Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  ‘Oh yes: like me, he was trading in furs.’ Meares tapped the tiny island again, then folded the map, stowing it back in his journal. ‘Some day I shall go and live in those parts. According to family legend, he buried his treasure there.’

  The sun had set the week before and wouldn’t rise until September. But its fossilized light, seeping up from the northern horizon, backlit the cone of Erebus where it smoked above the camp. To the west, across the ice of McMurdo Sound, this rumour of light touched the Royal Society Range, raising its peaks from the dead. There was a pink tint too on the ice to the north-west. Beyond that, Oates fancied he could see a water sky: perhaps the Ross Sea wasn’t yet wholly frozen.

  It was the sky above that shocked him. The sea ice, the western mountains, the island where he stood, were shades of black and grey and pastel, like a half-remembered dream. But the abyss above him blazed with life and business. Far above, a band of nacreous cloud caught the last of the year’s civil twilight, a gauzy patch of iridescent pinks and mauves. The stars burned so fiercely that it seemed to Oates if he held his breath he would hear them. They shone so hard that he wanted to duck.

  Meares and Dmitri were attaching the dogs to the sledges, a job that seemed to require a great deal of violence and swearing in Russian: the only language, Meares said, that his dogs understood. Oates watched until he saw how it was done, then grabbed a dog by the scruff of its neck and toggled its harness to a lamp-wick trace.

  ‘Good,’ said Meares. ‘We’ll make a dog man of you yet.’ He nodded at the fan of traces, half a dozen of them, which attached six straining dogs to the hoop of Oates’s sledge. As the dogs heaved and whined, eager to be off, Dmitri turned the sledge on its side and anchored it with an ice hook.

  Oates considered his sledge. No reins, no bits, no bridles, just half a dozen vicious Samoyeds sizing him up with their evil yellow eyes, panting slowly and licking their lips.

  Meares handed him a whip. ‘It’s very simple,’ he told Oates. ‘Your dogs will want to follow me on my sled. If you want them to go faster, crack the whip. If you want to stop, turn the sledge on its side. Try not to break your neck.’

  ‘How do I make them turn?’

  ‘You don’t. That’s lesson two. For today you just sit tight on the sledge and your dogs will follow mine.’

  ‘Right . . . So what do you really need me for?’

  Meares stepped up to his own sledge, hopped onto the end of it and pulled out the anchor. ‘Ballast,’ he said, then shouted in Russian.

  He shot off across the crusted snow. Oates’s dogs, yammering to follow, jerked so hard against their traces that they dislodged the anchor holding the sledge. Still not settled on the back, Oates was thrown backwards onto the snow. Dmitri, hovering wisely a little to the front, jumped into the sledge and bawled at the dogs until they came to a stop thirty yards off. Oates heard ironic cheers from Wind Vane Hill; Cherry-Garrard had witnessed his defeat.

  By the time he was under way again Meares was already a dot on the sea ice, veiled by the snow plume kicked up by his dogs. The land-fast ice had settled in hard for the winter. Rounding Cape Evans to seaward, they encountered only a few small pressure ridges off its western tip, folds of buckled ice holding drifts of deep snow. Apart from that, the ice on the sound appeared smooth and unbroken, its flaws hidden by powder blown off the Plateau.

  Oates, who was still some distance behind Meares, felt alone for the first time since the ship had left South Africa. His dogs paid him no attention. They were bent to their task, loping along, tongues lolling, their frozen breath jabbing the air. The sledge-runners sang like a bass violin. He could understand now why, as Meares had told him, the dogs loved their work.

  Having weathered Cape Evans they steered a course across South Bay, threading the channel between Inaccessible Island and Tent Island, sheer black pyramids streaked with white ice. Little and Great Razorback islands passed to their left, with Turks Head rearing above them. Across the sound, the peaks of the Royal Society Range gleamed in the starlight. Oates felt he could reach across and run his finger down their edge.

  His dogs, warming to their task, made ground on Meares, now a hundred yards ahead. Oates wondered why he couldn’t feel the wind on his face. Then he realized his mistake, and slipped his hands from his wolf-skin mittens to massage the blood back into his cheeks. Pulling his scarf up over his face, he watched Glacier Tongue spool past on the left, then he stretched flat on his back to stare up at the stars.

