The Ice on the Tamarack

by Dave Arneson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The umpire's table stood in the hall because there was nowhere else to put it. Two doors opened off the hall. Behind the left one, in the adjutant's office, Captain Lowndes and two lieutenants had Blue. Behind the right, in the room where the band kept its music stands in winter, Second Lieutenant Quarrier had Red by himself, because nobody else had wanted Red. Each room had a copy of the map with only its own blocks on it. The hall had the real map, all the blocks, both sets of dice, Livermore's book of tables open at the fire tables, and a stove that drew badly whenever the wind came off the river.

Captain Henry Stave had drawn the map himself over November and December, in ink, at the scale Livermore wanted. It showed a country that did not exist: a river he called the Tamarack, a town called Bergen Mills on the west bank, a road bridge of four spans below the town, a bluff road on the east side, woodlots, a creamery, eleven farms. He had put in the farms because a country without people in it looked wrong to him, and because he liked to know who lived where. Each farm had a line in his notebook. He had not expected anybody to ask about them.

He had also kept, since the first of January, a weather ledger for the Tamarack country. Every morning Private Tolliver of the band read the thermometer on the porch of the headquarters building and told him the figure, and Stave wrote it down twice: once in the post journal, once in the ledger for the country that did not exist. It saved him inventing weather. The ledger for the fourteenth of January 1884 read Minus 22. Clear. Wind NW. So did the post journal.

Major Pettibone had come by at seven, before breakfast, with his lecture under his arm.

"You've read the problem."

"I wrote the problem, Major."

"You wrote the ground. I wrote the problem." Pettibone set the lecture on the umpire's table, on top of the fire tables, and squared its edges. It was titled The Bridge as the Key of the Position, and it was forty-one pages in a clerk's hand. "Blue advances on the bridge from the south. Red holds the town. Red has a battalion and a section of guns. Blue has two battalions and four guns. Blue should be on the bridge by the twelfth move. I'd like to be able to say so on Thursday."

"Blue may be," Stave said.

"It's a demonstration, Henry."

"It's a game, Major. Livermore says so on the cover."

Pettibone took the lecture back. He did not seem angry. He seemed like a man who had already been to Thursday and was only waiting for the rest of the week to catch up with him.

---

The first eight moves went the way the Major had written them. Lowndes was a careful officer and a good one. He sent his orders out in a round hand on the printed slips, and Stave moved the blue blocks up the south road, a ten-minute move at a time, and the blue blocks came on in the order Pettibone would have wanted: skirmishers, supports, the guns unlimbering on the rise by the creamery. Tolliver carried the slips. He was a slight, exact man who played second cornet, and he had asked for the duty because the hall was warmer than the band room. He knocked before he opened either door, even the second time, even the tenth.

Red's orders came back short. Quarrier held the town with four companies and kept his guns behind the churchyard wall. He was twenty-three, a year out of the Academy, and on the fifth move he sent out a slip that said only: Request information. Who lives in the house at the bend of the river north of the bridge?

Tolliver put it on the table and waited.

Stave looked at the map. There was a small black square at the bend, above the bridge, on the Red side. He had drawn it in December because the bend looked empty. He opened the notebook and turned to the page.

Farm at the north bend. Halvorsen. Widow; husband drowned 1879. Two grown sons gone to the Red River country. Two horses, a wood sledge. Cuts cordwood on the east bank, hauls it across.

He had written that on the eighteenth of December. He remembered doing it, and he remembered why: the sledge and the cordwood explained the track he had drawn from the farm to the water's edge, which he had drawn because it looked right.

He copied the entry out onto a slip, word for word, and gave it to Tolliver.

"Is he winning, sir?" Tolliver said.

"Nobody's winning. It's the fifth move."

Tolliver knocked on the right-hand door.

---

The sixth move went by. The seventh. On the eighth Lowndes brought his second battalion up in column behind the first, which was what page twenty-six of the lecture said to do, and Stave moved the blocks and measured the distance to the bridge with the brass scale and found the head of the column a mile and a half from the first span. Four more moves. Pettibone would be right almost to the minute.

Quarrier's slip for the eighth move was the longest he had written.

Request information. (1) What is the state of the river? (2) Can a sledge and team cross it at the Halvorsen track? (3) I wish to speak to Mrs. Halvorsen.

Stave read it twice. Then he opened the ledger and ran his finger down the column.

He had forgotten that his war was taking place in January. He had set the date of the war because the Major's problem left that line blank on Livermore's form and somebody had to fill it in, and he had written the day he was writing on, and then the weather had come from the porch thermometer because it was easier than making it up. And the porch thermometer had not been above zero since the fourth.

