The Winter Pony (15 page)

It was a good day for marching, clear and cold. But Weary couldn’t walk, and Mr. Oates wouldn’t leave him behind. So everyone stayed, with the wind tearing at the tents, whipping flurries over the pony walls.

He was just a few miles from the stable, just a couple of days from a straw bed and a hot stove. He must have known it himself. But, just as surely, I knew that he would never make it, that he would die out there on the Barrier.

The men would build another lonely cairn, to mark the grave of another pony. They would erect a spike of snow in a
world of snow, and it scared me to think of Weary Willy lying in the ice as it carried him slowly to the sea. It would be years and years and years before he reached it, the Barrier moved so slowly. But one day he would tumble out from the edge, frozen and stiff, and the killer whales would tear away his legs. I wondered: Would anyone be there to see him? Would they wonder who he was, and
why
he was, and could they ever guess in a thousand years how far he’d come to get there?

It was a sad day. And it was a sad night that followed, with Weary shivering away, breathing his rasping breaths.

I remembered how stubborn and lazy he’d been. I remembered him fighting the dogs and kicking his wall. But I didn’t want to think about that, so I remembered Jehu instead, until a terrible fear came over me that I would never see
him
again, either. Then I tried to think of happy times in my life from before I knew the Englishmen. But I had to go all the way back to my days running free in the forest, to the time when I had never heard of people.

When the morning came, I tried not to look at Weary. I watched the tents instead, and finally Patrick came out to feed me an oil cake. As I ate the first half, he rubbed the coldness out of my legs. “You’ll be glad to get into your stable, won’t you, James Pigg?” he said. “Any day now.”

He rubbed my shoulders and my neck. He fed me the rest of the oil cake, then peered across the Barrier with his eyes squinted. “Now, who’s that coming this way in such a dreadful hurry?” he asked.

The men came on skis, in long fast strides, driving with their ski poles, pumping with their arms.

Everyone piled out of their tents. We watched the little figures growing larger. The skis flashed sunlight, kicking up sparkles of snow.

“It’s Captain Scott,” said Mr. Oates.

“Yes,” said Birdie Bowers, squinting. “And Thomas Crean, I think.”

He was right. The two men had dashed from the hut at the lonely place and didn’t waste any time by chatting. “Get the ponies moving,” shouted Captain Scott before he’d even joined us. “The ice is going out.”

Mr. Oates looked alarmed. Birdie Bowers stared up at him with the same frightened look. Patrick reached out and touched my shoulder. “Steady, James,” he said, as though to steady himself.

I remembered our trek around the glacier, where Guts had fallen through a hole to the sea. The ice had been dangerous then, the floes already breaking apart. If we couldn’t get back across, and back around the glacier, we’d be stuck on the Barrier when winter came, sure to freeze to death.

“What about Weary Willy?” asked Mr. Oates.

Captain Scott looked toward the poor old pony. Weary stood shivering behind the wall, his nose nearly touching the ground. “Titus, there isn’t much time,” he said.

“I can’t leave him behind.” Mr. Oates tightened his wind helmet. “I shall stay.”

He turned and walked away. Captain Scott watched him for a moment, then sighed. “Wait,” he said. “I’ll stay with you.” He bent down to free his feet from the bindings of his skis.

The rest of us left in a terrible hurry. Tents and camping gear were thrown in a muddle onto the sledges. I and the other ponies were harnessed, and we set off toward the sea. Mr. Crean came with us, leaving his skis for Mr. Oates. My last sight of old Weary was sad but lovely: the pony shivering in his tattered green blanket; a man on each side of him rubbing and petting; the haunting hugeness of the Barrier stretching forever behind them. Then Patrick turned my head and we plodded along in the line.

In the lead were Uncle Bill and Birdie Bowers. At the back were me and Patrick. When we reached the edge of the Barrier, we were spread in a straggly line high above the sea.

Below us, the floating ice was streaked with blue, colored by sea and sky. Through gaps between the floes swam killer whales and leopard seals, while penguins stood, like little specks, scattered all around. The tracks of the dogsleds wove across the ice, broken already by the shifting floes.

A black mist was gathering high above us. It fell quickly, like a thing swooping upon us, and it blotted out the sun as we started down a snowy slope toward the ice. It settled on the land, thick as night, with a feeling of gloom and despair.

Far ahead, Uncle Bill was swallowed by the blackness. I watched for the marks of his big hooves in the snow, and knew he was all right as long as I could see them. Patrick sang to me softly, so I wasn’t afraid.

For once my sledge moved easily. It moved
too
easily on the slope; it nearly ran me over. Patrick had to walk behind and hold it back as I trotted down through the black fog.

At the bottom, I found Uncle Bill and Guts and Nobby and Punch. They were out of breath, their ribs heaving. We all
gathered close together and set off as one, across the floating ice.

