The Winter Pony

by Iain Lawrence

  I didn’t want to be afraid, but I couldn’t help it.

  But it wasn’t my turn next. It was Christopher’s.

  The choice was Captain Scott’s. Mr. Oates wasn’t pleased, and they argued loudly back and forth. Mr. Oates said Christopher was strong enough to go a lot farther, to go right over the Beardmore if he was asked to do it. But Captain Scott said Christopher had been nothing but trouble from the start. And at any rate, he said, his mind was made up.

  Mr. Oates led the pony himself. He used one hand to lead his pony, and the other to carry his pistol. Then they stood together in the ruts of the sledges, with Mr. Oates leaning against Christopher.

  I wished I could hear what he was saying. But it was all in whispers and murmurs, while his hand went round and round over the shaggy white hair of the pony.

  For once in his life, Christopher didn’t try to pull his head away, or rear up, or stomp the snow with his hooves. He just stood there, huffing gently, then made a soft nickering sound.

  When Mr. Oates brought up his pistol, I didn’t want to see what would happen. I looked for Patrick and saw him hurrying toward me, staggering through a drift of snow as though a wolf was right behind him.

  Then the shot made me jump. I jerked at my tether. I tried to bolt, and nearly tangled in the picket line. Then Patrick was beside me, and I didn’t worry anymore.

  My ears rang with the crack of the shot. But still I heard Christopher scream. Then I saw him gallop past, more wild than he had ever been. He kicked and he bucked; he spun in tight circles.

  Mr. Oates ran after him with the pistol still in his hand. He had somehow missed his shot.

  The men chased Christopher through the camp. They spread out in a line and tried to surround him. Birdie Bowers waved his felt hat in the air.

  Christopher shied away from one of the men, only to turn and face another. He was terrified, and the smell of his fear made the rest of the ponies uneasy. The men closed in around him. He ran up against a sledge. He nearly trampled a tent, and all the time kept shrieking and fighting, leaping clear from the ground with his four hooves flailing.

  Then a man grabbed his tether. And three others held on while the pony bucked and struggled. But Mr. Oates got him calm again, then led him back to the trail.

  They went right past me. I saw a hole in the side of Christopher’s head. Drops of blood had been flung in a red spray through the hairs around it. Mr. Oates looked awfully wretched.

  I didn’t watch where they went. The pistol clicked, then fired again, and the monster was no more.

  Now there were seven ponies. Again our loads were lightened as the men cached more supplies. Then on we went into the white haze.

  It was thick as milk to start with, but it grew thinner as we walked. Patches of sky appeared in the east, then rocky cliffs of yellow and brown. A tumbling glacier shimmered between snow-covered peaks, as blue as the eyes of a sledge dog.

  Mr. Wilson shouted, “There’s the Gateway!” and I looked straight ahead, and I could hardly believe what I saw.

  Below a band of clouds was a snowy ramp leading up through the mountains, up through a river of ice. On either side were pillars of rock, and the clouds seemed to arch across them.

  It was my old vision of the ponies’ place, the image that I’d seen in the wretched stables long ago. I’d never thought I would actually see it, but now I struggled on toward the Gateway, as though into my own imaginings.

  For an hour or more, it was there in front of me, glaring and bright. It encouraged me on, until Patrick had to slow me down because I was pulling him along. High in the mountains, the wind whipped snow from the Beardmore, wild whirls that raced across the surface like the spirits of the glacier. Then the clouds thickened, filling the Gateway, and soon it was snowing again.

  I wasn’t sure that I would ever reach the Gateway. It was many days in the distance, and I was failing quickly.

  It was Victor who trailed at the end of the line that day. He was Birdie Bowers’s pony, and the little man trudged beside him, not caring how slowly they walked. They came into the camp together, and Captain Scott went out to meet them.

  Birdie seemed surprised at that. He stopped, looked up at Captain Scott, and put his hand on Victor’s muzzle, as though to guard the pony.

  “He’s not doing very well, is he?” asked Captain Scott.