  It had taken Oates and his ponies a day to reach Hut Point the last time he had gone there, during the autumn depot-laying expedition. He had considered that good going. Now, only a little over two hours after leaving base at Cape Evans, he was outside the disused Discovery hut at Hut Point.

  The entrance was packed with hard névé snow compacted by the winter storms. He and Meares took turns to attack it with their shovels, shedding first their windproofs, then their jerseys, until they both stood in their woollen undershirts steaming in the cold. At last the tiny front door, sheltered by wide overhanging eaves, appeared at the end of their snow tunnel. They levered it open, replaced their jerseys and crawled inside.

  Snow lay thick on the south-facing skylights, admitting only a faint blue glow. A paraffin candle, once lit, conjured tinned food and biscuits, bits of old harness hanging from rafters, all furred with silver crystals, the petrified breath of the last men to leave.

  ‘Let’s take a rest,’ suggested Meares. ‘Have a smoke and a bite to eat. Then we can do our business and go.’

  What business? thought Oates. But he settled himself on a packing case and busied himself with his pipe.

  They smoked in silence for a while, listening to the tethered dogs bickering outside. When Oates sat with Meares, or with Atkinson, in the hut at Cape Evans, Griff Taylor would make bets with his fellow Australians on which would be first to break his silence. Often the bets went unwon.

  The hut was fragrant with pipe smoke when Meares finally spoke. ‘Will you go back to your regiment when the ship calls here next summer? Or do you still hope to be in the party that will go to the pole?’

  Oates thought about the close confinement, the winter routine, the prospect of another season of drudgery commanded by yet another stuffy idiot whose rank exceeded his manners – it turned out that in this regard the navy was scarcely any better than the cavalry. And worse than that, even more dispiriting, because it was so unfamiliar, was his growing fear of failure: if the ponies proved a crock next season, as Oates was all but sure they would, Scott would put the blame on him. He dreaded the looks he would get in the mess room on the Curragh, the first meeting with his mother at their country place in Gestingthorpe.

  ‘In principle, I’m only here for the ponies . . . Once their job is done at the foot of the glacier, I should return here in time for the ship . . . But if Scott does decide to name me in the polar party I’ll have to see it through . . . That’s hardly likely though: Wilson knows I’ve got a bad leg thanks to that Boer bullet . . . Then again, Scott’s always so keen on paying compliments to me as the only soldier on this jaunt . . . The devil of it is, the Inniskillings didn’t want me to come here in the first place. My particular chum, old Terrot, begged me not to go. He’d heard that Scott was a bit of a bungler.’

  Meares’s pipe flared several times in quick succession, semaphoring his stifled laughter.

  ‘I shall be going back with the ship next autumn,’ he said. ‘I shan’t stay for the second winter.’

  Now that was a surprise. ‘You don’t think Scott will want you and your dogs to go to the pole with him?’

  Meares shook his head. ‘I don’t. He doesn’t believe in dogs, against all science and reason . . . But either way, I shall go back with the ship when it calls next summer. I’ll have no choice. The ship will be bringing bad news for me.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I’ve alre
ady arranged for it.’

  Oates was inwardly delighted. This was a man who saw other horizons. ‘I see.’

  Meares tapped his pipe out, emptying the embers in a fruit tin on the floor. ‘There wouldn’t be much point in me sticking around here for another winter. I shall have business in Europe: there’s going to be a war. Dmitri can handle the dogs, if Scott still wants to use them. In any case, Wilson and Cherry are learning to manage them too.’

  ‘Dmitri can’t handle the dogs half as well as you do,’ said Oates. ‘However did you learn to beat a Siberian at his own game?’

  It was a direct question, almost unthinkable. Meares stood up and crossed the room. His boots drummed loudly on the bare wooden floor.

  ‘I had plenty of opportunity to learn,’ he said. ‘Once, I sledged nearly two thousand miles from Okhotsk to Cape Chelyuskin, then the same back again. I don’t expect you’ll have heard of it, but Cape Chelyuskin is the most northerly point on the mainland of Asia, about as close to the North Pole as we are to the South Pole here. Not to boast, but I doubt if any other Englishman ever made that journey overland. Not many Russians either. I was a different man when I got back from that trip.’

