and tell them
of the work on the coast, and what he needed to carry it on.

This meeting was to have been held in May, and to reach New York in
season to attend it Dr. Grenfell decided to leave St. Anthony
Hospital, where he then was, toward the end of April, for in any case
traveling would be slow.

It was his plan to travel northward, by dog team, to the Straits of
Belle Isle, thence westward along the shores, and finally southward,
down the western coast of Newfoundland, to Port Aux Basque, from which
point a steamer would carry him over to North Sydney, in Nova Scotia.
There he could get a train and direct railway connections to New York.
There is an excellent, and ordinarily, at this season, an expeditious
route for dog travel down the western coast of Newfoundland, and
Grenfell anticipated no difficulties.

Just as he was ready to start a blizzard set in with a northeast gale,
and smash! went the ice. This put an end to dog travel. There was but
one alternative, and that was by boat. Traveling along the coast in a
small boat is pretty exciting and sometimes perilous when you have to
navigate the boat through narrow lanes of water, with land ice on one
side and the big Arctic ice pack on the other, and a shift of wind is
likely to send the pack driving in upon you before you can get out of
the way. And if the ice pack catches you, that's the end of it, for
your boat will be ground up like a grain of wheat between mill stones,
and there you are, stranded upon the ice, and as like as not cut off
from land, too.

But there was no other way to get to that meeting in New York, and
Grenfell was determined to get there. And so, when the blizzard had
passed he got out a small motor boat, and made ready for the journey.
If he could reach a point several days' journey by boat to the
southward, he could leave the boat and travel one hundred miles on
foot overland to the railroad.

This hike of one hundred miles, with provisions and equipment on his
back, was a tremendous journey in itself. It would not be on a beaten
road, but through an unpopulated wilderness still lying deep under
winter snows. To Grenfell, however, it would be but an incident in his
active life. He was accustomed to following a dog team, and that
hardens a man for nearly any physical effort. It requires that a man
keep at a trot the livelong day, and it demands a good heart and good
lungs and staying powers and plenty of grit, and Grenfell was well