  “Oh, he’s all right, sir,” said Birdie, with a funny little smile. He rubbed harder on the pony’s nose. “He’s pulling his weight and more.”

  Captain Scott, in his sledging clothes, looked as big as a bear beside Birdie. His face was windburned, his eyebrows frosted. “It’s the end for him, Birdie,” he said.

  “But, sir—”

  “The forage is running out,” said Captain Scott. “There’s not enough for all the ponies, and I’ve made up my mind.”

  “But, sir,” said Birdie again. “I told you that. I asked for more, and …” He looked away; he couldn’t bring himself to argue with the captain. In the end, it would have made no difference.

  “I’ll send Oates,” said Captain Scott, and he turned around and left.

  Poor little Birdie Bowers stood and petted his pony. When Mr. Oates came with the pistol, Birdie asked him to wait. Then he got out his own biscuits—his dinner—and fed every one of them to Victor, though it meant he would go hungry himself that night. He broke them into little pieces that he fed to the pony one by one, so that Victor might think he was getting more than he really was.

  Mr. Oates didn’t try to hurry him. He looked embarrassed as he stood there waiting, examining his pistol over and over, as though it was something he had never seen and couldn’t quite understand.

  Then the last bit of the last biscuit was gone, and Birdie looked up at Mr. Oates. He had to look up at everyone, poor little Birdie. “Well, I suppose that’s it,” he said. “Thank you, Oates.”

  Still, he didn’t want to let go of Victor. The pony still seemed strong and healthy to me. He looked back at Birdie as Mr. Oates led him away. Then he trotted along with high steps, as he thought he was heading for a warm stable at last.

  I watched Birdie turn away and head toward his tent. It seemed that he was in a hurry to get there. But the roar of the pistol stopped him for a moment. He straightened—looking very tall for a moment—then slumped down and went along on his way.

  In the distance, the dogs were coming. Their barks and howls were growing louder.

  All the way from the winter station, the dogs had carried food for ponies. I had always thought it was a bit funny they would do that. But now it seemed cruel, just the very sort of thing a dog would do. They had made Victor big and fat, and now they threw themselves at the pieces of him.

  They ate and they ate until they could eat no more, until the snow was red all around.

  For me, there wasn’t enough. I was still hungry when I finished my meal, though I snuffled up every last bit from the bottom of my nose bag. Patrick looked at me sadly. “That’s all there is. I’m sorry, lad,” he said.

  Now Mr. Meares had his eyes on me, I thought. Three times I saw him looking at me across the camp, past the peak of his tent. I imagined he was measuring in his mind the pounds of flesh I had, calculating how many meals he could find for his horrible dogs. When he came along the line of ponies, petting every one, I cringed from his touch, from the smell of dog on his hands. I felt as though death was touching me.

  It was another miserable night. My blanket was sodden from melted snow and sweat, then froze as the sun carried his light far to the north. Patrick came along and tightened it, pulling the icy layers close against my ribs. He was trying his best to help, but he only made me colder.

  Then the wind blew hard. It blew harder than ever before. The tents fluttered and banged, the dogs dug themselves deep, and the sledges disappeared under enormous moving drifts. A river of snow seemed to flow across the Barrier. It toppled the pony wall, and icy pellets rattled on our blankets. It nearly knocked me off my feet.

>   I couldn’t look into that wind. So much snow streamed across the Barrier that I could hardly see Nobby beside me. I shivered under my blanket.

  But out of the whiteness came Mr. Oates. He was leaning forward, struggling for every step, and behind him came Birdie Bowers and Captain Scott. I saw Cherry, with his glass eyes already balls of snow, and Patrick and all the others. They looked like gray shadows as they set to work in the howl of wind, to rebuild the pony wall.

  We marched in breaks between the blizzards. Captain Scott pushed us hard, trying to make his thirteen miles. With skis strapped to his feet, he moved up and down the line as we straggled south together.

  On the outside he looked hard as rock—browned and toughened—by wind and sun and weather. But on the inside he was worn away, whittled down like the lonely cairns on the Barrier. He said no man deserved to find winter weather in the middle of summer.

