The Winter Pony

by Iain Lawrence

  Mr. Oates examined the pony. “That’s the fellow. That’s the soldier,” he said as he moved from tail to head.

  Mr. Wright hovered nearby. “It doesn’t look good for him, does it?” he asked.

  “Frankly, it doesn’t look good for any of them,” said Mr. Oates. He rubbed Chinaman’s shoulder. “You should be proud of this one. He’s done very well.”

  “But how much farther can he go?” asked Mr. Wright. “Another mile or two, and that’s it?”

  “Oh, I think he’s got days yet,” said Mr. Oates. “His spirits are good, and that’s the thing. It isn’t muscle and bone that will carry him on, you know. It’s spirit.”

  “But to make him work till the end …” Mr. Wright let his voice fall away. “To the very end?”

  “He would want nothing less,” said Mr. Oates. He walked along the tether line, stopping again at Jehu. I snorted, trying to call him closer. “Yes, I see you there, James Pigg,” he said.

  Mr. Atkinson followed him. “It seems so calculated,” he said.

  “Well, you see, you’re thinking like a person, Silas. You want to think like a horse instead.” Mr. Oates touched a finger to his head, tapping through the wool of his balaclava. “There’s a lot of bone up there, but not much else. Believe me.”

  Well, that seemed a bit insulting. But I didn’t mind too much if it came from Mr. Oates.

  He ran his hand down Jehu’s neck, up across the pony’s ribs, down again along the flank. All the time, he kept walking toward me.

  “Most men—most people—want the same thing,” he told Mr. Wright. “A good life of good work, then out to pasture—in our own way—until the end arrives some long time later. But not so for a horse, and a pony’s surely no different.”

  He was smiling at me now as he reached up his hands to my forehead. “The saddest horses I’ve ever seen are the ones put out to pasture,” he said. “They get listless, they get fat, they stand by the fence forever, looking out at the world they knew. They’re trapped by that fence, you see. People think the pasture’s a kindness. But to a horse it’s a prison.”

  Mr. Wright sighed. “Do you believe that truly?”

  “I do,” said Mr. Oates. “A horse doesn’t dream of the pastures. If anything it lives in dread of them.”

  He was almost right. I did not dream of pastures, when pastures were fields of dirt and nibbled-down grass and rusty old buckets to drink from. But I didn’t dream of harnesses, either. I worked because it pleased him, and because it pleased Patrick and Captain Scott and all the others who had been very kind.

  Mr. Oates rubbed his hand down the long flat of my nose, then cupped it under my mouth. I snorted. I made the happiest sounds that I knew, but to the men, it was just a murmuring flutter of lips and gums.

  Mr. Wright chuckled. “You’d think he’s trying to talk to you.”

  “In his way, he is,” said Mr. Oates.

  I lowered my head to let him rub the space between my ears.

  “I understand horses better than I understand people,” he said. “I prefer their company most of the time, to be honest. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: A horse would sooner die in harness than rot in a field.”

  Mr. Wright didn’t look convinced. He came up beside Mr. Oates and idly stroked my nose. “Aren’t you giving them your own thoughts?”

  “Only because we think the same way,” said Mr. Oates. “Soldiers and horses. We don’t hope to die old.”

  He was so nearly right. I didn’t want to die old if it meant being alone and frightened. But it wasn’t the harness that made me work, or the tether that stopped me from running away. Christopher was proof of that, with all his fears and battles. If I had the choice, I would rather grow old with Mr. Oates. But I’d sooner die in harness than disappoint him. Not that it seemed to matter much. Everything was already decided, and a pony didn’t have many choices to make.

  The next day’s march brought us to the place where Blucher was buried. The flagstaff still marked the spot, and all around it the snow was fresh and deep. It was an eerie place, with the little pole tipping in the wind, back and forth, as though Blucher was pushing up from below, trying to struggle from his icy grave.

  Chinaman had never been there. I watched as he veered from his path ahead of me, pulling Mr. Atkinson sideways till he stood right above the grave. He made a sad sort of whine, then pawed the snow gently with a forefoot. His gesture made me think of my mother, when she had helped me to my feet on my first day on Earth.

