The 1000 Hour Day

by Chris Bray

  Alex chimed in, ‘I’ll lend you my two kayaks—but tomorrow, you two should go driving.’ We assumed the whole lack-of-any-kind-of-vehicle situation would also resolve itself in true Arctic style, nodded, and reached for a second steak.

  The next afternoon Alex pulled up the door to his garage, revealing two little 4WD all-terrain vehicles (ATVs)—the island’s main form of summer transport when retreating snow grounded everyone’s snow mobiles. To our amazement, after giving us a quick ‘crash course’ on how to avoid crashing, he flicked us the keys, ‘Have fun!’ Before we knew it, we were hurtling along the dirt road out towards Mount Pelly with the perpetual twilight igniting our dusty wake into a beautiful orange tail behind us.

  Mount Pelly is the only hill of any significance around Cambridge Bay, and to the Inuit it has special traditional ties. Inuit legend has it that Mount Pelly is actually the fallen body of Ovayok, a giant that starved to death while wandering around looking for food. We parked our ATVs at the bottom and hiked wearily upwards, reaching the summit at 3 am, where the view from our sleeping bags was spectacular. In the low sweeping sunlight the endless patchwork of thousands of lakes below shimmered like quicksilver out into the distance, sprinkled with the odd herd of silently grazing muskox. Victoria Island, we now realised, is a truly beautiful place.

  It was at this moment of inspiration, combined with extreme tiredness and bad planning, that we inadvertently invented ‘arctic tea’—a drink we would both come to depend on during the expedition to restore vital energy, morale and warmth after a hard day’s hauling. Having forgotten to bring milk powder, we melted a few of our excess chunks of white chocolate into our tea, and the combination far surpassed all our expectations. It was absolutely delicious—it even made the inch of tea leaves at the bottom palatable! After a few hours’ blissful sleep, we awoke to sunburnt noses and headed back into town.

  More letters stuck to Doug’s door invited us to do a radio interview with the local CBC radio, and another gave us directions to find Lawrence, another faceless name who’d been helping organise the loan of the two local shotguns we’d be taking. After negotiating past his hyperactive dog we knocked on the door and waited, and waited. Something we could never get used to was that every house on the island had a double set of doors, the first door opening into a tiny room no more than a metre or so long, fronting immediately onto a second door. Although confusing for two Aussies who’d consider it rude to just march inside the first door without knocking, it was of course a very practical setup—in mid winter it means visitors don’t bring a blizzard inside with them, and the inner rooms remain toasty warm. We generally found, though, if we knocked loud enough on this outer door, and waited long enough, the occupant would eventually open the door to peek curiously out.

  ‘Oh! G’day, fellas!’ Lawrence’s beaming smile and best Aussie impersonation made us feel right at home, and in no time we became old friends, chewing on strips of dried fish and laughing about our misconceptions. ‘Oh, yes,’ he grinned, ‘when I placed the order for the amount of ammunition you guys were after, some people were wondering if you two were planning on starting a revolution on the island! You know, start a war or something!’ It was true, we really were taking a small armoury with us—two 12-gauge pump-action shotguns, 20 solid slugs, 30 buckshot, 15 pyrotechnic ‘bear-bangers’ as well as several pen-flare bear deterrents—we’d had very conflicting reports about the number of polar bears we could expect to encounter out there.

  ‘I think you’ll be lucky to see any,’ Lawrence predicted thoughtfully, adding, ‘although, up where you’re going, who really knows?’

  As we left, he passed us a bag of frozen fish—arctic char. This absolutely mouth-watering salmonoid fish forms a staple food of the entire community, and racks of drying char hung tantalisingly outside almost every house. We soon became regular char addicts, eating it raw, dried, fried, frozen—it tasted divine whatever you did to it. It seemed that the Arctic Ocean was brimming with these fish, and Wilf, another friend on the island, gave us all the right fishing lures to ensure we’d easily supplement our expedition diet along the way. ‘What you really want, though,’ Wilf whispered, ‘is square hooks. That’s the easiest way to catch char. But only Inuit are allowed to use square hooks, it’s just too easy to catch them.’ Then, ruining my cunning plans of quietly squaring-up all our normal hooks using our trusty Leatherman pliers, Wilf added, ‘Square hooks is what we call fishing nets.’

