The Winter Pony Read online

  Then I saw his handler trudging along at his side. It was Mr. Atkinson, one of the doctors, and he looked just as worried as the pony.

  “Poor old thing,” he said. “Crocked out already. He won’t last the summer. There’s not a hope.”

  Mr. Keohane kept his hand in my halter. It was always there. I liked the feel of his knuckles pressing against my cheek, through the fur and hide of his mitten. We soon left Jehu behind.

  Mr. Atkinson called out. “He’ll be next, won’t he? That one of yours.”

  “No, not James Pigg. Hardly,” said Mr. Keohane. He tightened his hand on my halter, and I felt the press of his knuckles more tightly. “Don’t you worry, lad,” he said in his soft voice. “Don’t you worry.”

  I didn’t care very much just then for Mr. Atkinson. But I started wondering as I heaved my sledge along: Was I really a crock, no better than Jehu? Of course I wasn’t a match for Uncle Bill. I wasn’t as strong as Bones or Guts or Punch or Nobby. I couldn’t go as steadily as Snatcher, or as quickly as Victor. But I hated to think that I was a crock.

  I kicked the snow; I snorted. I decided right then to work harder, to work as hard as I possibly could. I would show Mr. Atkinson that he was wrong.

  As I waited at the ship one day, Mr. Keohane left me to help Mr. Oates with Christopher. I stood a few yards from the edge of the ice, near the big anchor line that held the ship in place. Two of the dogs were tied to the rope, curled up like big furry balls.

  Beyond them, in the water, the fins of killer whales appeared. I heard the puffs of the whales’ breaths and saw the little clouds of spray. The dogs woke up, yawned and stretched. They looked at me hungrily.

  The fins sliced quickly through the sea, rising and falling. Then they disappeared, all at once, and there was just the empty water.

  But soon their heads appeared. They popped up together, a row of seven—young and old—staring toward me in that eerie way of theirs.

  Captain Scott shouted from the ship. “Ponting! Look at the whales.”

  Mr. Ponting was taking pictures of penguins. He snatched up his big wooden camera and came running across the ice. He wore his coat and furry boots, a felt hat that bounced on his head.

  The whales kept staring. Their teeth glistened in white rows. Mr. Ponting ran right up beside the dogs and knelt with his camera.

  Suddenly, the whales disappeared. They sank into the water, all as one, and Mr. Ponting looked very disappointed. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the dogs started barking. They leapt at their tethers as though they were trying to jump right into the sea.

  I felt a shudder in the ice. I felt another—a tremor that shook the floe. Mr. Ponting looked down at his feet, and I saw the ice bulge up around him. The dogs barked louder than ever. There was a big thud from below, a cracking of ice, and up came the back of a killer whale.

  It pushed right through the floe, through twenty-four inches of ice. Mr. Ponting fell backward. With another thud and a boom, great cracks appeared in the ice, a spidery web that spread out in all directions. One raced toward me, zigzagging as it widened, and veered away just as it reached my hooves. A second whale burst through the floe, and a third behind him, and the booming went on and on underneath me.

  The dogs’ barking turned to howls and whines. Mr. Ponting leapt to his feet and sprinted across the ice as the cracks opened around him. He leapt from floe to floe. They tilted crazily, then flew apart, and up came a whale’s head right behind Mr. Ponting. Its little round eye swiveled, seeking out the man. Its jaws opened and snapped shut, and Mr. Ponting raced for his life.

  On every side of me, the ice cracked and split. The dogs whined; they shrieked. Mr. Meares ran flat out toward them, shouting at the whales. Mr. Keohane hurried to help me.

  A strip of water appeared right at my feet, wide and black and gaping. I tried to back away, but my sledge trapped me on the breaking ice. I turned to my right, and then toward the ship, and in a moment, I was tangled in the traces. A whale’s eye, like a yellow stone, peered up at me through the water. Then the head came crashing through the ice.

  The floe tilted. I nearly lost my balance. I could look right into the whale’s mouth, past its rows of teeth and down its wide, open throat. I could smell its breath, foul and fishy.

