248 CONQUERING THE ARCTIC ICE 



Lat. 71 14' N. Temperature at start 15 C., at 3 P.M. 

 8 C. Wind E.S.E., four to eight miles an hour. 



Thursday, April 25. Broke camp at 6.20 A.M. and had some 

 very bad going all day. We came into an abyss of broken up 

 ice, with soft, deep snow between the rubble, and men and dogs 

 toiled alike. And while we are toiling over this kind of ice we 

 know that we are drifting back, probably even faster than we 

 can hope to walk over it ; the lead line makes the fact only too 

 plain. For about an hour we had some rather good going, 

 then we were stopped by open water, and when we again could 

 go on we saw two seals playing about in it. " Kamalook " was 

 rapidly getting worse, and we thought that some fresh meat 

 mi^ht perhaps tempt him to eat and possibly restore him to 

 health. At i P.M. we camped, after shooting one seal, and 

 I went out for it on a small piece of ice, using our shovel as a 

 paddle. I did not move very fast, but in twenty minutes the 

 seal was on the ice. The dogs were quite mad with joy, howled 

 about us while we cut it open, and ate the snow which was red 

 with the blood of the seal. We gave each of them a large 

 chunk, and the warm bloody meat disappeared in a twinkling ; 

 only " Kamalook," the invalid, and our best dog, would not or 

 could not eat. Then we cooked some soup for him ; he just 

 tasted it, and turned round to try to bite some dogs close to 

 him. By accident we dropped a cracker not far from him, and 

 he ate it at once, and looked appealingly at us for more. He got 

 it, though it meant diminishing our own ration, but we would 

 do anything to save him. Whether he really appreciated the 

 crackers, or whether it was only because it gave him something 

 to chew, is of course impossible to say, but whatever his 

 motives were he ate them and thereby got some nourishment. 



It is a strange thing that the dogs are not more eager to eat 

 the blubber. We have always thought that there was too little 

 fat in our pemmican, but that apparently is not so. The meat 

 they ate greedily, but the blubber was lying about all day and 

 all night without being touched. 



The ice we have come over to-day is heavy and crushed into 

 large ridges. The ice of some of these ridges is at least 7 

 feet thick and is pressed up in places as high as 20 feet. A 

 floe which we passed over was cracked into deep and rather 

 wide fissures, about 6 feet deep, and some so wide that we 



