658 APPENDIX 



On October 9th " Skvint" gave birth to puppies, but as so 

 young an animal could not have brought them up, especially 

 in such a cold season, we allowed her to keep only one of them 

 as an experiment ; the others were at once killed. A week 

 later " Sussi" produced a second litter, two he-dogs and nine 

 she-dogs. We let her keep the two males and one of the females. 



It proved inadvisable to have both the mothers with their 

 families in the same kennel. If one of the mothers went out 

 for a moment, the other at once took all the puppies into her 

 keeping, and then there was a battle royal when the first one 

 returned and wanted to reclaim her property. Something of 

 this sort had, no doubt, occurred one night in the case of 

 *' Skvint," whom Henriksen found in the morning lying at the 

 door of the kennel frozen so fast to the ice that it cost us a good 

 deal of trouble to get her loose again. She must have had 

 anything but a pleasant night — the thermometer had been down 

 to —33^ C. ( — 27.4^ Fahr.) — and her tail was frozen fast to one 

 of her hind-legs, so that we had to take her down into the sa- 

 loon to get her thawed. To obviate such misadventures for 

 the future I had a detached villa built for her where she could 

 be at peace with her child. 



One evening, when Mogstad was housing the puppies for 

 the night, two of them were missing. Henriksen and I at 

 once set off with lanterns and guns to hunt for them. We 

 thought that there had been a bear in the neighborhood, as 

 we had heard a great deal of barking earlier in the day out 

 upon the ice to the east of the ship ; but we could find no 

 tracks. After supper we set out again, five of us, all carrying 

 lanterns. After an hour's search along the lanes and up in the 

 pressure-ridges we at last found the puppies on the other side 

 of a new lane. Although the new ice on the lane was strong 

 enough to bear them, they were so terrified after having been 

 in the water that they dared not come over to us, and we had 

 to make a long detour to get hold of them. 



In the middle of December we took the youngest puppies 

 on board, as they had now grown so big, and ran away if they 

 were not ver}- closely watched. The gangway was left open at 



