The Winter Pony

by Iain Lawrence

  But Patrick looked at me strangely. “You’re limping,” he said.

  I tried to keep going, but he wouldn’t let me. He held my halter and called out loudly, “Captain Oates!”

  His voice drifted away across the Barrier, soaked up by the snow and the sky. He shouted again, “Sir, my pony can’t walk!”

  Far ahead, leading Punch, Mr. Oates stopped and looked back. Patrick waved to him with wide sweeps of his arm.

  As much as I wanted to go on, it was a relief to stop walking. Big Uncle Bill was nearly a quarter of a mile ahead by then. He turned his head to see me. So did Weary Willy—much closer. So did Blucher and Guts and Blossom. But they all kept hauling through the snow. I didn’t expect them to stop, because there was nothing they could do. We had known all of our lives—or all the years we’d spent with men—what it meant to go lame.

  I stared at Mr. Oates as he came trudging toward me. He didn’t have a gun in his hand—not yet—but he didn’t look at me or at anyone else. Patrick rubbed my cheek with his bare knuckles. “It will be all right, James Pigg,” he said.

  I knew he was trying to be kind. I pressed against him, and he pressed back.

  I was sad. I didn’t want to be shot there in the sunshine, in that soft white snow. But I didn’t blame the men for what they had to do. This wasn’t their fault; it was mine. I felt sorry for Mr. Oates, and especially for Captain Scott because I’d let him down so badly. I wondered what he’d say when he heard the gunshot. I could almost hear his voice. “Poor James Pigg. He was a good lad.”

  Patrick kept petting me. Mr. Oates joined us, puffing his breaths in the cold. He pulled his gloves away with his teeth, squatted beside me, and lifted my sore foot.

  “I think he twisted something,” said Patrick. “But he’ll be all right, won’t he, sir? A bit of a rest will sort him out?”

  Mr. Oates kept pressing and poking at my tendons. “I doubt that very much,” he said.

  “But he’s barely begun,” said Patrick with a small laugh. “He has to be all right.”

  Mr. Oates stood up. He squinted at the sun, at the lonely Barrier stretching south. When he reached into his jacket, I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to see the gun.

  It was a hard thing to stand there and wait for the end. I heard the ponies struggling ahead, the dogs barking in the distance. Then I smelled tobacco and dared to take a look. And there was Mr. Oates with his pipe in his hand—not a gun. He lit it slowly, with nearly as much smoke as a steam engine, staring at me all that time.

  “We could lighten his load, I suppose,” he said. “Give him a rest tomorrow. Maybe that will help.”

  Patrick looked delighted. So was I, of course, but he didn’t really know that. He freed me from the traces and we walked very slowly together. He kept his hand firmly in my halter. “Come on, lad,” he said. “You’ll be getting to the Pole.”

  To the Pole! I didn’t really understand exactly. I pictured an actual pole somewhere very far away, a bit of wood standing lonely on the ice. I had no idea just then how far there was to go, or what troubles lay ahead. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I wanted to stay with Patrick, and now that I had his promise to take me to the Pole, I had no fear of being left behind.

  I limped along beside him.

  The men were cheerful, excited to be at the beginning of a big journey. They chattered all the time and laughed a lot as we plodded on. They pointed out every little thing, making sure every man shared each excitement. Someone spotted two strange mounds in the snow, and didn’t they wonder about that! They peered at them through telescopes, muttering away in their groups like the penguins on the ice. Then Captain Scott went over to have a look.

  We saw him bend down and brush the snow with his mittens. Then he pulled up scraps of old cloth, and wooden sticks, and something that sparkled in the sun.

  “Good Lord, they’re tents!” said Birdie Bowers.

  He was right. Out there on the Barrier, buried and forgotten, a pair of tents stood flapping in the wind where men had stopped and ate and slept.

  The sparkling thing was a stove. Captain Scott got it going, and he cooked a meal from the things in the tent: cocoa and Bovril, sheeps’ tongue, cheese and biscuits. I was offered one of the biscuits by Patrick. It disappointed him badly when I wouldn’t take it, but I didn’t feel like eating. The wind blew gritty snow across the Barrier, and the men sat with their backs to the blow, eating food that I thought belonged to ghosts.