  Mr. Atkinson frowned. He didn’t know that Blucher was buried there. But Patrick did, and he looked at Chinaman with astonishment. When the pony whined again, he seemed almost afraid. “This gives me the willies,” he said. “Let’s get him away from here.”

  It took a few tugs to get the old pony moving. Chinaman didn’t want to leave that place. Then he kept looking back, turning his head this way and that way, still making the sad little cries that had spooked Patrick.

  A hundred yards on, he stopped altogether. He stomped his feet in the snow, raised his head, and let out a shrill sort of shriek. It was the cry I’d known, when I was young, as the gathering call of the silvery stallion.

  I was sure that Chinaman was calling to Blucher. And I was sure that Patrick knew it. My friend’s breaths came a little more quickly. His hand tightened on my halter, as though he didn’t want me to look back, or was afraid to look back himself, in case he saw the ghost of Blucher rising gray and shimmering from the snow.

  Storm followed storm. It snowed, it stopped, it snowed again as we made our way south from one old camp to another. The Barrier was either hidden by blizzards or veiled in the white mist that blinded men and ponies. We saw no land for days, but trekked along, guided by the compass, from one old cairn to the next.

  Mr. Wright kept thinking that every mile was the last for his old pony. But Mr. Oates was right, of course. Both Chinaman and Jehu kept slogging on, though the going got worse all the time. I could see that neither pony would last much longer, but they kept pushing themselves on, not wanting to be left behind. Patrick kept telling me, “You’re doing well, James Pigg. You’re a good lad.” But I was getting tired too. I felt nearly as old as Chinaman.

  We reached Bluff Depot, where I had turned back the year before with poor old Blucher and Blossom. We picked up the supplies they had dragged so far, and we carried them on to the south. A day later, Patrick gave me half an oil cake in the middle of the march and told me, “You’ve come a hundred miles, James Pigg.”

  Then we went another fifty.

  Even the strongest ponies were starting to wear out, but we struggled every day in a line that stretched far along the Barrier. Then we reached One Ton Depot, where Captain Scott had buried his last supplies the summer before, where he’d turned back to spare his ponies.

  I could see the old wall where Guts and Punch and Uncle Bill had sheltered. The marks of their hooves were still punched through the snow around the big cairn that marked the place. All of them were dead, but that wall still stood.

  Nobby had been there. But if he was sad, he didn’t show it. He barely glanced at the wall, then watched the men get out their shovels and stared at one little spot on the snow. He never took his eyes from it, and as soon as the men went near it, he whinnied with excitement.

  Patrick was putting my blanket on my back just then. He heard Nobby’s shrill cry, saw him watching the digging, and I felt his hands tremble at the edge of my blanket. “Now, what’s buried there?” he asked himself.

  The men dug through the snow, then dropped their shovels and knelt by the hole they’d made. When they reached into the snow, Nobby shrieked again, stomping his little hooves. Then Patrick laughed as the men brought up a bale of frozen fodder.

  There was a lot of pony food buried there at One Ton Depot. We had a day of rest as the men sorted out the supplies and rearranged the sledges. Captain Scott had long talks with the men, making plans for “the march on the summit,” as he calle
d it. He lightened the loads for Jehu and Chinaman, and added to Christopher’s, to Michael’s, to the other strong ponies. He lightened mine as well, making me think that I might be part of the dash. But when we trekked away to the south, I saw that the men had saved weight by leaving out forage and oil cakes, and that made no sense to me. How were we supposed to eat, I wondered, if the food was far behind us?

  When we trekked away toward the south, a huge amount of pony food still sat on the snow. I thought of pulling on my tether to make Patrick see it. But he could hardly have missed the bales of fodder, the boxes of biscuits, lying as though abandoned.

  The sun made it harder for us. He filled the sky with a terrible glare, a brightness that softened the surface until even Christopher was exhausted by plunging through hollows where the snow was soft as swamp mud.

  Icicles grew from our nostrils again. Mr. Wright used his windproof jacket to cover Chinaman’s nose, to shield his pony from the cold wind.

