The Winter Pony by Iain Lawrence

Author:Iain Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horses, Animals, (1910-1913), Juvenile Fiction, Adventurers & Explorers, South Pole - Discovery and Exploration, Explorers, Antarctica, South Pole, Polar Regions, Biography & Autobiography, Antarctica - Discovery and Exploration, British Antarctic ("Terra Nova") Expedition, Ponies, History
ISBN: 9780375983610
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The men got out their stoves. They brewed tea for themselves, and hot mash for the rest of us, then sat on a sledge, all in a row. They didn’t talk, but I could sense the worry shared by the three of them.

In front of us, the killer whales swam back and forth. A seal barked from a distant floe, and a pair of penguins popped up to have a look at us. But the men looked only at the Barrier, watching for the wind.

If the wind picked up from the north or the west, we were safe. Our island would be blown across to the Barrier. But if the wind came instead from the south, we were finished. We would sail away on our icy little home, away from the winter station, away from our friends and our food. There was not a ship in all the land to save us.

And the wind almost always came from the south.

On the lip of the Barrier, little whirls of snow showed that the wind was already blowing up there. Cherry took off his glass eyes. He wiped them with his mitten, then put them on again, working their little arms under his wind helmet. Then he sat facing the west, and three times he slurped his tea. “You know,” he said, “if a chap went off that way, he might find a place to get across to the hut. He could tell Captain Scott what’s happened.”

Birdie nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”

I believed they were right, but it was hard to tell. Far to the west, the ice did seem to butt up against the Barrier. But it might have been a trick that the ice was playing, the way it sometimes looked very close when it was really far away, or how it sometimes seemed to float upside down in the sky.

“It’s worth a try,” said Cherry. He bent down to tighten his boots for the long walk. But Birdie Bowers, looking very comfortable, said, “I say, it might be better if it’s Crean who goes.”

Mr. Crean suddenly sat up straight. Cherry blinked through his little glass eyes. “Why?” he asked.

“Well …” Birdie frowned and twitched. “Well, the chap has to see,” he said with an awkward laugh. “You understand?”

Poor Cherry. I felt so sorry for him as he turned away. It wasn’t his fault that he had to wear his eyes on his nose, hooked over his ears. He scraped a little rut into the snow with his boot. “Yes, of course,” he said softly. “You’re quite right.”

So Mr. Crean headed off alone. We watched him work his way across the floes, standing in our little group—four ponies and two men.

Cherry hated to sit and do nothing. He got out a tent and began to set it up. “At least we’ll have a marker,” he said.

Birdie helped him. It was a job they could do very quickly, but one or the other was always looking away from the canvas and the poles, his head turned to the west.

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