ore my supplies gave out. Now I was
spurred on by the necessity of making my goal, if possible, before the
round face of the coming full moon should stir the tides with unrest and
open a network of leads across our path.

After some hours the sledges caught up with me. The dogs were so active
that morning, after their day's rest, that I was frequently obliged to
sit on a sledge for a few minutes or else run to keep up with them,
which I did not care to do just yet. Our course was nearly, as the crow
flies, due north, across floe after floe, pressure ridge after pressure
ridge, headed straight for some hummock or pinnacle of ice which I had
lined in with my compass.

In this way we traveled for ten hours without stopping, covering, I felt
sure, thirty miles, though, to be conservative, I called it twenty-five.
My Eskimos said that we had come as far as from the _Roosevelt_ to
Porter Bay, which by our winter route scales thirty-five miles on the
chart. Anyway, we were well over the 88th parallel, in a region where no
human being had ever been before. And whatever distance we made, we
were likely to retain it now that the wind had ceased to blow from the
north. It was even possible that with the release of the wind pressure
the ice might rebound more or less and return us some of the hard-earned
miles which it had stolen from us during the previous three days.

Near the end of the march I came upon a lead which was just opening. It
was ten yards wide directly in front of me, but a few hundred yards to
the east was an apparently practicable crossing where the single crack
was divided into several. I signaled to the sledges to hurry; then,
running to the place, I had time to pick a road across the moving ice
cakes and return to help the teams across before the lead widened so as
to be impassable. This passage was effected by my jumping from one cake
to another, picking the way, and making sure that the cake would not
tilt under the weight of the dogs and the sledge, returning to the
former cake where the dogs were, encouraging the dogs ahead while the
driver steered the sledge across from cake to cake, and threw his weight
from one side to the other so that it could not overturn. We got the
sledges across several cracks so wide that while the dogs had no trouble
in jumping, the men had to be pretty active in order to follow the long
sledges. Fortunately the sledges were of the new Peary type, twelve feet
long. Had they bee