The Winter Pony

by Iain Lawrence

  Then Patrick took off my blanket. “Come on, lad,” he said. The sun had burned his face, except for two white circles around his eyes where his snow goggles usually rested. “Let’s get you home now. Next year, it’s the Pole.”

  So off I went with Blucher and Blossom, down our tracks toward the sea.

  It was embarrassing to be sent back with the old wheezers. I couldn’t believe that I was a wheezer too, a crock, not wanted on the depot journey. I reminded myself: “My name is James Pigg; I’m a good lad.”

  At least I led the way. That was something that made me feel a bit better. We had one sledge, and I did the pulling. It was almost empty, easy to haul with the wind behind me. Many times, I had to stop to let the others catch up.

  Blucher was behind me. His handler, the kindly Mr. Forde, seemed to be holding him up as they walked along together, each leaning on the other. Both had their heads down, their feet dragging. At the back was Blossom, not much better, led by Mr. Teddy. I felt sad to see those ponies struggling on. I remembered them rolling on the ice on the day we’d come ashore. In the sunshine and the cold, they had frolicked like colts. And now—not quite a month later—they could hardly walk. They couldn’t even lift their heads. The only thing they ever saw was the snow right in front of them.

  I was reminded again and again of the old mare lagging at the back of the herd when I was young. I saw it in the way Blucher breathed, in the way Blossom’s ears sagged like ferns in the fall. I wondered if they would take themselves off alone if they had the chance, the way the mare had done, to die on the lonely Barrier. I couldn’t imagine doing it myself. How brave and desperate would a creature have to be for that?

  I felt tired too, of course. Deep inside, I was still so chilled by the blizzards that I thought my middle might never warm up. There was a little part of me—maybe in my heart—that was happy because I was heading for the stable.

  The men seldom spoke. It was Mr. Teddy who set the pace because he was an officer, the second in command of the whole expedition. His real name was Teddy Evans, and he had the same last name as the big sailor Taff Evans, and that was very confusing. So I thought of him as Mr. Teddy instead.

  It was funny that all three of our handlers were sailors. Now they walked on frozen water that floated on the sea, and that seemed a strange thing. I saw Mr. Teddy pop a little piece of biscuit into Blossom’s mouth, and I wondered what it was about sailors that made them so kind to animals.

  The sky was full of churning clouds when we set off. But soon a blizzard whirled up from behind us, turning everything to frozen white.

  The cold and the misery were too much for little Blucher. His legs wobbled, and down he went in a heap. Mr. Forde knelt beside him in the snow. “Come on, Blucher,” he said. “Please. Come on.” He pushed and pulled and got the pony up again, and for a moment, it seemed that Blucher might recover. He walked on a few yards with Mr. Forde holding his halter, telling him, “There you go. That’s good.” But again he toppled over, and now it took all three of the men to get him on his feet.

  We stopped there. We went no farther. The men built a wall, and in its shelter they kept rubbing Blucher’s legs. They tried to feed him, to walk him back and forth. Their faces froze in the wind, but they kept at it. They did everything they could possibly do, yet they couldn’t save Blucher. The pony collapsed into a small and quivering heap.

  “He’s done,” said Mr. Teddy. “I’m sorry, Forde, but the most kindly thing is to help him on his way.”

  Mr. Forde nodded. He was crying, his tears freezing on his cheeks in jagged, windblown lines. He took out his sailor’s knife, shook off his mitts, and opened it. Blucher was on his side, his chest heaving.

  “I’ll do it,” said Patrick, holding out his hand for the knife.

  But Mr. Forde wouldn’t let him. “No, no, he’s my pony,” he said. “I’ve looked after him this long; I’ll look after him now.”

  It was over in a moment, as the blizzard swept across the Barrier with a melancholy moan. Poor Blucher was so old, so small and sick, that there was almost no blood to come out of him. Mr. Forde held the pony’s head, the two of them stretched out on the snow, and I felt such a terrible sadness in the air that I thought it would hang over this place forever.