  It was as though the place had turned against him, that the mountains—like giants—were trying to blow him right back to the sea. Captain Scott had come with his motor sledges, with his ponies and dogs and men, all marching like an army to conquer the mountains. Maybe they didn’t want us on their backs. Maybe the Pole preferred not to be found.

  I was no longer in the lead. Again we straggled along, with Bones and Snatcher and Snippets pushing past me. Often Nobby and Michael passed me too, and I was last of all, too far back to see anyone else. It was just me and Patrick plodding through the white mist.

  It’s October 19 when Amundsen finally starts for the Pole. Now it’s spring without doubt, and there’s not a thought of turning back. He has no idea how far the Englishmen might have gotten by now, if they’ve met the same cold that forced him off the Barrier. He thinks of the motor sledges; he imagines their tracks turning round and round, mindless of the temperature.

  There are five men and four sledges. There are thirteen dogs to pull each sledge, and they go seventeen miles before they camp. After four days, they’re ninety miles nearer to the Pole.

  But ahead are the mountains, and the climb to the polar plateau, and no man has even searched for a route from this direction.

  Amundsen loads his sledges heavily at his 80-degree depot. He decides to limit his marches to seventeen miles a day until he sees how the dogs cope with the weight. But in the first hour, they cover six and a quarter miles.

  On November 6, when Scott is one day out from Corner Camp, Amundsen leaves his last depot at 82 degrees and heads toward the unseen mountains.

  “Now the unknown lay before us,” he writes. “Now our work began in earnest.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THERE were times when it was beautiful. Behind the clouds, the sun encircled himself with giant rings of different colors, like pale rainbows all around him. They shone through the clouds and onto the snow, and Patrick stopped me once to admire it. We might have been the only creatures in the whole world, with the whiteness all around us. “Now, isn’t that a splendid sight, James Pigg?” he asked. The light shimmered above us; it shimmered in front of us, great rings of gold and blue and yellow. Patrick petted my nose. “We might be looking at the eye of God,” he said.

  And there were times when it was strange. Out in the snow on a windy day, a pony came from behind me. I was plowing through a hollow full of powdery snow, my shoulders aching from the harness. Patrick used my halter to hold himself up as he waded and staggered along. In an hour we’d moved a hundred yards, and I was so tired that I could hardly keep awake. I knew I was right at the back of the line.

  The pony came up through the blowing snow without a sound of breaths or hooves or harness. He just appeared beside me and glided past at a steady trot, not even denting the snow with his hooves. He had neither a handler nor a sledge, and moments later, he’d overtaken us and was disappearing into the blizzard. I called out with a shrill whinny that Patrick didn’t understand. “Easy, lad,” he said. “I know it’s hard.”

  The pony kept moving, fading away. But he turned his head just enough, in the instant before he vanished, that I saw that he was Blucher.

  Michael’s end came next. The small pony with the tiny hooves, the one who ate my fringes, had his nose bag on when Mr. Oates came to fetch him. His handler was Cherry, and I had never seen a man so sad as poor Cherry was just then. He asked Mr. Oates to wait until Michael had finished eating, and that didn’t take very long because there wasn’t a lot in our feed bags. He petted the little pony every minute. Then he took off the bag and scraped the inside of it for the last flakes that Michael couldn’t lick from the folds and the corners. He held them out on his palm, his hand bared to the cold. Then his glass eyes frosted over, and that made him seem like a spirit.

  Michael went playfully. He was always happy with Mr. Oates, and he must have imagined that they were off on some sort of game. He rolled in the snow, then sprang to his feet, then nickered with his teeth showing, as though the whole thing was a great joke.

  I didn’t want to watch him being shot. I muzzled at my feed bag, wishing I didn’t have to hear the sounds. I was glad the little pony fell so softly into the snow.

  And now there were five of us. We were twelve miles from the Gateway. One more day would get us there, and I didn’t know if I should be happy or afraid. Just then, all I felt was loneliness.

  When the men were in their tents, and we were shuffling sleeplessly along the picket line, the clouds sailed away and I saw the Beardmore.

