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searchlight battery. Be sure and wrap that up well." "Bandages?" "No need. Seventy degrees of frost will freeze blood and seal a wound quicker than any bandage. But bring the morphia kit. Any water in these two buckets?" "Full. But more ice than water." "Put them on the stoveand don't forget to turn out the stove and both the lights before you leave." Incongruously enough, we who could survive in the Arctic only by virtue of fire, feared it above all else. "Pile the rest of the stuff up by the instrument shelter." I found Jackstraw, working only by the feeble light of his torch, outside the lean-to drift-walled shelter that we had built for the dogs from empty packing cases and an old tractor tarpaulin. He appeared to be fighting a losing battle in the centre of a milling pack of snarling yelping dogs, but the appearance was illusion only: already he had four of the dogs off the tethering cable and the sledge tracelines snapped into their harness. "How's it coming?" I shouted. "Easy." I could almost see the crinkling grin behind the snow-mask. "I caught most of them asleep, and Balto is a great helphe's in a very bad temper at being woken up." Balto was Jackstraw's lead doga huge, 90-pound, half-wolf, half-Siberian, direct descendant of, and named for the famous dog that had trekked with Amundsen, and who later, in the terrible winter of '25, his sledge-driver blind behind him, had led his team through driving blizzards and far sub-zero cold to bring the life-giving anti-toxin into the diphtheria-stricken town of Nome, Alaska. Jackstraw's Balto was another such: powerful, intelligent, fiercely loyal to his master- although not above baring his wolfs fangs as he made a token pass at him from time to time -and, above all, like all good lead dogs, a ruthless disciplinarian with his team-mates. He was exercising that disciplinary authority nowsnarling, pushing and none-too-gently nipping the recalcitrant and the slow-coaches, quelling insubordination in its earliest infancy. "I'll leave you to it, then. I'll get the searchlight." I made off towards the mound of snow that loomed high to the westward of the cabin, broke step and listened. There was no sound to be heard, nothing but the low-pitched moan of the wind on the ice-cap, the eternal rattling of the anemometer cups. I turned back to Jackstraw, my face bent against the knifing wind. "The planehave you heard the plane, Jackstraw? wide angle lens for digital camera I can't hear a thing." Jackstraw straightened, pulled off his parka hood and stood still, hands cupped to his ears. Then he shook his head briefly and replaced the hood. "My God!" I looked at him. "Maybe they've crashed already." Again the shake of the head. "Why not?" I demanded. "On a night like this you wouldn't hear a thing if they crashed half a mile downwind." "I'd have felt it, Dr Mason." I nodded slowly, said nothing. He was right, of course. The frozen surface of this frozen land transmitted vibration like a tuning-fork. Last July, seventy miles inland, we had distinctly felt the vibration of the ice-cap as an iceberg had broken off from a glacier in a hanging valley and toppled into the fjord below. Maybe the pilot had lost his bearings, maybe he was flying in ever-widening circles trying to pick up our lights again, but at least there was hope yet. I hurried across to where the tractor, sheeted in tarpaulin, lay close in to the high snow wall that had been cut down the middle of the drift. It took me a couple of minutes to clear away the accumulated snow at one end and wriggle in under the tarpaulin. There was no question of trying to lift itits impregnated oils had frozen solid and it would have cracked and torn under any pressure. The searchlight, fixed to a couple of bolts on the tractor bonnet, was held down by two quick-release butterfly nuts. In these latitudes, quick-release was a misnomer: the nuts invariably froze after even the briefest exposure. The accepted practice was to remove one's gloves and close mittened hands round the nuts until body heat warmed and expanded them enough to permit unscrewing. But there was no time for that tonight: I tapped the bolts with a spanner from the tool box and the steel pins, made brittle by the intense cold, sheared as if made from the cheapest cast iron. I crawled out at the foot of the tarpaulin, searchlight clutched under one arm, and as soon as I straightened I heard it againthe roar of aero engines, closing rapidly. They sounded very near, very low, but I wasted no time trying to locate the plane. Head lowered against the wind and the needle-sharp lances of the flying ice, I felt rather than saw my way back to the cabin hatch and was brought up short by