l to me, and when _with me_ more effective in covering distance
with a sledge than any of the others, he had not, as a racial
inheritance, the daring and initiative of Bartlett, or Marvin,
MacMillan, or Borup. I owed it to him not to subject him to dangers and
responsibilities which he was temperamentally unfit to face.

As to the dogs, most of them were powerful males, as hard as iron, in
good condition, but without an ounce of superfluous fat; and, by reason
of the care which I had taken of them up to this point, they were all in
good spirits, like the men. The sledges, which were being repaired that
day, were also in good condition. My food and fuel supplies were ample
for forty days, and by the gradual utilization of the dogs themselves
for reserve food, might be made to last for fifty days if it came to a
pinch.

As the Eskimos worked away at repairing the sledges while we rested
there on the first day of April, they stopped from time to time to eat
some of the boiled dog which the surplus numbers in Bartlett's returning
team had enabled them to have. They had killed one of the poorest dogs
and boiled it, using the splinters of an extra broken sledge for fuel
under their cooker. It was a change for them from the pemmican diet. It
was fresh meat, it was hot, and they seemed thoroughly to enjoy it. But
though I remembered many times when from sheer starvation I had been
glad to eat dog meat raw, I did not feel inclined to join in the feast
of my dusky friends.

A little after midnight, on the morning of April 2, after a few hours of
sound, warm, and refreshing sleep, and a hearty breakfast, I started to
lift the trail to the north, leaving the others to pack, hitch up, and
follow. As I climbed the pressure ridge back of our igloo, I took up
another hole in my belt, the third since I left the land--thirty-two
days before. Every man and dog of us was as lean and flat-bellied as a
board, and as hard.

Up to this time I had intentionally kept in the rear, to straighten out
any little hitch or to encourage a man with a broken sledge, and to see
that everything was in good marching order. Now I took my proper place
in the lead. Though I held myself in check, I felt the keenest
exhilaration, and even exultation, as I climbed over the pressure ridge
and breasted the keen air sweeping over the mighty ice, pure and
straight from the Pole itself.

These feelings were not in any way dampened when I plunged off the
pressure