CHAPTER XXIX 



SPRING TRAVEL, 1915 



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THE first advance ice party of the year left Cape Kellett under 

 the command of Wilkins on February 9th, and the rest of us 

 started a few days later. Our plan was to follow the west 

 coast of Banks Island north about a hundred and fifty miles and 

 then to cross McClure Strait to Prince Patrick Island and strike out 

 on the ocean northwest from the southwest corner of that island. 



Before leaving I had come to realize that we were facing a 

 failure of the plans for that spring because of circumstances not 

 to be prevented, however clearly foreseen. The various sorts of 

 dog sickness are still as mysterious as were the African fevers in 

 the time of Livingstone. By Christmas-time our dogs at Kellett 

 had begun to die one by one. In some cases it was the fattest 

 and the youngest dogs, in others the oldest and most decrepit. The 

 only thing we could do was to isolate the affected animals from 

 the healthy ones, and this may have helped, although one or two 

 of the dogs that died appeared never to have had any contact 

 with the ones that originally showed the disease. There are many 

 theories about these diseases. There may be some significance 

 in the fact that we have never lost any dogs that have been living 

 on caribou or other land game, but always dogs that have been 

 living on seal meat. 



When we finally got away from Kellett we still had two good 

 dog-teams and a third poor one, which was really all we needed 

 with only two first-class sledges. But a day or two after starting 

 we faced a serious additional difficulty. During the preceding 

 autumn a certain amount of snow had first fallen upon the coast 

 ice and later a shower of rain had formed a skin of ice over the 

 snow. On top soft snow had again fallen, but the thin layer of 

 ice was left as a sort of roof over innumerable cavities and soft 

 places underneath, so that every few steps a dog would break 

 through and get the sharp, angular pieces of thin ice between his 

 toes. Before we realized it nearly all our dogs had bleeding feet 

 and some of them were incapacitated for work. The temperature 



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