Ten days. Minus eighteen, minus twenty-six, minus nine, minus thirty-one. Clear most days. Snow on the sixth, four inches, then wind.

He had built a frozen river and not known it.

He sat for a while. The stove ticked. Behind the left-hand door somebody laughed at something, probably not the war.

It was not a question of what he wanted. He knew what he wanted; he wanted to see what the boy would do. The question was what was true of the Tamarack on the fourteenth of January after ten days like that. He had grown up on the Crow Wing and had been through the ice once, at eleven, not far from shore. He knew that a river holds differently from a lake. It freezes at the edges first and the channel last, and where the current runs fast over a riffle or round the outside of a bend it can stay thin all winter. A widow who hauled cordwood across every week would know where it was good. That was the whole reason she had a track.

He wrote on a fresh slip:

(1) The river is frozen bank to bank. Snow on the ice, drifted. Open water: none visible. (2) Mrs. Halvorsen has hauled wood across all month at her track. (3) See below.

Then he stopped. He could not tell a man about a conversation. He would have to have it.

He got up, knocked on the right-hand door himself, and went in.

---

The band room smelled of valve oil and wet wool. Quarrier had the map on two music stands laid flat with a door across them. He had a cigar he was not smoking. He stood up when Stave came in.

"Sit down, Mr. Quarrier. I'm not here. I'm Mrs. Halvorsen."

Quarrier looked at him.

"You've come to my door," Stave said, "and there are soldiers in my yard, and my horses are in the barn, and I would like to know what you want, because it is very cold."

Quarrier was quiet for a second. Then he took his cap off. Stave had not expected that, and he liked it.

"Ma'am, I need to cross the river. I have a battalion and two guns. Where is the ice good?"

"At my track it is good. I cross there every Monday with a load of wood, and the sledge weighs more than a man. There is a spruce pole stuck in the ice at the middle. Keep the pole on your right." Stave heard his own voice change, a little higher and slower, the way his aunt in Brainerd had talked, and he let it. "Below the bend where the water runs over the stones it is not good. My husband went through there. Do not go below the bend."

"Can your team pull a gun?"

"My horses pull wood. A gun I don't know." He thought. "They are good horses."

"Will you lend them?"

"Will you give them back?"

"I'll give you a receipt from the United States."

Stave considered what a widow in a river town would think of that. "Then you will give me the receipt first."

Quarrier wrote one. He actually wrote it, on the back of an order slip, Received of Mrs. R. Halvorsen, two horses and one wood sledge, for the use of the U.S. Army, and signed it, and handed it across. Stave put it in his pocket.

"I'm not Mrs. Halvorsen anymore," he said. "Give me your orders in writing."

---

The orders came out on the ninth move. Two companies to stay in the town and hold the churchyard wall and make a lot of noise. Two companies across the ice at the Halvorsen track, in single file, twenty paces between men at the centre, then north through the woodlot on the east bank and down the bluff road to come in behind the bridge. The two guns to follow on the ice with six-horse teams, the widow's pair leading on the first gun, the ammunition on the sledge.

It would take them four moves. Lowndes would be on the first span by the twelfth.

Stave went through Livermore twice looking for a table for ice and could not find one. Livermore had tables for fire at every range and for every formation and for troops in woods and in houses. He had nothing for a frozen river, and probably he had never needed one.

So it was the umpire's to decide. And the umpire could not decide how it came out, only how likely it was, and he had to decide that before he rolled.

He took a clean sheet and wrote at the top, Crossing of the Tamarack ice, Halvorsen track, 9th–10th moves, and under it:

Infantry in file, extended: crosses. No roll. The widow's sledge, loaded, crosses; she has done it all month.

Guns. Each gun with limber and six horses weighs about what a loaded sledge weighs, but it bears on wheels, not runners, and the horses do not know the track. The track is good ice but near the channel. Each gun: roll one die. On a one, the ice gives.

He looked at that for a long time. One in six. Was it too hard? Too easy? He did not know what the ice on the Tamarack would bear, because there was no Tamarack. But he knew what the ice on the Crow Wing had been like in the January he was eleven, and he knew what a three-inch rifle weighed, and he thought one in six was honest. He wrote the time beside it, 10:40, and signed it, because he wanted to be able to show that he had written it before and not after.

The door on the left opened and Major Pettibone came out.

He had been in with Blue, watching. He had not been told anything, because Blue had not been told anything, but he had heard Stave go into the band room and come out after a long time. He came to the table and looked at the map and saw the red blocks strung out in a line across the blue of the river.

