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Most of us can hear the hush of snow, at least every once in a while, or the creaking of leafless branches moving against each other in the winter wind. If we listen, we hear the patter of animal feet on dry ground at night, the air cleared of katydids and crickets until spring. Only a few of us, however, get to hear the otherworldly sound of wild ice.

Most of North Carolina doesn’t get cold enough to freeze streams and ponds for any significant length of time. When ice and snow do come south and east, it feels like an alien takeover. We cancel school, hunker down, don’t dare drive anyplace. Ice and snow turn us into spindly-legged fawns, scrabbling around for purchase. And like fawns, we hear the world with new ears.

When cold temperatures descend on the swamps and canals of eastern North Carolina, slow-moving water in places like Lake Mattamuskeet can freeze, leaving stretches of ice that creak and moan. photograph by Neil Jernigan

The first time I heard the sound of wild ice, I was a teenager exploring a swamp with my parents on a Sunday afternoon. Most Sunday afternoons were reserved for “going to the woods.” In Wayne County, and throughout North Carolina, hunters were prohibited from killing on the Lord’s Day, so we were free to look and wander, even during deer season.

It had been unusually cold that year. The swamp streams and puddles were covered in a layer of ice, something I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since. When we stepped on them, the ice split, resonated like plucked steel cables. Perrrrnnnnn! Pewww! The cracking layers sounded like laser guns. Like whales singing to each other in the ocean depths.

The second time I heard wild ice, I was 20 years older, throwing rocks and pine cones at a frozen pond in Durham with my two sons. None of us had seen a pond frozen over before. I’d moved far enough away from that swamp in Wayne County that I thought it had all been a dream. But there it was, on that pond, the preternatural chords reverberating in the winter air.

Ice in glasses tinkles and cracks. Crushed ice shushes and grumbles. But wild ice, the ice no human can make, the ice that covers streams and ponds and lakes, has its own language. When bodies of water freeze, especially in warmer places like North Carolina, they don’t usually freeze solid. Instead, they leave the river and pond beneath to slosh. The lid of ice, stretched taut like the head of a drum, rattles the water below. It cracks, sends vibrations deep down and up above. These vibrations make sounds, the twangs and croons of wild ice.

We’re in the perfect place to hear those sounds. In colder climates, when the water gets too frigid, the ice becomes too thick to vibrate, too heavy to move. It silences any water beneath.

We don’t get too cold. Most winters, we get just cold enough for wild ice to sing. It hums and moans, shoots and warbles. It turns the heads of phoebes and squirrels — they, too, wonder over the eerie refrains of water that once splashed and trickled. These animals don’t know whale calls; they’ve never heard a laser gun in the movies. For them, it’s just the music of a frozen day.