The Winter Pony (20 page)

Well, that made me very proud. A politician! I whinnied in my stall and nudged the manger board to make it rattle.

“Yes, hello there, James Pigg,” said Patrick. He turned to look at me, and I was pleased to see his old smile, nearly as wide as his face.

But it was a few days later before I really knew he liked me again. It was an embarrassing moment, just at lunchtime.

The men always took away our manger boards and hung the little troughs on the next board down, so we could reach them more easily. They tied our heads with two ropes, one to each side of our stalls, to make sure we didn’t steal from our neighbors.

Somehow—I wouldn’t have thought it was possible—I tangled myself in my head ropes. I dribbled some mash on the floor, tried to reach it, and got all twisted around until I couldn’t move.

Mr. Oates was ladling mash for Christopher. Patrick, moving ahead of him, was setting up a trough for old Snatcher. I tried to call out to them, but I couldn’t make a sound. The ropes were choking me.

Mr. Oates moved down to Snatcher’s trough, his ladle dripping mash. Patrick kept ahead, now lifting the manger board from Victor’s stall.

I pulled at the ropes, but they only twisted more tightly. Then I lost my balance and tumbled to the floor. I hung from the ropes, and couldn’t breathe at all.

For a while, I writhed and flailed. Then into my mind came an old picture: the enormous gate, the snow, the ponies’ place. I hadn’t thought of it since my days in the forest, but I
saw it clearly, as though I was right at the gateway. It was shiny and bright, almost blinding with its sparkles. While the stable around me was fading into darkness, the gateway shone brighter than ever. It was so beautiful that I groaned.

Mr. Oates heard me. His bucket of mash clattered to the floor as he shouted, “Jimmy Pigg!” He ran down the stalls, pushing Patrick aside. He whipped a knife from his belt and cut my ropes. And as I fell to the floor, the picture of the ponies’ place shimmered away into nothing.

It was Patrick who came into my stall and got me up on my feet. He rubbed my ears and stroked my neck, and he stayed with me for more than an hour. But he didn’t talk until Mr. Oates left the stable. Then he threw an arm around my neck and hugged me so tightly that it nearly hurt.

“What a scare you gave me,” he said. “What a fright.”

He rubbed his face in my hair. “I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you, lad,” he said. Then he looked around, and his Irish voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re a lovely lad, James Pigg.”

By midwinter, the men who sat around the blubber stove hardly talked anymore. They had nothing left to say, and a friendly sort of silence hung over them. They just worked away in silence, making different types of snowshoes that they hoped would suit the ponies.

Still, once in a while a man would begin to speak, and it was always about one of two things: the South Pole or his home. He would wonder what it was like at the Pole, how long
it would take to reach it, how long to get back. Or he might worry about the things in the way, like the enormous glacier called the Beardmore, with all its cliffs and crevasses. But I liked it best when the man told a little story about someone at his home. There would be a rumble of laughter for a moment then, before the silence settled in again.

As the months went by, their conversations changed a little bit. They began to connect the Pole and their homes into the same thought and tried to imagine what it would be like to finally get home from the Pole. Sometimes it pleased them, when they thought of their mothers and their wives. But sometimes it scared them, when they imagined how people would pester them to hear the story of their adventures, how their lives would suddenly be loud and busy.

I didn’t like that sort of talk so much, because it always made me think of my own home. And I could never quite see how
I
would get back. It didn’t seem possible that I would ever see the forest again, and that made me frightened and sad. I had to stomp on the floor to make the men look up, laughing, and talk of something else.

Winter stretched on and on, until it seemed that spring would never come. I wondered if the sun had died in his wintering place, and if the moon was now the king of the sky. But one day at lunchtime, a glow appeared on the distant horizon, and I knew the sun was alive and that he was waking up.

Every day, his light brightened. Then he peeked over the horizon, and a great beam of yellow light shot across the ice. The men all looked, and the men all cheered.

From then on, I thought, it would be easy. But just a day or two later, I felt a twinge in my stomach as I was standing in
my stall. I looked at my belly, thinking I might see a little creature pushing at my skin from the inside. The pain shot through me, sharper than before. It made me snort and stomp my foot.

Then it got a lot worse. It felt as though the creature in there had suddenly twisted all my guts into a knot. I squealed. I tried to kick my belly to knock him away. I called out for Patrick, for Mr. Oates or Captain Scott, for anyone to come and help me.

There was no one in the stable.

The creature kept twisting and pulling my guts. I wanted to lie down, but there wasn’t room. I had to fold my front legs and press my belly against the frozen earth. But that only made the thing angry, and he tried to kick me back on my feet.

My legs slipped away from under me. I bashed against the wall and flailed with my hooves.

The noise brought the watchman. He came into the stable half amused and half annoyed, thinking Nobby or Bones was up to his old tricks. He talked in a policeman’s sort of voice. “Now, now, what’s all this, then?”

When he saw me lying on the ground, panting and frightened, he raced from the stable, shouting for Mr. Oates.

