The 1000 Hour Day

by Chris Bray

  Looking at the problem with fresh eyes in the morning, there really was no decision to make. There quite simply was no way we were going to descend from this gravel highway, back down into the hell of yesterday. Our plan is now to follow this esker north to the coast, and then hopefully we’ll be able to kayak along the coast to cover some westward kilometres after that.

  Rolling by 9.30, our spirits soared as we made fantastic progress along the esker, watching kilometre after kilometre of marshland pass by on either side. ‘Eskers are so the way to go!’ We morphed our kayak paddle communication system to our hiking poles, and marched ever onwards, glancing back every so often and raising a hiking pole merrily into the air until receiving the ‘all okay’ signal. It’s interesting—the tempo of our iPod music seems to directly affect our hauling speed. If I’m listening to some upbeat dance track, I seem to stride ahead, until some chilled-out reggae track comes on, and I sag back, to be overtaken by Clark. One thing’s for sure though: without our iPods to take our minds off things, we wouldn’t be going anywhere fast.

  Mid morning I stumbled across strange circular groupings of rocks on the esker. ‘Hey, check this out!’ I called back to Clark. ‘Tent rings!’ We’d seen photos of such things in the cultural centre at Cambridge Bay—the Inuit used rocks to weigh down the edges of their circular caribou-hide tents in the summer. We were standing in the middle of an ancient Inuit campsite. Patches of orange lichen growing on the rocks suggested that these boulders had been in this position for possibly a thousand years or more. It certainly was an ideal campsite, commanding a wide view of the surrounding tundra from atop the esker, and judging by the amount of animal bone fragments around, must swarm with caribou during their yearly migration. The Inuit Heritage Society asked if we could take photos and record GPS locations for any such sites as they don’t have much data from out here, and so after we’d documented the find, we lurched our PACs into motion and headed on, full of enthusiasm for further discoveries.

  BANG!! Just after lunch—when we were both still feeling weak with hunger—a nice fat ptarmigan came too close to resist, and I shot it dead. Running over and picking it up, I was at once filled with a mixture of adrenalin and euphoria, but also shame.

  ‘I feel kinda bad,’ Clark murmured, looking at the chunky pigeon-sized bird, its head hanging limply to one side.

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ I agreed, battling the balance of ethics versus my gnawing hunger.

  ‘But … I bet it tastes good!’ Clark said with a grin. ‘What do we do with it?’

  It was surprisingly easy to convert the feathery feast into two hearty breast fillets and a pair of wing and leg muscles, and by the time I was done, we were feeling altogether better about our sin. ‘Mmm, mmm! Ptarmigan burritos tonight!’ Clark laughed, rubbing his hands together gleefully while I salivated at the thought.

  ‘Come on, let’s keep hauling,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can stop early!’

  I had noticed earlier that the webbing strap on my hauling yoke was almost worn through again, but not wanting to spend the time converting it to the fancy chafe-free pulley system we’d fixed for Clark’s, I’d decided to ignore it and see how long it would last. And so when rattling our way across a tussocky break in the esker highway, as I knew I eventually would, I felt the bow of my PAC suddenly nose-dive into the ground behind me, dragging me to a stop. ‘Dammit!’ I cursed, pulling out my earphones and coiling them away. Looking back, I could see that the webbing had indeed finally worn through, but to my absolute horror, I also saw that the entire steel tow bracket—joining me to my PAC—had literally torn in half!

  ‘Oh, F&*K!!’ I shouted, ‘CLARK!’

  Drawing level, Clark stared at the damage and slowly dragged his eyes up to meet mine, dismay etched across his face. ‘That’s … not good,’ he whispered, and then after a pause, added, ‘Can we even fix that?’

  It was serious. The hauling bracket cops the biggest stress loads of the PAC, and we built it from the strongest metal in the entire cart, and I’d simply torn it in half—I’d literally torn through a total of about 100 millimetres of 3-millimetre-thick steel plate.

