November 1st I placed a minimum self-registering thermometer on the top of a hill 410 feet high about a mile distant from the _Roosevelt_. On the 2d among other work some baled hay was opened for use in connection with the snow houses ashore, and the perfume of it brought back a rush of associations. What a contrast—this frozen night-canopied land- and sea-scape, and warm summer hayfields in God’s country. It does not seem as if both could be upon the same planet. On the 8th four families of Eskimos came in from the Ruggles River. They have been in the field twenty-seven days and have secured some seventy-five musk-oxen, thirty to forty hare and twenty to twenty-five foxes. Besides musk-ox meat they brought in some hundred pounds of the peerless salmon trout from Lake Hazen. [Illustration: A DAY’S HARE SHOOTING AT SHERIDAN ] [Illustration: RETURN OF HUNTING PARTY FROM CAPE HENRY WITH SPECIMENS OF NEW REINDEER (_Rangifer Pearyi_, Allen) September, 1905 ] [Illustration: LAST VIEW OF THE SUN, BLACK CAPE, OCTOBER, 12, 1905 ] On the 15th an aurora, one of several successive displays of no great brilliancy, was in several respects different from any that I had ever noticed. Occurring in the east directly over some pools of open water it was so low as apparently to emanate from the water, and at irregular intervals the faint patches of auroral light would disappear completely to be replaced a moment later by a single bright spot like a pale parhelion close to the water. Occasionally in place of the parhelion a bright narrow vertical bar of light appeared. The 16th was marked by pronounced barometric and thermometric fluctuations, the former downward, the latter upward, these abrupt changes followed by violent wind from the south, and this in turn by a mile-wide belt of water reaching from behind Rawson past the ship and Cape Sheridan, and so northward toward Henry as far as could be seen in the obscure moonlight. The view from the hill in the evening was striking. The brilliant moonlight; the sky blue-black except where flecked with silvery clouds; the dead white of the ice; the inky blackness of the water; the ghostly shapes of the land; the one tiny speck of yellow light shining out from the _Roosevelt_. Accompanying and adding a touch of action to this outlook was the rush of the wind which, although laden with drifting snow, seemed yet to have a touch of warmth in it, and the cries of the Eskimo children playing on the ice-foot, mingled with the sound of waves dashing against the edges of the lead, and the distant hoarse roar of the ice pack surging back with the flood-tide into the mouth of Robeson Channel. The 25th was marked by groans and complaint from the _Roosevelt_ and the ice about her, accompanied by loud roaring of the heavier floes as they ground past the point of Sheridan during the greater portion of the flood-tide.