Our return to camp was very near being enlivened by an incident. The wind had freshened so much, and carried such a quantity of large crystalled snow with it, that it was impossible to travel except in one direction—namely, straight before it. Fortunately, it blew directly towards our camp. So we started off across the lake, knee-deep or more in a flying drift which rustled like dead leaves in autumn. The ice was not thick even close to shore, for we had fired a bullet through it to try whether the water beneath was salt or not, and when we got about half-way across, it began to crack in an alarming manner, and to yield unmistakably to every footstep. We could neither stop nor turn back; the only thing to be done was to separate and shuffle on as fast as possible. The water soaked through cracks in our footsteps; but we were soon wading in the deeper snow of the land, and reached camp without further excitement, and thoroughly resolved to be more careful of untried ice in the future. Starting early next morning, we made a more extended, but equally fruitless, search for game. There was neither bird nor beast in the country, and but for a musk ox skull picked up near the shore we might have supposed that no living creature had ever visited the land. Punctual to their time, our sledges reappeared on the morning of the fourth day, having succeeded in depositing their load of pemmican on the further shore of Black Cliff Bay. The ice they had travelled over was so insecure in some places between the shore and the heavy floes that the sledges had broken through more than once, and the travellers had been wet through ever since they left us. There was evidently no game to be got, so we returned to the ship, and on the way back met a strong party hauling forward two boats in order to deposit them at an advanced point in readiness for the spring sledging.