Soon an active lead cut right across our path, and on the farther or northern side of it we could see that the ice was moving.

The lead seemed to narrow toward the west, and we followed it a little way until we came to a place where there were large pieces of floating ice, some of them fifty or a hundred feet across.

We got the dogs and sledges from one piece of ice to another--the whole forming a sort of pontoon bridge.
As Borup was getting his team across the open crack between two pieces of floating ice, the dogs slipped and went into the water.

Leaping forward, the vigorous young athlete stopped the sledge from following the dogs, and, catching hold of the traces that fastened the dogs to the sledge, he pulled them bodily out of the water.

A man less quick and muscular than Borup might have lost the whole team as well as the sledge laden with five hundred pounds of supplies, which, considering our position far out in that icy wilderness, were worth more to us than their weight in diamonds.