The Winter Pony (6 page)

Just the sound of his voice was calming. I lay heaving on the floor as he untangled my legs. The big round face of Taff Evans peered down at me over the boards. Then he joined Mr. Oates in my stall, and the two of them hauled me to my feet just as my mother had done on the day I was born. They held me up till I found my balance. They braced me against the side.

“There you go, Jimmy,” said Taff Evans. “Up on your pegs, eh. Bob’s your uncle.”

When he saw that I was safe, Mr. Oates hurried away. I could hear the ponies struggling in the dark space inside the ship, screaming as they bashed against the wood.

At the stern stood Captain Scott, as ragged as a scarecrow. He steered to the east with the wind behind him. To me, the ship seemed frightened. It ran at a crazy speed, hurtling through the waves. Captain Scott didn’t seem worried. But I thought the ship had bolted and was running just for the sake of running.

I
didn’t know that two ponies had died until I saw their bodies being hoisted through the skylight.

It was awful to see them so slack and limp, as lifeless as the bags of coal. A group of sailors dragged the bodies across the deck, waited until the ship rolled heavily, then heaved them over the rail. Poor Mr. Oates looked brokenhearted.

I saw him leaning against the rigging, staring into the sea, and I wished I could go and prop him up, as he had held me through the storm. I knew what he was thinking, that it had not been fair to the ponies to drag them half a world away from forest and field, to see them die in a ship on the ocean. I imagined that he was afraid the ponies hated him for it.

All the men stopped work for a moment as the dead ponies
plunged into the sea. Spray flew up and splattered on Mr. Oates’s boots. He looked horrified by that. Then the sailors went back to work, but Mr. Oates stayed where he was. He got out his pipe and lit it, and turned up his face to the sky.

Compared to me, he was small and frail. But at that instant, he seemed as strong as an ox, and I knew I would follow him to the end of the earth if that was where he cared to lead me.

South, south, forever to the south, the ship moved along over rounded waves, to wherever it was we were going.

We saw the first iceberg of the voyage. It was far to the west, hard for me to see at all. The men were all excited, shouting at each other to look. I leaned to the right and peered between two rows of packing crates. I saw the iceberg far away as sunlight glowed on its top. It looked to me like a lump of sugar, glistening on a gray plate of sea and sky.

On that same day, we saw sleek fish that the men called dolphins, a very playful sort of fish. The men gathered in the bow to watch them roll and spin. It gave me a small pang to see Mr. Oates among them, smiling so broadly that I wondered if he preferred fish over ponies.

The dogs, of course, went into a barking frenzy at the puffing sound of dolphin breaths. They did the same with the birds and the chunks of ice that began to appear in the following days. Soon, there was ice all around us, and birds all above us, and the dogs were seldom silent. The photographer, a man named Mr. Ponting, took pictures of everything that moved and many things that didn’t.

Then the ice grew thicker, and soon the ship could go no farther. We sat in a field of white slabs that stretched forever in all directions. The sails furled, the engine stilled; we just floated there, waiting for a channel to appear.

We waited for hours. We waited for days. The men grew bored with all the waiting and just stood along the rails and up on the mast, for once as mindless as the dogs. They pointed out everything that moved, from the great whales spouting among the floes, to the tiniest of birds. They shouted at some of the things. They shot at others, the hollow bark of their guns a flat sound with no echo. But mostly they laughed, and they laughed particularly loudly at the fat little birds they called penguins, the sorriest sort of bird I’d ever seen.

Standing upright on flat feet, with little round bellies and stubby wings, the penguins came waddling toward us in huge numbers. All black and white, like little men in little suits, they swayed from side to side. They sometimes toppled over. Far in the distance, I could see more coming, and more behind those, and distant dark specks, all moving in columns and rows.

Now and then the ice parted with a shudder, and the ship moved along again, sometimes under sail and sometimes with the engine. Some days we gained less than a mile, and on others we slipped backward, carried along in the floes. Once in a while we came to a bit of open water and sailed a long way, only to jam up in the ice again and begin our waiting all over.

All the days were the same, except for one called Christmas. On that day, Mr. Oates brought me a special sort of biscuit. Then Taff Evans brought an oil cake, and I could
hardly believe my luck to get two fine treats in one day, for doing nothing but standing in my stall. But Christmas wasn’t even finished yet. Captain Scott came by after dinner, and three or four others after him, all arriving one by one. I got more treats and pets that day than I’d had in my whole life before it.

The last to come was a sailor named Patrick Keohane, who had a funny way of talking because he lived in a place called Ireland. He gave me a piece of apple, the first I’d had in a very long time. Then he stood for a while and petted me. “Do you know they’ll all be in church in Ireland just now?” he said. “Yes, sitting in church, and probably saying a prayer for me too. All day I’ve been thinking of them. Oh, I was missing my home this morning.” The sailor’s hands were tough and red. He squeezed my ear in his fist, in a way that was firm and gentle at the same time. “I was thinking of the sheep. Of the shamrocks,” he said. “Everything’s green in Ireland, all the year round. You’d fancy that, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded my head. I snorted softly as I pressed against him. He stroked the side of my nose.

“You poor thing; you’ve no idea what you’re in for.” He chuckled quietly. “I’m not even sure that I know it myself. But I’ve got a sense of what’s coming, and you don’t, and I wonder: Who’s the lucky one, then? Oh, I’d change places with you quick enough, I think.”

He might have stayed and talked to me for a long time. But another sailor came by, and Mr. Keohane suddenly seemed a bit embarrassed to be talking to a pony. He gave me a friendly cuff, then moved slowly away.

“Merry Christmas to you, James Pigg,” he said.

The sun swung very low in the north. The ice turned to many colors, to many shades of blue and red. Then down in the ship, the men started singing. Their songs were solemn and slow, but I felt happy that night, like a shipmate of them all.

On the last day of the year, Captain Scott saw the mountains on the land ahead. He was standing at the rail with his head poking over a packing crate, staring eagerly to the south like a groundhog poking its head from a hole.

When he saw the mountains, he cheered. Then everyone looked, and everyone cheered, and I could feel an excitement sweep over the ship like a fire. Even the dogs stirred restlessly, sensing that something had changed, or that something was about to happen. Captain Scott wore an expression of triumph, as though his goal had been only to
see
the mountains, that he could now turn the ship around and head for home.

But the ship pressed on. The ice ground against the hull, forced aside as we moved south toward those mountains. And two hours later, though it didn’t matter to me, one year ended and another began.

In the counting of men, it was now 1911.

On the third day of the year, we saw the land along the sea. What a terrible place we’d come to, a world that seemed to guard itself with giant walls of ice and rock. There were mountains like dogs’ teeth, and one with a plume of smoke streaming from a rounded top, as though a great fire burned inside it. Glaciers tumbled down between the peaks and
calved into the sea with a constant roar and thunder. The cliff at the face of the glaciers was higher than the masts of the ship, and blocks of ice as big as houses split away and tumbled into the water. The sea churned at the foot of it, where icebergs rolled and tilted.