Nearly right away, the immense cliff of the Barrier vanished behind us. Birdie Bowers led the way by his compass, as though through a tunnel in the mist. I heard the curious sounds of penguins, the booming breaths of killer whales, the scary creaks and cracks of the ice. Patrick had stopped singing. He tightened his fist in my halter, his knuckles pressing more tightly on my cheek.

The men were anxious to get off the ice. It was thick but not solid. I sometimes felt it shifting underneath me, though the men didn’t seem to notice. As the sledges dragged along, water bubbled up through thin little cracks that split the surface into giant shards.

I snorted and shook my head, hoping the men would see that the ice wasn’t safe. The farther we went, the more I worried. I saw more cracks, wider cracks, and a place where I was sure a pony could fall through. But it was a long time before Birdie Bowers stopped Uncle Bill and looked around with a worried expression.

“I don’t like the look of this ice,” he said.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Mr. Crean.

“I think it’s moving.” Birdie Bowers stamped a foot, as though that tiny weight could shift the ice. “How much farther to the hut, do you think?”

No one could say for sure. We couldn’t see fifty feet in any direction, and Birdie’s compass—though a wizard at finding direction—didn’t have a clue about distance.

“I think we should turn back,” said Birdie. “Make for the
harder ice along the shore. We can give the ponies a rest and wait for the fog to lift.”

The ice creaked just then. It sounded like a great tree swaying in the wind. But out there in the fog, on top of the sea, it was a heart-stopping sound.

Suddenly, every man agreed with Birdie. We wheeled the sledges around and started back along our trail.

“Look at this. Oh, look at this,” said Birdie. Cracks that had been a hair’s thickness when we crossed them were wide enough that a man could slip his thumb inside them. Cherry peered through his glass eyes, but they didn’t let him see any farther through the fog.

We all hurried along, trying to reach solid ice before dark.

It was Nobby who set the pace. He pulled his sledge forward step by step, with growing pauses between them. His breath wheezed and rasped. Even with a man helping him, poor Nobby could not go faster than a snail.

We didn’t make it to the shore. We stopped at the first solid-looking bit of ice, and Birdie had a little walk around, in and out of the fog’s black edge. “It isn’t great,” he said, with an awful worry. “But I think it might do.”

The men built their camp. They spaced the sledges apart, set up our picket line, and piled up crumbly walls of snow. Soon their little stoves were hissing away, and I smelled our mash growing hot and bubbly.

When the sun went down, it brought the darkest night of all my life. I could not see my own hind hooves. I couldn’t see the snow below my head, and I had a terrible thought that I was floating away in the fog. I imagined myself a thousand feet
up, blowing south with the wind, an invisible sea below me. Frightened, I stamped my feet; I touched my nose to the ground, to make sure that it was still there.

Again, I couldn’t sleep. I watched the fog break up hours later, when the moon came out and pushed it away. Then the southern lights flashed blue and green across the sky, and they filled my mind with memories of the northern forests. I remembered running under
northern
lights that were just the same, running at a full gallop with the cold wind in my lungs, my mane blowing back, running just for the sake of running.

It was the last time I had ever run like that, free and fearless. It was before the men had come and taken me. I’d been weighted down ever since by logs and carts and sledges.

The thought made me terribly sad. I looked toward the tents and found it comforting to see them, dark and shadowy against the shining lights.

I could see the other ponies behind their walls, Guts not far away at all, Uncle Bill—asleep, it seemed—his head swaying very slowly. I imagined they were all thinking, like me, of times long past.

The sun came up again, small and meek. It still stretched its long shadows over the ice, but it had lost a great deal of the fierceness and heat it had shown just weeks before. I imagined it was fading away before its winter hibernation.

As the day brightened, I was surprised to see great patches of empty sea all around us. The floe was breaking up. Our own bit of ice was fractured by the narrow sort of cracks that had startled Birdie Bowers. There was one between my feet, another right beside me. A thicker one, wide as a plank, zigzagged under Guts and passed below his wall.

I snorted loudly, hoping the men would come out of their tents.

Then, with an almighty bang, the ice split along the zigzagging line. That crack, in an instant, was wider than a pony, and I was nearly thrown to the ice by the movement of the floe. When I looked at Guts, he was gone.

His wall stood cleaved in two. His tether line hung broken. It was as though an invisible giant had swung a giant axe and opened the ice underneath the pony. The edges of the wall were still crumbling, the blocks toppling into black water. But of Guts, not a hair was showing.

From the tent came a shout. “The ponies!” cried Birdie Bowers. “They’re helping themselves to the oats.”

He thought what he’d heard was a sledge overturning, and he was out of the tent in a flash. He didn’t bother with his boots but came running out in his socks and nearly stepped right through the crack, nearly right off the ice and into the sea. But he caught himself at the edge. He looked left and right, his face drawn into wrinkles and ridges.

“The ice!” he shouted now. “Cherry! Crean! We’re floating out to sea!”

Little Birdie Bowers stepped well back from the gap. He was on one side of it, and I was on the other. I looked up and down, and saw that I was all alone on a little island of ice.