  Thirteen miles a day. That was the goal set by Captain Scott, and we struggled along to meet it. But me and Jehu and Chinaman barely managed to keep ahead of the others. As the men packed up our lunchtime camps, we could see Christopher plodding up along our tracks with Mr. Oates beside him. When we stopped at the end of the march, we could hear the dogs coming quickly from the distance.

  Every handler fussed over his pony to keep us warm behind our walls, blanketed and fed. But just as Mr. Oates had said, it was only spirit that kept Chinaman moving. Every day, I could see dread in his eyes as Mr. Wright backed him into his harness. Then off he went with a grim determination. The men began to call him Thunderbolt, a name they used with both amusement and admiration.

  I led the way. My hooves left tracks where there were no tracks. In the hours around midnight, when the sun was low and the day was coldest, I punched through the soft crust that froze on the Barrier. With the steady pace that Patrick set, the sound was like the drumming of a faraway army. I was proud to be the leader, breaking trail for every pony from worn-out old Jehu to the fierce Christopher. Even Captain Scott walked in the tracks I made.

  I was the one who found the cairn as big as a mountain, towering so high from the snow that I saw it from more than nine miles away. I found the motor party camped just beyond it, the men in their seventh day of waiting. They had dragged their sledge nearly as far as I had dragged mine. And now they fell in with us and dragged it some more, heaving together in the harness. They were hungry and tired, nearly as thin as Jehu.

  I was pleased that I could help Jehu. He plodded in my tracks, down the grooves of my sledge runners. He could hardly haul the sledge, although his load had been lightened again and again, and now a team of dogs could have hauled it easily. He could barely lift his hooves.

  He looked worse than the tired old mare who had wandered away from my band of ponies. But he never slowed, or never stopped to rest. He just walked along, one step at a time, as though his legs were parts of an engine.

  Four days out from Framheim, Amundsen’s dogs reach their full vigor. They run nearly out of control, eager to go forward. The drivers have to slow them down. Teams collide and the dogs get into terrible fights.

  Then the temperature drops, and it’s suddenly sixty-eight below. “One’s breath was like a cloud,” says Amundsen later. “And so thick was the vapor over the dogs that one could not see one team from the next, though the sledges were being driven close to one another.”

  The men can take the cold. Amundsen says that at times it even feels too warm. But he worries about the dogs.

  “In the morning, especially, they were a pitiful sight,” he says. “They lay rolled up as tightly as possible, with their noses under their tails, and from time to time one could see a shiver run through their bodies; indeed, some of them were constantly shivering. We had to lift them up and put them into their harness. I had to admit that with this temperature it would not pay to go on; the risk was too great.”

  Amundsen decides to turn back at his depot at 80 degrees south. He reaches it on the fourteenth of September, empties his sledges, and races back to the sea.

  Along the way, he turns loose the dogs that can’t keep up, trusting them to find their own way home.

  CHAPTER TEN

  JEHU was dying, and everyone knew it. He had worked till the end of his days.

  But Mr. Atkinson was terribly sad, and he believed it was a cruelty to push the pony any farther. So on the morning of the twenty-fourth of November, at the end of a night’s long march, Mr. Atkinson fed his little pony a biscuit. He combed the forelock with his fingers, then petted Jehu one last time.

  Mr. Oates had the pistol. He led the pony away from the rest of us, making quiet little clucking sounds as he did it. A few of the men, like Cherry, gave Jehu a pet as he passed. “Good lad,” they said. “Well done,” they told him.

  Jehu looked back, puzzled because Mr. Atkinson wasn’t going along with him. But Mr. Atkinson didn’t see that. He had turned his back on the pony and was rubbing his ears as if they were cold. I thought he was masking the sound of Jehu’s wheezing breaths.

  Suddenly, all of the men were busy with little jobs. Captain Scott had to nip into his tent for a moment. Birdie Bowers had to crouch down beside his sledge and tug at the lashings. Patrick had to comb my mane a hundred times, with his left hand tight on my halter and his cheek pressed so firmly against my neck that I could feel the frosty stiffness of his beard.

  I heard a click of metal, and then the clap of the gunshot, so loud that it seemed to shatter the air.

