He gave a short nod. “Sledges out on the ice away from the pressure area, packed, and kyack-loaded. We had kept the dogs in condition by short journeys, and we knew they were as splendid animals for work as they were terrible for fighting. We couldn’t prevent them from tearing each other to pieces, but between whiles they carried us on. Eh, Ky? You carried us on, for you carried our means of life. Or maybe we carried you, with our whips and clubs and curses. It’s horrible to look back, that’s why I do it, to save Ky any more—” His eyes implored the dumb creature’s pardon. “Those days and months of forcing the dwindled pack over the pressure ridges!—and when the patient beasts stopped from sheer exhaustion, shouting at them till our own voices tore our nerves and burst our very ear-drums, hardening our hearts, beating the splendid animals, till they lay down one by one on those desolate ice-plains and died. Well, well, well,”—he made sure of the bundle again,—“the dogs had the best of it. _We_ blood-marked many a mile of the polar ice, we stumbled from floe to floe, we stormed the pressure ridges, and when the teams had dwindled and the ice opened in long reaches, we took the remaining dogs into our canvas boats and along the water lanes we sailed and sailed.” “To the Pole? You _did_ find the—” “Lord!” he interrupted, “finding the Pole isn’t a patch on hunting for it! That’s what the men of the future will never know. You can read the kind of thing we went through in any arctic book. You can read it all, and then know nothing about it. We did impossible things—things any man will say he can’t do. And then he does them because he must, and because human endurance is the one miracle left in the world.” An instant he stopped for breath. “Good men, all our fellows. But their bones are up yonder. Good dogs, too. Ky’s the one that’s left.” There was a long silence in the dim little room. “But you reached the Pole, Borisoff and you!” Slowly he shook his wild head. “Not Borisoff.” There was silence for a while. “It must have been very horrible for you when he—” “Yes,” said the sick man, and Hildegarde saw the mouth set harder yet under the tawny cloud. “The day he died we came upon a great piece of timber frozen aslant in the ice. Borisoff had been queer, wandering all those last days. But that great shaft that had come from some land where the trees grow glorious and tall, the sight of it excited him so that it cleared his head. He said it was Siberian spruce, and had come from his own forests of the Yenisei. And he talked about the currents that had carried it so far—talked rationally. We found initials carved on one end: ‘F. N.—H.’ If ever there had been more the record was frayed out of existence by the timber catapulting against the ice. ‘I’ll rest here,’ Borisoff had said, and”—a long time seemed to go by—“I’ve no doubt he rests well. Splendid fellow, Borisoff. “The next day I cut his name on the great log, and I went on alone.”