Survival Tails: Endurance in Antarctica

by Katrina Charman

  Bummer watched Samson ushering the pups down the gangplank while Roger tried to ride on his tail.

  “Maybe… maybe I could come with you?”

  Mrs. Chippy gave him a kind smile. “Cats are solitary creatures, Bummer. Besides,” she said, gesturing to Samson, Sally, and the pups, “you belong with them.”

  She turned to slink across the narrow wooden beam, putting one paw carefully but purposefully in front of the other.

  “He left me behind,” Bummer said quietly.

  “Maybe so,” she said. “But out here on the ocean, fortunes can change in an instant.”

  “Technically, we’re not on the ocean,” Bummer started, but Mrs. Chippy had gone. A set of small footprints in the snow was the only sign she’d been there at all.

  On the ice, the men set up tents and unloaded supplies. The dogs returned to what remained of their old dogloos, hoping they would be rebuilt. Bummer felt sorry for the humans. Despite their thick clothes and heavy fur gloves and hats, many shivered as they worked, their faces as white as the snow around them. A group gathered around the captain and Bummer wandered over to see what was going on.

  “They don’t have enough fur sleeping bags for each human,” Sally told him as they watched the men choose and pull a piece of string from the captain’s enclosed hand. “They have to draw lots.”

  “They’ll freeze out here,” Bummer said. “Humans have the thinnest skin I’ve ever seen.”

  “Maybe we can help?” Samson suggested, coming to join them. He gave Bummer a small smile.

  Bummer thought for a moment about what Mrs. Chippy had said, giving a small smile in return. “How?”

  “Our fur is thick—maybe we can sleep alongside the men to keep them warm?”

  “Nice idea,” Bummer said with a small laugh, “but I’m not sure they’ll want a beast like you in a tent with them. There’s barely enough room for the humans, let alone a dog twice their size!”

  “It was a nice idea,” Sally said, smiling at them both.

  “The boss is making a speech!” Nelson said, running over to their mother.

  “Ship and stores are gone,” the boss told the group solemnly. He took a deep breath. “So now we go home.”

  “So that’s that, then?” Bummer asked. “The expedition is over. We are going home.”

  He sat for a moment, letting it all sink in.

  But it wasn’t as simple as all that, he thought, as the realization of the terrible situation they were in fully dawned on him. They were stranded on an ice floe drifting farther away from land every day. Nobody from the outside world knew where they were, or even that they were still alive.

  “The goal now isn’t simply to get home,” Bummer whispered. “But to survive.”

  CHAPTER 13

  SAMSON

  November 1915

  Dog town was miserable. It wasn’t the grand place it had been when the dogs were free to run and play. Now there was the constant threat of the pack ice moving, and of being crushed by rising walls of ice or being pulled down into the depths of the ocean as the floes ripped apart. It was impossible to sleep.

  The men no longer took the dogs out on long trips with the sleds for fear that the landscape would change too quickly. Their magnificent ship, which had been built to last and endure, was slowly being defeated, day by day. Every day it seemed to list even more as though giving up the fight. The masts cracked and broke apart and the hull was crushed as the ice pushed and pulled the ship this way and that.

  They were now hundreds of miles from land. The closest was somewhere to the west. Now that the ship was beyond salvation, Samson wondered how they were ever to reach land. What would happen as the ice floe began to break up and flood? They couldn’t live on the barren ice raft forever. Their daily servings of pemmican were already being rationed, so that now they only had two meals a day.

  Sally and the pups bounded over to Samson’s dogloo.

  “We’re on the move!” Roger said excitedly.

  “On the move to where?” Samson asked, trying not to bang his head on the ceiling as he stood to see what was going on.

  “Home!” Nell said.

  Sally shook her head slightly. “Home is a very long way away,” she told Nell. “We’re going to march across the ice to reach land.”

  The men were taking down their tents and loading supplies into the three lifeboats, while close by some of the dogs were being put into their harnesses.

