Then he saw that he must have more clothing, and also that he and the dogs must have some food the only thing to do was to sacrifice one of his beloved team. So he made a noose with one of the traces, and slipped it over a dog's neck, and tied it to his own foot; then, holding its head down in this way, he threw the dog on its back, and stabbed it to the heart.
Two more were killed in the same way. Then he skinned them and stitched their hides together with thin strips of leather, and thus made himself a coat, with the fur inside.
All the clothes he had had on till then were some old football things he had come across that morning in his house. A pair of football shorts and stockings of the Richmond Football Club (red, yellow, and black), and a flannel shirt and sweater, so he was practically in Boy Scout's kit rather than what you would expect a missionary-doctor to be wearing.
But then, you see, he was quite as much a Scout as he was a doctor or missionary; and we understand from this story how, like a Scout, he was able to turn his hand to anything and invent for himself the different means for saving his life although he was all alone with his dogs on a small lump of rotten ice floating past the coast of Labrador.
There was one little point in which, perhaps, a Boy Scout could have helped him had he been there. As darkness came on, he thought he would light up a flare, which would catch the attention of anyone on shore, so he frayed out a piece of rope and smeared it with the fat of the dead dogs, and was about to light it when he found that his matches had got wet, and in that damp air he could not get them dry.
I wonder whether he thought of the Scout's dodge of drying them in his hair for a minute or two?
[Illustration: Dr. Grenfell as he appeared on the ice-floe, with a cloak of dog-skins, and puttees made of flannel taken from a dog's traces. He used his shirt for a flag, and made a flagstaff of frozen dogs' legs.]
In order to keep warm he used one of the dead dogs as a seat, with the other dogs hugged close round him for warmth. His feet being in thin moccasins, which easily got wet through, were freezing with cold till he thought of an idea for keeping them warm.
He had seen the Laplanders put a lot of grass into their boots before pulling them on, and then filling up the legs with as much more grass as they could cram in.
There was not much grass growing on his ice-floe, so Grenfell had to invent something to use in place of it; he cut from the dogs' traces some flannel with which they were lined to prevent chafing, and with this he stuffed the moccasins, and so made them warmer, and then bound the remainder round his knees as puttees.