  Keen to learn the apparent lack of skill required to catch bucketloads of char with or without square hooks, we jumped at Lawrence’s invitation to join his family at their cabin the next day. Almost everyone on the island seemed to have a little ‘cabin’ out of town, to which the family could retreat for a spot of fishing, hunting or relaxation. Land is uncontrolled out of town, and families just build these little shacks wherever there’s a good spot. Lawrence’s overlooked a beautiful ice-strewn bay in a place known affectionately as ‘Gravel Pit’. The view—when you could see it through the clouds of mosquitoes—was spectacular, looking out over an endless sea of drifting pack ice. It was our first chance to actually go down and touch the grinding mosaic of ice. Some blocks perhaps 20 metres wide had been pushed right up high and dry onto the land, throwing up great bow waves of pebbles, while others tilted at precarious angles, dripping and sparkling in the sun. The air was filled with the sounds of chunks of ice moaning and squeaking against each other, driven by unseen currents, and the whole puzzle was continually drifting and separating, with gaps suddenly opening up to the frigid water beneath.

  We were hesitantly walking along the shoreline admiring all this, venturing the odd step onto a grounded berg, when to our horror, Lawrence—apparently hell-bent on suicide—walked casually out onto the floating sheets in front of us and proceeded to leap further and further out to sea, hopping from one bobbing iceblock to the next, fishing line in hand. ‘Come on, you two!’ he called over his shoulder, grinning.

  The fine art of ‘ice-hopping’, we eventually learned, is not so much physical as mental. It’s just a simple matter of ignoring that little voice of self-preservation and common sense on your shoulder that whispers, ‘Chris—leaping into mid air over deathly cold water, towards a small piece of ice that you’re well aware won’t support your weight—that’s a bad thing to do,’ and instead listening to the darker voice on your opposite shoulder hissing: ‘Go on, Chris! It’s perfectly safe. Just maybe give the video camera to Clark in case it gets a bit wet …’ Many of these ice stepping stones were indeed far too small to support our weight, but the trick was not to stay on those ones too long—run, jump; run, jump; jump, jump, jump. Worryingly, the whole thing depended on the seemingly remote possibility that we’d eventually find a piece of ice large enough not to completely sink under us—only then could we stop to collect our thoughts and plan the route ahead. To add to the excitement, as water tends to lap around the edges of these ice sheets, the sides are all undercut to an unknown extent, sometimes giving way just as we tried to launch ourselves across the open water. Even in these cases, however, I found that the enormous incentive to stay in the air always got me safely to the far side.

  ‘And the most important thing to remember,’ Lawrence continued his coaching, ‘is to always look over your shoulder to check you can still get back, because gaps have a habit of widening after you jump them.’ We both laughed nervously at visions of Clark and me standing on an ever-shrinking iceblock as it drifted slowly away. ‘It happens,’ Lawrence cautioned. ‘People die like that—you can’t exactly swim back to shore.’

  After cheating death a few more times, our master finally found a suitable raft of ice to fish from, and we all lay down and peeped over the edge, jiggling the lure up and down in the crystal-clear water. After a few minutes, I had to reluctantly let go of my misconception that char were going to flock to the hook like moths to a light. The only thing that happened was my legs went numb and my pants actually froze firmly onto the ice—I nearly tore th
e front off them as I stood up.

  As we had miraculously survived his first lethal trial, Lawrence now seemed determined to finish us off, and strode out of the cabin with not one but two pump-action shotguns. ‘Okay, boys …’ In a practised motion, Lawrence levelled his shotgun and fired three powerful shots in quick succession out over the ice. BANG. BANG. BANG. The explosions ripped apart the serene silence and we both stood there like stunned mullet, blinking. ‘Your turn,’ Lawrence said, passing the gun to Clark. ‘See that bit of ice sticking up over there? Pretend that’s a polar bear. It’s coming right at you!’

  Neither of us had fired a shotgun before, and after explaining how the thing worked, Lawrence stepped back and offered one final warning: ‘It’ll have a bit of a kick, so hold it tight …’

  BANG. He wasn’t kidding. For a moment there, I think Clark was unsure if he’d accidently fired the gun around the wrong way, and shot himself in the shoulder. He missed the ice ‘bear’. ‘Oh, don’t worry, my friend,’ Lawrence reassured him cheerily, ‘polar bears are huge—you can’t miss a polar bear!’ Several shoulder reconstructions later, we were both able to at least scare the target, most of the time.

