Note 23 — Chapter VII · Land at Last (continued 2)

We still had some of the provisions we had brought from the Fram, but these we decided not to use during the winter. They were placed in a depot to be kept until the spring, when we should move on. The depot was well loaded with stones to prevent the foxes from running away with the bags. They were impudent enough already, and took all the movable property they could lay hold of. I discovered, for instance, on October 10th, that they had gone off with a quantity of odds and ends I had left in another depot during the erection of the hut; they had taken everything that they could possibly carry with them, such as pieces of bamboo, steel wire, harpoons and harpoon-lines, my collection of stones, mosses, etc., which were stored in small sail-cloth bags. Perhaps the worst of all was that they had gone off with a large ball of twine, which had been our hope and comfort when thinking of the time when we should want to make clothes, shoes, and sleeping-bags of bearskin for the winter; for we had reckoned on making thread out of the twine. It was fortunate that they had not gone off with the theodolite and our other instruments which stood there; but these must have been too heavy for them. I was angry when I made this discovery, and, what made it more aggravating, it happened on my birthday. And matters did not improve when, while hunting about in the twilight on the beach above the place where the things had been lying, to see if I could at any rate discover tracks to show which way those demons had taken them, I met a fox that stopped at a distance of 20 feet from me, sat down, and uttered some exasperating howls, so piercing and weird that I had to stop my ears. It was evidently on its way to my things again, and was now provoked at being disturbed. I got hold of some large stones and flung them at it. It ran off a little way, but then seated itself upon the edge of the glacier and howled on, while I went home to the hut in a rage, lay down, and speculated as to what we should do to be revenged on the obnoxious animals. We could not spare cartridges to shoot them with, but we might make a trap of stones. This we determined to do, but nothing ever came of it; there were always so many other things to occupy us at first, while we still had the opportunity, before the snow covered the talus, and while it was light enough to find suitable stones. Meanwhile the foxes continued to annoy us. One day they had taken our thermometer,23 which we always kept outside the hut, and gone off with it. We searched for it in vain for a long time, until at last we found it buried in a heap of snow a little way off. From that time we were very careful to place a stone over it at night, but one morning found that the foxes had turned over the stone, and had gone off with the thermometer again. The only thing we found this time was the case, which they had thrown away a little way off. The thermometer itself we were never to see again; the snow had unfortunately drifted in the night, so that the tracks had disappeared. Goodness only knows what fox-hole it now adorns; but from that day we learned a lesson, and henceforward fastened our last thermometer securely.