Horrible work it was!  Foggy and dark, so they could not choose the road, and, as it happened, lit on the very worst mass of broken ice in the channel.  Just as they entered on it, one black raven must needs appear.  “Bad luck,” said the men.  And when Mr. Pim shot a musk-ox, their first, and the wounded creature got away, “So much for the raven,” they croaked again.  Only three miles the first day, four miles the second day, two and a half the third, and half a mile the fourth; this was all they gained by most laborious hauling over the broken ice, dragging one sledge at a time, and sometimes carrying forward the stores separately and going back for the sledges.  Two days more gave them eight miles more, but on the seventh day on this narrow strait, the dragging being a little better, the great sledge slipped off a smooth hummock, broke one runner to smash, and “there they were.”

If the two officers had a little bit of a “tiff” out there on the ice, with the thermometer at eighteen below, only a little dog-sledge to get them anywhere, their ship a hundred miles off, fourteen days’ travel as they had come, nobody ever knew it; they kept their secret from us, it is nobody’s business, and it is not to be wondered at.  Certainly they did not agree.  The Doctor, whose sled, the “James Fitzjames,” was still sound, thought they had best leave the stores and all go back; but the Lieutenant, who had the command, did not like to give it up, so he took the dogs and the “James Fitzjames” and its two men and went on, leaving the Doctor on the floe, but giving him directions to go back to land with the wounded sledge and wait for him to return.  And the Doctor did it, like a spirited fellow, travelling back and forth for what he could not take in one journey, as the man did in the story who had a peck of corn, a goose, and a wolf to get across the river.  Over ice, over hummock the Lieutenant went on his way with his dogs, not a bear nor a seal nor a hare nor a wolf to feed them with:  preserved meats, which had been put up with dainty care for men and women, all he had for the ravenous, tasteless creatures, who would have been more pleased with blubber, came to Banks Land at last, but no game there; awful drifts; shut up in the tent for a whole day, and he himself so sick he could scarcely stand!  There were but three of them in all; and the captain of the sledge not unnaturally asked poor Pim, when he was at the worst, “What shall I do, sir, if you die?” Not a very comforting question!

He did not die.  He got a few hours’ sleep, felt better and started again, but had the discouragement of finding such tokens of an open strait the last year that he felt sure that the ship he was going to look for would be gone.  One morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer.  After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage,