The Winter Pony (28 page)
I pushed my nose up against him. I made the sound of contentment, but he didn’t understand. He thought I was looking for biscuits in the padding of his pockets.
“Oh, lad, I haven’t any more,” he said. But he felt through his pockets anyway, and he found the smallest crumb of a biscuit, no bigger than a sugar cube.
I licked it from the fingers of his glove. Then I kept licking, enjoying the feel of the wool, all the scents and tastes of the man I loved so much. Behind me, the pistol cracked again. There was another thud, then the sound of Mr. Oates coming to get me.
“Oh, James Pigg.” Patrick put his arms around me. He pressed his face against my hair. “I’m going to miss you dearly,” he said. “You’re such a good lad, James Pigg.”
Mr. Oates let me walk as slowly as I liked. He didn’t make me hurry at all for my last few yards. He led me near to Snippets and Snatcher and Bones and Nobby, all sprawled out on the snow as though they were sleeping.
The dogs were coming now, running up from the south with a spray of powder flying up from their feet. They made a white haze of their own, half hiding Mr. Meares at the back of the sledge. I heard their barks and howls.
Then Mr. Oates swung me around, and I was facing the Beardmore. It looked again like my old vision of the ponies’ place, and I wondered if I’d been right about that. I had come close already to finding the things I’d imagined: a heated stable, blankets made warm by the stove. I had seen men step into the harness and share my load. Men had served me, building walls to keep me sheltered, feeding me biscuits and oil cakes.
Mr. Oates put the end of his gun to my head. I could
see how much he hated doing it, but I couldn’t quite sense his feelings. It was as though he had shut them off, or shut them out, and in his mind was only the job of aiming his pistol.
“So long, James Pigg,” he said. “If there’s a heaven for horses, I’ll find my way there.” Then he pulled the trigger.
I went up the Gateway at a gallop. I flew across the snow like a colt again. In a moment, I was over the summit and hurtling down to the Beardmore. Snow turned to ice under my hooves and I ran along with a clatter, up to the rocky pillars, up to the arch of clouds.
My mane streaming back, my hooves flashing, I rounded the turn in the glacier and saw a huge white plain, and a stable up ahead. It looked warm and rosy-bright inside, with a little chimney wisping smoke, little windows glowing. The snow had melted from the roof and lay in huge mounds below the eaves.
The door swung open as I neared it. I saw Jehu in there, and old Uncle Bill and Hackenschmidt. I heard my mother cry from a line of ponies that seemed to stretch ahead for mile after mile after mile. And I raced over the threshold, onto a floor that was padded with straw.
The ponies all whinnied to greet me.
It’s the middle of December of 1911, nearly Midsummer Day in the high south. Captain Scott and his men set up a camp at the foot of the mountains, within a mile of the Gateway
.
On the ground lie five dead ponies. They have done their job and soon they’ll be butchered. Captain Scott writes in his journal, “Poor beasts! They have done wonderfully well considering the terrible circumstances under which they worked, but yet it is hard to have to kill them so early.”
He names the place Shambles Camp
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The men and the dogs go on up the glacier. The storm has covered the ice in thick, fresh snow, the worst conditions that Scott has ever seen. He wishes he could have the luck of Shackleton, who’d found clear blue ice in the same place at the same time of year
.
He thinks of Amundsen off to the east. Is the Norwegian suffering under the same conditions? Or do the constant storms blow only against the Englishmen?
After a day and a half of steady climbing, Scott sends back the dogs. From now on, it’s nothing but man-hauling, up the long Beardmore and over the polar plateau. The plateau is higher than the Barrier by nearly two miles
.
More depots are planted along the way, and men are sent back as their sledges are emptied. Scott writes of the disappointment of men whose hopes for the Pole are dashed forever. At the top of the glacier, it’s the end of the trek for Dr. Atkinson and Silas Wright, for Patrick Keohane and Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Just eight men are left, just two teams plodding south, the first led by Scott, the second by Commander Teddy Evans. The second team is tired. On the last day of the year, Commander Evans and his men cache their skis and another hundred pounds of unnecessary gear. The next day, the first of 1912, they rebuild their sledge, making it smaller and lighter. But they still have to struggle to keep up with Scott
.
