The Winter Pony (30 page)

Christopher:
never tamed; died on the polar journey

Victor:
the favorite of Birdie Bowers; died on the polar journey

Michael:
the playful little pony; died on the polar journey

Snatcher:
strong and steady; died at Shambles Camp, below the Beardmore

Snippets:
the nibbler; died at Shambles Camp

Bones:
a “flier”; died at Shambles Camp

Nobby:
led at times by Captain Scott; died at Shambles Camp

James Pigg:
the Winter Pony; died at the foot of the Gateway

THE PEOPLE

OFFICERS

Captain Robert Falcon Scott:
leader

Lieutenant Edward “Teddy” Evans:
in command of the
Terra Nova

Lieutenant Henry Bowers:
in charge of stores

Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates:
in charge of ponies

Edward Atkinson:
surgeon

SCIENTIFIC STAFF

Apsley Cherry-Garrard:
zoologist

Tryggve Gran:
ski instructor

Cecil Meares:
in charge of dogs

Herbert Ponting:
photographer

Edward “Bill” Wilson:
zoologist, chief of scientific staff

Charles “Silas” Wright:
physicist

THE MEN

Thomas Crean:
petty officer, Royal Navy

Edgar “Taff” Evans:
petty officer, Royal Navy

Robert Forde:
petty officer, Royal Navy

Patrick Keohane:
petty officer, Royal Navy

I learned the story of Captain Scott when I was a young boy. My father made sure of it. As a young boy himself, growing up in Cambridge, England, he had become an explorer of sorts, wandering through the storerooms of Cambridge University, discovering artifacts and photographs of polar expeditions.

Scott was my father’s hero, and so he was mine.

I knew about Lawrence Oates going out into a blizzard on his thirty-second birthday, to die by himself in the hope of saving the others. I knew about the big sailor Taff Evans slowly collapsing, and the little marine—Birdie Bowers—sticking it out to the end. I admired them all. And I loathed Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian scoundrel who had kept his plans a secret so that he might dash to the Pole ahead of the Englishmen. He had stolen their triumph, but not their glory.

In my father’s big blue books—the journals of Scott—I saw pictures that Dr. Wilson had painted in the sunless winter at Cape Evans. I saw a copied page from Scott’s journal, the desperate handwriting of a man who was dying.

So I must have seen the ponies, white and sturdy, pulling the sledges south. But I don’t remember that. And I don’t know if I even wondered what happened to them in the end.

I only found out last year, when I took an old book about Scott on a camping trip. I realized that I had never read his story myself, that everything I knew I had learned from my father.

In the book was a photograph of a pony named James Pigg, with a little anecdote about the day he fell into a crevasse on the Barrier. He was saved only because the men had made him roundly fat with all his little treats. He fell until his belly hit the snow, then jammed in the crack like a cork in a bottle.

Right away I wanted to tell James Pigg’s story. I thought that it would be warmhearted and fun; if I had known how sad it would turn out to be, I might not have started.

I found it hard to write about all the deaths of all the men. But it was even harder to write about the ponies. I became more attached to James Pigg than to any character I’d ever known. He was like a child, I suppose—taken along without a say and never offered a choice, dependent on the men for everything, convinced they would never hurt him. His last day was so miserable that I thought of inventing a different ending. But that wouldn’t have been fair to poor Jimmy Pigg. I wanted more than anything for the story to be true, and I had already strayed here and there from the facts.

The pony’s early life is pure invention, of course. The way
that he comes to join Scott is simplified for the story. But after that, everything that he talks about is true, though it didn’t always happen exactly as he says. Because the real James Pigg did not see every part of the expedition, I thought it was all right for him to
imagine
that he did. A pony’s memories, I decided, can be a bit unreliable. There are four places where the truth is muddled.

Killer whales really did break through the ice, trying to snatch away the dogs. They nearly got Mr. Ponting—the photographer—but not James Pigg.

Captain Scott really did see his dog team plunge into a crevasse. The snow suddenly opened ahead of him, and most of the team sank through it. The lead dog was Osman, and he planted his feet on the far side of the crevasse, just as it says in the story. And Captain Scott really did rescue the dogs by going down through the ice on a rope. But James Pigg was not there to see it. He did not save the dog.

Three ponies really did come to their end as they tried to cross the sea ice. Guts and Punch and Uncle Bill died exactly as described in the story. But James Pigg was taken on a different route by Patrick Keohane, and saw none of these events.

The men really did exercise the ponies through the long black winter by leading them to a remote weather station. But it was Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Birdie Bowers who lost their way back to the hut until they stumbled onto a familiar landmark. James Pigg wasn’t with them, and I only imagined that ponies steered the men.

By the time I finished
The Winter Pony
, my impression of Scott had changed. I admired him a little less, and Amundsen a lot more. I realized that it wasn’t just good luck and bad manners that let the Norwegians triumph.

It was sad to see that, but not really surprising.

For sixty years after Scott’s death, he was a great hero: Amundsen was a scoundrel. Oh, there were people who whispered a different story, but nobody listened. Statues went up, books were written, movies were made, and every one of them praised the Englishman.

