Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 1.djvu/930

620 had considerable difficulty and ran a pretty good risk in doing this, but succeeded all right. There were now Scott, Oates, Crean. Gran, Meares, and myself here and only three sleeping-bags, so the three first remained to see if they could help Bowers, Cherry-Garrard, and the ponies, while Meares, Gran, and I returned to look after our dogs at Hut Point. Here we had only two sleeping-bags for the three of us, so we had to take turns, and I remained up till 1 o'clock that night while Gran had six hours in my bag. It was a bitterly cold job after a long day. We had been up at 5 with nothing to eat till 1 o'clock, and walked 14 miles. The nights are now almost dark.

March 2. A very bitter wind blowing and it was a cheerless job waiting for six hours to get a sleep in the bag. I walked down from our tent to the hut and watched whales blowing in the semi-darkness out in the black water of the Strait. When we turned out in the morning the pony party was still on floating ice but not any further from the Barrier ice. By a merciful providence the current was taking them rather along the Barrier edge, where they went adrift, instead of straight out to sea. We could do nothing more for them, so we set to our work with the dogs. It was blowing a bitter gale of wind from the S.E. with some drift and we made a number of journeys backwards and forwards between the Gap and the hut, carrying our tent and camp equipment down and preparing a permanent picketing line for the dogs. As the ice had all gone out of the Strait we were quite cut off from any return to Cape Evans until the sea should again freeze over, and this was not likely until the end of April. We rigged up a small fireplace in the hut and found some wood and made a fire for an hour or so at each meal, but as there was no coal and not much wood we felt we must be economical with the fuel, and so also with matches and everything else, in case Bowers should lose his sledge loads, which had most of the supplies for the whole party to last twelve men for two months. The weather had now become too thick for us to distinguish anything in the distance and we remained in ignorance as to the party adrift until Saturday. I had also lent my glasses to Captain Scott. This night I had first go in the bag, and turned out to shiver for eight hours till breakfast. There was literally nothing in the hut that one could cover oneself with to keep warm and we couldn't run to keeping the fire going. It was very cold work. There were heaps of biscuit cases here which we had left in Discovery days, and with these we built up a small inner hut to live in.

March 3. Spent the day in transferring dogs in couples from the Gap to the hut. In the afternoon Teddie Evans and Atkinson turned up from over the hills, having returned from their Corner Camp journey with one horse and two seamen, all of which they had left encamped at Castle Rock, three miles off on the hills. They naturally expected to find Scott here and everyone else and had heard nothing of the pony party going adrift, but having found only open water ahead of them they turned back and came to land by Castle Rock slopes.