While faithful to me, and when _with me_ more effective in covering distance with a sledge than any of the others, he had not, as a racial inheritance, the daring and initiative of Bartlett, or Marvin, MacMillan, or Borup.

I owed it to him not to subject him to dangers and responsibilities which he was temperamentally unfit to face.
As to the dogs, most of them were powerful males, as hard as iron, in good condition, but without an ounce of superfluous fat; and, by reason of the care which I had taken of them up to this point, they were all in good spirits, like the men.

The sledges, which were being repaired that day, were also in good condition.

My food and fuel supplies were ample for forty days, and by the gradual utilization of the dogs themselves for reserve food, might be made to last for fifty days if it came to a pinch.
As the Eskimos worked away at repairing the sledges while we rested there on the first day of April, they stopped from time to time to eat some of the boiled dog which the surplus numbers in Bartlett's returning team had enabled them to have.

They had killed one of the poorest dogs and boiled it, using the splinters of an extra broken sledge for fuel under their cooker.