  “We can’t pull those boats!” Samson choked. “A sled is one thing, but a boat that size, filled with provisions…”

  “We’re not pulling them alone,” Sally said, trying to smile for the sake of the pups, although she clearly felt as anxious as Samson. “We’re going to work as one big team with the men.”

  The thought of actually doing something, going somewhere, was appealing to Samson. He’d had enough of sitting around and waiting. At least there was a plan, a goal to work toward rather than simply waiting on the ice.

  But even with the men helping to pull the lifeboats, Samson knew it wasn’t going to be easy. The landscape was filled with obstacles: walls of ice, thin ice, snow several feet deep in some places, not to mention the shifting floes. He couldn’t help feeling a terrible sense of dread. As much as he trusted that the boss knew what he was doing, things felt wrong. Every sense in Samson’s body tingled with nervous apprehension.

  When he led his sled team, Samson knew the best routes to take and what to avoid. It was relatively easy to maneuver out of danger with a team of dogs on his side. But that kind of teamwork had taken months to build up. There would be no quick turns or going back to safety with the lifeboats and gear in tow. If they were confronted with trouble, there was very little chance of getting out of it.

  Samson joined his and Amundsen’s teams as they were leashed to the same lifeboat. Amundsen’s eyes looked duller than usual, and he seemed thinner. They all did, Samson remembered, since their food had been rationed—especially the men, many of whom hadn’t had much meat on them to begin with.

  Once they were harnessed—dogs and men both, the men having tied ropes around their waists that were attached to the lifeboats—they set off: a parade of men, dogs, and boats marching across the hostile terrain. Samson strained, digging his claws into the ice for a better grip as they puffed and heaved and pulled, the lifeboat behind them feeling as heavy as though they were pulling the Endurance itself.

  “This is impossible,” Sally groaned behind him as the puppies ran alongside. “It will take a lifetime to get anywhere at this pace.”

  Samson agreed, but he didn’t have the energy or breath to say so out loud. As long as the men kept going, he would keep going, too. The boss hadn’t given up yet, and neither would he. They pulled on into the night, resting only for a few hours before continuing beneath the moonlit sky. Some of the dogs struggled more than others, and each day when they put their harnesses back on, Samson noticed that there were fewer dogs. He glanced back at Bummer every few hours to see how he was coping. To his surprise, Bummer seemed to be doing as well as any of the others, including Hercules and Wolf. Amundsen did not look as well. He wheezed in and out as he struggled against his harness.

  Behind him, Bummer stumbled, jolting the main harness.

  “Keep up!” Amundsen growled between wheezes. “All of you. You’re stronger than you think. Let’s show the boss what we’re made of.”

  Bummer straightened at the back, looking as surprised as Samson at Amundsen’s outburst, but it seemed to have done the trick. The dogs began moving more steadily together, as a team, even though some of them had never worked together before.

  After three days and nights, despite their best efforts, the Endurance was still in plain sight behind them. They had barely made any progress, and many of the dogs had fallen ill… or worse. Some had collapsed out of pure exhaustion, others from lack of food, water, and rest.

  “This isn’t working, is it, boy?” Shackleton said to Samson while the others
slept. “We’ll run out of food before we ever reach land.”

  Samson licked the boss’s face in sympathy. Shackleton scratched behind Samson’s ears in return. Samson wished he could tell the boss it would be all right… that the men and dogs had faith in him. But instead he lay on the boss’s feet to warm them, the only way he could think of to make him feel a little better.

  The next morning, the boss ordered the men to set up Ocean Camp. Tents were erected for the men and new dogloos built for the dogs. That night, Samson had the best sleep he’d had in his whole life, and the next morning he awoke feeling strangely stronger than ever. He joined a new sled team made up of the stronger dogs, and Wild took them back to the Endurance, where they salvaged everything and anything they might use from the ship to set up their new camp: sleds, food, fuel, and whatever equipment they could find. They pulled everything back to Ocean Camp on the sled. After a short break, they set off again, picking at the remains of the once-magnificent ship until there was little left.

