“We had twenty horses, and perhaps twice as many men with shovels. We’d lashed a spar to the boat-carriage, a sort of whiffle-tree, and from that to the ten pair of horses ran such a tackle of ropes and traces as you never saw--all thicknesses, plain and hawser, pieced out and joined everywhere with sailors’ knots and hitches. Willie Harverson, on the frame of the carriage, was shouting orders through the speaking-trumpet--to find the ridge past the mill, to rouse High Lee village on the way--I don’t suppose anybody heard half he said, for already the digging had begun. Old Joe Barker had donned a cork jacket for warmth, and was flat on the fore air-chamber: he was directing, and Willie, off and on the carriage continually, was his spokesman. Without a captain, you see, forty diggers are little better than a dozen. The men who weren’t digging were scouting, starting her after each halt, or standing by to see that the traces didn’t get mixed. “I said the snow was dry: it was so dry that half of it fell from the shovels of the diggers, blown away by the wind. That meant twice as much stooping, and the men were up to their waists in it. The fellows who scouted for rising ground appeared and disappeared in the drifts, and the snow crusted on their lanterns, melting and freezing both at once. We couldn’t hear the sea now; instead there rose the shrill notes of trees and the silky soft whistle of the ice particles over the snow. We came to a quickset hedge: they dug through the drift to it, slapped the quarters of the horses with the shovels, and we came through with branches of briar and thorn caught in the trace-ropes.