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The Slice: Don’t skip a chance to hear it for yourself

There’s a certain magic in freezing weather that not everyone knows about.

If you skim a stone across a recently frozen-over pond, it can create arguably the eeriest sound to be encountered in nature.

It’s like a cross between the arrival of a flying saucer in a 1950s sci-fi movie and a theremin.

Or it can even sound like, well, I’ll go ahead and tell the story.

My wife and I were taking a walk on the day after Veterans Day. We came upon a pond covered with fresh ice.

I can’t remember when or where I learned it. But I knew what to do next.

Using the motion of someone skipping stones on a lake in July, I side-armed a rock across the frozen water. And there was that strange, almost haunting sound.

I waited for my wife’s reaction. None was forthcoming.

So I chucked another stone. Again, it sounded like an alien spaceship was about to land.

Once more, my wife didn’t notice.

As we started to walk away, I asked. “Didn’t you hear that sound?”

She said that all she heard was the call of an exotic bird that must have escaped from its cage. I think she was worried about it.

Then I remembered. She grew up in a warm climate and did not have childhood experiences with frozen ponds.

That, I said, was no bird.

We went back to the edge of the pond. I found a fresh rock and repeated my experiment.

My wife made a mini-movie of it with her phone. This time she heard. And she smiled like a woman who now realized some poor Amazonian parrot was not going to freeze to death.

She sent the video to her mother and sister. At first, they didn’t recognize the source of the eerie sound either.

I do not understand the physics or water-acoustics of it. I just know the ice thickness has to be just so. Once it gets strong enough to skate on, it’s too late.

Maybe, considering the freeze/thaw cycles of the Inland Northwest winter, you will get a chance to hear it. I hope you do.

My guess is that you will not forget it.

Today’s Slice question: Where are you apt to wind up if you go over the river and through the woods?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. One reader said that when hunters and nonhunters can resist stereotypes, civil conversations are possible.

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