The Winter Pony

by Iain Lawrence

  On the fifteenth of January, they make their camp less than thirty miles from the Pole. They plant their last depot, a tiny thing with just four days’ worth of food, and set off eagerly in the morning. With twenty miles to go, they stop for lunch, then press on again in high spirits.

  Then, not two hours later, Birdie Bowers sees a strange sight.

  To him, it looks like a cairn standing out on the plateau. But he isn’t sure, and he says it might be a pile of snow, a drift or a wave. Then a black speck appears, and they all know that isn’t natural.

  They find a flag, and the remains of a camp where the tracks of many dogs, of sledges and skis, are printed in the snow.

  “This told us the whole story,” writes Scott. “The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole. It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions.”

  The Englishmen are all feeling the cold. Their hands and feet are frozen. But they go on, of course. The next day, the seventeenth of January, 1912, they reach the South Pole.

  This is the day that Scott has been working toward for more than ten years, for the whole of the century. He has planned for it, and dreamed of it, but now he calls it “a horrible day.” Amundsen has beaten him. The remains of the Norwegian’s camp lie scattered around the Pole, on the frozen wasteland at the very bottom of the world.

  “Great God!” writes Scott. “This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

  One of Amundsen’s tents is still standing. Inside are bags of mitts and sleeping socks and various bits of gear. There is a note dated almost exactly a month earlier, on a day when Scott and his men were still struggling up the Beardmore. It asks Scott to deliver a letter to King Haakon announcing the Norwegians’ victory, just in case they don’t make it home themselves.

  Scott takes the note and leaves his own, a record that he was there, that the Englishmen had reached the Pole.

  “We built a cairn,” he writes, “put up our poor slighted Union Jack, and photographed ourselves—mighty cold work all of it.”

  Then they turn to the north, with eight hundred miles of solid dragging ahead of them.

  “Good bye to most of the day-dreams,” writes Scott in his journal.

  Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. “I wonder if we can do it.”

  At last the wind blows at the backs of the Englishmen. They hoist a sail on their sledge and harness this thing that has caused them so much misery all the way to the Pole.

  But the wind is still their enemy. It rises to a blizzard, hiding the tracks that lead to their buried supplies. Soon it will swing around and blow in their faces again.

  Scott knows he has pressed his luck. He had planned to be back at One Ton Depot on March 20, at Hut Point a week later. To do it, he has to walk more than six hundred miles in sixty days, and already it’s a struggle for the men. Their boots are wearing out; their bodies are wearing out. Oates feels the cold badly in his feet, but Taff Evans is the worst. His hands have never healed and now are badly blistered. There’s frostbite on his nose.

  Just six days out from the Pole, Scott writes, “Things beginning to look a little serious.”

  The weather is atrocious. “Blizzards are our bugbear,” says Scott, “not only stopping our marches, but the cold damp air takes it out of us.”

  They plod down their ghostly tracks, following them so exactly that they stumble across small things they had lost on the way to the Pole: a pair of night boots belonging to Evans, mittens that Bowers had dropped, the Soldier’s treasured pipe.

  It’s the end of January now, with temperatures falling. Scott sounds hopeful one day, despairing the next, as he records the failing of his team. Dr. Wilson sprains a tendon and his leg swells up. Two of Taff Evans’s fingernails fall away. More troubling, the big sailor is beginning to lose heart.

  On February 7, they reach the depot at the top of the Beardmore, only to find that a biscuit tin is missing, a full day’s rations vanished. “Bowers is dreadfully disturbed about it,” says Scott.

  Despite the cold, despite their troubles and their hunger, the men stop along the glacier to collect fossils picked out by Dr. Wilson. They add thirty-five pounds of rock to their sledge.

  By the tenth, they have only two days’ worth of food remaining, and at least two marches down the glacier to the next depot. And another blizzard is blowing snow across the surface, hiding not only their landmarks but the deep crevasses in the ice. Scott must reduce rations or march blindly if the weather doesn’t clear.

  They lose their way on the glacier. They think their proper track is off to their left, then off to their right, and they blunder back and forth. That night they think they’re on course, but they’re not sure. They halve their rations, and are prepared to halve them again if they don’t make progress.

  “In a critical situation,” writes Scott the next day. Their morning march has taken them within sight of an old camp, but the afternoon has found them lost among crevasses and fissures. With one meal remaining, Scott isn’t sure they’ll reach the next depot.

  In fog and haze they wrestle their sledge down the Beardmore. Evans cries out, “There’s the depot!” He thinks he has seen a cairn, but it’s only a shadow on the snow. Then, suddenly, Dr. Wilson spots a flag, and the five men have a lunchtime feast at the old depot.

  Then it’s off again, on toward the next cache on the lower glacier. There’s food for three and a half days, and thirty miles to go.

  Bowers and Wilson are snow-blind. Oates is bothered by the old wound in his leg. Taff Evans has an enormous blister on his foot, and his mind is beginning to fray.