  ‘Did you buy many furs when you were up there?’

  ‘Not on that occasion. Things got a bit fraught and I couldn’t stay long. I shall have to go back some day. Perhaps next time you can come along.’

  Oates worked hard to hide his pleasure. ‘I’m surprised the Russians let you go there at all. I hear they don’t care much for foreigners wandering about in Siberia. Particularly Englishmen.’

  ‘I expect I forgot to ask their permission. Cape Chelyuskin is an interesting spot. If the Russians could find a reliable anchorage in that area they could switch their warships back and forth between the Pacific and the Atlantic without anyone being the wiser. Which would double their potential naval power in both theatres.’

  Oates knew of the battle of Tsushima Strait, in which the Russian Baltic Fleet, having steamed very publicly halfway round the planet, was destroyed in one day by the waiting Japanese. Meares had witnessed it. Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, had been there too, for Harper’s Weekly.

  Oates spat into the fruit tin. ‘Ponting says that the Russians took you prisoner during the war of ’04. They thought you were a spy. The Japanese too. He said you were rather knocked up when he met you.’

  ‘That was all a misunderstanding. The Russians were rather upset, what with just having lost two fleets one after the other. And the Japs were only being prudent. I’m on much better terms with both of them now.’

  ‘I heard that too. Wilfred Bruce said that you shipped your dogs to Vladivostok on a Russian destroyer. He couldn’t believe his eyes as he stood on the dock and saw you waving from the bridge.’

  ‘It was a stroke of good fortune. I happened to know the skipper. He said they were coming my way.’

  Oates sucked on his pipe, found it expired. He tapped it out and stood. ‘I brought the revolver, by the way.’

  Meares had gone into a corner of the hut. He was testing the frost-silvered floorboards. ‘Good man.’

  Oates followed him over. ‘The dogs seemed alright to me. I didn’t have to shoot so much as one.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Meares. He was tapping a board with the toe

  of his boot. ‘They were angels. They’re fine when they get running.’

  ‘I had a mad idea you were worried about Amundsen.’

  ‘Amundsen? No. He’s hundreds of miles away. And besides, he’s a friend of ours anyway. The Norwegians are keen on having allies in London to back them against the Swedes. Amundsen has helped us out before. . . . But of course, you never quite know.’

  Oates watched Meares kneel on the floor, gently pulling at the board. He lowered his head, peering at it, then grunted in satisfaction.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Could you kindly pass me that ice-axe? The one on the wall over there?’

  Perhaps, thought Oates, I ought not to be involved in this. He didn’t believe in a god but he worshipped reserve, and it occurred to him now that reserve and secrecy were not the same thing at all. A secret was a form of compulsion, like marriage, or employment, and once he committed himself to Meares he could never decently repudiate him. If he went along with this, no ship could take him all the way back to hunting and yachting and mannerly boredom. Perhaps, he thought, I should go outside and see how the dogs are.

  He went over to the far corner of the hut and collected the ice-axe, which hung by its thong from a nail.

  ‘Thanks, Soldier. Now would you mind fetching the candle as well?’

  Oates stood over Meares, holding the light. Their breaths came together in one silver cloud. Meares inserted the point of the axe into the crack of the floor and rocked it gently back and forth, widening the gap without straining the plank. When the space was broad enough, he slipped both hands in on either side of the plank, close to where it was nailed to the joist. Then he hauled smartly upward. The plank came away in one piece in his hands.

  Meares set it to one side, its protruding nails downward. Beneath the joists was a layer of felt insulation rimed with ice.

  ‘Hold the candle a bit lower, please.’

  There was a hole in the felt, or rather a flap had been cut in it, three sides of a rectangle, and the felt then replaced. Meares reached down and pulled the flap upward. Beneath it, a wooden tea-chest was sunk in the snow which filled the space beneath the hut.

  Meares sat back on his heels and smiled at Oates.

  ‘It’s still here,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The thing I was sent to collect. I couldn’t risk digging it up when we all stayed here together last autumn. Too many people around.’

