OUR FIRST MEETING WITH THE POLAR OX. 49 



By mid-day, Fosheim and I at last were ready with our 

 preparations. It was a thick, hazy forenoon, with a slight fall of 

 snow, which made the going at first somewhat heavy. Added to 

 this, the dogs were lazy; they had got loose in the night, and 

 had demolished the whole of our store of stock-fish. How they 

 can have found room for it all I cannot imagine. 



From Fort Juliana, the fjord trended in a south-westerly direc- 

 tion into the land ; but when we had driven nearly fourteen miles 

 we came to a point, in rounding which we discovered that Hayes 

 Sound here divided into two branches, of which one continued in 

 a southerly direction, while the other, which was somewhat 

 narrower, made a little bend towards the north, and thereupon 

 took a direction due west. We decided to follow this arm, which 

 appeared to penetrate the deeper into the land. The ice was 

 splendid in here, almost entirely free of snow, and the dogs, 

 too, began to recover from the fish, and worked very well. At 

 eight o'clock in the evening, we camped to the west of a little 

 glacier which came down on the west side of the fjord. 



On Sunday morning, we started on again. The ice on the 

 fjord was almost everywhere black and shining, and our pace was 

 better than even on the previous day. The country, however, 

 did not look promising for sport. The mountains were perpen- 

 dicular on both sides of the fjord, and the ground at the foot 

 of them was thickly strewn with boulders. On the south side 

 projected quite a series of small glaciers, which appeared to be 

 very productive, as there were many icebergs in the fjord, several 

 of which were of fair size. It astonished me to see that such 

 small glaciers could produce such comparatively large icebergs. 

 There was, however, the possibility that they might have drifted 

 in, though it did not appear to be probable. After driving for six 

 hours, we came to a point whence the fjord trended away in a more 

 southerly direction, and we then discovered that we had almost 

 reached the end of this branch of it. The arm terminated in 

 a long reach of sands, which in their turn gave place to a large 

 glacier, one to two miles from the fjord. 



As we could not discover any promising shooting- or camping- 

 ground in the vicinity of the point, while the country on the 

 VOL. i. E 