  All around, the whales shoved their heads above the ice. They hovered there, looking at the dogs, at me, at Mr. Ponting, who was safe on thicker ice, kneeling down to catch his breath. I saw Mr. Meares leaping over the ice toward his dogs. The whale in front of me turned its eye slowly around and glared with a look that made my blood as cold as snow.

  Then Mr. Keohane was there, his hand in my halter. “Come along, lad,” he said, pulling gently. Even now his voice was soft and whispery. But it was tinged with fear.

  The ice trembled. The whale sank below it, and the heads of all the others disappeared as well. I waited for a boom underneath me, for a loud crack and the split in the ice that would drop me into the sea, with Mr. Keohane clinging to my halter.

  It never happened. The whales vanished, as if called away by a voice I couldn’t hear. The bits of ice slowly closed together, and the dogs curled up again, pressed against each other into one big ball of fur. Mr. Meares went away, and Mr. Keohane helped me toward the ship. And soon it was as though the killer whales had never come at all.

  It is now January 12, 1911. Captain Scott records in his diary that the last load has been brought ashore from the Terra Nova. Only the meat remains, waiting for the men to finish chipping caves into the ice to be their storage rooms.

  It’s midsummer, and the sun never sets. Yesterday a blizzard blew up, and now the land is covered with white drifts. The temperature is falling to fifteen degrees.

  Above the beach, on the flank of smoking Mount Erebus, the hut that will house the team through the winter is nearly finished. A stable, made of walls of straw bales, butts against one side. Now the ship’s carpenter is building a darkroom in one corner for the photographer. He’s putting in a desk for the captain, and a workstation for the meteorologists.

  The hut is fifty feet long, divided not quite in the middle by a wall of crates. Scott, sticking to the navy tradition that he’s known most of his life, is keeping the enlisted men separate from the officers.

  He is cheerful and optimistic. He notes in his journal, “We are LANDED eight days after our arrival—a very good record.”

  But Amundsen is catching up. The Norwegian is now working his way through the ice, and for him it goes quickly. Leads open ahead of the Fram, and the ship moves steadily forward. “A four days’ pleasure trip,” Amundsen calls it.

  On January 11, as Scott sits out his first blizzard, Amundsen sights the Barrier from the deck of the Fram. He is closing in on the Bay of Whales, now just a hundred miles away.

  But suddenly, things look grim for Amundsen. The bay is clogged with sea ice, and there is no chance of getting in. He scouts to the east, then returns in the morning. And as he watches, the ice floes in the bay begin to move. “One after another they came sailing out,” he writes later. “The passage was soon free.”

  On January 14, he lands on the Barrier, on that enormous slab of floating ice, and begins to look for a place to build his hut. His 97 dogs have now become 116, and he brings them all ashore.

  By his choice of a landing spot, Amundsen has leapfrogged ahead of Scott. He is sixty miles nearer to the Pole.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE very last thing to come off the ship was a small piano. I hauled it myself, in pieces, over the ice and up to the hut on its little hill twelve feet above the sea. I didn’t know that it was a piano until the men put it together and played a song. They seemed so happy then, everyone sunburned and smiling. That Captain Scott, he thought of everything.

  There was a fire in the hut’s stove, and smoke wafting from the roof. The sea sparkled with sunlight, dotted with floating castles of ice. It was a very beautiful place, everywhere white and snowy except for the strip of black sand along the shore
. Mountains all around us, glaciers tumbling to the sea. And our stable! It might have come from a fairy tale: a stable built of straw.

  I thought our work had ended for a while. But as soon as we finished taking things off the ship, we started putting them on instead. Poor Weary Willy—who thought he’d earned a long rest—looked even more miserable than usual when he saw what we had to do. Over the ice we went again, but this time hauling rocks. It seemed stupid to fill a ship with rocks, but I imagined the men had a reason. They worked very hard to dig out the stones from the slopes above the beach, then ran them down icy chutes to the frozen sea, where they piled them on our sledges.

