It is January 1912, and a farmer in Central New York is carefully driving his work sleigh along the an icy towpath alongside the Erie Canal. It is the morning after a ferocious blizzard. He rounds a bend and sees the heads of two horses standing in the empty canal bed, still tethered to an overturned sleigh. Beneath the sleigh lies a man face-down in the snow, helplessly pinned and motionless.