Free The Winter Pony by Iain Lawrence

Willy to try them out.
    That sad old pony looked pretty sorry for himself as the men strapped on the shoes. It was a young man who led him off, a Norwegian named Gran who’d been brought along to teach the others how to ski.
    Weary Willy moved pretty slowly at first, looking down at his feet with such a woeful expression that Cherry fell laughing into a snowbank. But Weary got the hang of it quickly, and soon went strolling across drifts that had swallowed him before. It was magic, I thought. The snowshoes had a power that could hold up a pony. I wondered if Weary Willy could walk on clouds if he wore those shoes, or climb the back of a rainbow.
    Captain Scott was very pleased. “Now we can double our distance,” he said happily. “Break out the rest of them, Birdie.”
    But there
were
no more, and that crushed him. Poor Birdie Bowers, who might have counted every grain of rice, was beside himself trying to understand how snowshoes had been left behind.
    “Well, never mind,” said Captain Scott. He sent two men on a dogsled all the way back to Cape Evans, to the winter station where we’d first come ashore. He told them to hurry, because the ice was already breaking up.
    They went racing away in a mad barking of dogs, the little sledge tipping over the drifts. They disappeared behind a wave of snow, then rose to the top of the next one, the dogs dashing along in their double line. On the white ground, with the clouds behind them, it seemed as though they were flying.

    We were more than twenty miles from the winter station. The dog drivers were gone until noon the next day, when they arrived in the usual clamor of shouts and barks. It always startled me to hear the Russian words from the drivers. The soundcarried me back with a flash of fear to my days in the forest with men who broke bottles on my bones.
    Captain Scott and the others hurried out to meet the drivers, but the sledge was empty. The sea ice had broken up so much that the men had never reached the winter station.
    For Captain Scott, it was a hard blow—“a bitter pill,” he’d say. I saw him stare out across the Barrier, at the hundreds of miles we had to go, and he seemed a little bit beaten. He went into his tent and wrote in his journal, and we didn’t move on that day at all.
    The temperature fell in the night—or what
passed
as the night. The sun swooped very low but never disappeared, and when our shadows were their longest, the melted snow froze up again.
    In the morning, we started out ahead of the dogs. They were faster, but they liked to have a trail to follow, so Captain Scott held them back to give us a head start.
    When Patrick harnessed me to my sledge in the morning, my leg still hurt. I worried about falling through the drifts again. So I watched Weary Willy go ahead on the snowshoes. He did even better than he had before. Why, he went at a trot, and that was a rare thing for Weary. Then Uncle Bill went behind him—and with his first step on the snow, he broke through the crust. But he was the heaviest pony, and the rest of us managed all right. The frozen snow was so hard that Weary didn’t need the shoes, and someone took them off.
    Poor Uncle Bill didn’t like to follow; he wanted to be in front of everyone, where a leader belonged. So he tried to hurry, and that made him sink deeper. And the more he sank, the more he hurried. An hour later, he was drenched withsweat, as sleek and shiny as a seal. We all passed him. Even I went past him, though I didn’t want to. It was hard to go ahead of the leader.
    We went five miles in not much more than an hour. Then the sun was high again, and the snow began to thaw, and we started falling through the crust again. So Captain Scott blew his whistle, and we wheeled off to the left like soldiers.
    We were all tied along the picket line—our harnesses off, our blankets on—before Uncle Bill came staggering into the camp. He smashed through the snow, his magnificent mane all matted with