  We pushed on a little farther, then stopped to make camp. Patrick offered me a biscuit again, and this time I took it. He smiled as I ate. At the other end of the picket line, Birdie Bowers was feeding biscuits to Uncle Bill, because he was worried about him as well. “He’s having trouble with his forefeet,” said Birdie. Even the biggest pony was struggling, so I didn’t feel so bad.

  Mr. Oates made me rest the next day while the other ponies brought up more supplies. It was awful to be left behind and see them trek off through the snow. But my leg was very sore, and in truth I was glad for the rest. In my old home in the forest, I would have been kept at work until I finally fell in my tracks. That would have been hard to bear, but all I’d expect. I had believed it was the way to the ponies’ place, that I could never get there by shirking.

  Hours and hours went by before I heard the ponies coming back, their sledges rasping in the snow, their breaths hot and panting. I felt lonely then, afraid they’d be angry because I hadn’t done my share. But Blossom came and nibbled at me, picking away my lice, and I knew that no one minded that I had stayed behind.

  In the morning it was Sunday, and Captain Scott held a service on the Barrier, with all the men standing silently as he read from a small black book. The wind whooshed across the ice, and snow flurried around their feet, but they didn’t move until Captain Scott had finished and they had sung a solemn song.

  Mr. Oates handed out bandages to the pony handlers. He showed them how to wrap our legs like soldiers’—round and round—so the snow crust wouldn’t chafe our skin every time we stepped through it. Uncle Bill didn’t understand, and right away he ate one of his bandages. I thought mine would be a big help, but for days I did very little work as we moved the supplies forward again, to a place about two miles from the sea.

  Two men were sent back with injuries, and Captain Scott took Nobby for himself. We moved along in stages, back and forth across the Barrier, every journey a struggle. There was ice as hard as rock, then snow as soft as pudding, and we wallowed in drifts up to our bellies. We had to leap at the traces then and jerk the sledges forward. Our legs ached; our shoulders ached. We sweated as we moved along, and shivered when we stopped, with our sweat freezing into skins of ice.

  My eyes stung from the light on the snow. When the sky was clear and the surface glared, I had to squint as hard as I could. But cloudy days were even worse. The white of the sky and the white of the snow were the same, and it was hard to place my hooves on ground that had no shadows. There were times I could hardly see anything, but still I soldiered on.

  I wasn’t happy that my sledge was the lightest of all. It was hard to think that I wasn’t doing my share, and I wished that Jehu and Chinaman were with me, so that I wouldn’t be the weakest of all.

  When Captain Scott blew his whistle that afternoon and called an end to the march, I had never been more tired. I gobbled down the biscuits that Patrick fed me. The dogs got into a big, happy fight with each other, but the ponies just stood and panted clouds of breath.

  Captain Scott went ahead on his skis to see if the way ahead was any better. But he came back very disappointed. “It looks grim,” he told Mr. Oates, who was looking rather gloomy. “What do you think?”

  “It’s too much for the ponies,” said Mr. Oates. “They won’t last long like this.”

  “Let’s give the snowshoes a go,” said the captain.

  Mr. Oates let out his breath. “They’re a wasted effort, those wretched things.”

  “Nonetheless, I should like
to try,” said Captain Scott, and he sent Birdie Bowers to fetch them.

  Birdie could normally put his fingers on anything in a moment, but not this time. After a lot of rummaging around, he produced just one set of snowshoes. They were the strangest things I’d ever seen: hoops of wire and bamboo that looked like squashed umbrellas. I was sure Mr. Oates was right and that I would tangle my feet together as soon as I wore them. So I was happy when the men chose Weary Willy to try them out.

  That sad old pony looked pretty sorry for himself as the men strapped on the shoes. It was a young man who led him off, a Norwegian named Gran who’d been brought along to teach the others how to ski.

  Weary Willy moved pretty slowly at first, looking down at his feet with such a woeful expression that Cherry fell laughing into a snowbank. But Weary got the hang of it quickly, and soon went strolling across drifts that had swallowed him before. It was magic, I thought. The snowshoes had a power that could hold up a pony. I wondered if Weary Willy could walk on clouds if he wore those shoes, or climb the back of a rainbow.