  The snow is soft, the temperature hovering between zero and ten degrees. The men sweat heavily while they work, then freeze when they stop, and their clothes never dry out. Evans slows them down, finding small excuses to halt the march, to get out of his harness and leave the others to do the hauling. He falls behind, then staggers along—alone—trying to catch up.

  On February 17, near the foot of the glacier, Evans stops to tie his boots. He asks for a bit of string and says, cheerfully, that he’ll be along soon enough. The others go on with the sledge, and when they stop for lunch, they can see the big sailor far behind, plodding through the snow. They pitch their tent, eat their meal. When they look out again, Evans can’t be seen.

  All four hurry toward him on skis.

  “I was first to reach the man,” Scott writes the next day, “and shocked at his appearance. He was on his knees with clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frostbitten, and a wild look in his eyes.”

  In slow speech, Evans says he thinks that he fainted. The men pull him up, but he falls again. So Oates stays with him while the other three bring the sledge. By the time Evans has been hauled to the tent, he’s unconscious. He dies without waking, just after midnight.

  Less than half an hour later, the men pack up and move on. They reach their depot, sleep for five hours, then march down through the Gateway to Shambles Camp.

  They’re back on the Barrier now, with its swampy snow and fragile crust. Their skis and sledge runners leave deep tracks; they can see them for miles behind them. But the old tracks of returning teams are so faint, they’re hard to find. Progress is terribly slow. In the Barrier nights, the temperature swings well below zero now. Scott feels winter settling in around them.

  Two days’ travel brings them to Desolation Camp, where the blizzard had pinned them for four days. They look for buried pony meat but find nothing.

  There’s a northerly wind that freezes them through and through. But they drag themselves on: five miles in one day, seven in another. On the next, they struggle for eight and a half miles, and Scott writes, “We can’t go on like this.”

  They pass old cairns, old pony walls, worrying that they’ve lost their way until the next little relic comes into view. They pass a whole camp without seeing it, and when they pitch their camp on the empty Barrier, t
he thought comes over Scott that he might never find the route again.

  It’s Bowers’s sharp eyes that save them. He sees a crumbling cairn in the distance, and it leads them to the next one, and on to Southern Barrier Depot, where the next disaster greets the men. There’s a shortage of oil, which alarms Captain Scott. Returning parties have opened the tins and taken their share. But the leather washers, once disturbed, have allowed the oil to evaporate, and now Scott and his men must ration their fuel.

  At the Mid-Barrier Depot, on the first of March, Oates asks Dr. Wilson to look at his feet. The Soldier’s toes are very badly frostbitten. He has been marching in agony for the last few days, trying to hide his condition. That’s a second blow for Scott, followed immediately by a third. The temperature plummets to forty below and a howling wind covers the Barrier in blowing snow.

  At least the wind is from the south. The men hoist the sail on their sledge.

  But the surface is so bad that a day’s march takes the men only three and a half miles. Their lives depend on reaching the next cache, but it’s One Ton Depot that lures them on with its huge stocks of food and fuel. Scott isn’t sure they can do it. It’s been four months since they left the old hut at the edge of the sea ice, a hundred and twenty nights spent in tents on the Barrier and the Beardmore and the polar plateau. “We are in a very queer street,” he writes that night, “since there is no doubt we cannot do the extra marches and feel the cold horribly.”

  The wind turns again. Blizzards cover the Barrier with woolly crystals that make sledging nearly impossible. The Soldier is lame now, limping in the harness. In grim marches, not five miles a day, they battle on to the next depot, only to find another disappointment: The caches of food and oil are smaller than they’re supposed to be. Scott wonders why men have not come out from the huts to replenish the stores, and decides that his dogs must have failed him at last.

  It’s a sad night for the men. In the morning, on the tenth of March, Oates needs two hours to put on his boots. He asks the doctor what chance he has of reaching Cape Evans, and Wilson says, “I don’t know.” But to Scott, it’s plain. “In point of fact he has none.” He writes of Oates’s pluck and bravery and says it makes little difference that the Soldier is slowing them down. “With great care we might have a dog’s chance, but no more.”

  There’s another blizzard, another march that lasts only half an hour, another cold camp on the Barrier. Then Oates, after breakfast, asks what he should do. The others urge him to go on, but the Soldier knows he’s near his end. Scott orders Dr. Wilson to distribute opium and morphine, to give every man the chance to choose his death. Now he notes that the daily distance averages six miles, and he does a bit of calculating in his little notebook:

  We have seven days’ food and should be about 55 miles from One Ton Camp tonight, 6 × 7 = 42, leaving us 13 miles short of our distance, even if things get no worse. Meanwhile the season rapidly advances.

  But still they press on, over the terrible surface, into the wind, through temperatures of forty below. “Truly awful outside the tent,” writes Scott on the fourteenth of March. “Must fight it out to the last biscuit.”

  At lunch the next day, Oates asks to be left behind. Let him die in his sleeping bag, he says. He doesn’t want to be a burden. But the others won’t allow it, so he gets up and goes with them, dragging his frozen feet another few miles.