Then in 1979 a book came out that changed all that. It attacked Scott at every turn, accusing him of countless errors and oversights, blaming him for the deaths of his men. When Scott’s journals told of doubts and regrets, they were a faithful record. When they spoke of bravery, of heroism, they were just a pack of lies. Altogether, it was an excellent book, but I don’t want to name it, I was so annoyed by the writer. He was like the old archaeologists who opened ancient tombs for others to plunder. The writers who came after him chipped away pieces of Scott’s reputation.

It seems a shame, really. The story of Scott is a tale of obsession, of courage and sacrifice. It’s one of the greatest ever lived, and Scott is still my hero.

So I hope this story doesn’t make people hate him, or assess him too harshly. While it seems very wrong to treat ponies like walking sacks of dog food, it isn’t fair to judge the past by modern standards. Scott was nothing if not kind to his ponies. I believe it was that very kindness—his reluctance to push the animals too hard in the first year of his expedition—that killed him.

If he hadn’t worried about Weary Willy and the others, his huge cache of supplies at One Ton Depot would have been placed at eighty degrees south latitude. Instead, it was thirty miles north of there, thirty miles farther from the Pole. He knew he was taking a chance but was loath to lose the ponies.

On the long struggle home from the Pole, in the second year of the expedition, Scott passed that more southern point of eighty degrees. But he never reached the second one. He died eleven miles from One Ton Depot. He had lost his wager—the lives of five men against the lives of five ponies.

In his last lonely camp on the Barrier, Scott wrote a letter to the public. Their donations had paid for his expedition, and he wanted to explain why Amundsen had beaten him, why he and four others would never get home.

“We took risks,” he wrote. “We knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.

“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”

He is still there today, sealed in his tent and buried in snow. Side by side with Birdie Bowers and Bill Wilson, he shuffles along in the moving ice of the Barrier, every year coming inches closer to the tumbling edge at the ocean.

The body of Titus Oates is somewhere behind him, never recovered. A bit farther along lies Taff Evans, both following Scott in their cold sleep. And the bones of the ponies move along with them.

On that great shelf of ice, nothing lasts forever. One day, the whole thing may be gone. But in the sky above the Barrier are points of navigation that never move at all. They’re used by pilots to track their courses across Antarctica. And in 2010, those points were named in honor of the ponies and dogs that served in man’s race to the South Pole.

Now five of Scott’s ponies are remembered forever as points in the sky. There’s Snippets and Bones and Jehu and Nobby. And there’s Jimmy Pigg as well.

I think it’s a beautiful tribute.

It took Captain Scott a year and a half to travel from England to the South Pole. It took me a year and a half to write about it.

Captain Scott battled storms at sea, killer whales and calving glaciers, crushing ice and gaping crevasses, frostbite and hunger and blinding blizzards. I got cold one day and put on a sweater.

I can only imagine the ordeals that were faced by Captain Scott. But, like him, I relied on others to get where I was going.

As usual, the first person I called on was Kathleen Larkin of the Prince Rupert Library. She helped me with photographs and horseshoes and the thinking of ponies. She wrote to the
Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England, which answered many questions about Scott’s little ponies.

The next was my father. He had taught me about Scott when I was a boy, and was delighted to hear that I wanted to write about the man who had always been his hero. He took it upon himself, in his eighty-ninth year, to go through the two volumes of Scott’s published journals and note every reference to the pony named James Pigg. He lent me books he’s owned for more than fifty years, big thick books with big thick pages, so treasured that I was scared to open them.

To understand horses, I turned to my fourteen-year-old niece, Shauna Wells. She gave me a small library of horse stories, and explained with great patience why James Pigg might have done the things he’d done a hundred years before. A lot of others helped me with questions about horses, including Kelly Berthelot, Lillian Kuehl, Tom and Kerry Marcus, and Thomas Uhlig.

For the story itself, I relied, as I always do, on my editor, Françoise Bui, and on my agents, Danielle Egan-Miller and Joanna Mackenzie. They set me off on the right course and warned me if I was going astray. As problems arose, I talked them over with my partner, Kristin Miller, and my old friend Bruce Wishart.

The sadness of the story often wore me down. Many people picked me up again without even knowing it, often with just a smile or a kind word. They include my brothers and my sister, my friends on Gabriola Island, and those both up and down the coast. To all of them, and to those named here, I extend my very deepest thanks.

IAIN LAWRENCE studied journalism in Vancouver, British Columbia, and worked for small newspapers in the northern part of the province. He settled on the coast, in the port city of Prince Rupert; he now lives on the Gulf Islands. His previous novels include
The Giant-Slayer, The Séance, Gemini Summer, B for Buster, Lord of the Nutcracker Men, Ghost Boy
, and
The Lightkeeper’s Daughter
. He is also the author of the Curse of the Jolly Stone trilogy—
The Convicts, The Cannibals
, and
The Castaways
—and the High Seas trilogy—
The Wreckers, The Smugglers
, and
The Buccaneers
.