Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  She laughed. ‘Well enough.’

  Fay sat with her arms folded on the table staring at old photos on the wall. Fay’s last glass of beer was still almost full, so Nelson gave Rose the fresh beer he’d just bought. Rose smiled and touched his arm.

  ‘You’re just like your brother,’ she said. ‘Did I already tell you that?’

  Sometimes, when Rose leaned closer, her hair brushed his face. She wore a nice perfume. Her kid was staying with her mother tonight. She didn’t often get out any more.

  ‘Bert was in a real good mood last time I saw him. He was just back from London England. He said he’d found something he’d been looking for for years. So we had a celebration.’

  The band had started playing again. Nelson had to shout. ‘Did Bert tell you what he’d found?’

  ‘He did more than that. He left it in my apartment. I brought it here tonight in case I ran into him.’

  She fished in her bag and took out a book. The cover had photographs of old-time explorers with wooden skis and canvas tents and huskies and tobacco pipes. Men of Ice, said the title. By Leif Mills. Short biographies of two different polar explorers: Cecil Meares and Alister Forbes Mackay.

  And what, thought Nelson, am I meant to do with this? He turned it over in his hands.

  ‘Keep it safe,’ she said. ‘Don’t go leaving it behind.’

  ‘Like Bert did?’

  She punched his shoulder. ‘It was safe at my place! . . . That book meant a lot to him. He said he found it at some rare book store in England. It’s the only book ever written about these two explorer guys he was interested in.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He looked at the back but the words were too small for him. ‘Is it valuable?’

  ‘It was to him. He told me it tied his stuff together.’

  ‘Tied what together?’

  ‘He never really said. You’re his brother. I thought you’d know what he was doing.’ She was watching the stage again. The band had struck up a new tune. This has to be their last set, he thought. They won’t play on much longer.

  ‘He must have said something.’

  ‘He said something about oats,’ said Rose, standing up. She took Nelson’s hand and pulled him to his feet. ‘And about some guy called Cecil. That’s a name you remember. Come on. We’re dancing.’

  Ross Island, Antarctica, 1911

  Blossom, Michael, Nobby, Punch. Blücher, Bones, Davy, Guts. James Pigg, Jehu, Hackenschmidt, Jones. Snatcher, Snippets, Uncle Bill. Weary Willie. Victor. Michael. Chinaman.

  They did not belong here, but here they all would die, whatever that sentimental oaf Scott chose to tell himself. They would be worked to death in the snow and then shot and butchered and fed to Meares’s dogs, and it would be he, Oates, who would have to do the killing while Scott stood by and wrung his precious hands.

  The ponies were patient white ghosts in the dark of their stalls, their eyes gleaming in the glow from the stove. Outside, the wind off Mount Erebus sighed in the eaves of the little lean-to stable. A pony shifted its weight, snorted, and Oates caught the comforting smell of fresh-baked horse shit; for a moment it eclipsed the reek from the seal-blubber stove. From next door in the hut, through four layers of plank insulated with seaweed, he could hear the growl of talk and the plink of the player-piano. It was almost dinner time: they’d all be in there now, yarning and scheming and pursuing half-humorous feuds – officers against ratings, gentlemen versus scientists, English against Australians, with Crean no doubt working his usual Irish mischief, singing ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ deliberately off key, or tricking Keohane into one of his famous Fenian outbursts.

  Oates, who was officer, gentleman, English, would stay where he was in the stable, thawing out another block of the compressed fodder he’d paid for himself and smuggled aboard against Scott’s direct orders. He would keep his own company until he heard the scraping of chairs around the long table.

  Christ, he was sick of this. He had come here for real adventure, a famous journey, and had never felt more trapped in his life.

  He had put it to Scott on the Ice Barrier, 140 miles south at the One Ton Depot: take the weakest ponies as far onward as we can, at least another thirty miles towards the pole, then put them out of their misery and cache them for their meat. It would only be a cruelty to try and bring the poor things back to Ross Island, half starved, up to their bellies in snow, the sweat freezing hard on their summer coats. Give them a last feed of mash, Oates had said (because he too could be sentimental), then when they’re not looking, my revolver. They’ll be fresh meat for the dogs in the next sledging season and for the men coming back from the pole.

