappear in one side of it and come out on the other.

-from the journals of Henry David Thoreau