  The blizzard seemed longer and colder than the one before. It buried the sledge and it buried the tent, and it buried little Blucher, bit by bit, until only his silver mane fluttered above the Barrier. Then that was buried too, and there was only the snow where he lay.

  Behind the pony wall, Blossom and I huddled close together. Under two blankets, he was shaking like a mouse, swaying his head from side to side. I pressed against him as hard as I could, trying to make him warmer.

  When the sky finally cleared, the men buried Blucher. The wind was still keen and cold, whipping up funnels of snow. In their heavy, furry clothes, the men built a little cairn to mark the grave. They stuck a flagstaff into the snow, and we went along to the north.

  The wind seemed colder now. Blowing snow whirled through the air all around us. It was Blossom who lagged behind, Blossom who slowed us down. He looked as thin as an old leaf, every bone sticking out. The blizzard had worn him down so far, there was almost nothing left.

  Patrick and Mr. Teddy harnessed themselves to my sledge, and all three of us pulled together. Mr. Forde walked with Blossom, holding him up as they waded through the fresh drifts.

  Blossom went in a wobbling, weaving way. He went as though every step would be his last. Then he stopped and refused to go farther, and it seemed he wanted to die right there. So Mr. Forde left him, and we all went on as the pony stood and sadly watched us go. But soon he came staggering along, lurching as though he had died but didn’t know it. He managed mile after mile like that. Then his legs splayed out and he plopped on his belly.

  It was a terrible thing to see. Blossom lay on the snow exactly like the old mare, his nose touching the surface. His eyes moved slowly. His breath was soft and wheezy.

  I wished I could help him. I wanted to nudge him back to his feet, the way my mother had done for me on the day I was born. But I stood in my harness, and I couldn’t move.

  The men melted snow in their hands to let Blossom drink. They fed him oil cakes and sugar, or tried to. They covered him with blankets, put sacking on top, and kept rubbing, rubbing everywhere that the pony trembled.

  There was no need for the knife. Blossom closed his eyes and slipped away.

  He lay at the very end of his tracks, with the marks of his hooves stretching away to the south, fainter and fainter, until they vanished in the wind-smoothed white of the Barrier.

  I snorted quietly. Patrick looked over, then came to see me. He ducked his head under my nose and put his arm around my chest. “No worries, lad,” he said. “We’ll get you home, no fear.”

  There was another burial, another cairn. Then all together we pulled the sledge, three men and a pony working together. Every time we stopped, the men built the most enormous wall. They piled me high with every blanket and sack they could find. And they fed me Blucher’s food, and Blossom’s, as well as my own. They stuffed me full at every meal.

  Day after day, we walked to the north, toward the lowest point of the sun. There, at midnight he sank below the horizon, only to rise again right after. I had watched his travels all my life and knew that he was heading for his wintering place, that he would soon be gone altogether.

  It was a miserable time, but a wonderful time as well. I lived high on the hog with my extra rations, and I didn’t feel like an old pony tagging along with the men. I felt like a companion, a friend.

  When cracks began to appear in the ice, I knew we were getting close to the sea. The men went more carefully then, sometimes stomping on the snow to make sure it was solid.

  We strolled along, everyone pleased to see Mount Erebus loom ahead of us, its plume of smoke like a welcoming flag. Patrick stroked my shoulder. “You’ve done it, James,” he said. “You’re home.”

&
nbsp; I thought so too. But with my next step, the snow broke apart underneath me. I dropped like a stone, right into a crevasse.

  It was an awful shock to have the ground fall away, to be suddenly standing on nothing. I felt my heart push up through my throat as I hurtled down. For just an instant, my eyes were level with Patrick’s—and what a startled look I saw! Then he was above me and I was still falling.

  I thought I was going to disappear inside the Barrier. But suddenly, with a thud, I came to a stop.

  Luckily, my belly was a little bit wider than the crevasse, and I stuck in the ice like a cork.

  The men watched me squirm and kick. My hooves were dangling underneath me, above a frightening chasm that might have been bottomless for all I could see. The men looked awfully surprised at first, but soon they started laughing.