  As they hauled the final load back to their camp and rejoined their friends, Samson turned around to look at the Endurance one last time. Time seemed to slow down as parts of the ship broke off, crashing onto the ice. Bit by bit, the ship was squeezed and crushed and devoured by its foe.

  “She’s going, boys!” the boss called out as men and dogs watched what was once their home slowly disappear, piece by piece, into the Weddell Sea, until there was nothing left but debris. They stood in silence. Even though they had been expecting it, no one had the words to express the devastating loss of the one thing tethering them to the hope that they would survive: That they would one day return home.

  Samson lifted his head to the sky and howled a lament for the fallen ship. The puppies followed suit. Slowly every voice joined theirs, the men’s included, as their howls were carried on the wind. A farewell to the only home the pups had ever known, and any chance of honor and recognition gone with it.

  CHAPTER 14

  SAMSON

  December 1915

  It seemed to Samson as though their ice camp were a boat adrift on the ocean with no oars or engine or sails. They were at the mercy of the ocean currents, carrying them out into the unknown.

  “Maybe we will eventually drift back to land?” Sally said as she and Samson sat in the glowing warmth of the blubber stove.

  “Do you think that’s possible?” Samson asked.

  Sally shrugged. “Some of the men seem to think so. Perhaps we could at least get close enough to make an escape attempt on the lifeboats.”

  “Or maybe we’ll float back toward the Antarctic to continue our adventure?” Samson said, half joking.

  He knew that even if they could reach Antarctica now, they’d have no chance of making it across the continent. Even with the supplies that the Ross sea party had laid out, they had too few provisions to make it to the first post. The Ross party had set out from the Ross Sea on the opposite side of Antarctica, making their way along previously used polar routes to lay out supplies for when Shackleton reached the Beardmore Glacier. But that was so far out of reach now, and many of the dogs were sick from worms or exhaustion. Every time they went out on the sleds, there seemed to be fewer and fewer of them.

  At least his friends were well, Samson thought. He couldn’t bear it if anything happened to them. They were as close to Samson as family. He just wished Bummer would forgive him.

  “Have you seen Amundsen lately?” Samson said in a low voice.

  Sally nodded. “I think he’s ill… not that he would admit it. Too pigheaded to know when he needs help and too proud to ask for it. He’s been giving his food away to the pups, says he’s not hungry, but there’s more to it than that.”

  Samson lifted his head toward the tents, from which the sound of the banjo and the men singing jolly tunes floated on the wind. “What do you suppose they have to celebrate?” he asked.

  “Something called Christmas,” Sally said. “Surly told me. He said they’ve finished off all the good food, without giving us a sniff.”

  “I’d give anything to taste something other than pemmican or seal blubber,” Samson sighed, laying his head on his paws and letting his eyes drift closed to dream of lamb chops and gravy.

  The next day, Samson was awoken by a flurry of activity in the camp. The men had taken down their tents and were loading the lifeboats back up with everything and anything in sight.

  “We’re on the move again,” Sally told him with a sigh.

  Samson groaned. “Not with the lifeboats?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “It was hard enough when we were healthy. Now…” He gestured around at the dogs gathering. Their numbers were dwindling day by day. Samson could count at least twenty dogs missing—Amundsen included. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Sally if Amundsen was still sleeping or sick… or worse.

  “Mother says we’re going on another adventure!” Roger said, rushing up to greet them, his tail wagging excitedly. He gripped Samson’s tail in his jaws and Samson spun, swinging Roger around and around until he felt dizzy.

  “Me next!” Toby yelled.

  Samson laughed and shook his head, trying to stop the ground from swaying beneath him.

  “We might be big enough to help pull the boats,” Nelson added.

  “Do you think they’re strong enough?” Samson asked Sally, flicking his tail back and forth to stop Toby from hanging on.

  Sally glanced at the playful pups, who didn’t seem to have a care in the world. “I’m not sure I’ll have much say in the matter,” she replied. “We’re short of dogs, and all of us are weaker—the men included.”

