and stopping to paw the ground:  Khan Sahib, on the other hand, was bored, yawning continually:  it was suggested that he was suffering from polar ennui!  Altogether they reflected the greatest credit upon Lashly, who groomed them every day and took the greatest care of them.  They were subject to the most violent fits of jealousy, being much disturbed if a rival got undue attention.  The dog Vaida, however, was good friends with them all, going down the line and rubbing noses with them in their stalls.

The food of the mules was based upon that given by Oates to the ponies the year before, and the results were successful.

The accommodation given to the dogs in the Terra Nova on the way south is open to criticism.  As the reader may remember, they were chained on the top of the deck cargo on the main deck, and of course had a horrible time during the gale, and any subsequent bad weather, which did not however last very long.  But it was quite impossible to put them anywhere else, for every square inch between decks was so packed that even our personal belongings for more than two years were reduced to one small uniform case.  Any seaman will easily understand that to build houses or shelters on deck over and above what we had already was out of the question.  As a matter of fact I doubt whether the dogs had a worse time than we during that gale.  In good weather at sea, and at all times in the pack, they were comfortable enough.  But future explorers might consider whether they can give their dogs more shelter during the winter than we were able to do.  Amundsen, whose Winter Quarters were on the Barrier itself, and who experienced lower temperatures and very much less wind than was our lot at Cape Evans, had his dogs in tents, and let them run loose in the camp during the day.  Tents would have gone in the winds we experienced, and I have explained that we had no snow in which we could make houses, as was done by Amundsen in the Barrier.

Our more peaceable dogs were allowed to run loose, especially during this last winter, at the beginning of which we also built a dog hospital.  We should have liked to loose them all, but if we did so they immediately flew at one another’s throats.  We might perhaps have let them loose if we had first taken the precaution Amundsen took, and muzzled all of them before doing so.  The sport of fighting, so his dogs discovered, lost all its charm when they found they could not taste blood, and they gave it up, and ran about unmuzzled and happy.  But the slaughter among the seals and penguins would have been horrible with us, and many dogs might have been carried away on the breaking sea-ice.  The tied-up ones lay under the lee of a line of cases, each in his own hole.  They curled up quite snugly buried in the snowdrift when blizzards were blowing, and lay exactly in the same way when sledging on the Barrier, the first duty of the dog-driver after pitching his own tent being to dig holes for each of his dogs.