The creature dropped; both Wilson and Clark were up at once:  and we three hurried to the spot.

But the very first near glance showed a singular kind of bear.  Wilson put his hand to the head, and a lax skin came away at his touch....  It was Aubrey Maitland who was underneath it, and I had shot him dead.

For the past few days he had been cleaning skins, among them the skin of the bear from which I had saved him at Taimur.  Now, Maitland was a born pantomimist, continually inventing practical jokes; and perhaps to startle me with a false alarm in the very skin of the old Bruin which had so nearly done for him, he had thrown it round him on finishing its cleaning, and so, in mere wanton fun, had crept on deck at the hour of his watch.  The head of the bear-skin, and the fog, must have prevented him from seeing me taking aim.

This tragedy made me ill for weeks.  I saw that the hand of Fate was upon me.  When I rose from bed, poor Maitland was lying in the ice behind the great camel-shaped hummock near us.

By the end of January we had drifted to 80 deg. 55’; and it was then that Clark, in the presence of Wilson, asked me if I would make the fourth man, in the place of poor Maitland, for the dash in the spring.  As I said ‘Yes, I am willing,’ David Wilson spat with a disgusted emphasis.  A minute later he sighed, with ‘Ah, poor Maitland...’ and drew in his breath with a tut! tut!

God knows, I had an impulse to spring then and there at his throat, and strangle him:  but I curbed myself.

There remained now hardly a month before the dash, and all hands set to work with a will, measuring the dogs, making harness and seal-skin shoes for them, overhauling sledges and kayaks, and cutting every possible ounce of weight.  But we were not destined, after all, to set out that year.  About the 20th February, the ice began to pack, and the ship was subjected to an appalling pressure.  We found it necessary to make trumpets of our hands to shout into one another’s ears, for the whole ice-continent was crashing, popping, thundering everywhere in terrific upheaval.  Expecting every moment to see the Boreal crushed to splinters, we had to set about unpacking provisions, and placing sledges, kayaks, dogs and everything in a position for instant flight.  It lasted five days, and was accompanied by a tempest from the north, which, by the end of February, had driven us back south into latitude 79 deg. 40’.  Clark, of course, then abandoned the thought of the Pole for that summer.

And immediately afterwards we made a startling discovery:  our stock of reindeer-moss was found to be somehow ridiculously small.  Egan, our second mate, was blamed; but that did not help matters:  the sad fact remained.  Clark was advised to kill one or two of the deer, but he pig-headedly refused:  and by the beginning of summer they were all dead.

Well, our northward drift recommenced.  Toward the middle of February we saw a mirage of the coming sun above the horizon; there were flights of Arctic petrels and snow-buntings; and spring was with us.  In an ice-pack of big hummocks and narrow lanes we made good progress all the summer.