  ‘Goes to show how hard we’re hauling,’ Clark commented wryly. We didn’t have anything even vaguely as strong to replace it with, and there was no way we could repair it. A mosaic of thoughts began forming in my head. It’s over—we get to go home! Or perhaps we could load all the gear into Clark’s PAC and take turns hauling—or double-haul, even—that might work! Or I could just push my PAC instead of hauling it …

  ‘I dunno,’ I said, standing up, ‘let’s think it over. But we’re not going any further today, that’s for sure—let’s make camp.’

  We talked over the options while Clark cooked our scheduled dinner, and then with great ceremony, fried up the ptarmigan with some precious garlic powder. ‘Oh my, that smells good!’ I said, unable to shift a stupidly large grin plastered across my face. Clark agreed, dishing it out and passing me a bowl. Our first real meat in weeks, it tasted absolutely amazing. ‘For rubbery little knots of meat,’ I said, ‘these things are bloody awesome!’

  It was agreed: the lows of hunger outweigh the highs of morality in the case of ptarmigans, and we’ll bag any that are silly enough to come too close in the future. Convincing ourselves that tonight we should make the most of the opportunity for our bodies to recover, we decided to also eat half of tomorrow’s cashew nut ration.

  ‘I almost feel full,’ Clark announced cheerily.

  ‘Almost!’ I agreed.

  DAY 13: Major repairs

  Waking early, I staggered wearily over to Clark’s PAC and discovered that, as I feared in my sleep, his steel tow bracket was about to tear off also—fatigue cracks had worked their evil along both sides, and the metal was already paring. ‘There goes the idea of just using your PAC,’ I grumbled over brekky.

  We removed my hauling system entirely and tried tying the bow of my PAC directly to my harness—but that resulted in the PAC repeatedly hammering into the small of my back with each step. ‘No way!’ I said, wincing. ‘We’re just going to have to fix that torn bracket somehow—modify it or something.’

  We stared blankly at it for some time, until eventually inspiration struck. ‘Maybe we can bang the torn-off bit flat, on a rock, and then re-pop-rivet it back to the hull … and we’d also have to drill a big hole in the deck for the nut to recess into …’

  ‘Do we even have a drill bit that big?’ Clark said, looking up.

  ‘Nope! But we can always drill a ring of little holes, and then knock it out—like tearing along the dotted lines,’ I said.

  ‘Sounds good to me!’ Clark said, impressed.

  ‘Oh, but hang on,’ I faltered, ‘the bow won’t be watertight anymore with a hole in it.’

  ‘Was it ever?’ Clark laughed. ‘Let’s do it.’

  It was mid afternoon before we’d finally got mine fixed, and although it took several hours, we managed Clark’s conversion more smoothly than our first attempt. Our spirits were buoyed by a gorgeous little arctic fox that bounced curiously up and stood staring at us while we worked. I took some great photos with the 400-millimetre lens that I had borrowed from Canon, and—full of enthusiasm to be a filmmaker and wildlife photographer respectively—Clark and I shackled up, heaved our PACs into motion behind us and plodded onwards.

  After only about 100 metres, Clark’s fancy anti-chafe pulley system holding his hauling arm down chafed through, and it was his turn for his PAC to nose-dive into the tundra and snag him to an undignified stop. Thankfully, however, our newly repaired tow bracket held firm.

  ‘Let’s just make camp. It’s already 8 pm,’ Clark said, smiling in spite of himself at the comic pathos of it all. ‘Clearly, we just weren’t supposed to get anywhere today!’

  DAY 14: Losing hope and paddles

  ‘Let’s do this!’ We were up swiftly with our alarm at 7.30, and soon on our way, aiming for an epic day of at least 15 kilometres to re-establish confidence in our ability t
o get to the far side before our food (and the season) runs out.

  Mid afternoon, just after passing another tent-ring site—complete with broken bits of old bone harpoon heads—Clark shouted something I couldn’t hear. I waited for him to catch up. ‘My paddle fell off!’ he repeated. I glanced past him to where his paddle should have been clipped onto the deck of his PAC. It wasn’t there.

  ‘Where did it fall off?’ I asked, still failing to grasp the calamity.

