This is book four, it runs about a hundred pages with pictures, and it puts a stowaway on a ship headed for Antarctica.
Jack Nin talks his way from stowaway to cabin boy on Robert Falcon Scott's ship, sailing from New Zealand into the ice. Ranger, the golden retriever who travels with an old first aid kit, turns up on board. There is a rival party racing them for the Pole. There is pack ice, there are killer whales working the edge of it, and there are blizzards that stop everything for days.
Grades 2 to 5, illustrated, an afternoon.
The science it actually teaches
Here is the reason it belongs on our Stealth Science shelf, and it is not the penguins.
A man in a harness dragging a loaded sledge across snow burns far more food in a day than he can carry for a day, across the number of days the trip takes. That single fact is the whole of polar travel. It is why an expedition is never a walk. It is a supply problem that has to be solved on paper before anyone puts a boot on ice, and every famous decision in that era came straight out of the sum.
Which is where depots come from. You haul food and fuel out ahead of time, bury them, mark them, and walk on lighter. Then you have to find them again on the way back, which means a marker you cannot see in a whiteout is exactly the same thing as no food at all. Your child will feel the weight of that the moment they understand it.
Then transport, which is the choice that decides the ending before anybody starts. Dogs, ponies, motor sledges, or men in their own harnesses. Dogs travel well on snow and, in the plans of the era, could be eaten as the load lightened. Ponies sink in soft snow and need their own fodder hauled along for them. Engines fail in that cold. Each option has a different arithmetic and the arithmetic is not negotiable.
Then the body. Blood pulls back toward the core to keep the middle of you alive, so hands, feet, nose and ears cool first and freeze first. That is not bad luck, it is the design working. And the one children get instantly because they have all lived it: sweating is dangerous. Wool holds heat by holding air, wet wool holds neither, and a man who works too hard on the trail is far colder an hour later than the man who paced himself. Anyone who has stood at a bus stop in a damp coat already knows this in their body.
Then the ice itself. Sea ice is not land. It is a moving lid that opens and closes and can hold a ship in place for a season. Orcas hunt along the thin edges where seals rest, which is why standing on that edge is a bad idea whether you are a seal or not.
What you do not get is history with any depth. The ship, the ice, the cold and the feel of a race, yes. The politics, the rival party's actual plan, or the ending, no.
The child it lands with
A child who likes ships.
After that: a child who likes a number hiding inside a story, because this one has a real one in it. A child who has been properly cold once and remembers it. And a child who has read two or three of the other Ranger books and is ready for something with a longer horizon than a single afternoon of trouble.
One place to stop and talk
This is the book on the shelf that earns a pencil.
Somewhere out on the ice, stop and do the sum together. Pick a number of days out, and the same number back. Call it two pounds of food per person per day, which is in the right neighbourhood for a man hauling in that cold, and look up the real figure later if your child wants it. Multiply. Then ask how much a person can actually drag behind them.
The number gets uncomfortable fast, and that is the entire point of stopping. Your child will invent depots on their own inside about two minutes, because there is no other answer available, and having invented them they will understand polar travel better than most adults ever bother to.
If they want to push further, here is the second question. What happens to the sum when one man gets sick and the party still has to haul his share, and eat while they do it? That question is the real history of what happened down there, and your child got to it with a pencil and a piece of paper.
What to know going in
The real expedition ended badly. Scott's party reached the Pole, found that a rival team had already been there, and five men died on the way back.
How far this book carries that is worth checking before you promise your child an ending, because the publisher's own summary stops at the ice rather than at the return. Either way, a child who enjoys this book will go looking, and it is better that they hear it from you than from a search box.
On the page itself: animals are in danger and in real distress, the cold is described as genuinely dangerous, and the rival party is framed as a race. It is tense rather than frightening, which is a different thing and an easier one.
Where to get it
Book four does not lean on the first three at all, so this is a fine place to walk in. Race to the South Pole, $7.99.
One condition. Buy it knowing you will want a grown-up account of the real expedition sitting on the shelf behind it inside about a month, because this book is very good at making a child want that account and it was never built to be it.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Ash and Smoke: What a Volcano Actually Drops on You
Journey Through Ash and Smoke (Ranger in Time #5) by Kate Messner
Grade 2 to 5
Escape from the Great Earthquake: The Fire Did the Damage
Escape from the Great Earthquake (Ranger in Time #6) by Kate Messner
Grade 2 to 5
Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967: Who Fed the Bears
I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967 (I Survived #17) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
California Wildfires, 2018 in Panels: How Fire Moves
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived Graphic Novel #13) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