  Scott had ignored his horse expert, as Scott so often ignored the advice of his men. I’m afraid you’ll regret it, sir, Oates had told him. And Scott, his lips aquiver, his eyes dull with the foreshadowing of his own failure and death, had bawled Oates out of it, effing and blinding as if he, Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates of the Inniskilling Dragoons, was one of Scott’s common seamen. The ponies had suffered enough, Scott said. He’d have no further cruelty to animals for the sake of a few more days’ march.

  Scott knew nothing about horses and, if what Teddy Evans said was true, not as much as he should about battleships. But when it came to poetry, he knew all about that. He’d be at the head of the table already, jawing with Wilson about Tennyson and Ruskin, and he, Oates, would have no choice, being the army’s sole representative on this naval expedition, but to sit at Scott’s elbow and listen to his rot. And Scott, who for all his damned sensitivity was too bound up with himself to notice that Oates frankly despised him, would tease Oates for his silence, while Wilson, who saw everything, would smile like a saint with a spike up his arse and beatifically say nothing . . .

  Davy and Jones had died before they even reached Ross Island, victims of the entirely predictable Southern Ocean storm that almost sank the overloaded Terra Nova. They had hauled the two dead ponies up through the forecastle skylight and consigned them to their namesake. It was as if Davy and Jones had been shipped expressly as offerings to the sea. If so, it had worked: the storm had stopped blowing.

  Blücher and Blossom had collapsed on the Ice Barrier on the way back from the depot-laying trip last February, just as Oates had predicted. They died halfway back from One Ton Depot, where their corpses would be no use to man nor dog. Weary Willie had dragged himself on for another few marches before dying himself in sight of Mount Terror.

  Guts had disappeared through a crack in the sea ice. Punch had died next, too numb to drag himself out of the water after missing his jump over an open lead; Oates, who had sent his revolver ahead, had to finish him off with an ice-pick. Then Uncle Bill got stuck in another crack and Bowers, whose pony he was, who loved the old thing dearly, insisted on swinging the ice-pick himself. That was no kind of job for poor Bowers. The skuas had wheeled around him like a blizzard, shrieking for their share. Nobby, Scott’s own pony, was the only one saved from the debacle on the floes.

  Of the eight ponies they had set out with to lay food depots for next season only two got back to Ross Island. None of the dead ones had been depoted anywhere useful. And when they finally got back to base at Cape Evans they found that Hackenschmidt, who had been left in reserve, had died in his stable after a short and mysterious illness. It was as if he’d foreseen what was coming and decided to have none of it.

  Oates opened his notebook. He had already lost half of his ponies. There were only ten left.

  Michael: lame near hind; ringbone; aged.

  Bones: name speaks for itself; severe tapeworm infection.

  James Pigg: sand crack near hind; aged.

  Jehu: aged; debility, worn out.

  Snatcher: half bald from lice.

  Snippets: bad wind-sucker; doubtful back tendons off fore legs; lame off fore; pigeon toes.


  Victor: narrow chest; knock-knees; bad eyes; aged; wind-sucker.

  Michael: lame near hind bone; ringbone; aged.

  Chinaman: ringworm just above coronet on near fore; the oldest of them all, which was quite a distinction.

  Nobby: aged; spavin near hind, goes with stiff hocks; best of the lot of them. Which was why Scott had claimed him for himself.

  The Mongolian horse traders must be laughing still. But it was Oates’s own fault: he should have gone to Manchuria to select the ponies himself. Instead, he had allowed Scott to pass the job to Meares, who was going there anyway to buy the expedition’s dogs.

  The warmth from the stove made it hard to think clearly. He’d been outside in the cold air for most of the day, exercising his ponies. If I’m not careful, he thought, as his chin sank to his chest, I might drift off. He let his eyes flutter shut, pleasantly aware that he wasn’t quite asleep yet, lulled by the comforting sounds of fed and restful ponies. Now he was sinking deeper.

