“As we stood there and watched this race for food we were gradually possessed with the idea that the chicks looked upon each adult coming up full-bellied from the shore as not a parent only, but a food-supply.  The parents were labouring under a totally different idea, and intended either to find their own infants and feed them, or else to assimilate their already partially digested catch themselves.  The more robust of the young thus worried an adult until, because of his importunity, he was fed.  But with the less robust a much more pathetic ending was the rule.  A chick that had fallen behind in this literal race for life, starving and weak, and getting daily weaker because it could not run fast enough to insist on being fed, again and again ran off pursuing with the rest.  Again and again it stumbled and fell, persistently whining out its hunger in a shrill and melancholy pipe, till at last the race was given up.  Forced thus by sheer exhaustion to stop and rest, it had no chance of getting food.  Each hurrying parent with its little following of hungry chicks, intent on one thing only, rushed quickly by, and the starveling dropped behind to gather strength for one more effort.  Again it fails, a robuster bird has forced the pace, and again success is wanting to the runt.  Sleepily it stands there, with half-shut eyes, in a torpor resulting from exhaustion, cold, and hunger, wondering perhaps what all the bustle round it means, a little dirty, dishevelled dot, in the race for life a failure, deserted by its parents, who have hunted vainly for their own offspring round the nest in which they hatched it, but from which it may by now have wandered half a mile.  And so it stands, lost to everything around, till a skua in its beat drops down beside it, and with a few strong, vicious pecks puts an end to the failing life."[358]

There is a great deal to be said for this kind of treatment.  The Adelie penguin has a hard life:  the Emperor penguin a horrible one.  Why not kill off the unfit right away, before they have had time to breed, almost before they have had time to eat?  Life is a stern business in any case:  why pretend that it is anything else?  Or that any but the best can survive at all?  And in consequence, I challenge you to find a more jolly, happy, healthy lot of old gentlemen in the world.  We must admire them:  if only because they are so much nicer than ourselves!  But it is grim:  Nature is an uncompromising nurse.

Nature was going to give us a bad time too if we were not relieved, and on January 17, as there were still no signs of the ship, it was decided to prepare for another winter.  We were to go on rations; to cook with oil, for nearly all the coal was gone; to kill and store up seal.  On January 18 we started our preparations, digging a cave to store more meat, and so forth.  I went off seal hunting after breakfast, and having killed and cut up two, came back across the Cape at mid-day.  All the men were out working in the camp.  There was nothing to be seen in the Sound, and then, quite suddenly, the bows of the ship came out from behind the end of the Barne Glacier, two or three miles away.  We watched her cautious approach with immense relief.