On September 5 it was blowing as if it would rip your wind-clothes off you.  We were bagging pemmican in the hut when some one said, “Can you smell burning?” At first we could not see anything wrong, and Gran said it must be some brown paper he had burnt; but after three or four minutes, looking upwards, we saw that the top of the chimney piping was red hot where it went out through the roof, as was also a large ventilator trap which entered the flue at this point.  We put salt down from outside, and the fire seemed to die down, but shortly afterwards the ventilator trap fell on to the table, leaving a cake of burning soot exposed.  This luckily did not fall, and we raked it down into buckets.  About a quarter of an hour afterwards all the chimney started blazing again, the flames shooting up into the blizzard outside.  We got this out by pushing snow in at the top, and holding baths and buckets below to catch the debris.  We then did what we ought to have done at the beginning of the winter—­took the piping down and cleaned it all out.

Our last fire was a little business.  Debenham and I were at Hut Point.  I noticed that the place was full of smoke, which was quite usual with a blubber fire, but afterwards we found that the old hut was alight between the two roofs.  The inner roof was too shaky to allow one to walk on it, and so, at Debenham’s suggestion, we bent a tube which was lying about and syphoned some water up with complete success.  Our more usual fire extinguishers were Minimax, and they left nothing to be desired:  indeed, all they left were the acid stains on the material touched.

From such grim considerations it is a pleasure to turn to the out-of-door life we now led.  Emperor penguins began to visit us in companies up to forty in number:  probably they were birds whose maternal or paternal instincts had been thwarted at Cape Crozier and had now taken to a vagrant life.  They suffered, I am afraid, from the loose dogs, and on one occasion Debenham was out on the sea-ice with a team of those dogs of ours which were useless for serious sledging.  He had taken them in hand and formed a team which was very creditable to him, if not to themselves.  On this occasion he had managed with great difficulty to restrain them from joining a company of Emperors.  The dogs were frantic, the Emperors undisturbed.  Unable to go himself, one dog called Little Ginger unselfishly bit through the harness which restrained two of his companions, and Debenham, helplessly holding the straining sledge, could only witness the slaughter, which followed.

The first skua gull arrived on October 24, and we knew they would soon breed on any level gravel or rock free from snow; and we should see the Antarctic petrels again, and perhaps a rare snowy petrel; and the first whales would be finding their way into McMurdo Sound.  Also the Weddells, the common coastal seals of the Antarctic, were now, in the beginning of October, leaving the open water and lying out on the ice.  They were nearly all females, and getting ready to give birth to their young.