  “It’s all that high living,” said Mr. Teddy. “It’s saved your life, James Pigg.”

  Mr. Forde got a long rope from the sledge. They tied it around me and pulled together. They rolled me out onto the snow, and I squirmed like a beetle until I managed to get myself up. The men kept laughing, but there was nothing mean or cruel about it. I was a bit roly-poly.

  When he saw that I was safe, Patrick walked right to the edge of the crevasse. He bent down and peered into it. “It’s very blue,” he said, smiling. “Deep and dark.”

  I went over to see for myself. I stood right beside Patrick, hung my head like him, and together we stared straight down into the darkness. We stared and we stared, then I turned my head and looked at my friend.

  Mr. Forde and Mr. Teddy found this enormously funny. I didn’t know why. They put their hands on their thighs and bent forward, laughing all over again. Patrick grinned at me in the way that made me feel warm inside. “That was a near shave for you, James Pigg,” he said.

  Far to the west, at his hut on the Barrier, Amundsen is doing some housekeeping between his journeys to the depots. He takes time to make sure that his dogs will survive the winter in comfort.

  From the beginning, he has provided tents for the dogs. Until now, they’ve been sitting on the surface, but that won’t do when temperatures fall to forty and fifty and sixty below. So he sinks the floor of each tent six feet into the Barrier, chopping the ice with axes. Then he drives twelve posts into the floor, spaced evenly along the wall. One dog will be tethered to each post. Otherwise, they would kill each other before spring.

  With that job done, Amundsen loads seven sledges and sets off again to the south. In two weeks, he’ll travel beyond his last depot, all the way to 82 degrees south, but his dogs will be worn out. “This is my only dark memory of my stay in the South,” he writes later, “the over-taxing of these fine animals. I had asked more of them than they were capable of doing. My consolation is that I did not spare myself either.”

  Scott is worried about some of his men and how they will fare in the spring. Oates’s nose seems always on the point of frostbite; Meares has trouble with his feet. Both Cherry-Garrard and Scott himself have been nipped by frostbite on the cheeks. Bowers, who wears nothing on his head but a felt hat, never seems to feel the cold. But Scott sees that his ears have turned white.

  On February 18, Scott hurries ahead to meet Teddy Evans and the others he had sent back with the crocks. He goes by dogsled and is amazed by the speed and endurance of the dogs. From morning to lunch, they take him seventeen miles.

  “The way in which they keep up a steady jog trot for hour after hour is wonderful,” he writes. “Their legs seem steel springs, fatigue unknown—for at the end of a tiring march any unusual incident will arouse them to full vigour.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  AT Safety Camp we rested. It was a lovely place, cold and quiet, with the men’s tent like a tiny gray mountain on the plain of ice. We could see Mount Erebus smoldering away to the west, and the glaciers oozing out onto the Barrier. A glacier moved so slowly that I imagined it saw everything else go by in a blur, the sun and moon dashing round and round the world like an eagle chasing a sparrow.

  We expected a long wait for the others to catch up, but after just a day or two, we were surprised by the sound of dogs approaching.

  All of us turned toward the distant yapping. We saw tiny black specks far off to the south, rising over the crests of the snow waves. There and gone, that’s how they came: a little bigger, a little louder, every time they reappeared.

  Two teams of dogs were running side by side, as though racing each other. The men ran beside the sledges, sometimes holding on with one hand. They stumbled and rose and ran on again. I saw Captain Scott and Mr. Meares at one of the sleds. At the other was young Gran, and then Cherry with his glass eyes on his nose. That made everything seem so fine. I was always happy when I saw Cherry.

  Men and dogs, they flew toward us, weaving around the crests of snow. We all watched them come. I peered above my snow wall. Mr. Forde looked out from the tent where he was cooking. Mr. Teddy and Patrick raised their heads from the overturned sledge, where they were sharpening the metal edges of the runners.

  The dog Osman was leading a team. I watched him leap at his harness, and all the others leap behind him. Every dog in every team was silent now, exhausted by their travel. We could hear them panting as their paws pattered along.