  It was horrible but beautiful, a hundred miles of ice pouring down between the mountains, shattered by crevasses, jumbled with enormous blocks and ridges. I could see why no pony had ever climbed it. I didn’t believe it was possible. The Beardmore looked worse than the Barrier, and all uphill for a hundred miles. I hoped just then that Captain Scott wouldn’t even ask me to climb it.

  The Gateway didn’t look so much like a gateway anymore. We were too close; there was no arch of clouds to close it in. The mountains at the sides seemed more like barriers than pillars. My mountains at home had been friendly and safe, but these seemed only cruel.

  I felt scared. I felt cold and very alone. I wanted to huddle close to Snatcher or Snippets, but we were spread too far along the picket line. We could only look at one another, and the two of them stared at me with wide and wondering eyes. They looked fearful, trapped somehow on the huge Barrier.

  I didn’t sleep. I watched for Patrick, staring at his tent for hour after hour.

  Clouds moved in again, hiding the Beardmore. Snow began falling, very soft and silent, with huge flakes drifting down. Then the wind picked up again, and the snow became a stinging sleet.

  I kept staring at the tent. I could feel half-melted snow slithering from my forelocks, dripping from my mane. I had to blink it away. Everything looked dim and watery.

  When Patrick appeared, a blizzard was blowing again. The sides of his tent were booming in the wind, and the pony wall had tumbled.

  It was a wretched, awful day. The snow was wet enough to soak through my blanket, until every inch of me was wet. Then the temperature fell, and all the water turned to ice. I shivered so hard that I thought my bones would shatter.

  For four days, it was like that. Howling wind and sleet one moment, enormous flakes the next, tumbling through the air like a storm of butterflies.

  Mr. Oates stayed with us. He fussed with our blankets and rubbed us down. Then he huddled by himself against the pony wall while the wind whipped over his head. The men kept saying that the temperature was well above zero, but I had never felt so cold.

  On the third day, Blossom went by. I saw him only vaguely, through whirls of blowing snow. He walked as though there was no wind, his mane unruffled, his forelock hanging straight. Like Blucher, he stepped along on top of the snow, and he left no tracks on the powdery surface. I remembered him as sickly and old, a staggering thing. But now he looked younger than I’d ever known him, strong and healthy.

  He passed between the tent and the pony wall, very close to Mr. Oates and Snatcher. The man d
idn’t see him, but Snatcher did. He turned to look, snow tumbling from his hair as he raised his head. But already Blossom was gone, a faded ghost in the blizzard.

  I hadn’t slept since the storm began. I was cold and tired. But I was sure that I saw Blossom, unburied from his grave.

  An hour later, the wind began to ease. The snowfall stopped, the sky brightened, and the men crawled out from their tents.

  They looked like foxes emerging in the spring, wary and worried. Their tents were drifted over so heavily that only the tips of the bamboo poles were poking from great mounds of white. They came out wet and miserable, from a warm dampness to a world of unbelievable snow.

  The sledges were buried four feet deep. The dogs couldn’t be seen at all, though wisps of steam rose from the little holes where they’d dug themselves in.

  The men brought shovels and picks. They dug out the tents; they dug out the sledges. Mr. Oates and Patrick gave us our nose bags, though there was so little food inside them that it was hardly worth the bother.

  Patrick offered a biscuit. What an effort to lift my head enough to take it. Cold and wet and frozen, I felt more dead than alive.

  As quickly as it had cleared, the sky filled in again. Clouds thick and gray descended on the Barrier, and snow came drifting down.

  Captain Scott looked sad and beaten. He had lost four days: He should have been another sixty miles ahead, halfway up the glacier. He couldn’t wait any longer to get started again. He asked for Nobby to be led out so he could see how the surface would hold up. Mr. Oates said it was a wasted effort to untie the pony, but the captain insisted.

  Nobby looked as tired as me. He dragged his feet through the snow, then sank to his belly as soon as he rounded the end of the pony wall. The fresh drifts were nearly as tall as Mr. Oates.