Presently one of Grenfell’s feet went through where slush covered an opening crack.  He shouted at the dogs, but, buffeted by wind and floundering through slush, they could travel no faster though they made every effort to do so, for they, no less perhaps than their master, realized the danger that threatened them.

Then, suddenly, the ice went asunder, not in large pans as it would have done earlier in the winter when it was stout and hard, but in a mass of small pieces, with only now and again a small pan.

Grenfell and the dogs found themselves floundering in a sea of slush ice that would not bear their weight.  The faithful dogs had done their best, but their best had not been good enough.  With super-human effort Grenfell managed to cut their traces and set them free from the komatik, which was pulling them down.  Even now, with his own life in the gravest peril, he thought of them.

When the dogs were freed, Grenfell succeeded in clambering upon a small ice pan that was scarce large enough to bear his weight, and for the moment was safe.  But the poor dogs, much more frightened than their master, and looking to him for protection, climbed upon the pan with him, and with this added weight it sank from under him.

Swimming in the ice-clogged water must have been well nigh impossible.  The shock of the ice-cold water itself, even had there been no ice, was enough to paralyze a man.  But Grenfell, accustomed to cold, and with nerves of iron as a result of keeping his body always in the pink of physical condition, succeeded finally in reaching a pan that would support both himself and the dogs.  The animals followed him and took refuge at his feet.

Standing upon the pan, with the dogs huddled about him, he scanned the naked shores, but no man or sign of human life was to be seen.  How long his own pan would hold together was a question, for the broken ice, grinding against it, would steadily eat it away.

There was a steady drift of the ice toward the open sea.  The wind was bitterly cold.  There was nothing to eat for himself and nothing to feed the dogs, for the loaded komatik had long since disappeared beneath the surface of the sea.

Exposed to the frigid wind, wet to the skin, and with no other protection than the clothes upon his back, it seemed inevitable that the cold would presently benumb him and that he would perish from it even though his pan withstood the wearing effects of the water.  The pan was too small to admit of sufficient exercise to keep up the circulation of blood, and though he slapped his arms around his shoulders and stamped his feet, a deadening numbness was crawling over him as the sun began to sink in the west and cold increased.