We said good-bye to Day and Hooper next morning, and they set their faces northwards and homewards.[204] Two-men parties on the Barrier are not much fun.  Day had certainly done his best about the motors and they had helped us over a bad bit of initial surface.  That night Scott wrote:  “Only a few more marches to feel safe in getting to our goal."[205] At the lunch halt on November 26, in lat. 81 deg. 35’, we left our Middle Barrier Depot, containing one week’s provisions for each returning unit as at Mount Hooper, a reduction of 200 lbs. in our weights.  The march that day was very trying.  “It is always rather dismal work walking over the great snow plain when sky and surface merge in one pall of dead whiteness, but it is cheering to be in such good company with everything going on steadily and well."[206]

There was no doubt that the animals were tiring, and “a tired animal makes a tired man, I find."[207] The next day (November 28) was no better:  “the most dismal start imaginable.  Thick as a hedge, snow falling and drifting with keen southerly wind."[208]

Bowers notes:  “We have now run down a whole degree of latitude without a fine day, or anything but clouds, mist, and driving snow from the south.”  We certainly did have some difficult marches, one of the worst effects of which was that we knew we must be making a winding course and we had to pick up our depots on the return somehow.  Here is a typical bad morning from Bowers’ diary: 

“The first four miles of the march were utter misery for me, as Victor, either through lassitude or because he did not like having to plug into the wind, went as slow as a funeral horse.  The light was so bad that wearing goggles was most necessary, and the driving snow filled them up as fast as you cleared them.  I dropped a long way astern of the cavalcade, could hardly see them at times through the snow, but the fear that Victor, of all the beasts, should give out was like a nightmare.  I have always been used to starting later than the others by a quarter of a mile, and catching them up.  At the four-mile cairn I was about fed up to the neck with it, but I said very little as everybody was so disgusted with the weather and things in general that I saw that I was not the only one in tribulation.  Victor turned up trumps after that.  He stepped out and led the line in his old place, and at a good swinging pace considering the surface, my temper and spirits improving at every step.  In the afternoon he went splendidly again, and finished up by rolling in the snow when I had taken his harness off, a thing he has not done for ten or twelve days.  It certainly does not look like exhaustion!”

Indeed these days we were fighting for our marches, and Chinaman who was killed this night seemed well out of it.  He reached a point less than 90 miles from the glacier, though this was small comfort to him.