During Hobson's long journey to lay down an advance depot he lost a dog actually from overcare. She had the bad habit of gnawing and eating her seal-thong harness, and to prevent this Hobson caused her to be tightly muzzled after the evening meal. One of the numberless dog-fights occurred during the night, and with the trait so common to these half-wolfish beasts they fell on the least defenceless, and the whole pack bit and tore almost to pieces their muzzled and defenceless sister. Her wounds were so many and so deep that she died during the day. In this journey Hobson's party barely escaped perishing through a violent northeasterly gale which drove seaward the ice-pack on which they were encamped. McClintock says that on discovering that the entire ice-field was adrift "They packed their sledge, harnessed the dogs, and passed the long and fearful night in anxious waiting for some chance to escape. A little distance offshore the ice broke up under the influence of the wind and sea, and the disruption continued until the piece they were on was scarce twenty yards in diameter. Impelled by the storm, in utter darkness and amid fast-falling snow, they drifted across a wide inlet. The gale was quickly followed by a calm, and an intense frost in a single night formed ice strong enough to bear them safely to land, although it bent fearfully under their weight. Their escape was indeed providential." [Illustration: King William Land.] Death spared these men of action in the field, but it invaded the ship, and Brand, the engineer, died of apoplexy. When the sun came back after seventy-three days of absence, McClintock decided to take the field, and started February 14, earlier than any previous arctic traveller, for an extended journey. His great hope of success depended on finding Eskimos in the region of the north magnetic pole, which entailed a trip of four hundred and twenty miles, in temperatures as much as eighty degrees below the freezing-point. Sledging through an unknown country, wearily breaking day after day a trail for his emaciated, untrained dogs, McClintock vainly searched the unbroken snowy wastes for trace of sledge or of man, and anxiously scanned the dreary landscape for sight of the longed-for igloo or hut. The cold was intense, the land was barren of game, the region seemed accursed in its desolation, while the conditions of travel were hard in the extreme. The absence of human life was far more distressing to the heroic McClintock than the rigors of the journey, for without Inuit aid the labors and sufferings of his crew and of himself would be unavailing. Was it possible that the region was abandoned by beast and so by man? Was his mission destined to be a failure? Could he succeed without Eskimo help?