Horses on Ice

Samoans catch flying fish with flaming torches. Eskimos shoot salmon with bows and arrows. Chinese catch whiting with tame cormorants. The Hairy Ainus of Japan catch salmon with grizzly bears. Finns catch turbot with horses. Unlike cormorants and bears, Finnish horses do not actually catch the fish, nor are they used for bait. In winter Finnish fishermen use plodding draft horses to haul away their heavy loads of fish from the holes chopped in the roof of the Baltic Sea.

Last week a cavalcade of 700 fishermen and 100 horses clattered out of Helsingfors to drag the ice of the Gulf of Finland. For two days the expedition prospered, moved farther and farther out from the shore. Suddenly a shrieking, steel-grey blizzard swept down on them. With prodigious snapping and grinding a great ice floe broke away from the shore. All the fishermen and their steeds were swept out to sea on an island of ice.

They had few provisions, no protection against the blizzard. The little colony subdivided dangerously. Small parties floated away in different directions, most of them toward Finland's greatest enemy, Soviet Russia. After 24 hours the blizzard let up sufficiently for Finnish army planes to take off. They dropped sausages, blankets, hay, most of which fell into the sea. Slower but surer, Finnish and Soviet icebreakers smashed their way to the rescue. The refugees, horses and men alike, gnawed frozen fish. At the end of the third day, all but one or two of the frost-bitten fishermen had been saved, nearly half of the horses.

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