The weather conditions were extraordinarily local, as another experience will show.  Atkinson and Dimitri were off to Hut Point with the dogs, carrying biscuit and pemmican for the coming Search Journey:  I went with them some way, and then left them to place a flag upon the end of Glacier Tongue for surveying purposes.  It was clear and bright, and it was easy to get a sketch of the bearings of the islands from this position, which showed how great a portion of the Tongue must have broken off in the autumn of 1911.  I anticipated a pleasant walk home, but was somewhat alarmed when heavy wind and drift came down from the direction of the Hutton Cliffs.  Wearing spectacles, and being unable to see without them, I managed to steer with difficulty by the sun which still showed dimly through the drift.  It was amazing suddenly to walk out of the wall of drift into light airs at Little Razorback Island.  One minute it was blowing and drifting hard and I could see almost nothing, the next it was calm, save for little whirlwinds of snow formed by eddies of air drawn in from the north.  In another three hundred yards the wind was blowing from the north.  On this day Atkinson found wind force 8 and temperature -17 deg. at Hut Point:  at Cape Evans the temperature was zero and men were sitting on the rocks and smoking in the sun.  Many instances might be given to show how local our weather conditions often were.

There was a morning some time in the middle of the winter when we awoke to one of our usual tearing blizzards.  We had had some days of calm, and the ice had frozen sufficiently for the fish-trap to be lowered again.  But that it would not stand much of this wind was obvious, and after breakfast Atkinson stuck out his jaw and said he wasn’t going to lose another trap for any dash blizzard.  He and Keohane sallied forth on to the ice, lost to our sight immediately in the darkness and drift.  They got it, but arrived on the cape in quite a different place, and we were glad to see them back.  Soon afterwards the ice blew out.

Much credit is due to the mule leaders that they were able to exercise their animals without hurt.  Cape Evans in the dark, strewn with great boulders, with the open sea at your feet, is no easy place to manage a very high-spirited and excitable mule, just out of a warm stable, especially if this is his first outing for several days and the wind is blowing fresh, and you are not sure if your face is frost-bitten, and you are quite sure that your hands are.  But the exercise was carried out without mishap.  The mules themselves were most anxious to go out, and when Pyaree developed a housemaid’s knee and was kept in, she revenged herself upon her more fortunate companions by biting each one hard as it passed her head on its way to and from the door.  Gulab was the biggest handful, and Williamson managed him with skill:  some of them, especially Lal Khan, were very playful, running round and round their leaders