The team from Cape Norman took the lead to break the way.  Every one put on his snowshoes, for traveling without them was impossible.  One of those with the advance team went ahead of the dogs to tramp the path for the sledge and make the work easier for the poor animals, while the other remained with the team to drive.  In like manner Walter tramped ahead of the rear dogs and Doctor Grenfell drove them.

At length they reached the opposite shore, fighting against the gale at every step.  Now there was a hill to cross.

Here on the lee side of the hill they met mighty drifts of feathery snow into which the dogs wallowed to their backs and the snowshoes of the men sunk deep.  They were compelled to haul on the traces with the dogs.  They had to lift and manipulate the sledges with tremendous effort.  Up the grade they toiled and strained, yard by yard, foot by foot.  Sometimes it seemed to them they were making no appreciable progress, but on they fought through the black night and the driving snow, sweating in spite of the Arctic blasts and clouds of drift that sometimes nearly stopped their breath and carried them off their feet.

The life of the young fisherman’s wife at Cape Norman hung in the balance.  The toiling men visualized her lying on a bed of pain and perhaps dying for the need of a doctor.  They saw the agonized husband by her side, tortured by his helplessness to save her.  They forgot themselves and the risk they were taking in their desire to bring to the fisherman’s wife the help her husband was beseeching God to send.  This is true heroism.

As the saying on the coast goes, “’tis dogged as does it,” and as Grenfell himself says, “not inspiration, but perspiration wins the prizes of life.”  They finally reached the crest of the hill.

On the opposite or weather side of the hill the gale met them with full force.  It had swept the slope clean and left it a glade of ice.  They slid down at a dangerous speed, taking all sorts of chances, colliding in the darkness with stumps and ice-coated rocks and other snags, in imminent danger of having their brains knocked out or limbs broken.

The open places below were little better.  Everything was ice-coated.  They slipped and slid about, falling and rising with every dozen steps.  If they threw themselves on the sledges to ride the dogs came to a stop, for they could not haul them.  If they walked they could not keep their feet.  Their course took them along the bed of Bartlett River, and twice Grenfell and some of the others broke through into the icy rapids.

At half past one in the morning they reached the mouth of Bartlett River where it empties into the sea and between them and Cape Norman lay twenty miles of unobstructed sea ice.  They had been traveling for nearly six hours and had covered but ten miles of the journey.  The temporary lull in the storm had long since passed, and now, beating down upon the world with redoubled fury, it met them squarely in the face.  No dog could stem it.  The men could scarce stand upright.  The clouds of snow suffocated them, and the cold was withering.