  The dog Osman veered around the end of a ridge and galloped across the flat space behind it. The others followed him two by two, leaning into the turn. The second team fell back a bit, and someone yelled at them in Russian, telling them to hurry.

  I felt the old twinge inside me. I remembered men screaming those words, and I saw—in my mind—a red-faced Russian raising a whip, his eyes full of fury.

  The memory was more real than the dogs and the sled and the pale streaks of the clouds. I winced from the whip, closing my eyes as I waited for the sting. So I didn’t see the dogs plummet through the snow.

  It was the sound that brought me out of my memory, a frantic noise of dogs and men. I saw the dog Osman standing alone in the snow, leaning forward with his feet planted firmly, as though he was pulling a thousand pounds but not moving an inch. Behind him was a gaping hole, a crevasse so wide and deep that every dog except for Osman had vanished inside it. On the other side sat the sledge, tilted at the very lip of the crevasse. Captain Scott and Mr. Meares had leapt clear, but already they were on their feet and hurrying back.

  All around the sledge, the snow was cracked and crumbling. The men wrestled it sideways and anchored it firmly where the snow was solid. The traces stretched taut in front of it, into the crevasse and up again on the other side, where the dog Osman was holding the weight of his whole team. He was strangling in his harness, breathing in painful rasps. But he held his ground, and as much as I hated that dog, I had to admit he looked heroic.

  A hideous howling came up from the ice. Mr. Teddy and Mr. Forde ran out to help. Patrick untied me from my picket and hurried me around the wall. “They’ll be needing you now, James Pigg,” he said.

  I went at a trot as he ran beside me.

  It was a bridge of snow that had caved in, a cover for the crevasse. If the sledge had gone another foot or two, if it had weighed another pound, it would have crashed through the snow along with the dogs, taking Captain Scott with it, down and down through the Barrier.

  Patrick led me in beside the dog Osman. He could tell I was scared to go near that beast, and he kept talking to me calmly. “Easy, lad. It’s all right,” he said. But the smell of the dog made me want to run away.

  Cherry and Gran had turned their team around and stopped their sledge. They ran across the snow toward Captain Scott.

  Patrick took me right to the edge. I looked straight down into the crevasse. It was much wider and deeper than the one that had nearly swallowed me. I could see a hundred feet down, but not all the way to the bottom. The ice was pale blue at the top, growing darker and darker until everything faded away.

  Sixty feet down, part of the bridge had jammed between the sides of the crevasse to make a narrow shelf. Tw
o of the dogs lay there, on their sides, absolutely still. The rest dangled from their harnesses, some upside down, some sideways, all howling in terror. Two were swinging back and forth, back and forth, like enormous spiders at the ends of their threads. And every time they swung together, each snarled and snapped, trying to grab the other by the throat.

  Then Patrick turned me around and led me up beside the dog Osman. The smell of that dog put into my mind an image of Weary Willy fighting off the team. I was so scared that I shied away, and if not for Patrick, I might have fallen back right into the crevasse. But he kept his hold on my halter and stood between me and the dog. As we went past, the dog Osman raised its head and looked at me. For the first time, I stared straight into a dog’s eyes. I expected a black look of evil, but all I saw was fear and pleading. The dog couldn’t hold on for much longer. Already it trembled with the effort of holding the other dogs, and the weight was slowly dragging it back toward the crevasse. A long rut was scraped in the snow, carved with the deep slashes of the dog’s claws.

  I was not wearing my collar, not rigged for a harness. Cherry brought a rope and put a loop around my shoulders. He cinched me up to the dog harness. Then Patrick stepped me forward, and the weight the dog was holding came onto me instead.

  I leaned into it. My hooves slipped, nearly dragging me down. But I planted them solidly and heaved on the rope. I took all the weight on my shoulders. Then Cherry whipped out his knife and freed the dog Osman. The dog bounded forward, then stopped and turned around.

  I hadn’t imagined us changing places, with me tethered and the dog standing free. Its mouth was open, its tongue hanging out, a pink slather slithering between enormous fangs, in and out over gums as black as coal.