The Winter Pony (19 page)

But not all the ponies were winter ponies. Some of them hated to be dragged away from the blubber stove, and they tried to break loose as soon as they were out the door. Christopher was the worst for that. He was so wicked and mean that only Mr. Oates could ever try to walk him, and then it was as if Mr. Oates was trying to put a tether on a blizzard, because all we could see was a whirl of white mane and tail.

Poor Mr. Oates nearly had his arm torn off as he hauled his pony from the stable. More often than not, Christopher would be back very quickly, his rope swinging from his halter. Then Mr. Oates would arrive a long time later, always covered in snow, sometimes bruised or limping. But he never raised a hand to Christopher; he never even raised his
voice
. I believed he felt sorry for the pony, who didn’t enjoy the battles any more than Mr. Oates. Christopher had never learned to trust a man, and that disappointed Mr. Oates. Patrick and the others called Christopher “a man-eater,” but the pony was more terrified than most of them ever knew.

On days of blizzards, we got no exercise. For hours and hours, the wind howled around the hut. There was a tremendous rattle and bang from everything that was loose. Snow flew hard as gravel against the walls and windows of the hut,
while the tarpaulins on the stable roof fluttered and banged. Inside, most of the ponies were frantic with fear. Mr. Oates never left us then. He slept in a chair pulled close to the stove, making sure we could see him and know we were safe.

I didn’t like the blizzards, but there was one thing I hated even more. The silence. Through the hours when the men were sleeping, when the wind was calm, I was scared by the silence. I wished for things I’d known in the north woods: an owl’s hoot, an eagle’s cry, a raven’s lovely gurgle. I missed the scurry of a mouse through frozen grass beneath the snow, and the dashing of a hare across a field.

Here, there was nothing like that. When the men were sleeping, the only noise in all the world was the tiny hiss from the stove, and I grew so used to that sound that I had to remind myself to listen for it. The silence sometimes drove me crazy. I started thinking about the sea ice and the Barrier, about the huge and lonely world around me. Then I thought of Weary Willy, of Blossom and Blucher lying out in the snow, so horribly alone. I thought of Guts and Nobby and Uncle Bill and saw them floating dead in the frozen sea, their eyes staring. And I thought of poor Hackenschmidt, his death such a puzzle that sometimes it didn’t even seem true. I wondered if all of us would die in this place, every man and dog and pony.

All these ideas whirled through my mind like snow whipped up from the Barrier. They made me feel frightened and alone, so I pricked my ears and listened as hard as I could for the tiniest sound from the hut. If I heard the creak of the watchman’s chair, I felt better. If a man snorted in his sleep or called out in a dream, I was happy. But if there was only the
silence, I couldn’t stand it. I rocked from side to side against the walls or knocked my hooves on the stable boards, and if that didn’t bring the watchman, I started kicking at the wall.

I could make a terrific noise by kicking at the wall. The boards banged and shook; the nails came loose. Across the corridor and behind the other wall, the men woke with groans and curses, sometimes laughing too. One or the other came into the stable, and I always felt warm and safe again.

When the other ponies saw how easy it was to make the men come running, they started kicking at the wall as well. But they did it just for the sake of doing it. They hammered at the walls until the moment the stable door banged open. Then they stopped on the instant and gazed around with a look of innocence. Time and again the men came running, but in the end, they got a bit fed up and padded the walls with blankets. That muffled the sound, and took a lot of the fun away.

I liked it best when the men came to visit, especially Captain Scott. He would arrive smiling, with a pocket full of biscuits, and would stop at each stall with a pet and a treat. “Hello, Jehu. And how are you, James Pigg?” he would say. He greeted us all by name, as though we were men like him.

A good long distance from the stable, across the sea ice and along the cliff, there was a place where the men had a little wooden box that did magical things. They liked to open the box and consult with a glass stick that lived inside it. It was as thin as a worm, that little stick, with a red blood vein
running down its middle. But it was a clever little thing. It never spoke, yet somehow told the men just how cold it really was.

Now and then, I was taken there for exercise, between my breakfast and my lunch. There were always two men and two ponies, and the men would always try to guess the temperature as we walked along. The stick would tell them who was right.

It was a lovely walk when the sky was starry bright or flashing with aurora. The ice sparkled everywhere then. The snow crunched, and the men talked in nice low voices, and the air chilled my lungs.

At midwinter, I set out for the box with Patrick, with Victor and Birdie Bowers beside us. The sky was ablaze in sheets of blue and red. It was so beautiful that nobody spoke for a long time. We just trudged along in the crackle of icy snow.

But halfway to the box, the lights began to fade. Clouds swirled in from the Barrier, blotting out the sky. A wind began to blow against us, not strong but so cold that it froze my bones.

The men lowered their heads against it. They stopped speaking. We marched down the tracks of ponies and people.

Soon we were tramping in darkness. No stars to guide us, led only by the marks in the snow, we couldn’t even see the cliffs of the Barrier. The wind whipped the snow around our feet. “Damn, it’s cold,” said Birdie. “Must be thirty below.”

Patrick barely answered, “Nearer to forty, I’d say.”

By the time we arrived at the box, a full blizzard was blowing. Birdie opened the box. He had to take off his mittens to light a match, and his hands were trembling before he could even strike a spark. Three times he tried, only to see the wind
snatch away his little flame. In the box, the stick watched silently.

