Belgrave Ninnis went down a crevasse with six dogs, the tent and most of the food, roughly 300 miles out from the hut. Xavier Mertz died about five weeks later on the way back, and Mawson sawed the sledge in half and brought the rest of it in alone over the last hundred-odd miles. He lived another forty-five years after that, mostly over Precambrian rock in the Flinders Ranges, and died in Adelaide in 1958 at 76.
The usual explanation for how badly they fell apart is vitamin A poisoning from the husky livers — dog liver is extraordinarily rich in it, and too much causes the skin to peel away and the mind to go dull. It fits what Mawson described, though nobody has proved it, and starvation and cold alone would do a great deal.
Inés — the hut at Cape Denison sits on one of the windiest stretches of coast anyone's bothered to measure, gales most days of the year, and the Adélies breed there anyway, thousands of pairs on the same bare rock. Mawson's men counted them between blizzards. The birds seemed less impressed by the weather than the humans were.