Fire on ice.

February 20

Skate to Fair Haven Pond. 

Make a fire on the south side of the pond, using canoe birch bark and oak leaves for kindlings. It is best to lay down first some large damp wood on the ice for a foundation, since the success of a fire depends very much on the bed of coals it makes, and, if these are nearly quenched in the basin of melted ice, there is danger that it will go out.

February 20, 2024

How much dry wood ready for the hunter, inviting flames, is to be found in every forest, — dry bark fibres and small dead twigs of the white pine and other trees, held up high and dry as if for this very purpose!

The occasional loud snapping of the fire is exhilarating. I put on some hemlock boughs, and the rich salt crackling of its leaves is like mustard to the ears, — the firing of uncountable regiments. Dead trees love the fire. 

We skate home in the dusk, with an odor of smoke in our clothes.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 20, 1854

Make a fire on the south side of the pond, using canoe birch bark and oak leaves for kindling. See February 7, 1854 ("Made a fire on the snow-covered ice half a mile below Ball's Hill -- a large warm fire, whose flame went up straight, there being no wind, and without smoke.  . . We had often sailed over this very spot.”); January 26, 1860 ("To Eleazer Davis's Hill, and made a fire on the ice, merely to see the flame and smell the smoke. ")

Snapping of the fire

and crackling of leaves is like 

mustard to the ears.