  ‘Okay, fellas, that’ll do. Let’s start up the barbecue, eh?’

  Like many Inuit communities, Cambridge Bay is officially a ‘dry town’, yet many of the parties we attended were positively swimming in alcohol. One house even had its entire attic stashed full with enough beer, presumably, to ‘last the winter’. Matt, the local radio presenter who ran the entire branch of CBC radio on his own, threw a party for us the next ‘evening’. It was a wild ‘night’, culminating in ‘the two Oz-tralians’ being dared to go for a swim. With national pride at stake, we dutifully accepted and were escorted down to the wharf. The wind was offshore and had blown the floating pack ice across to the other side of the bay, but solid or not, the water was still pretty much zero degrees Celsius.

  ‘Go on—jump off the end of the wharf and swim back to shore!’ We might have been foreigners—slightly intoxicated foreigners even—but we weren’t stupid. Even if we were lucky enough not to have a heart attack when we hit the water, the 40-metre swim back to shore would be near impossible. We announced that in Australia we were used to beaches, and we’d be going in from the shore.

  With a cry of ‘Not scared, are you?’ one guy ran towards the end of the wharf, slipped and tumbled awkwardly into the icy water below. Everyone stopped. He surfaced, and for the first five seconds proceeded to pretend he was enjoying it—floating on his back, a stroke or two of backstroke, and then, sufficiently impressed with everyone’s concerned pleadings for him to come back, he turned and headed for shore.

  His strokes got slower and slower as his legs started to fail in the cold. Aborting his swim to shore, he turned back to the wharf and tried to reach for a rusty hanging ladder. Having been in the water for over 30 seconds, hypothermia was setting in and he could hardly grip the ladder, let alone haul himself up. After a few failed attempts to get out, everyone crowded to his rescue and eventually heaved him back onto the wharf. It was certainly sobering to see how quickly the water had crippled him, and any last alcoholic haze was smacked from us when we waded into the water ourselves from shore for our more controlled experience. That’s certainly one way to sober up.

  HOME AWAY FROM HOME

  Taking a break from still more frustrating setbacks in our mission to free our PACs, we borrowed two of Alex’s kayaks and slid them into the Arctic Ocean in front of Doug’s cabin. ‘So how much kayaking have you guys done before?’ Brent asked, ready to guide us to his cabin.

  Clark considered this question, drew a complete blank and looked at me—I at least had sat in the PACs briefly in our neighbour’s swimming pool while they gradually sank under me. ‘Umm … well,’ I began, ‘my uncle took me out for a brief paddle about a year ago.’

  It really was pretty absurd. In my defence I will point out that I’d lined up a free kayaking training course for us back at home, but in the final frantic months we’d run out of time to attend.

  ‘That won’t be a problem. You guys’ll be fine.’ Brent had an incredibly calming quality about him, and after a quick run-down of the basics, we found ourselves paddling—with Brent in the lead—out of the bay.

  Reaching the seemingly impenetrable pack-ice shelf, Brent led us through a maze of little open-water leads amidst the shifting ice. Eventually, however, our luck ran out, and ice grated hard against the hull on all sides. In kamikaze-like style Brent back-paddled, and then paddled forward as hard as he could, directly at the ice sheet in our way. With a sickening scrunching sound, the kayak struck the ice, and then gracefully slid up onto it, glided frictionlessly across it, and slipped silently back into the water on the far side! Having been gob-smacked in astonishment so frequently in the last week, both Clark and I barely batted an eyelid, and obediently followed suit, effortlessly sliding up and over the barrier. This seal-manoeuvre was as fun as it looked, and we both started actively aiming for ice sheets to practise on.

  Inevitably, the ice became so close that progress was, at last, impossible. We were high and dry, essentially punting our way over the top of a layer of semi-submerged ice, wedging the paddle into melt-holes and slushy bits to push ourselves forward. In another kamikaze stunt, Brent simply stood up in his kayak and stepped out onto what looked alarmingly like water. He turned and showed us—with a quick prod of his paddle—that he was actually standing on a transparent ice sheet just below the surface.