  And here they were again. He and his father, sitting in the lobby of the Bela Vista hotel in Funchal, waiting for Englebright to once again shoot himself. Englebright had shot himself before, the first time that Oates and his father had stayed in Madeira, when Oates had been only seven. It was on that same trip, he thought, that his father had died of typhoid fever. But had it been that trip, or the next one? Because he was sixteen now, and there was Father still alive, sitting across from him in a cane chair, his legs crossed, a newspaper folded in his lap, and when Englebright – aloof, ever-silent, said to be Swedish, or perhaps from Alaska – walked past them, taking the stairs that led to his death, William Oates smiled sadly at his son and shook his head. And Second Lieutenant Oates – now only days short of his twentieth birthday, wearing the khaki field-dress of the Second Anglo-Boer War, smiled back at his father. He would have to be especially nice to the old man today: there was something not quite right with him. Then he heard the shot he’d been waiting for in the hotel room upstairs. Presently, Oates knew, Englebright would once again be carried past them through the lobby, blood drooling from his temple. His father had gone back to his newspaper.

  The stable door heaved open, jerking him awake. A man ducked inside and pulled the door shut. Oates’s father was dead again. This intruder had killed him. The lower part of his woollen helmet was a mask of solid ice, but Oates recognized Cecil Meares from the quilted Cossack jacket which he wore around the camp.

  Oates roused himself, tamping fresh tobacco in his pipe, as Meares stamped the snow from his boots and peeled off his balaclava, taking care lest the wool had frozen to his whiskers.

  ‘I’ve been doing some thinking, Dearie,’ Oates said.

  Meares, beating his arms around his body to warm himself, sat beside Oates on an upturned mash tub. He held his hands out to the stove. ‘Is that wise, Soldier? Doesn’t it make your head hurt?’

  ‘I’ve put it in my diary: it works out like this. Nineteen Mongol ponies. Cost: five pound each, not including transport halfway round the planet; actual worth here: fuck all. Three mechanical sledges. Cost: one thousand pound each; actual worth here: square root of fuck all. Your thirty-two Siberian sledge dogs. Cost: one pound ten a head; actual worth here: priceless.’

  Meares had peeled off one glove and was rubbing a patch of frostbite on his chin. ‘It’s down to twenty-seven dogs now. The others seem to have eaten poor Vaska. When I dug them out of their drift this was all that I could find of her.’ He showed Oates a piece of bloody lamp-wick harness.

  Oates lit his pipe, then threw another piece of blubber into the melting pan. It dwindled into a pool of hot oil, which drip-fed the ignition coil.

  They sat for a while gazing into the fire. Silence was one of the things they admired in each other. Next door, voices were raised in argument, drowning out the pianola. The wind fussed outside in the snow.

  Meares took his pipe from an inner pocket and polished its bowl. ‘If it stays fine,’ he said, ‘I shall take a run with the dogs down to Hut Point tomorrow. The sea ice has set in hard.’

  Hut Point again, thought Oates. Why is Meares always scheming to go back to that squalid hole?

  ‘I thought,’ went on Meares, ‘you might join me. I need someone to drive a second team.’

  Oates was pleased at Meares’s invitation, but he was practised at hiding it: he had learned to buy horses in Ireland, at Smithfield and Ballinasloe. He tapped his pipe against the stove. ‘I expect the Owner wants someone to clean up the old hut a bit. He was moaning again last night about the state Shackleton’s lot left it in the year before last.’

  Meares smiled. ‘As it happens, the Owner doesn’t know I’m going there. As far as he’s concerned, I’m giving the dogs a training run to the Ice Barrier. We should be there and back in the same day.’

  Oates stretched his bad leg out in front of him. A Boer bullet had left it two inches shorter than its neighbour. ‘Why not take Dmitri? I’ve had nothing to do with your mangey bow-wows.’

  ‘You’ll like my dogs. They pull like an express train. Make a change from your sorry old nags.’ Meares rose to go. The chairs were scraping loudly in the main hut. Meares turned at the door. ‘Dmitri’s a lovely fellow but he’s Russian. I need an Englishman tomorrow. One who has his own revolver.’

