The Winter Pony (12 page)
It was Captain Scott. I heard his voice. “The ponies are a disappointment,” he said.
At the edge of the group, Mr. Oates leaned back until he rested his shoulders on the canvas. I could tell his shape right through the cloth. He answered quite loudly: “You expect too much of them.”
Behind me on the picket line, Blucher was pawing at the snow. He looked thin and hungry, and I imagined that he was searching for grass where he couldn’t possibly find any.
“I still want to get them to eighty degrees,” said Captain Scott. The shadow of his hand turned the shadow of his kettle. “If we don’t leave our depot at eighty degrees, we won’t have a chance in the spring.”
“Oh, you’ll get them there,” said Mr. Oates, with a cheery laugh. “Or most of them, at any rate. But I’ll tell you this: You won’t get them back.”
The stove kept hissing away. Little whirls of steam shadowed on the side of the tent.
“There’s three that might drop dead tomorrow,” said Mr. Oates. “They’re on their last legs. They’re done in.”
I looked again at Blucher. He was still muzzling through the snow, and I was happy he wasn’t listening to the men or he didn’t understand the words. He was surely one of the three who wouldn’t last, and I thought Blossom was another. But I wasn’t sure about the third.
Birdie Bowers looked at Captain Scott. I could tell it was him by the long shadow of his nose. “Why not send them back now?” he said. “They’ve done a sterling job, haven’t they? Let them live to fight another day.”
That was all I heard. Patrick came out from the other tent and began to feed me biscuits. Weary Willy put on such a show of sadness that he got one as well.
In the morning, I was surprised to see what happened.
Nearly a hundred miles from his hut, at 79 degrees south latitude, Captain Scott sends the weakest ponies back to the stable. He buries their load of fodder, names the place Bluff Depot, and keeps heading south with his five other ponies. He plans to reach 80 degrees and plant his final cache, a ton of supplies. Every pound of supplies that he carries now—every mile he takes it—means less work in the spring, a quicker dash to the Pole
.
His dogs are thin, underfed on their diet of biscuits. He notes that Meares will have to give up his habit of riding on the sledge if he wants the dogs to last. “Meares, I think, rather imagined himself racing to the Pole and back on a dog sledge,” he writes in his journal. “This journey has opened his eyes a good deal.”
The ponies are worse. Cold weather is hard on the animals, and the temperature falls to twenty below out on the Barrier. To spare the animals, Scott stops early. He plants his last depot at 79 degrees, 28½ minutes south, about twenty miles short of his
goal. He marks the spot well, with a cairn six feet high, a flag on a bamboo pole, and a pile of biscuit tins to reflect the sun. He stands the empty sledges up on end, then turns north for the trek home
.
It’s February 16, 1911
.
As Scott marches south, his
Terra Nova
sails along to the east. She’s heading for the farthest edge of the Barrier, to an explored part of the continent. She carries four men and two ponies—Jehu and Chinaman—meaning to leave them in the strange land and collect them again the next summer
.
But as the ship crosses the Bay of Whales, the men see a strange sight. The spars of a ship reach up above the edge of the Barrier, stark black lines of masts and yards against the glare of the sky
.
They know right away it’s the
Fram.
There’s no other ship it can be
.
Aboard the
Fram,
a watchman is drinking coffee. He hears a rattle of chain and comes up on deck at midnight to see the
Terra Nova
anchored off the stern. He rubs his eyes; he pinches himself, because he can hardly believe he’s awake
.
Amundsen visits the
Terra Nova,
then the Englishmen dine on the
Fram.
But the visits are short. Everyone seems in a hurry
.
The
Terra Nova
changes plans and returns straight away to Evans. She brings the news that Amundsen is less than six hundred miles away, working his dogs on the ice
.
She unloads the two ponies, who have no choice but to swim ashore, towed along by a whaleboat. Chinaman manages well, but Jehu can’t move his legs and has to be hauled through a mile of icy water. On shore, each pony gets half a bottle of brandy poured
down his throat, and Chinaman staggers around for a while, comically drunk. But the swim nearly kills little Jehu, and he’s never the same after that
.
Amundsen is also laying depots on the Barrier. He has taken just three men, three sledges, and eighteen dogs. Each sledge carries 550 pounds, but most of that weight—350 pounds per sledge—is dog food
.
A man goes ahead on skis, “to show the direction and encourage the dogs,” he says. The sledges follow in a line. The lead driver has the compass, and he calls directions to the forerunner: “A little to the right, a little to the left.” Each is annoyed by the other
.
The forerunner has the hardest job. “It is no easy matter to go straight on a surface without landmarks,” says Amundsen. “Imagine an immense plain that you have to cross in thick fog; it is dead calm, and the snow lies evenly, without drifts. What would you do? An Eskimo can manage it, but none of us.”
Amundsen drives the last sledge, watching for things that fall from the others. They travel through a haze that hides the horizon. There are no shadows; the forerunner can’t see the rises and hollows in the snow until he stumbles over them. But they make seventeen miles a day, then twenty-eight on day three. They reach 80 degrees south on Valentine’s Day, and Amundsen places his depot there. He builds a cairn twelve feet high
.
They mark their route with black flags. When the flags run out, they use dried fish instead, dangled from bamboo poles. Every half a kilometer—measured by the sledge meter—a man calls out the distance, and Amundsen drives another fish into the snow as they
dash along. With their sledges emptied, they’re flying over the Barrier: forty-three miles the first day, sixty-two the next, to reach their base in just two days
.
It’s autumn now in the south, with winter coming quickly. But Amundsen makes two more trips across the Barrier, laying depots as far to the south as 82 degrees of latitude
.
He settles down for the winter with a huge lead over Scott. But he’s worried that he might be beaten already. He knows the Englishmen have brought motor sledges, and he imagines the machines rattling on and on across the Barrier
.
HAPTER
F
IVE
I
spent the night wondering about the third pony. I didn’t sleep for all my thinking.
Blossom and Blucher were certainly crocks. They barely ate, and shivered all the time, and went everywhere at a plodding walk as slow as funeral horses. I was pleased they were turning back. But who would go with them? I had no idea. Was it Weary Willy? Was it Nobby?
In the end, I couldn’t have been more surprised.
It was me.
I knew it as soon as Patrick came out of his tent. He was more quiet than usual, not joking with the others. He came and fed me a biscuit, as he always did. But as he brushed the snow from my blanket and mane, I could feel the sadness
inside him. I heard him sigh as he looked to the north. I knew he was turning back, though he’d rather go on.
Right after breakfast, the men took the supplies from my sledge, from Blossom’s and Blucher’s, and buried it all in the snow. Captain Scott named the place Bluff Depot because there was a big bluff of mountains fifty miles to the east, though mostly it was hidden. They built a cairn to mark the place.
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.