  As our inner voices of common sense had long since given up trying to advise us, we both recklessly stood up and followed suit. Soon all three of us had our respective kayaks in tow behind us like sleds as we wandered, jumped and shuffled across the ice. All around us bits of ice were breaking, rising up, falling and squealing as they all drifted about. Brent cheerfully commented that the ice was particularly ‘religious’ today, as in it was very ‘holy’—full of massive gaping holes through which we could fall at any moment. It was an insane situation to find ourselves in, and yet boyishly exciting.

  We had our Gore-Tex Immersion Drysuits on while kayaking, which was very reassuring, and once at his cabin we tested them out properly—wading into the water and then venturing deeper for a swim, feeling every bit like displaced astronauts as we flapped and bobbed around on the surface in our bright yellow spacesuits. After we lost all feeling in our limbs we floundered back to shore and, zzzzzip, stepped out of our dripping drysuits, revealing perfectly dry clothes underneath. ‘How cool is that!’ Clark said, nodding approvingly.

  We helped Brent set out his line of ‘square hooks’—a legal activity for him as his girlfriend is Inuit—and then prepared ourselves for some much-needed sleep. Brent retired to the cabin, and Clark and I heaved two enormous muskox hides from storage nearby and each wrapped ourselves in their shaggy folds, promptly falling asleep to the sound of water lapping the shoreline a metre or two just beyond our feet.

  By the time we awoke, Brent had already finished chopping a large pile of wood and we joined him beside the fire. Like everyone else we’d met recently, Brent was determined to fatten us up in readiness for our journey, and we were only too willing to oblige, accepting several helpings of a fried substance that tasted like a cross between beef, lard and Spam. Each mouthful probably reduced our healthy lifespan by a year or more, but it was just what our bodies were craving to fuel another day of Arctic training. ‘There,’ Brent said warmly, scraping the last greasy pile of cholesterol onto our plates, ‘that should give you a bit more energy.’

  Maybe we replied a little too enthusiastically, because before we knew it we found ourselves bodily dragging a large wooden dog-sled between the two of us, inching it along the shoreline for hours while Brent searched around, piling more and more slabs of rock onto the back. This morning’s task was to collect flagstones to drag back and extend the cabin’s front patio. The bigger the better—some took two people to lift—and it didn’t take long before the sled beca
me completely immovable. ‘Have a look over the hill there,’ Brent called, ‘I think you’ll find a smaller plastic sled there that you can use to haul the rocks back a few at a time …’ Unfortunately he was right, and we obediently tied ourselves to this new torture device and struggled the first load of rocks back, emptying them beside the door. In the distance we could see Brent adding still more flagstones to the pile.

  We shot each other a meaningful glance, and without exchanging a word, seized the opportunity before us. We quickly slipped inside the cabin whereupon I started fumbling for a spoon while Clark tracked down a large jar of peanut butter we’d spied earlier. Spoonful after sticky spoonful we gorged ourselves on peanut butter, Clark digging out his next spoonful from the rapidly emptying jar while I struggled to chew and swallow my own gummy mouthful fast enough to be ready for the next one. I was shocked to find myself doing this, but I’d never felt quite so desperate for energy in all my life, not even half-starved down in Tasmania. Eventually we brought ourselves back under control and replaced the jar into the cupboard and returned for the next load of rocks.

  The distant growl of an approaching ATV heralded the end of the stone age for our little slave labour camp. Brent’s Inuit girlfriend Jeanie and her son hopped off the buggy and donated it to our cause. Never before had we fully appreciated the impact motorised transport must have had on the world.

  ‘I think we’ve caught some fish, boys!’ Jeanie said, beaming. Overnight, the gentle arc of floats suspending the fishing net had evidently been upset, with some floats now pulled out of line and others submerged altogether. As we watched, a black shadow cruised in towards the net and struck it in a fury of thrashing water. ‘That might be a seal!’ Brent exclaimed, hurrying down to the shore. Not altogether sure if this was a good thing, we battled inwardly with ethical dilemmas as he paddled out towards the now silent net in his kayak. He untangled one, two, four large char from the net, slipping each one between his legs into the kayak cockpit, pulling himself along the line of floats towards the black giant. Jeanie joined us on the shore, carrying two moon-shaped ulu blades. Brent shouted something and we watched in suspense as he reached underwater and heaved a … massive char up onto the deck. Our relief that it wasn’t a seal was short-lived, however, as Jeanie—slightly disappointed—tried to cheer us up by announcing that she’d brought some old boiled seal meat with her that we could have for lunch anyway.