  Captain Scott was very pleased. “Now we can double our distance,” he said happily. “Break out the rest of them, Birdie.”

  But there were no more, and that crushed him. Poor Birdie Bowers, who might have counted every grain of rice, was beside himself trying to understand how snowshoes had been left behind.

  “Well, never mind,” said Captain Scott. He sent two men on a dogsled all the way back to Cape Evans, to the winter station where we’d first come ashore. He told them to hurry, because the ice was already breaking up.

  They went racing away in a mad barking of dogs, the little sledge tipping over the drifts. They disappeared behind a wave of snow, then rose to the top of the next one, the dogs dashing along in their double line. On the white ground, with the clouds behind them, it seemed as though they were flying.

  We were more than twenty miles from the winter station. The dog drivers were gone until noon the next day, when they arrived in the usual clamor of shouts and barks. It always startled me to hear the Russian words from the drivers. The sound carried me back with a flash of fear to my days in the forest with men who broke bottles on my bones.

  Captain Scott and the others hurried out to meet the drivers, but the sledge was empty. The sea ice had broken up so much that the men had never reached the winter station.

  For Captain Scott, it was a hard blow—“a bitter pill,” he’d say. I saw him stare out across the Barrier, at the hundreds of miles we had to go, and he seemed a little bit beaten. He went into his tent and wrote in his journal, and we didn’t move on that day at all.

  The temperature fell in the night—or what passed as the night. The sun swooped very low but never disappeared, and when our shadows were their longest, the melted snow froze up again.

  In the morning, we started out ahead of the dogs. They were faster, but they liked to have a trail to follow, so Captain Scott held them back to give us a head start.

  When Patrick harnessed me to my sledge in the morning, my leg still hurt. I worried about falling through the drifts again. So I watched Weary Willy go ahead on the snowshoes. He did even better than he had before. Why, he went at a trot, and that was a rare thing for Weary. Then Uncle Bill went behind him—and with his first step on the snow, he broke through the crust. But he was the heaviest pony, and the rest of us managed all right. The frozen snow was so hard that Weary didn’t need the shoes, and someone took them off.

  Poor Uncle Bill didn’t like to follow; he wanted to be in front of everyone, where a leader belonged. So he tried to hurry, and that made him sink deeper. And the more he sank, the more he hurried. An hour later, he was drenched with sweat, as sleek and shiny as a seal. We all passed him. Even I went past him, though I didn’t want to. It was hard to go ahead of the leader.

  We went five miles in not much more than an hour. Then the sun was high again, and the snow began to thaw, and we started falling through the crust again. So Captain Scott blew his whistle, and we wheeled off to the left like soldiers.

  We were all tied along the picket line—our harnesses off, our blankets on—before Uncle Bill came staggering into the camp. He smashed through the snow, his magnificent mane all matted with sweat.

  Captain Scott watched him panting. “We should have put the shoes on that one, Birdie,” he said.

  Mr. Bowers nodded.

  “Well, tomorrow.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Mr. Bowers. “Don’t you know? The shoes were left behind.”

  “What?” The captain was frowning. “Who decided that?”

  Birdie shrugged. He looked uncomfortable, as though he knew who had done it but didn’t want to say. Then Captain Scott looked around, and I was glad that Mr. Oates didn’t see the icy look that was aimed toward him. It would certainly have hurt his feelings, because Mr. Oates meant nothing but the best for the ponies. If he left the shoes behind—and I wasn’t sure he did—it was only because he felt they would bring more grief than help.

  Captain Scott sent Gran skiing back to get them. Then he gathered all the men, including Mr. Oates, and gave a little talk. “A change of plans,” he told them. There would be no more shuffling back and forth. Instead, he would load our sledges heavily and lead us steadily south for two weeks. We would build small caches along the way and plant one enormous depot at 80 degrees south latitude. That was more than two hundred miles away, and we had to get there and back before the southern summer ended. In springtime, when we all set out in a dash toward the Pole, the food we had cached along the route would feed ponies and dogs.

