The Winter Pony (29 page)

In slow speech, Evans says he thinks that he fainted. The men pull him up, but he falls again. So Oates stays with him while the other three bring the sledge. By the time Evans has been hauled to the tent, he’s unconscious. He dies without waking, just after midnight
.

Less than half an hour later, the men pack up and move on. They reach their depot, sleep for five hours, then march down through the Gateway to Shambles Camp
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They’re back on the Barrier now, with its swampy snow and fragile crust. Their skis and sledge runners leave deep tracks; they can see them for miles behind them. But the old tracks of returning teams are so faint, they’re hard to find. Progress is terribly slow. In the Barrier nights, the temperature swings well below zero now. Scott feels winter settling in around them
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Two days’ travel brings them to Desolation Camp, where the blizzard had pinned them for four days. They look for buried pony meat but find nothing
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There’s a northerly wind that freezes them through and through. But they drag themselves on: five miles in one day, seven in another. On the next, they struggle for eight and a half miles, and Scott writes, “We can’t go on like this.”

They pass old cairns, old pony walls, worrying that they’ve lost their way until the next little relic comes into view. They pass a whole camp without seeing it, and when they pitch their camp on the empty Barrier, the thought comes over Scott that he might never find the route again
.

It’s Bowers’s sharp eyes that save them. He sees a crumbling cairn in the distance, and it leads them to the next one, and on to Southern Barrier Depot, where the next disaster greets the men. There’s a shortage of oil, which alarms Captain Scott. Returning parties have opened the tins and taken their share. But the leather washers, once disturbed, have allowed the oil to evaporate, and now Scott and his men must ration their fuel
.

At the Mid-Barrier Depot, on the first of March, Oates asks Dr. Wilson to look at his feet. The Soldier’s toes are very badly
frostbitten. He has been marching in agony for the last few days, trying to hide his condition. That’s a second blow for Scott, followed immediately by a third. The temperature plummets to forty below and a howling wind covers the Barrier in blowing snow
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At least the wind is from the south. The men hoist the sail on their sledge
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But the surface is so bad that a day’s march takes the men only three and a half miles. Their lives depend on reaching the next cache, but it’s One Ton Depot that lures them on with its huge stocks of food and fuel. Scott isn’t sure they can do it. It’s been four months since they left the old hut at the edge of the sea ice, a hundred and twenty nights spent in tents on the Barrier and the Beardmore and the polar plateau. “We are in a very queer street,” he writes that night, “since there is no doubt we cannot do the extra marches and feel the cold horribly.”

The wind turns again. Blizzards cover the Barrier with woolly crystals that make sledging nearly impossible. The Soldier is lame now, limping in the harness. In grim marches, not five miles a day, they battle on to the next depot, only to find another disappointment: The caches of food and oil are smaller than they’re supposed to be. Scott wonders why men have not come out from the huts to replenish the stores, and decides that his dogs must have failed him at last
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It’s a sad night for the men. In the morning, on the tenth of March, Oates needs two hours to put on his boots. He asks the doctor what chance he has of reaching Cape Evans, and Wilson says, “I don’t know.” But to Scott, it’s plain. “In point of fact he has none.” He writes of Oates’s pluck and bravery and says it makes little difference that the Soldier is slowing them down. “With great care we might have a dog’s chance, but no more.”

There’s another blizzard, another march that lasts only half an hour, another cold camp on the Barrier. Then Oates, after breakfast, asks what he should do. The others urge him to go on, but the Soldier knows he’s near his end. Scott orders Dr. Wilson to distribute opium and morphine, to give every man the chance to choose his death. Now he notes that the daily distance averages six miles, and he does a bit of calculating in his little notebook:

But still they press on, over the terrible surface, into the wind, through temperatures of forty below. “Truly awful outside the tent,” writes Scott on the fourteenth of March. “Must fight it out to the last biscuit.”

At lunch the next day, Oates asks to be left behind. Let him die in his sleeping bag, he says. He doesn’t want to be a burden. But the others won’t allow it, so he gets up and goes with them, dragging his frozen feet another few miles
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The Soldier goes to sleep hoping that he won’t wake. But he does. There’s a blizzard outside, shaking the tent, booming in the canvas. Oates crawls from his sleeping bag and unfastens the doorway. “I am just going outside,” he says, “and may be some time.”

