The way back was beset with even greater dangers than before. While they were on their way north they had known that the shifting and breaking up of fields of ice might cut them off forever from their friends and supplies. So every few hundred miles they had “cached,” or buried, tools and provisions, and marked the places so that they could find them again when a little food might save them from starving. In spite of such precautions, many exploring parties found only hardship, starvation, and death in the cruel ice. But Peary and his party succeeded in making their return to the Inland Ice fields, the region of young Peary’s boyish dreams, through violent wind-storms, drifting snows, and freezing fogs. Even the hardy little Arctic dogs were half famished and worn out. Finding the _Kite_, with other explorers, waiting for them there, the Peary party sailed down to the United States, meeting mountain-like icebergs, and shooting walruses and polar bears by the way. Lieutenant Peary at once went to work preparing for a second attempt at the discovery of the North Pole. Mrs. Peary again accompanied her husband into the Arctic regions, and the twelfth of September, 1893, the first white baby ever seen in that far northern country was born. This was the Pearys’ little blue-eyed daughter, “bundled deep in soft, warm Arctic furs, and wrapped in the Stars and Stripes.” During the first half year of her life, Marie Snowbaby Peary--as they named her--never saw the sunlight. Before the sun began to show above the southern horizon again, Papa Peary started off on another twelve-hundred mile ice journey. This time he took with him eight men, twelve sledges, and ninety-two Eskimo dogs. But some of the dogs were strangers to the rest, and those from different places fought one another. As it is hard enough to separate only two fighting dogs, it was impossible to stop the wholesale dog-fight that went on constantly and kept the party from going forward. The cold became even more intense; the temperature went down to sixty degrees below zero. Conditions were so much worse than on the previous trip that Peary decided to _cache_ all the provisions and other things they did not need to preserve life, and returned to the place where he had left his wife and baby. The feet of the men, even of the Eskimos of the party, were badly frozen, and when they returned to their base of supplies, out of the ninety-two dogs, there were only twenty-six left.