  When everyone agreed to that, the captain had one more suggestion. “This snow is too soft for the ponies,” he said. “I suggest we travel at night, when the surface is hardest.”

  There was no argument. Mr. Oates, always thinking of his animals, said it was a splendid idea. The ponies could rest in the warmest part of the day instead of coming off the march all lathered with sweat, to spend the night shivering.

  “Then it’s settled. We’ll start tonight,” said Captain Scott.

  The men pitched their tents and disappeared inside to eat and rest. I sometimes thought that men were like beavers: They liked to stay inside a little house, and when they came out, they went straight to work, always very busy. I had seldom seen a man or a beaver doing absolutely nothing.

  We marched for three hours that night, ate dinner, and marched for two more. We covered ten miles before the snow softened and Uncle Bill suddenly fell through.

  The ponies close behind him blundered into the hole he made, and there was soon a big pileup of ponies and sledges, such a tangle that the animals had to be unharnessed. Patrick led me far to the right, where the snow was still hard, so I pulled my sledge right to the camp, proud that I could do my share.

  As we turned off the trail, Patrick smiled. “Why, James Pigg,” he said. “You’re not limping, you see.”

  I actually looked down at my legs, watching my front hooves swing forward. The bad one didn’t even hurt anymore.

  “Good lad!” cried Patrick, with a friendly thump on my shoulder. We walked in together, side by side, and Captain Scott grinned when he saw that I was better.

  I wouldn’t have minded going back to help with the sledges. But it was Uncle Bill they chose for that. They put the shoes on him, and he trekked back and forth, doing the work for all the others. He thought he was being punished, but it only made sense for the strongest pony to wear the shoes.

  He was bringing in the last sledge when the dog teams arrived. They swept into the camp, over a rise and past the place where the ponies had floundered. They came barking louder than usual, a sign that they were tired and hungry.

  Captain Scott walked over to meet Mr. Meares, who was driving the first team, riding—like a Russian—on his sledge. The dogs were thin as rakes, hungry and mean. They looked dangerous to me, but Captain Scott didn’t notice. He kept walking. The dogs snarled at him, and suddenly the dog Osman swept around and grabbed the
captain by his ankle.

  It was an awful moment. The dog thrashed its head. Captain Scott fell to the snow. He tried to crawl away but couldn’t. He tried to kick the dog, but it held on, growling like mad. The other dogs were closing in on him now, their teeth gleaming in hungry grins, the hair standing like spikes on their backs.

  A dog was heartless. To a dog, a man was no different than a biscuit, something to be gobbled down if there was even half a chance of doing it. The team was a pack, and it moved against Captain Scott, every dog intent on tearing off his own little bit of the meal.

  Mr. Meares leapt from his sledge. He struck at the dogs with his driving stick, trying to chase them off. It seemed at first they wouldn’t go. They turned on him as well with the same growls and snarls, their faces twisted into looks of evil.

  But Mr. Meares wasn’t scared. He waded right in among them, swinging his stick, kicking out with his feet. There was never a greater coward than a dog, and soon the growls turned to yelps and whines, and the beasts sulked away with their tails bent down.

  Mr. Meares saved his last blows for the dog Osman. I thought he might beat the thing to death—and I wouldn’t have minded—but Captain Scott shouted at him to stop.

  I could hardly believe it. There was the captain sprawled on the snow with his boot nearly torn away, crying out to save the dog that had nearly killed him. “It’s instinct,” he said. “You can’t break them of instinct.”

  That was the way of Captain Scott. If the dogs had ripped him to shreds, if they’d torn off his legs and his hands and his arms, and if the only thing left was his head, he might still have spoken up and said, “They’re just hungry.” He thought he understood the thinking of dogs, believing their lives were ruled by fear and food and nothing else. He didn’t trust them, and he didn’t like them very much. But he was still as kindly to a dog as he was to a pony.

  I lost track of the miles we traveled, of the times we camped, of the cairns that were built by the men to mark our path. My eyes got so sore and dim that they couldn’t make sense of things sometimes. The whole Barrier seemed to slope uphill, while enormous ridges rose in our path, only to shrink into tiny waves as we reached them. The snow enjoyed playing little tricks.