"What is that?"

"Two companies of Red crossing on the ice."

"There is no ice in the problem."

"There's ice in the river, Major. It's January." Stave turned the ledger round and pushed it across. "Ten days below zero. I've been keeping it since the first."

Pettibone read the column. He turned back a page and read the date at the top, and then the one on the page before that, as though they might have been written that morning.

"You put in the weather for decoration."

"I put it in because it was cold."

"The problem is about the bridge."

"The problem's about the Tamarack, Major. The bridge is one of the things on it."

Pettibone put a finger on the black square at the bend. "And this?"

"Mrs. Halvorsen. She lives there. She hauls wood." Stave took the receipt out of his pocket and laid it on the table. Pettibone read that too.

For a moment Stave thought the Major would stop the game. He had the rank for it. He could say that the problem had been badly drafted, that the frozen river was an accident of the umpire's form-filling, that they would begin again on Wednesday with a line added saying The season is summer. And he would have been within his rights.

Pettibone picked up the sheet with the odds on it, read it, looked at the time, and put it down again.

"One in six," he said.

"Per gun."

"That's generous to the ice."

"Maybe. It's what I'd give it if I had to drive it."

Pettibone looked at him with an expression Stave could not read, and then pulled out the other chair and sat down on Stave's side of the table, which he had not done all morning.

"Roll it, then."

---

The infantry crossed. Stave moved the blocks himself, file by file, to the east bank and into the woodlot, and noted the time.

The first gun crossed. The widow's horses were on it, and Stave rolled a four, and moved the block.

The second gun had the Army's own six. He rolled.

It was a one.

He sat and looked at the die. He had not wanted it; he knew that as soon as he saw it. He had wanted to see the boy come down the bluff road with both his guns, the way you want to see a runner reach home. Pettibone did not say anything. Tolliver, who had come back with an empty slip, stood by the stove and did not say anything either.

Stave took the second red gun block off the map and set it on the edge of the table, by the ink bottle. Then he wrote the slip for Red:

10th move. The second gun has gone through the ice at a point forty yards short of the east bank, where the track runs closest to the channel. The gun and limber are lost. Four of the six horses lost. Two drivers in the water; both got out by the wheel team's traces; both unfit for duty with cold. The first gun, the sledge and the ammunition are across.

He read it over. It was true. He could not make it less true by wishing. He gave it to Tolliver.

"He won't like that, sir."

"No."

Tolliver knocked on the right-hand door.

---

On the twelfth move, Captain Lowndes's leading company reached the first span of the bridge over the Tamarack, exactly as page thirty-one of The Bridge as the Key of the Position said it would. On the thirteenth, two companies of Red and one gun came down the bluff road out of the woodlot, and found the Blue guns limbered up by the creamery with their teams facing the wrong way, and Stave spent a quarter of an hour at Livermore's fire tables and with the dice, and did the arithmetic twice.

At the end of it nobody held the bridge. The Blue battalion on the spans could not go forward because of the churchyard wall and could not go back because of the gun on the bluff road. The Red companies on the east bank had nowhere to go either and were short of ammunition, sledge or no sledge. Stave called time at the fifteenth move because it was one o'clock and the officers wanted their dinner, and he did not say who had won, because he did not know.

Pettibone gathered the lecture up off the corner of the table, where he had put it down at some point without Stave noticing. It had a ring on the cover from Stave's coffee cup. He looked at it.

"I'm going to have to write a different Thursday," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"You might have told me there were farms."

"You didn't ask, Major. Mr. Quarrier asked."

Pettibone went out. The doors on either side opened, and Lowndes and Quarrier and the lieutenants came out into the hall and stood round the real map, seeing the other side's blocks for the first time, and began at once to argue about the creamery. Quarrier saw the red gun block standing by the ink bottle and picked it up and turned it over in his fingers, and then set it down on the blue of the river, forty yards short of the east bank, where it had gone in.

Nobody moved it. When the others had gone to dinner, Stave did not move it either.

He took the ledger and the notebook to his quarters. After dinner he sat at his own table and turned to the Halvorsen page and wrote under the December entry, in the same hand:

14 Jan. Lent two horses and the sledge to Red. Holds a receipt from the United States. There is a gun in the river on her track, forty yards off the east bank.

He did not know what she would do about it. He thought she would probably want it out by the time the ice went, and that she might ask the Army for help, or might not, and that it was not his business to decide.

At seven the next morning Tolliver knocked on the door with his breath smoking and said, "Nineteen below, Captain," and Stave wrote it down twice.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Davīde Arnesōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Dave Arneson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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