d them all. They must get off it
at the earliest possible moment. This pan was nearer the shore than
the one they had left, but all the time an offshore wind was shoving
the entire ice-pack steadily out toward the open sea, so that, like
the frog in the well, for every foot they gained they were losing two
or three. All this time, Grenfell was longing for a chance to swim
ashore--and the dogs would have followed him in that. Grenfell doesn't
in the least mind a bath in icy waters. I remember one nipping day on
the _Strathcona_ I came out on deck to find that he had just been
taking his bath in the open by emptying the bucket over himself in
the biting wind. "You could have had one too," he said, "but I've just
lost the bucket overboard." I wonder that he didn't dive for it, as he
dived for the cricket-ball on that earlier occasion.

It was impossible to swim ashore from the pan--because there was that
slushy "sish" filling all the gaps. The tiny table-top on which they
were now crowded together measured about ten by twelve feet. It was
not even solid ice--it was more like a great snowball loosely packed
by the cold wind--and at any moment under the extra strain of the
weight of men and dogs it might break up and let them all down into a
watery grave. As the wind became more brisk and the sea grew rougher,
the pan rocked about and bent and swayed, and the risk of its parting
in the middle increased.

The pan headed toward a rocky point, where heavy surf was breaking:
and a hope sprang up in Grenfell's heart that he might get near enough
to swim ashore after all. But then the worst possible thing happened,
short of an utter break-up. The pan hit a rock, and a large piece of
it broke off. Then the rest of it swung round and the wind took hold
of it, like a fiend alive, and started to push it steadily out to sea
again.

The sea has been compared to a cat, which in calm weather purrs at
your feet and in a storm will reveal its true nature and crack your
bones and eat you. Now it was cruelly teasing Grenfell and his
four-footed comrades as a cat tortures a mouse before it kills. The
last hope seemed to have gone--unless someone by a miracle should pass
along the shore and spy that tiny object on the horizon, and summon
others to help him launch a boat to the rescue.

But no one lives on the shore of that huge bay. The other sled by now
was so far ahead that it would be a long time before those with it
could come back to