r with a dog-team is
accustomed to a hummocky road. It looked as if the sea had torn it up,
as men tear up the paving blocks in a city street, and then thrown the
bits together to make a hard, cohesive mass that men and dogs could
surely trust. The strong wind seemed to have packed it in and the
intense cold of the night, he supposed, had frozen it solid.

The wind died down, and Grenfell found that he was deep in what is
known as "sish"--soft ice as mushy as the name sounds. He compares it
to oatmeal, and it must have been many feet deep. There was a thin
coating of new ice on top of it, through which the whip-handle easily
pierced.

The "sish" ice is composed of the small fragments chipped off the
floes after the pounding and grinding between the millstones of the
great winds and the heavy seas. The changing breeze now blew from
offshore, and instead of packing the ice together it was driving it
apart. The packed "slob" was "running abroad," as the fisher-folk say.
The ice-pans were so small that there was hardly one as large as a
table-top.

By this time the team had come to a halt on one of these tiny pans,
and with the other pans floating about as the entire sheet was
breaking up the peril was evident. It was not possible to go back--the
way was cut off by the widening spaces between the pans. Only about a
quarter of a mile was left between their pan and the shore.

Grenfell threw off his oilskins, knelt by the side of the komatik, and
ordered the dogs to make for the shore.

It takes a great deal to "rattle" a husky. But the dogs, after about
twenty yards of half-wading, half-swimming, were thoroughly
frightened. They stopped, and the sled sank into the ice. With the
sled in the freezing water, it was necessary for the dogs to pull
hard, and now they too began to sink.

Not long before, the father of the boy to whom the Doctor was going
was drowned by being tangled in the dog's traces in just such a place
as this. To avoid that danger, Grenfell got out his knife, and cut the
traces in the water.

But he still kept hold of the leader's trace, which he wound about his
wrist.

In the water there was not a piece of ice to be seen in which dogs or
driver could put their trust. The dogs were as eager as their master
to find something to cling to. Care-free and jolly as they had been
hitherto, they knew as well as he that death by drowning stared their
little caravan in the face.

About twenty-five yards awa