. But the slaughter among the seals
and penguins would have been horrible with us, and many dogs might have
been carried away on the breaking sea-ice. The tied-up ones lay under the
lee of a line of cases, each in his own hole. They curled up quite snugly
buried in the snowdrift when blizzards were blowing, and lay exactly in
the same way when sledging on the Barrier, the first duty of the
dog-driver after pitching his own tent being to dig holes for each of his
dogs. It may be that these conditions are more natural to them than any
other, and that they are warmer when covered by the drifted snow than
they would be in any unwarmed shelter: but this I doubt. At any rate they
throve exceedingly under these rigorous conditions, soon becoming fat and
healthy after the hardest sledge journeys, and their sledging record is a
very fine one. We could not have built them a hut; as it was, we left our
magnetic hut, a far smaller affair, in New Zealand, for there was no room
to stow it on the ship. I would not advise housing dogs in a hut built
with a lean-to roof as an annexe to the main living-hut, but this would
be one way of doing it if you are prepared to stand the noise and smell.

The dog-biscuits, provided by Spratt, weighed 8 oz. each, and their
sledging ration was 11/2 lbs. a day, given to them after they reached the
night camp. We made seal pemmican for them and tried this when sledging,
as an occasional variation on biscuit, but they did not thrive on this
diet. The oil in the biscuits caused purgation, as also did the pemmican:
the fat was partly undigested and the excreta were eaten. The ponies also
ate their excreta at times. Certain dogs were confirmed leather eaters,
and we carried chains for them: on camping, these dogs were taken out of
their canvas and raw-hide harnesses, and attached to the sledge by the
chains, care being taken that they could not get at the food on the
sledge. When sledging, Amundsen gave his dogs pemmican but I do not know
what else: he also fed dog to dog: I do not know whether we could have
fed dog to dog, for ours were Siberian dogs which, I am told, will not
eat one another. At Amundsen's winter quarters he gave them seal's flesh
and blubber one day, and dried fish the next.[283] On the long voyage
south in the Fram, he fed his dogs on dried fish, and three times a week
gave them a porridge of dried fish, tallow, and maize meal boiled
together.[284] At Cape Evans or at Hut Point our dogs