  She gasped at something behind him. Samson turned to see what had caught her attention. Making his way through the crowd of dogs was Amundsen. He had lost more weight, and tufts of his fur hung in patches.

  “He’s not thinking of pulling the boats?” Samson said, unable to take his eyes off the dog who had once been so strong. Samson had always considered Amundsen invincible—as tough on the inside as he was on the outside. But now he seemed broken.

  “What are you all staring at?” Amundsen snarled. “We’ve got a job to do—I suggest we get on and do it. Wolf, Hercules, are you coming?”

  The dogs remained silent. Wolf and Hercules kept their eyes on the ground, neither able to look at Amundsen.

  Amundsen caught Samson watching. Samson held his gaze for a moment before nodding. “You heard what Amundsen said. Let’s get harnessed up.”

  Amundsen gave Samson the slightest of nods, then shuffled over to Crean.

  The march was slow and exhausting, pushing many of the men and dogs almost to the breaking point, but they had to reach land one way or another. There was no other option. Once the weather warmed, there would no longer be a solid ice floe beneath them. Samson kept an eye on Amundsen, and eventually they were moving so slowly that Crean shifted Bummer and Samson forward to help Amundsen lead the pack. Samson couldn’t help smiling as Bummer gave Crean a huge grin, his eyes filled with pride and determination.

  Beside him, Amundsen coughed and wheezed as he huffed in and out.

  “Amundsen,” Samson started.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Amundsen snarled. “Worry about your own team! Surly’s barely breathing back there.”

  Samson caught Bummer’s eye as he moved forward to stand side by side with Amundsen, pulling at the ropes. Bummer did the same, moving to Amundsen’s other side so the three were level, keeping pace with Amundsen to ease his burden a little without it looking as if he was struggling. Amundsen opened his mouth to say something but then closed it, giving a small nod.

  The days passed and their pace grew slower and slower as they headed across the floe toward the pale blue line of open water far in the distance. There didn’t seem to be any one dog leading the pack anymore. As exhaustion overcame even the strongest of dogs, they all hung in a group, cheering one another on when one or more fell behind, with barely more than a huff. They had to stop of
ten to allow the weakest dogs at the back to catch up and rest for a few minutes before being urged on by the men, who were just as exhausted.

  A few days later, some of the men had decided they had had enough.

  “I’m not going any farther,” McNish declared, dropping the ropes and collapsing onto the ground. “We’ll all be dead before we get anywhere near the water.”

  Some of the other men agreed and joined McNish on the ground. The dogs, grateful for even the shortest of breaks, took the opportunity to collapse on the ice, many of them falling asleep within minutes.

  The men gathered around, having a heated discussion with the boss as to what they were doing and who was in charge. In the end they seemed to come to some kind of agreement, and Wild returned with a face like thunder. “The boss won’t forget this, McNish,” he growled as he began removing the dogs’ harnesses. “Neither will I.”

  “We’re setting up a new camp, boys,” Wild told the dogs. “Welcome to Patience Camp.”

  Samson glanced over at Bummer. He lay on the floor, and his chest heaved up and down as he breathed. Samson thought of Amundsen and how much he was struggling. He couldn’t stand it if something happened to his best friend, too. He drew up his courage and the last bit of strength he had left in his legs and limped over on sore paws to talk to Bummer.

  “Bummer,” Samson said, taking a deep breath and hoping his friend wouldn’t reject him once more. “You were right. We are a team, and I let you down. I let my pride get in the way of what was most important, and I’m so, so sorry.” He nudged Bummer’s head gently with his, and Bummer smiled.

  “I forgive you,” Bummer said. “I won’t say I’ll forget about what happened, because I can’t, but… with things the way they are, we need to stay strong. For Sally and the pups and for all of us to make it. We’re stronger together than apart.”

  Samson felt a rush of relief. “We are,” he said.

  Bummer nodded, then gave a shy smile that reminded Samson of the first time they’d spoken.

  “Seven days,” Samson puffed. “Seven days we’ve been pulling these lifeboats across the floe, and now we’re just giving up?”