Mr. Oates came right away and climbed straight into my stall. He hadn’t even bothered with his boots but had run through the snow in his socks. There were little balls of snow stuck to the wool around his toes.

Patrick arrived behind him. He leaned over the manger board as Mr. Oates ran his hands along my belly and ribs, chasing the creature in there.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Patrick.

“I’m not certain.” Mr. Oates kept pressing with his fingers. “I think it’s colic.”

“Is it serious?” asked Patrick.

“Sometimes. We have to get him up.” Mr. Oates stood over me, straddling my neck.

Then when he pulled me up, I was so bad I tried to nip him with my teeth. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wrenched my neck around to bite his wrist. I heard my teeth snap and grind. It would have meant a whipping for me with a Russian, but Mr. Oates stayed calm and gentle. “It’s all right, James Pigg,” he said. “You’ll be right as rain in a minute.”

The men got me out of the stall and into the corridor. They took me out to the ice where the aurora flickered. Mr. Oates, still in his socks, walked me in a circle. Spasm after spasm twisted through my stomach, and I didn’t know if I wanted to run away or roll on my back or struggle and kick. I wanted to do them all at once. But Mr. Oates held my halter and kept me walking.

Patrick watched. “He’s going to be all right,” he said. “Isn’t he, sir?”

“I think so. It’s hard to say just yet,” said Mr. Oates.

“I’ve promised him the Pole.”

Mr. Oates looked at my friend with a strange expression. “I’ll do all that I can,” he said. And he did. He walked me around and around in my own tracks. He sent Patrick for a hot blanket and rubbed it on my belly. Then he said, “Patrick, do you think you might fetch my boots?”

Soon I was feeling a bit better. The creature inside still pulled at my belly, but he was fading away. I enjoyed trudging through the cold with Mr. Oates, as the southern lights danced
through the sky above us. The snow crunched under our feet, and Mr. Oates talked about things that were silly and things that were not.

“So Patrick’s promised you the Pole,” he said. “Poor fellow. Does he really think he’s going?”

A shimmer of blue spread across the sky above us. Mr. Oates watched it flicker and fade. “We can’t all go trooping off toward the Pole like a lot of schoolboys. It’s only a few who’ll get the chance,” he said. “Oh, we’ll all do the work. We’ll hump everything up and over that glacier. But just a few will go on from there. Just a few will get the glory.”

We walked around the circle. I could feel Mr. Oates thinking, a big whirl of thoughts going through his mind.

“I’m not at all sure if I’ll get the chance. But given the choice, who could say no?” he asked.

We stayed out there for hours, though the night was bitterly cold. The creature died inside me, the pain went away, and I felt like eating again. When Mr. Oates took me back to my stall, I tucked right into my dinner. Captain Scott came to see me, looking very worried. But I already felt a lot better, and by morning, I was good as new.

According to the stick in the wooden box, it was sixty degrees below zero in the winter night. Though the blubber stove sizzled away, the cold came up through the ground and filled every corner of the stable.

My skin grew itchy. Some of the other ponies were itchy
as well, and we rubbed ourselves against the walls of the stable. We rolled in the ice whenever we could. We rubbed our hair away in great patches, but the itching went on until the men discovered that lice were living in our hair. Then Mr. Oates washed us down with water and tobacco, and that took care of the lice.

Bones got colic next. He nearly died, but Mr. Oates got him through it. And after that, there were no more troubles. Spring was really coming, and the sun was out for hours every day, stretching his legs across the northern sky.

Every man worked to get ready for the big push to the Pole. Birdie Bowers sorted out his stores and supplies. Mr. Meares began to practice with his dogs, and others tinkered with the dreadful motor sledges.

Captain Scott supervised it all. He came nearly every day to the stable, looked us over and talked to Mr. Oates. “I’m relying on this lot,” he said. “If they don’t hold up, we lose the Pole.”

Mr. Oates was doing his best. He made fancy new blankets that would keep us warmer on the Barrier. Then he tried out different ways to stop the sun from blinding us. First he dyed our forelocks darker. Then he made us little fringes, but Jehu ate mine right away. So he made us bonnets instead, with visors to shield our eyes.

At the same time, Captain Scott experimented with our snowshoes. He wanted them bigger, but not so big that they’d trip us up. I thought they might work, but I didn’t like to wear them. It didn’t feel right to walk around with baskets on my feet. One of the sailors had a different idea, things like baggy
socks that slid right over our hooves. But he couldn’t figure out how to hold them on. In the end, when Captain Scott gave up, I wasn’t disappointed.

Every day, the dogs dashed around for exercise, one team racing another with their funny little sledges. The sun kept moving higher, and the days grew slowly warmer.

In the north, I had always liked to see the springtime come. All the plants put on their leaves. Animals traded their heavy coats for lighter ones. Snow disappeared, and rivers rose, and the whole world seemed to change.

But here it was different. Everything looked pretty much the same, just a little warmer and brighter.

The only thing that really changed was the men. The sun perked them up like the northern plants, making them straighter and stronger. They laughed more often, though only on the outside. I could feel their worries growing bigger and bigger as they got ready to leave for the Pole.