we were out of the leads, with our plane safe from the screwing of the pack-ice. It was June 9th, and now began the long grind of constructing a course upon which our final hopes must rest. If we failed there was nothing left. My diary shows the following entry for June 10th:--“The days go by. For the first time I am beginning to wonder if we must make the great sacrifice for our great adventure. The future looks so hopeless. Summer is on. The snows are getting too soft to travel over and the leads won’t open in this continually shifting ice.” Riiser-Larsen looked the ground over and decided that we must remove the two and a half feet of snow right down to the solid ice and level a track twelve meters wide and four hundred meters long. It was a heartbreaking task to remove this wet summer snow with only our clumsy wooden shovels. It must be thrown clear an additional six meters to either side, so as not to interfere with the wing stretch. After but a few shovelfuls we stood weak and panting gazing disheartened at the labor ahead. One problem was how to taxi our plane through the wet snow and get it headed in the right direction. We dug down to the blue ice, and now we were confronted with a new difficulty. The moist fog, which came over us immediately, melted the ice as soon as it was exposed. We found that by working our skis underneath the plane we were able finally to get her to turn, but after splitting a pair of skis we decided to take no more chances that way. In desperation we now tried stamping down the snow with our feet and found that it served the purpose admirably. By the end of our first day of shoveling down to the blue ice, we had succeeded in clearing a distance of only forty meters, while with the new method we were able to make one hundred meters per day. We adopted a regular system in stamping down this snow. Each man marked out a square of his own, and it was up to him to stamp down every inch in this area. We figured that at this rate we would have completed our course in five days. During the first day’s work we saw our first sign of animal life since the seal popped his head up out of the lead where we first landed. Somebody looked up from his work of shoveling snow to see a little auk flying through the fog overhead. It came out of the north and was headed northwest. Next day two weary geese flopped down beside the plane. They must have thought that dark object looming up through the fog in all that expanse of desolate white looked friendly. They seemed an easy mark for Dietrichson, but the rich prize was too much for his nerves and he missed. The two geese ran over the snow a long distance as if they did not seem anxious to take wing again. They too came from the north and disappeared into the northwest. We wondered if there could be land in that direction. It was an interesting speculation.