SNOWBOUND

A new book documents Canada's quirky fishing shacks

- By Rosemary Counter Photography by Richard Johnson

EVERY WINTER, tiny shelters pop up on frozen lakes across the country. Their purpose is quaint and simple: to provide a warm room where fishers sit around a hole drilled into the ice, their lines dangling into the dark. These are ice huts—portable, makeshift structures built by anglers during the fishing season.

For the record, ice huts are not made of ice. They’re pieced together from whatever the builder has in the garage, be it plywood, lumber or tarps. They date back to Indigenous fishers who chipped holes through the ice with bone or stone tools and speared fish through the opening. To better see into the water below, they built simple coverings to block the light.