Finally, Birdie got his fourth match burning. His hands were deep in the box, his face glowing in the tiny flame. His breaths were yellow fogs that gleamed as they drifted apart. He leaned close to the stick. “Thirty-six below,” he said.

“Ah,” said Patrick.

“So you were right.” Birdie threw away his match. He closed the door. “And that’s without the wind.”

We turned our backs to the blizzard and started for the hut. The blowing snow shot past us now, though we could scarcely see it. The tracks we’d followed—even the ones we’d made ourselves just moments before—were being quickly erased. In minutes, there was nothing to guide us.

“Well, this is a fix,” said Birdie Bowers.

Patrick, always the sailor, said he could steer by the wind. So he turned himself to take the blizzard on his shoulder—“by the quarter,” he called it—and led us into the darkness.

The cold was taking his strength. It was slowing not only his legs but his mind. He was going in
almost
the right direction.

Of course I knew where the stable was. I didn’t have to see it or smell it or hear the sounds of men and ponies. Patrick was leading us close enough that we would see the lights from the windows. We wouldn’t blunder past the hut and into the terrible emptiness beyond it.

So I didn’t worry at all. Until the wind changed.

It changed so slowly that Patrick didn’t notice. He just turned as it shifted, step by step, and very quickly we were heading in the wrong direction altogether.

I tried to tug him to the left, but Patrick only tugged me back. I tried again. But then he pulled sharply on my tether. “Stay with me, lad,” he said. “You wander off, you’ll be lost.”

Well, he didn’t understand. We went on and on and on. I kept putting pressure on Patrick’s hand, trying to swing him slowly to the left. But he was bound to keep his shoulder to the wind no matter what, and all I did was make him mad at me.

“Stop that!” he shouted the next time I pulled him.

Birdie raised his head. Great cakes of snow fell from the back of his hat. “Stop what?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“The bloody pony!” snapped Patrick. His voice was angry. “He’s trying to pull me all over the country.”

For a moment, his arm relaxed. I turned to the left as gently as I could. But Patrick noticed. He jerked on my halter, and the frozen leather dug painfully into my skin. “You stupid crock!” he said. “I’ll leave you behind if you don’t want to come.”

It was terrible to have Patrick angry. I snorted and shook my head a bit to show him that I didn’t mean to cause trouble. But he got mad even at that. “I’m warning you, James Pigg!” His hand came up like a club, clenched in its mitten, and he shook it in front of my eye. “What’s the matter with you?” he shouted.

I had seen too many fists come at me not to shy away from his. I turned my head and skittered sideways. So Patrick wrenched me back, then marched me on faster than I wanted to go. I stumbled along, feeling sad and rotten.

Victor and Birdie fell behind us. That thickheaded pony! He was content to follow in my tracks as Patrick led the way, straight for the emptiness of the sea ice. There was one little
spur of shoreline to cross, then nothing ahead but hundreds of miles of empty ice, and the sea where the killer whales lived.

I remembered a boulder that stood on the shoreline. Several times we had stopped there on the way to the box, and the men had climbed to the top of it, to sit and eat their raisins. I tried to see it in my mind, to picture exactly where it was. Then I looked at Patrick, shook my head, and made a spluttering sound with my lips.

He looked back at me, a dim shape turning in the dark. He patted my nose. “All right, lad,” he said. “I’m sorry I was angry.”

He stopped and stroked my ears. He brushed away the snow; he picked frosty icicles from my eyelashes. Then I nudged him with my nose as we started on again, and I turned him just a little to the right. I pressed against him in the friendly way he’d always liked, and so turned him a little bit more, so gently that he didn’t notice. I steered him to the boulder, and it soon loomed in front of us—or nearly—a great mass of snow and rock.

Patrick stopped. He grabbed Birdie’s arm as the little man came up beside him. “Birdie, look,” he said.

Birdie recognized the boulder. “What a stroke of luck to blunder into that,” he said. “A few yards in either direction and we would have walked on to our deaths.”

We turned very sharply and followed the shore. Patrick was so cold and tired that he rested for a minute in a square of window light. He put one knee on the snow and hung his head, and it looked as though he was saying a prayer. Then he got up and brushed himself off, and we hurried the last little bit to the stable.

He didn’t know I’d steered him. He thought blind chance had led us home, and that was fine with me.

Patrick told everybody what a crock I had been on the ice. He sat the next day with Mr. Oates and Cherry, the three huddled around the stove as the blubber burned and hissed. Mr. Oates had his own place; he spent most of his time in the stable. I sometimes thought that he’d rather sit with ponies than with people.

Patrick was on his left, astride a bale of hay. “The little rogue,” he called me. “A real screw he was,” he said.

Of course Mr. Oates had his pipe in his teeth. The smoke drifted up in lazy curves above the stove.

“I got so angry,” said Patrick. “I nearly hit him. It was horrid.”

“Oh, they try everyone’s patience sometimes,” said Mr. Oates. “Stubborn old goats, the lot of them.”

“But not Jimmy Pigg. Not usually,” said Patrick. “That was what made it so strange.” He held his hands toward the stove, warming his palms. “He kept pulling at me. Pulling and pulling. Why would he do that, Titus?”

Mr. Oates shrugged. He was wearing his wind helmet, as he always did in the stable. “It’s hard to say what a horse thinks.”

Cherry laughed. He set his glass eyes into place, twisting them on his nose. “I’ve determined that our ponies have the same intellect as politicians,” he said.