The Survivor by Thomas Keneally Page B

replacement. He’ll try to make a fool of you, and it won’t be hard with huskies at his disposal. Be prepared to laugh at yourself at first, but keep asserting yourself and show him that you want to learn the art. He’s a marvellous old man. Shackleton and Mawson both loved him.”
    The marvellous old man was perhaps fifty, but his wit was waspish and pulmonary as a ninety-year-old’s. He was a retired seaman and lived on the edge of a village where snow-drifts remained on the ridges even in summer. Here he and now Ramsey shared life with three cattle-dogs and fifty huskies tethered in teams of nine. The cattle-dogs were friends at table and on the hearth, but those uncouth Siberians were never let into the kitchen, not even to whelp or die. The three-hundred-and-sixty pounds of meat needed to feed them each week was paid for out of Leeming’s pocket, which luckily carried inherited wealth.
    On the slopes with dog-team and sledge, Ramsey suffered from the man’s wry sense of humour but learnt to drive a sledge in slush. The dying man had him chasing runaway teams, roaring the word he had been told (wrongly) meant Halt . The peculiar physics of the sledging-whip often wrapped nine feet of rawhide around his own head and shoulders. Yet the one vital hoax the wry and primitive man and dogs played off on him was to convince him that he too was a simple animal made for the large issues of Antarctic journeying.
    The dog-man, pretending to be cautionary and resentful, lived to make Ramsey an expert, and insisted on advancing his own death’s day by building a sort of dog-cart with axles of mountain ash to behave with something more or less like the pliancy of the runners on the sledge; for the sledge could never be taken far, and the ridges were subject to thawing except in the early morning. These were the sick man’s pride, the dog-cart that Ramsey drove up and down on level land, learning the difficult control of the dogs; the élan of the team; and the fluency of the old sledge that had been preserved by his hand. And Ramsey knew that he was close to a phenomenon of beauty when he saw the gasping man, his digitalis unopened above the mantelpiece, nudge the runners with his boot and blink. “Boss Shackleton used ’im; 1908 ’e got used by Boss, an’ ’e’s as good as ever and Dr Leemin’s gonna take ’im south agin. Mountain ash, see. Lovely, bloody lovely.”
    Just before Christmas, they consigned the dogs by train. The old man wasn’t too shattered but breathed morosely, choosing to show little faith in Ramsey when Ramsey shook the grey hand. In anticipation of the death, children had already broken into the yard and were playing admirals in the dog-cart.
    The dogs travelled all night in box-cars, tethered by steel cables to the wall. At each stop Ramsey changed from one car to another for the welfare of his dogs. His boots would thump down on the gravel of country sidings as the engine emitted the sibilants of its rest and the dogs began their lovely ululations to the moonlight. He told himself then that all his contradictions had been jolted into unity by the simplicity of his new life. He would forever enjoy the sanity of his oneness; and even suspected himself of a type of sainthood. Yet his innocence was already forfeit by reason of his Antarctic motives.
    Still the dogs chanted; their priesthood was of the moon; their science was selfhood, for Cybele was their goddess and of her order was the sainthood he felt to be imminent. He knew that tonight there was not one spurious identity left in him.
    He would have done well to listen to the angry milkcans of protestant farmers being taken on board farther down the train.
    The next day was hard, spent in the goods-yards where his parents came to say good-bye. The dogs stood muzzled and chained, a team at a time, to iron rings in the floor. Hot and constrained against their nature, they flashed their mad