It’s too painful for Oates to put on his boots, so he goes out in his socks, into the blizzard. What looks pass between the others?
What words are muttered? Scott says, “We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.”

Now only three men are out on the Barrier. They press on to the north, and pass the eightieth parallel, where Scott had meant to plant his One Ton Depot. If he hadn’t turned back to spare the ponies, if he hadn’t cared if they’d lived or died, the three men would be wallowing in food that night, their Primus roaring in their tent
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Instead they’re dying. Fifteen miles from their cached supplies, they have two days’ worth of food. But their feet are getting worse. Scott knows that his will have to be amputated if he ever makes it home
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Another day sees them eleven miles from the depot. But Scott can go no farther. He decides that Bowers and Wilson will press on without him in the morning and return with food and fuel. But they never leave. A blizzard worse than any they’ve seen blows up in the night, and for a week it never stops
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Birdie Bowers writes a farewell letter to his mother. He assures her that he has struggled on to the end. “Oh how I do feel for you when you hear all,” he writes. “You will know that for me the end was peaceful as it is only sleep in the cold.”

On March 29, Scott writes in his journal for the final time
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Their camp is not found until summer, when rescuers head out from Cape Evans. The tent still stands on the Barrier. Inside, Bowers and Wilson are covered up in their sleeping bags, as though asleep. Scott has tucked his notebooks under his shoulder and opened the flaps of his sleeping bag. He has died with his arm stretched out, touching his old friend, Bill Wilson
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The rescuers collapse the tent on top of the men. They build an enormous cairn to cover it, and mark it all with a cross made of skis. Then they turn back to Cape Evans, back to tell the world what has happened. And they leave Scott and Bowers and Wilson to their long sleep in the cold
.

The
Terra Nova
carries the news to New Zealand in February of 1913. From there it’s flashed around the world, and it’s met with shock and sorrow. Kathleen Scott, the captain’s wife, is at sea
when she’s told of his death. She’s heading for New Zealand to meet him, with no idea that she’s been a widow for nearly a year already
.

The great prize of first to the Pole has gone to Amundsen. But Scott becomes the real hero of Antarctic exploration. The story of his suffering, of his courage and endurance, inspires the world. England honors his request to look after his people with a memorial fund that raises thirty thousand pounds in the first three days, about six times the annual salary of the English prime minister
.

In London, where crowds had cheered the
Terra Nova
on her way to the south, the great newspaper
, The Times,
mourns the deaths of Scott and Oates and Wilson and Bowers and Evans:

“No more pathetic and tragic story has ever been unfolded than that of the gallant band of Antarctic explorers whose unavailing heroism now fills the public mind with mingled grief and admiration.”

On the twenty-first of May, eight thousand people fill the fabulous Albert Hall to hear a talk by Commander Teddy Evans. With him on the stage are many of Scott’s explorers, including Mr. Meares and Mr. Ponting, Gran and Cherry-Garrard and Dr. Atkinson. In the audience are Kathleen Scott—now Lady Scott—and the mothers and the widows of the men who sleep in the Barrier’s cold
.

As Ponting’s photographs flash up on a great screen behind him, Evans tells the story of Scott’s expedition. He speaks of the first
southern journey, when depots were laid across the Barrier. He tells how the dog team driven by Scott and Meares broke through a bridge of snow and plummeted into a crevasse
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Then he talks about the ponies
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In this magnificent hall in the middle of London, below its dome of iron and glass, eight thousand people sit silent in their seats. The man who had steered the
Terra Nova
south, who had walked with little Blossom across the Barrier, now stands in front of them, talking of ponies that had been taken from Russia and Manchuria and led nearly all the way to the South Pole
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Evans talks of the ordeal on the drifting ice, when the men could not save Uncle Bill or Punch or Guts. He tells how Blucher and Blossom and James Pigg became known as “the Baltic fleet” because they were old and slow. He says Mr. Oates predicted that not one of the three would make it back to the winter station
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The pictures of the ponies are enormous on the screen. There’s Blossom; there’s Blucher; there’s James Pigg staring into the camera
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The commander describes the deaths of Blucher and Blossom, the events he’d seen himself. Then he tells how one little pony surprised them all with his strength and spirit
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“James Pigg,” he says, “was a plucky little animal.”