r-zone, and kept
going northwestward, in the hope of picking up the trail of the Captain
and Borup, which we did after a mile of going. Close examination of the
trail showed us that Borup and his party had retraced their steps and
gone quite a distance west in order to cross the lead. It was on this
march that we were to have met Borup and his party returning, so Marvin
and his boy Kyutah were sent to look them up. The rest of the party kept
on in the newly found trail and came to the igloo and cache that had
been left there by Borup. The Commander went into the igloo, and we made
the dogs fast and built our own igloos, made our tea and went to sleep.

March 4: Heavy snow fall; but Commander Peary routed out all hands, and
by seven o'clock we were following the Captain's trail. Very rough
going, and progress slow up to about nine o'clock, when conditions
changed. We reached heavy, old floes of waving blue ice, the best
traveling on sea ice I had ever encountered in eighteen years'
experience. We went so fast that we more than made up for lost time and
at two o'clock, myself in the lead, we reached the igloo built by
Captain Bartlett. It had been arranged that I should stop for one sleep
at every igloo built by the Captain, and that he should leave a note in
his igloo for my instructions; but, in spite of these previous
arrangements, I felt that with such good traveling it would be just as
wise to keep on going, and so we did, but it was only about half or
three-quarters of an hour later when we were stopped by a lead, beside
which the Captain had camped. With Ootah and Tommy to help, we built an
igloo and crawled inside. Two hours later, the Commander and his party
arrived, and we crawled out and turned the igloo over to him. Tommy,
Ootah, and I then built another igloo, crawled inside, and blocked the
doorway up with a slab of snow, determined not to turn out again until
we had had a good feed and snooze.

From my diary, the first entry since leaving the land; with a couple of
comments added afterward:

March 5: A clear bright morning, 20 deg. below zero; quite comfortable.
Reached here yesterday at two-forty-five P. M., after some of the finest
going I have ever seen. Commander Peary, Captain Bartlett, and Dr.
Goodsell here, and fourteen Esquimos. First view of the sun to-day, for
a few minutes at noon, makes us all cheerful. It was a crimson sphere,
just balanced on the brink of the world. Had the weather been favo