ed and accepted by the Government, and though
unfortunately it was but very poorly marked, and we have had lots of
trouble since,--as we have never been able to say exactly where our
boundaries lie, nor even to find marks enough to follow over the
original survey again,--yet it enabled us to get to work, which was
all that we wanted at the moment.

The fresh problems at the hospital, and the constant demands on our
energies, made Christmas and New Year go by with our minds quite
alienated from the cares of the new enterprise. But when after
Christmas the dogs had safely carried us over many miles of
snow-covered wastes, and our immediate patients gave us a chance to
look farther afield, I began to wonder if we might not pay the mill a
visit. By land it was only fifty miles distant to the southward,
possibly sixty if we had to go round the bays. The only difficulty
about the trip was that there were no trails, and most of the way led
through virgin forest, where windfalls and stumps and dense
undergrowth mixed with snow made the ordinary obstacle race a sprint
in the open in comparison. We knew what it meant, because in our
eagerness to begin our dog-driving when the first snow came, we had
wandered over small trees crusted with snow, fallen through, and
literally floundered about under the crust, unable to climb to the top
again. It was the nearest thing to the sensations of a man who cannot
swim struggling under the surface of the water. Moreover, on a tramp
with the minister, he had gone through his snow racquets and actually
lost the bows later, smashing them all up as he repeatedly fell
through between logs and tree-trunks and "tuckamore." His summons for
help and the idea that there were still eight miles to go still
haunted me. On that occasion we had cut down some spruce boughs and
improvised some huge webbed feet for ourselves, which had saved the
situation; but whether they would have served for twenty or thirty
miles, we could not tell. Not so long before a man named Casey,
bringing his komatik down the steep hill at Conche, missed his footing
and fell headlong by a bush into the snow. The heavy, loaded sledge
ran over him and pressed him still farther into the bank. Struggling
only made him sink the deeper, and an hour later the poor fellow was
discovered smothered to death.

No one knew the way. We could not hear of a single man who had ever
gone across in winter, though some said that an old fellow who ha