THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



They revelled in the cold, enjoyed nothing so much 

 as a roll and a fight in a snowdrift, and wouldn't use the 

 kennels provided for them, preferring to curl up in the 

 snow, at most in the shelter of the kennels, or to He on 

 anything dark, such as a coal-bag. They showed some 

 characteristics of the wild northern dog, and some had 

 traces of their wolf ancestry. Gwen was purely wolfish 

 in her wildness and impatience of restraint, and her son 

 Terror was like her. It was attempted once to muzzle 

 Gwen, after some penguin hunting exploit, but she nearly 

 went mad in her efforts to get rid of the muzzle, turning 

 and twisting so rapidly that the eye couldn't follow her, 

 and she had to be freed from it. 



The struggle for kingship was not so sanguinary as 

 is common with such dogs. Old Scamp's authority was 

 never seriously disputed, though Trip and Wolf occa- 

 sionally fought him. Scamp was not the heaviest or 

 strongest dog, but he downed them all by his vehemence. 

 The females were very jealous, and were apt to eat one 

 another's litters. They make very good mothers. A 

 litter was born on the Nimrod while going south. After 

 we landed one of these pups was killed by the fall of a 

 house during a blizzard. The body was flung out on the 

 hill-side, some distance away. The mother. Possum, dis- 

 covered it and nursed it for a whole day. Though some- 

 what fierce and quarrelsome among themselves, the dogs 

 were very friendly to man. They would take the severest 

 beating when they had been misbehaving, and be friends 

 the moment it was over. 



The young pups, born in the Antarctic, were very 

 self-reliant little things. When very young they used 

 to issue from their shelter, run out in the snow and bark 

 in defiance of everything. They got their drinking-water 

 for a long time in the form of snow, and when summer 



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