  The motor sledges were put aboard next, then the dogs and all their gear. The pony sledges followed, and our harnesses and fodder. Mr. Meares went aboard, and Captain Scott as well. When the pony box was swung out from the deck, I thought all of us were moving on to somewhere else. But only Jehu and a pony named Chinaman were hoisted aboard. Then the box was stowed away again and the men gathered up the anchors and the mooring lines.

  It made me sad to see that Jehu was leaving without me. I stood as close to the ship as I could get, and we whinnied sadly back and forth, not knowing if we’d ever see each other again. Then the killer whales came snorting along the edge of the ice, and Mr. Keohane led me away.

  “Now, now, don’t you worry, old friend,” he said, petting my nose. “The ship is only going around the glacier. We’re not being left behind.”

  No one had ever said anything nicer. I was his friend! After that, I couldn’t think of him as a mister anymore. From then on, he was only Patrick.

  Just after Jehu left the winter station, so did I. But while he sailed on the ship, I went on foot. Along with six other ponies, with my friend Patrick at my side, I headed south.

  A few miles ahead of us, a glacier stretched far out into the sea. It made such a dreadful wall of ice that no pony could ever cross it. So we went around its tip instead, out on the floating ice, while the ship sailed around to meet us.

  We had no sledges. We just walked with our handlers, a line of ponies and men. As we started off, we passed the hut where Uncle Bill was standing. He was eager to come along, but he was tethered to a post and could only watch us pass with a sad, bewildered look. Then his handler—the lovely Birdie Bowers—came out from the hut to wave to us all. His enormous nose made a big shadow on the wall. “I’ll be along in a moment,” he shouted. “I’ve one more job to do.”

  Birdie Bowers always had “one more job to do.” His job was looking after the supplies, and to me he was just like a raven, small and powerful, always thinking, and happiest when he had a collection of things around him.

  We stayed as close to the shore as we could. The ice creaked and groaned, but we kept on going. I understood why our sledges had been taken on the ship. The ice was slowly breaking up, its little floes and islands drifting apart, sailing out to sea. In a way, we were racing the ice, trying to cross it before it vanished.

  A layer of fresh snow hid holes big enough to swallow a pony, and the killer whales lurked along the edges. I was afraid every moment that one of them would come bursting up beside me, or that I would sink right through the ice.

  Mr. Oates made us walk very slowly. “If a pony falls into one of these holes, I shall sit down and cry,” he said.

  A moment later, Guts shrieked. I turned my head and saw him on his stomach, as though his legs had been chopped away. His breath went out of him with a great whoof! as he landed. But already he was struggling to get up again, as the voices of the whales creaked in the ice. He paddled frantically in his little hole of slush and snow, but the more he moved, the more he sank. His whole back end disappeared into swirling water.

  I heard the puff of a whale’s breath. I saw the smoke it made, the little cloud on the sea, then the curve of its black fin sinking.

  Guts flailed with his forelegs, driving himself deeper. In a moment, only his head and shoulders were left. The men were running to help him, crowding around, everyone trying to grab on to halter and tether or mane. But Guts was thrashing around so violently that no one could get close enough. Then someone found a rope and got a loop around his neck and forelegs. The sailors heaved together, dragging Guts from his hole. They pulled him out, wet and trembling, and gave him a bit of a rubdown before we headed off again.

  We passed the tip of the glacier and saw the ship anchored a few miles ahead, near a cape of rock and snow. Smoke wafted from its funnel. As we made our way toward it, I heard someone coming behind us, a hurried thud of hooves and feet. It was Uncle Bill, half dragging poor Birdie Bowers. The man was wearing so many clothes that he looked as round as an egg. His face was fire-bright and slick with sweat. He’d put on his hat and his wind helmet, his parka, his sweaters, and three pairs of trousers, all to cross a bit of ice on a summer day. “It didn’t feel fair to make the pony carry my clothes,” he said. “So I wore my whole kit.” That made everyone laugh. Uncle Bill was so big that he could have carried the whole man without slowing down at all.