  I tried to jump away, but Patrick was still holding me tightly. Along the picket line, other ponies leapt and twitched. One of them shrieked and another whinnied, and the gunshot still seemed to ring in the air.

  Then I heard the soft thud of Jehu collapsing.

  Mr. Atkinson didn’t move for a long time. Then he walked toward his pony, passing Mr. Oates, who was walking back, both of them watching their own feet. Mr. Atkinson knelt in the snow and began to unbuckle Jehu’s halter. I could feel his despair from all the way across the camp.

  That night, the dogs had a feast, which rather turned my stomach. I heard them growl and snap at each other, the dog Osman the loudest of all. I saw blood dripping from his muzzle and his mane, blood on his fangs and paws.

  I was glad that Jehu wasn’t there to see that.

  It was a long, sad rest I had, through the brightest part of the day to the start of the next night’s march. I kept thinking of Jehu, remembering how happy he had been to roll in the snow when the ship first arrived. Though I was sorry he was gone, I was even sorrier for the men, and especially for Mr. Oates. He came out by himself while the other men were sleeping, and went from pony to pony just to tighten blankets, pet a nose, or rub an ear. I remembered what he’d said on the ice in the terrible time the year before: “I shall be sick if I have to kill another horse like the last one.” He seemed so mixed up inside that I couldn’t sort out what he was thinking.

  Two of the motor party turned back. Mr. Atkinson stepped into the harness and pulled the sledge that Jehu had pulled.

  We saw the mountains to the west as a dark and distant blur. But soon it snowed again and turned our world to white.

  That was the last time Chinaman saw the mountains. The blizzard blew without stopping, covering the Barrier in a sludge of soft snow. We all waded through it, men and ponies both. Christopher struggled as much as Chinaman now. Even that big monster of a pony was fading quickly.

  For another four days, poor Chinaman struggled on. And they were the hardest days of all. The never-ending gleam of white snow and white sky burned my eyes badly. Snow covered my nose when I walked. It covered my ears and my forelocks, and I had to snort it away from my nostrils. It covered my blanket when I rested. Then it melted. Then it froze, and I felt like a block of ice.

  When Mr. Oates led him away, Chinaman didn’t even bother to glance up. He was the most worn-out, tired-looking thing I’d ever seen, slumped and sad. I heard h
im whooshing his slow breaths with his muzzle near the ground while Mr. Oates prepared the pistol. But at the very end, he lifted his head and looked north down the tracks of our day’s march. His ears pricked up, as though he’d heard a sound of happy memories. His tail swished, flinging clumps of snow.

  I saw nothing on the Barrier, where Chinaman was looking. But he opened his mouth and made the shrill cry of greeting that I’d heard at Blucher’s grave. Then Mr. Oates held out his pistol, the shot boomed, and poor old Thunderbolt fell with a whoof and a thud.

  Again the dogs had a feast. And the men, in their tents, cooked up a rich-smelling stew. It made me queasy to think of what they were eating.

  Mr. Wright joined the man-haulers. We marched to the south, through blizzard after blizzard.

  Captain Scott pressed us on; he had to make his thirteen miles a day. But every march was worse than the one before, and the men grew as tired as the animals. There was deep snow to wade through, and underneath, a crust that sometimes shattered. Patrick broke through it as often as me, his arms and hands sinking into the snow as he fell. Side by side, we staggered and plunged and heaved ourselves on. And no one thought of turning back. That was how badly the captain and the rest ached to reach the Pole; they would never turn back, no matter what.

  Every march ended when Captain Scott blew his whistle. It was sharp and loud, like the cry of a hawk, and I came to love that shrill screech more than any sound I’d ever heard. When the whistle blew, Patrick thumped my neck or patted my nose and told me, “Good work, James Pigg.”

  My work was over, but my worry began. At the end of every march, I wondered if my end had come. I watched Patrick for a clue as he led me from the trail, as he unfastened my harness. I listened for clues in his voice. And I watched Mr. Oates as closely as I’d watched him on the little island where I’d first seen him. When he bent down to a sledge, or crawled into his tent, or reached a hand in his coat, was he fetching his pistol?