Three days later, the team is sent home. One of the men has come so close to the Pole that he weeps as he turns back
.
With a hundred and fifty miles to go, Captain Scott has his polar team. There’s his old friend Bill Wilson, the doctor who went with him on Shackleton’s expedition. There’s the big sailor Taff Evans, the most powerful man on the expedition, who represents “the lower deck,” and makes the expedition equal. And there’s Lawrence Oates, who did so well with the ponies. From the very beginning, Scott has planned that four men will reach the Pole
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But now, at the last minute, he plucks another from the supporting party. He takes little Birdie Bowers. And five men, harnessed together, pull the last sledge to the south
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Scott is content with his choice. “I think it’s going to be all right,” he says in his journal. “We have a fine party going forward and arrangements are all going well.” But the five men share food that was meant for four. Worst, they’re short one pair of skis. Birdie Bowers has to go on foot and struggle to keep up, trotting along in the midst of the group
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On the sixth of January they pass 88 degrees, with a hundred and twenty miles to go. Every hour takes them a mile and a quarter nearer to the Pole, each man moving in silent thought. “What lots of things we think of on these monotonous marches!” writes Scott. “What castles one builds now hopefully that the Pole is ours.”
Another day, another march, and they pass beyond the point where Ernest Shackleton turned back in 1909. In his tent that night, within a hundred miles of the Pole, Scott writes in his journal, “I suppose I have made the most southerly camp.”
But he can’t be certain of that. The question must haunt him: Where is Amundsen? Did the Norwegian find a new route through the mountains? Could his dogs cope with the glacier? Has he turned back, defeated, or is he somewhere up ahead? Has he reached the Pole already?
On the eighth, a blizzard prevents the men from moving on. Dr. Wilson dresses a nasty cut on Evans’s hand. Though the wait is frustrating, the men are thankful for a day’s rest. It takes all their effort to haul their sledge ten miles in a day, and they have never worked so hard in their lives
.
On the fifteenth of January, they make their camp less than thirty miles from the Pole. They plant their last depot, a tiny thing with just four days’ worth of food, and set off eagerly in the morning. With twenty miles to go, they stop for lunch, then press on again in high spirits
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Then, not two hours later, Birdie Bowers sees a strange sight
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To him, it looks like a cairn standing out on the plateau. But he isn’t sure, and he says it might be a pile of snow, a drift or a wave. Then a black speck appears, and they all know
that
isn’t natural
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They find a flag, and the remains of a camp where the tracks of many dogs, of sledges and skis, are printed in the snow
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“This told us the whole story,” writes Scott. “The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole. It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions.”
The Englishmen are all feeling the cold. Their hands and feet are frozen. But they go on, of course. The next day, the seventeenth of January, 1912, they reach the South Pole
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This is the day that Scott has been working toward for more than ten years, for the whole of the century. He has planned for it, and dreamed of it, but now he calls it “a horrible day.” Amundsen has beaten him. The remains of the Norwegian’s camp lie scattered around the Pole, on the frozen wasteland at the very bottom of the world
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“Great God!” writes Scott. “This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”
One of Amundsen’s tents is still standing. Inside are bags of mitts and sleeping socks and various bits of gear. There is a note dated almost exactly a month earlier, on a day when Scott and his men were still struggling up the Beardmore. It asks Scott to deliver a letter to King Haakon announcing the Norwegians’ victory, just in case they don’t make it home themselves
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Scott takes the note and leaves his own, a record that he was there, that the Englishmen had reached the Pole
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“We built a cairn,” he writes, “put up our poor slighted Union Jack, and photographed ourselves—mighty cold work all of it.”
