The Winter Pony (8 page)

Captain Scott shouted from the ship. “Ponting! Look at the whales.”

Mr. Ponting was taking pictures of penguins. He snatched up his big wooden camera and came running across the ice. He wore his coat and furry boots, a felt hat that bounced on his head.

The whales kept staring. Their teeth glistened in white rows. Mr. Ponting ran right up beside the dogs and knelt with his camera.

Suddenly, the whales disappeared. They sank into the water, all as one, and Mr. Ponting looked very disappointed. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the dogs started barking. They leapt at their tethers as though they were trying to jump right into the sea.

I felt a shudder in the ice. I felt another—a tremor that shook the floe. Mr. Ponting looked down at his feet, and I saw the ice bulge up around him. The dogs barked louder than ever. There was a big thud from below, a cracking of ice, and up came the back of a killer whale.

It pushed right through the floe, through twenty-four inches of ice. Mr. Ponting fell backward. With another thud and a boom, great cracks appeared in the ice, a spidery web that spread out in all directions. One raced toward me, zigzagging as it widened, and veered away just as it reached my hooves. A second whale burst through the floe, and a third behind him, and the booming went on and on underneath me.

The dogs’ barking turned to howls and whines. Mr. Ponting leapt to his feet and sprinted across the ice as the cracks opened around him. He leapt from floe to floe. They tilted crazily, then flew apart, and up came a whale’s head right
behind Mr. Ponting. Its little round eye swiveled, seeking out the man. Its jaws opened and snapped shut, and Mr. Ponting raced for his life.

On every side of me, the ice cracked and split. The dogs whined; they shrieked. Mr. Meares ran flat out toward them, shouting at the whales. Mr. Keohane hurried to help me.

A strip of water appeared right at my feet, wide and black and gaping. I tried to back away, but my sledge trapped me on the breaking ice. I turned to my right, and then toward the ship, and in a moment, I was tangled in the traces. A whale’s eye, like a yellow stone, peered up at me through the water. Then the head came crashing through the ice.

The floe tilted. I nearly lost my balance. I could look right into the whale’s mouth, past its rows of teeth and down its wide, open throat. I could smell its breath, foul and fishy.

All around, the whales shoved their heads above the ice. They hovered there, looking at the dogs, at me, at Mr. Ponting, who was safe on thicker ice, kneeling down to catch his breath. I saw Mr. Meares leaping over the ice toward his dogs. The whale in front of me turned its eye slowly around and glared with a look that made my blood as cold as snow.

Then Mr. Keohane was there, his hand in my halter. “Come along, lad,” he said, pulling gently. Even now his voice was soft and whispery. But it was tinged with fear.

The ice trembled. The whale sank below it, and the heads of all the others disappeared as well. I waited for a boom underneath me, for a loud crack and the split in the ice that would drop me into the sea, with Mr. Keohane clinging to my halter.

It never happened. The whales vanished, as if called away
by a voice I couldn’t hear. The bits of ice slowly closed together, and the dogs curled up again, pressed against each other into one big ball of fur. Mr. Meares went away, and Mr. Keohane helped me toward the ship. And soon it was as though the killer whales had never come at all.

THE
very last thing to come off the ship was a small piano. I hauled it myself, in pieces, over the ice and up to the hut on its little hill twelve feet above the sea. I didn’t know that it was a piano until the men put it together and played a song. They seemed so happy then, everyone sunburned and smiling. That Captain Scott, he thought of everything.

There was a fire in the hut’s stove, and smoke wafting from the roof. The sea sparkled with sunlight, dotted with floating castles of ice. It was a very beautiful place, everywhere white and snowy except for the strip of black sand along the shore. Mountains all around us, glaciers tumbling to the sea. And our stable! It might have come from a fairy tale: a stable built of straw.

I thought our work had ended for a while. But as soon as
we finished taking things
off
the ship, we started putting them
on
instead. Poor Weary Willy—who thought he’d earned a long rest—looked even more miserable than usual when he saw what we had to do. Over the ice we went again, but this time hauling rocks. It seemed stupid to fill a ship with rocks, but I imagined the men had a reason. They worked very hard to dig out the stones from the slopes above the beach, then ran them down icy chutes to the frozen sea, where they piled them on our sledges.

The motor sledges were put aboard next, then the dogs and all their gear. The pony sledges followed, and our harnesses and fodder. Mr. Meares went aboard, and Captain Scott as well. When the pony box was swung out from the deck, I thought all of us were moving on to somewhere else. But only Jehu and a pony named Chinaman were hoisted aboard. Then the box was stowed away again and the men gathered up the anchors and the mooring lines.

It made me sad to see that Jehu was leaving without me. I stood as close to the ship as I could get, and we whinnied sadly back and forth, not knowing if we’d ever see each other again. Then the killer whales came snorting along the edge of the ice, and Mr. Keohane led me away.

“Now, now, don’t you worry, old friend,” he said, petting my nose. “The ship is only going around the glacier. We’re not being left behind.”

No one had ever said anything nicer. I was his friend! After that, I couldn’t think of him as a mister anymore. From then on, he was only Patrick.

Just after Jehu left the winter station, so did I. But while he sailed on the ship, I went on foot. Along with six other ponies, with my friend Patrick at my side, I headed south.

A few miles ahead of us, a glacier stretched far out into the sea. It made such a dreadful wall of ice that no pony could ever cross it. So we went around its tip instead, out on the floating ice, while the ship sailed around to meet us.

We had no sledges. We just walked with our handlers, a line of ponies and men. As we started off, we passed the hut where Uncle Bill was standing. He was eager to come along, but he was tethered to a post and could only watch us pass with a sad, bewildered look. Then his handler—the lovely Birdie Bowers—came out from the hut to wave to us all. His enormous nose made a big shadow on the wall. “I’ll be along in a moment,” he shouted. “I’ve one more job to do.”

Birdie Bowers always had “one more job to do.” His job was looking after the supplies, and to me he was just like a raven, small and powerful, always thinking, and happiest when he had a collection of things around him.

We stayed as close to the shore as we could. The ice creaked and groaned, but we kept on going. I understood why our sledges had been taken on the ship. The ice was slowly breaking up, its little floes and islands drifting apart, sailing out to sea. In a way, we were racing the ice, trying to cross it before it vanished.

A layer of fresh snow hid holes big enough to swallow a pony, and the killer whales lurked along the edges. I was afraid every moment that one of them would come bursting up beside me, or that I would sink right through the ice.

Mr. Oates made us walk very slowly. “If a pony falls into one of these holes, I shall sit down and cry,” he said.

A moment later, Guts shrieked. I turned my head and saw him on his stomach, as though his legs had been chopped away. His breath went out of him with a great
whoof!
as he landed. But already he was struggling to get up again, as the voices of the whales creaked in the ice. He paddled frantically in his little hole of slush and snow, but the more he moved, the more he sank. His whole back end disappeared into swirling water.

I heard the puff of a whale’s breath. I saw the smoke it made, the little cloud on the sea, then the curve of its black fin sinking.

Guts flailed with his forelegs, driving himself deeper. In a moment, only his head and shoulders were left. The men were running to help him, crowding around, everyone trying to grab on to halter and tether or mane. But Guts was thrashing around so violently that no one could get close enough. Then someone found a rope and got a loop around his neck and forelegs. The sailors heaved together, dragging Guts from his hole. They pulled him out, wet and trembling, and gave him a bit of a rubdown before we headed off again.