  Smoke thickened from the ship’s funnel. I heard the sounds of motors and pulleys; I saw a group of men getting down to work. By the time we reached the ship, the motor sledges and the dogs had been unloaded. Captain Scott was helping Mr. Meares and the Russian harness their teams. Crates of supplies were swung down to the ice, but not Jehu. Not Chinaman.

  From the ship came even more things than we’d unloaded at the wintering station. All our sledges and our gear, food and tents and oil—everything I could imagine came out of the ship and down to the ice. There was so much that we spent three days hauling it all to shore, and what a tremendous pile it made! The oats and fodder alone weighed more than fifteen thousand pounds.

  When the ship was empty, it sailed off to the east to explore a new land, taking Jehu and Chinaman with it. Eight of us were left to tackle that pile of supplies. One load at a time, we hauled it around a ridge of ice, up a slope, up another, and on across the Barrier. The work was dreadfully difficult. We had only five miles to go to reach the Barrier, but getting there took forever. The snow was deep, the surface hard enough to hold a man or dog, but not a pony. I kept sinking to my knees or deeper, wading through snow with my sledge bogged behind me. Uncle Bill and Guts surged their way through it, but for me and the other smaller ponies, it was a trial. I floundered badly because I couldn’t lift my legs clear of the snow. The more I fell behind, the harder I tried to catch up.

  By the time we finished, I’d walked nearly a hundred miles, back and forth, with all my many trips.

  At the top of the first slope, on a bit of snow-covered ground, stood an old and lonely hut. It was smaller than the one we’d built at the winter station. It looked long abandoned and now was stuffed full of snow and ice because someone had left a window open. But there was still food on the table, and more on the shelves, and signs of men all around, as if they’d heard us coming and run away to hide. Patrick found a tin of gingerbread that was crisp and sweet. Captain Scott discovered dinner rolls that had been put down half finished, and still had teeth marks in them.

  I could tell that Captain Scott had been there before, that he had lived in the hut for a while. But other people had come and gone since he’d left it, and he was angry at things they had done. It made him sad and silent as he stood in the doorway, as if he was looking at ghosts.

  On the sheltered side of the hut were footprints in the snow, where the wind had not swept them away. I snuffled around, wondering if I might find forgotten biscuits, or apples frozen solid. Instead, I found the marks of pony hooves pressed deeply into old drifts.

  That was a curious thing. Disturbing. I didn’t like to think that other ponies had been to this frozen world and now had disappeared. I wished the men would tell me who had brought them, and what had happened in the end. But no one did.

  It was late when we left the lonely hut with our first loads, heading south again. We struggled up to the Barrier, that huge, vast plain of snow and ice. It
stretched farther than I could see, and its barren whiteness scared me. I kept looking sideways at the mountains on my right, glad they were nearby but afraid they would soon fade away. The men marked our path by building cairns of snow.

  We traveled just half a mile more until Captain Scott blew on a whistle, and the man in the lead swung to the side with his pony. The rest of us followed, all turning out to the left, till we stood in a line sideways to our trail. As men set up their tents, our handlers stretched a picket line between two sledges and tied us to it with our tethers. They gave us food and blankets before they went away to their meals.

  This was our first camp on the Barrier, and what a very cold place it was. I stood with my tail to the wind, watching Patrick’s tent. I never took my eyes away from it until he emerged in the morning.

  The second day was worse. We went back with our empty sledges and brought more supplies up onto the Barrier. It was fine until we pushed past our old camp. Then we came into a big patch of soft snow, and I sank right into it. For half a mile, all of us floundered along. But I had the worst time of it, and the other ponies passed me. When the snow grew solid again, I tried too hard to catch up. I tripped and sprained an ankle.

  It was sudden. A jolt of pain burned through my leg and I fell forward onto my chest. Patrick, beside me, looked startled. “James, what’s wrong?” he said.

  I didn’t want him to see that I was hurt. An injured pony was a dead pony; I had seen it a hundred times. So I clambered up and stood wobbling for a moment, trying not to cry out as I waited for the pain to go away. I ate some snow, though it chilled me right through. Then I pulled at the traces and tugged the sledge forward, hoping no one would notice my lameness.