Then they turn to the north, with eight hundred miles of solid dragging ahead of them
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“Good bye to most of the day-dreams,” writes Scott in his journal
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Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. “I wonder if we can do it.”
At last the wind blows at the backs of the Englishmen. They hoist a sail on their sledge and harness this thing that has caused them so much misery all the way to the Pole
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But the wind is still their enemy. It rises to a blizzard, hiding the tracks that lead to their buried supplies. Soon it will swing around and blow in their faces again
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Scott knows he has pressed his luck. He had planned to be back at One Ton Depot on March 20, at Hut Point a week later. To do it, he has to walk more than six hundred miles in sixty days, and already it’s a struggle for the men. Their boots are wearing out; their
bodies
are wearing out. Oates feels the cold badly in his feet, but Taff Evans is the worst. His hands have never healed and now are badly blistered. There’s frostbite on his nose
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Just six days out from the Pole, Scott writes, “Things beginning to look a little serious.”
The weather is atrocious. “Blizzards are our bugbear,” says Scott, “not only stopping our marches, but the cold damp air takes it out of us.”
They plod down their ghostly tracks, following them so exactly that they stumble across small things they had lost on the way to the Pole: a pair of night boots belonging to Evans, mittens that Bowers had dropped, the Soldier’s treasured pipe
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It’s the end of January now, with temperatures falling. Scott sounds hopeful one day, despairing the next, as he records the failing of his team. Dr. Wilson sprains a tendon and his leg swells up. Two of Taff Evans’s fingernails fall away. More troubling, the big sailor is beginning to lose heart
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On February 7, they reach the depot at the top of the Beardmore, only to find that a biscuit tin is missing, a full day’s rations vanished. “Bowers is dreadfully disturbed about it,” says Scott
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Despite the cold, despite their troubles and their hunger, the men stop along the glacier to collect fossils picked out by Dr. Wilson. They add thirty-five pounds of rock to their sledge
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By the tenth, they have only two days’ worth of food remaining, and at least two marches down the glacier to the next depot. And another blizzard is blowing snow across the surface, hiding not only their landmarks but the deep crevasses in the ice. Scott must reduce rations or march blindly if the weather doesn’t clear
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They lose their way on the glacier. They think their proper track is off to their left, then off to their right, and they blunder back and forth. That night they think they’re on course, but they’re not sure. They halve their rations, and are prepared to halve them again if they don’t make progress
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“In a critical situation,” writes Scott the next day. Their morning march has taken them within sight of an old camp, but the afternoon has found them lost among crevasses and fissures. With one meal remaining, Scott isn’t sure they’ll reach the next depot
.
In fog and haze they wrestle their sledge down the Beardmore.
Evans cries out, “There’s the depot!” He thinks he has seen a cairn, but it’s only a shadow on the snow. Then, suddenly, Dr. Wilson spots a flag, and the five men have a lunchtime feast at the old depot
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Then it’s off again, on toward the next cache on the lower glacier. There’s food for three and a half days, and thirty miles to go
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Bowers and Wilson are snow-blind. Oates is bothered by the old wound in his leg. Taff Evans has an enormous blister on his foot, and his mind is beginning to fray
.
The snow is soft, the temperature hovering between zero and ten degrees. The men sweat heavily while they work, then freeze when they stop, and their clothes never dry out. Evans slows them down, finding small excuses to halt the march, to get out of his harness and leave the others to do the hauling. He falls behind, then staggers along—alone—trying to catch up
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On February 17, near the foot of the glacier, Evans stops to tie his boots. He asks for a bit of string and says, cheerfully, that he’ll be along soon enough. The others go on with the sledge, and when they stop for lunch, they can see the big sailor far behind, plodding through the snow. They pitch their tent, eat their meal. When they look out again, Evans can’t be seen
.
All four hurry toward him on skis
.
“I was first to reach the man,” Scott writes the next day, “and shocked at his appearance. He was on his knees with clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frostbitten, and a wild look in his eyes.”