"Friday, April 26th. -24.7° Fahr. (-31.5° C.). Minimum temperature, -32° Fahr. (-35.7° C.). I was not a little surprised yesterday morning when I suddenly saw the track of an animal in the snow. It was that of a fox, came about W. S. W. true, and went in an easterly direction. The trail was quite fresh. What in the world was that fox doing up here? There were also unequivocal signs that it had not been entirely without food. Were we in the vicinity of land? Involuntarily I looked round for it, but the weather was thick all day yesterday, and we might have been near it without seeing it. It is just as probable, however, that this fox was following up some bear. In any case, a warm-blooded mammal in the eighty-fifth parallel! We had not gone far when we came across another fox-track; it went in about the same direction as the other, and followed the trend of the lane which had stopped us, and by which we had been obliged to camp. It is incomprehensible what these animals live on up here, but presumably they are able to snap up some crustacean in the open waterways. But why do they leave the coasts? That is what puzzles me most. Can they have gone astray? There seems little probability of that. I am eager to see if we may not come across the trail of a bear to-day. It would be quite a pleasure, and it would seem as if we were getting nearer inhabited regions again. I have just pricked out our course on the chart according to our bearings, calculating that we have gone 69 miles in the four days since our last observation, and I do not think this can be excessive. According to this, it should not be much more than 138 miles to Petermann's Land, provided it lie about where Payer determined it. I should have taken an observation yesterday, but it was misty. "At the end of our day, yesterday, we went across many lanes and piled-up ridges; in one of the latter, which appeared to be quite new, immense pieces of fresh-water ice had been pressed up. They were closely intermixed with clay and gravel, the result of infiltration, so that at a distance the blocks looked dark-brown, and might easily be taken for stone; in fact, I really thought they were stone. I can only imagine that this ice is river ice, probably from Siberia. I often saw huge pieces of fresh-water ice of this kind farther north, and even in latitude 86° there was clay on the ice.