  ‘You were sent? Scott told me he signed Ponting up to do the photography. He said it was Ponting who brought you in.’

  Meares stood up, easing his knees. ‘That’s what Scott was meant to think. As for Ponting, this is probably my last job with him. He wants to go into the moving pictures when this trip is over. I’m going to need someone else.’

  Oates pointed at the tea-chest. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  The tea-chest was held by the ice, but by chipping carefully with the axe Meares freed two sides, then levered it clear. He set it between them and prised the top open, taking care not to tear the lead strips that sealed its plywood seams. Inside, the chest was padded with barley-straw. From it protruded the neck of a bottle.

  ‘Good old Mawson!’ said Meares. He pulled out the bottle and showed it to Oates: Mackinlay and Co., Rare Old Highland Whisky. Meares set it reverently down on the floorboards, then rummaged again in the straw. When his hand came out again it held an old hardwood case about eight inches square and six inches deep. A white-silvered clock face showed through its glass lid.

  ‘It’s a marine chronometer,’ Oates said doubtfully.

  It seemed to Oates unexceptional: their own expedition had been issued with several chronometers by the Greenwich Observatory.

  This whole jaunt is a joke. Meares has been teasing me, not testing me. And I’ll be the first to laugh if it’s the price of a swallow of whisky on a dry expedition. ‘To whom do we owe the pleasure?’

  ‘The chronometer?’ said Meares. ‘It was lent to Douglas Mawson – the Australian geologist who was here two years back with Shackleton’s lot.’

  ‘I meant the whisky.’

  Ignoring him, Meares held up the clock for Oates’s inspection. ‘This, Soldier, has been all the way to the south magnetic pole. It went there with Mawson and David and Mackay two years ago. They’d a terrible time of it. It’s a miracle they made it back.’

  ‘It looks ancient. Couldn’t Greenwich give Mawson a newer one?’

  ‘Greenwich knew nothing about it. Mawson got this one from somebody e
lse.’

  ‘From who?’

  Meares stowed the chronometer inside his Cossack jacket. ‘From the people who sent me.’

  He reached into the straw and pulled out a leather-bound surveyor’s journal almost as long as the tea-chest was square. He flicked through it. Oates saw pages of maps and columns of figures – degrees and minutes and seconds. Meares closed the journal again and laid it on the floor. ‘Good.’

  He reached further into the box and took out a bag tied shut with a drawcord. It seemed quite heavy. ‘Ah,’ said Meares, again pleased. He untied the drawstring, looked inside and tied it shut again.

  ‘What fresh delight is this?’

  Meares shook the bag. It rattled. ‘Rocks. Mawson fossicked them in the mountains on his way to the magnetic south. But when he got back here he thought someone was trying to steal his things, so he hid them under the hut. I daresay he’d gone a bit mad after his terrible journey. Mackay and David certainly had. Before Mawson came back to his senses, Shackleton returned from eighty-eight south and whisked them all home.’

  ‘They must be very valuable if you’ve come all this way to get them. Or is it the maps that they wanted? Or the clock?’ Oates still didn’t know who they were.

  Meares busied himself with the tea-chest, replacing its lid. ‘I wouldn’t know, Soldier. I was only told to fetch the contents of the box. Except for the whisky. I was told I could keep that. Let’s put the floor back the way it was. Then we can have a drink, and I’ll tell you a little about Room 38.’

  Ross Ice Shelf, 1912

  March 16th

  On the Ice Barrier

  Dearie

  For privacy’s sake I’m folding this note into my diary, which I shall give to Birdie Bowers to pass on to my mother. I can trust him not to open it. Mother will find some way to get it to you – she already knows from my letters what great friends we are.

  I need hardly say how sorry I am about this. As I feared all along, the decision to include me in the polar party was made by Scott at the last minute. It was a compliment to the army. And so a half-crippled cavalry man was honour-bound to walk to the South Pole and back. Or most of the way back, anyway. The wound from that Boer bullet has reopened because of the scurvy. My leg weeps constantly, my feet are gangrenous and I can no longer keep up with the others. They are very good about waiting for me, but I know from their eyes what they think.