  The Soldier goes to sleep hoping that he won’t wake. But he does. There’s a blizzard outside, shaking the tent, booming in the canvas. Oates crawls from his sleeping bag and unfastens the doorway. “I am just going outside,” he says, “and may be some time.”

  It’s too painful for Oates to put on his boots, so he goes out in his socks, into the blizzard. What looks pass between the others? What words are muttered? Scott says, “We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.”

  Now only three men are out on the Barrier. They press on to the north, and pass the eightieth parallel, where Scott had meant to plant his One Ton Depot. If he hadn’t turned back to spare the ponies, if he hadn’t cared if they’d lived or died, the three men would be wallowing in food that night, their Primus roaring in their tent.

  Instead they’re dying. Fifteen miles from their cached supplies, they have two days’ worth of food. But their feet are getting worse. Scott knows that his will have to be amputated if he ever makes it home.

  Another day sees them eleven miles from the depot. But Scott can go no farther. He decides that Bowers and Wilson will press on without him in the morning and return with food and fuel. But they never leave. A blizzard worse than any they’ve seen blows up in the night, and for a week it never stops.

  Birdie Bowers writes a farewell letter to his mother. He assures her that he has struggled on to the end. “Oh how I do feel for you when you hear all,” he writes. “You will know that for me the end was peaceful as it is only sleep in the cold.”

  On March 29, Scott writes in his journal for the final time.

  We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.

  It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.

  R. Scott

  Last entry:

  For God’s sake look after our people.

  Their camp is not found until summer, when rescuers head out from Cape Evans. The tent still stands on the Barrier. Inside, Bowers and Wilson are covered up in their sleeping bags, as though asleep. Scott has tucked his notebooks under his shoulder and opened the flaps of his sleeping bag. He has died with his arm stretched out, touching his old friend, Bill Wilson.

  The rescuers collapse the tent on top of the men. They build an enormous cairn to cover it, and mark it all with a cross made of skis. Then they turn back to Cape Evans, back to tell the world what has happened. And they leave Scott and Bowers and Wilson to their long sleep in the cold.

  The Terra Nova carries the news to New Zealand in February of 1913. From there it’s flashed around the world, and it’s met with shock and sorrow. Kathleen Scott, the captain’s wife, is at sea when she’s told of his death. She’s heading for New Zealand to meet him, with no idea that she’s been a widow for nearly a year already.

  The great prize of first to the Pole has gone to Amundsen. But Scott becomes the real hero of Antarctic exploration. The story of his suffering, of his courage and endurance, inspires the world. England honors his request to look after his people with a memorial fund that raises thirty thousand pounds in the first three days, about six times the annual salary of the English prime minister.

  In London, where crowds had cheered the Terra Nova on her way to the south, the great newspaper, The Times, mourns the deaths of Scott and Oates and Wilson and Bowers and Evans:

  “No more pathetic and tragic story has ever been unfolded than that of the gallant band of Antarctic explorers whose unavailing heroism now fills the public mind with mingled grief and admiration.”

  On the twenty-first of May, eight thousand people fill the fabulous Albert Hall to hear a talk by Commander Teddy Evans. With him on the stage are many of Scott’s explorers, including Mr. Meares and Mr. Ponting, Gran and Cherry-Garrard and Dr. Atkinson. In the audience are Kathleen Scott—now Lady Scott—and the mothers and the widows of the men who sleep in the Barrier’s cold.

  As Ponting’s photographs flash up on a great screen behind him, Evans tells the story of Scott’s expedition. He speaks of the first southern journey, when depots were laid across the Barrier. He tells how the dog team driven by Scott and Meares broke through a bridge of snow and plummeted into a crevasse.
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  Then he talks about the ponies.

  In this magnificent hall in the middle of London, below its dome of iron and glass, eight thousand people sit silent in their seats. The man who had steered the Terra Nova south, who had walked with little Blossom across the Barrier, now stands in front of them, talking of ponies that had been taken from Russia and Manchuria and led nearly all the way to the South Pole.

  Evans talks of the ordeal on the drifting ice, when the men could not save Uncle Bill or Punch or Guts. He tells how Blucher and Blossom and James Pigg became known as “the Baltic fleet” because they were old and slow. He says Mr. Oates predicted that not one of the three would make it back to the winter station.

  The pictures of the ponies are enormous on the screen. There’s Blossom; there’s Blucher; there’s James Pigg staring into the camera.

  The commander describes the deaths of Blucher and Blossom, the events he’d seen himself. Then he tells how one little pony surprised them all with his strength and spirit.

  “James Pigg,” he says, “was a plucky little animal.”

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE PONIES

  (LISTED IN ORDER OF THEIR DEATHS)

  Davy and Jones: probably named after their deaths; died at sea

  Blucher: old and tired; died coming back from One Ton Depot

  Blossom: one of “the Baltic Fleet”; died at the end of the depot journey

  Weary Willy: the lazy pony; died near Safety Camp

  Guts: a powerful pony; fell through the ice and vanished

  Punch: always obedient; died while crossing the ice floes

  Uncle Bill: the biggest pony; died on the ice floes

  Hackenschmidt: the pony who could not be tamed; died at the winter station