  ‘My revolver?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Meares gave him a wink. ‘One really ought to carry a pistol when driving dogs you don’t know. Before they get used to you, they’re just as likely to eat you. You just never know.’

  Oates considered that he lived in shrunken times. His hero was Napoleon, but he was sure that for himself there would never be an Austerlitz, nor even a frozen retreat. He would have to settle for the minor skirmish in the Klein Karoo which had shattered his leg, a silly affair diminished even further by the talk, which he scotched himself, that he ought to get a VC for it.

  Recovered enough to sit on a horse, he had spent the last months of the war with Rimington’s Guides in the Orange Free State. He had hunted down starving farmers whose courage he rather admired, abducted their families, rustled their cattle and set fire to their homes. His greatest triumph was to intercept a Boer wagon that was found to be loaded with baby chairs. For that, he remarked at the time, he would gladly have taken a medal.

  Oates watched, bemused, the emerging mechanics of a new kind of war. By day, observation balloons were towed above the British columns, tethered to ox-wagons. By night, searchlights flashed Morse on the clouds high above their camps, sharing news of the enemy’s movements, of the names of his men, of the hills and the caves where his children were hiding. Armoured trains steamed back and forth along Kitchener’s new railways, their searchlights probing the dark.

  One morning, leading his troop out on patrol, Oates came across a strange sight on the edge of their laager. A Benz motor car, shielded with boiler-plate and mounting a Maxim gun, had broken down on the track. Its flimsy wheel spokes had buckled under the weight of its armour. The driver said it had come from the ­Rhodes mine workshop in Kimberley, one of Labram’s last ideas before that Long Tom shell killed him. Oates flicked his reins to make his horse circle around the stranded armoured car. The next one, he thought, will work better than this. So much for horse cavalry.

  Soon after that he was back in a troopship, bound once again for Madeira and the Curragh. In Ireland he would win every steeplechase that a gentleman could enter. At the races in Punches­town, plunging over hedges with the Kildangan hunt, chasing jackals in India, he never quite managed to break his own neck.

  When war broke out between Russia and Japan in 1904 he volunteered to go as a military observer. Even a second-hand war would be better than none. But the Horse Guards refused him leave of absence.

  Cecil Meares had gone to that war. But as far as Oates could tell, Meares had been some kind of private observer, neither journalist nor military attaché. He had witnessed the fall of Port Arthur, se
en drowned Russian sailors in the Tsushima Strait. Once, sitting together by the stove in the stables, Oates had asked Meares point blank what had sent him to the Far East in the first place. Meares had raised his eyebrows and said, ‘I was trading in furs.’ And Oates, who had seen that same bland look before, from Castle men in Dublin, district commissioners in India, political officers in Cairo, knew he should leave it at that.

  It was Meares who had finally broken that silence. Reaching into his Cossack jacket he took out a journal and – carefully, so as not to open the pages to Oates’s view – removed a paper from it. Unfolding it, he showed it to Oates. It was, Oates saw, an old-fashioned map of the Pacific coast of north America. Much of the interior was blank, and the word ‘Oregon’ appeared where Oates would have expected to see ‘British Columbia’. Meares pointed to it.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘See that?’

  Oates saw a small squiggle on the coast of Vancouver Island.

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘That’s Meares Island. It’s named for my ancestor, John Meares. Have you ever heard of him?’

  ‘I can’t say I have, Dearie.’

  ‘He was born in Dublin in the eighteenth century and got a commission in the navy. Later, he began smuggling sea-otter pelts into Macau from Alaska. To do that, he had to play the East India Company against the South Sea Company, the English against the Spanish, the Russians against the Cantonese, and the local redskins against the Yankees. He almost caused a war between England and Spain. It was thanks to his shenanigans that the Admiralty sent George Vancouver to chart that coast and claim it for the crown. And also, to look for the North West Passage, which my ancestor had sworn was somewhere thereabouts. So if it wasn’t for John Meares, British Columbia would now be Russian Columbia. Or Yankee Columbia. Yet the man was practically a pirate.’

  ‘You seem to admire him.’