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ Clark managed, unable to meet my eye. ‘I actually can’t remember when I last saw it. It could have been … well …’ With a jolt, I suddenly realised what he was saying, what this meant. I grabbed my camera and started cycling through all the photos I’d taken that day, searching for a glimpse of the paddle still clipped onto his PAC. It wasn’t in a photo I took at lunchtime. Scrolling back through time, my stomach started to knot in despair. I reached a photo from yesterday’s campsite—the paddle wasn’t clipped on Clark’s PAC then either.

  I swore, and Clark visibly squared himself ready to cop a barrage of abuse. I looked at him.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Chris,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t notice it was missing.’

  I was speechless with despair. ‘We’ll leave the PACs here and go back and look for it,’ Clark suggested.

  ‘And look where?’ I murmured, still coming to grips with the impossibility of it all. ‘We don’t even know where we walked, there’s no footsteps to retrace.’

  Clark shot a look back over the expanse of lumpy tundra opening out behind him, and said, ‘We could try …’

  ‘Even if we thought we could find it,’ I murmured, ‘we can’t leave our PACs here and go back—what if a bear came and trashed the PACs to get to all our food, or what if we meet a bear along the way and need our guns, or our medical or emergency stuff, or if we still can’t find it and it’s late, we’d need to bring food, tent, tripwire—’

  ‘All right,’ Clark retracted the idea, ‘I can see that. Well, what are we going to do then?’ We both knew the expedition depended on us both being able to paddle. We were counting on being able to paddle long distances along the coast in a few days’ time, and partway across the island we’re intending to link up with the Kuujjua River and kayak for hundreds of kilometres—not to mention the patchwork of lakes and rivers we have to kayak before then.

  ‘We’ll build a new paddle,’ I said, an inspirational idea forming as I spoke. ‘We can just pop-rivet our spare patch of aluminium onto … one of the bear alarm poles?’

  Taken aback almost as much as I was by the idea, Clark looked at me. ‘Umm … okay. Let’s do that.’

  The satellite phone cut out midway through our weekly live TV interview with Sky News, and I briefly called my dad and asked him to apologise for us. When I told him about the paddle, he plunged into despair. ‘No!’ he insisted. ‘You must haul back and look for it!’ He dismissed building a paddle as a joke. ‘Oh, Christopher—don’t be stupid—you won’t get anywhere with a little toy paddle!’

  ‘There is NO WAY we’re going to haul our PACs back the way we’ve come!’ I said, begging him to see the reason in our decision. ‘It could take days, and we might still not find it, and then what?’

  ‘Ah, well, it’s your decision, Christopher,’ he said heavily, in the end. ‘But I think you’re making a big mistake.’

  Even though collapsing here at 8 pm we’ve racked up 13 kilometres—one of our best days yet—we don’t feel like celebrating. We are far more exhausted and drained than we’ve ever felt so far. I actually feel quite dizzy as I try to walk around camp, and Clark feels sick from exertion. Dad’s foreboding really put a dampener on our morale this evening too. We only keep going out here propped up on positive thoughts and self-belief in the face of overwhelming odds, and to lose something as critical as our paddle, and then to also lose the mental encouragement from my dad—it’s torn a gaping hole in our carefully constructed veil of optimism, and through it we now can’t help but see despair and failure.

  ‘We gave it everything today,’ Clark muttered dejectedly in his sleeping bag. ‘Everything! And it was probably some of the best terrain we’ll ever get—we pushed on way past normal dinner time—and all we managed is 13 kilometres.’

  I didn’t want to talk about it. I was hoping Clark wasn’t going to bring it up. The reality is—and we both know it—that there really is no way we can make it to the far side anymore, paddle or no paddle. We’d need to somehow haul further than we did on our ungodly push today, every single day from now on, for over a month, to get to the west side of the island. ‘Yeah,’ I said at last, voicing what neither of us wanted to hear. ‘There’s just no way we’re going to make it, is there?’

  I glanced over at Clark. He was nodding sadly to himself as he heard the words. ‘Not really, no,’ he finally agreed, ‘and it’s stupid to keep trying like this—our bodies just can’t cope.’

  Our feelings couldn’t sink any lower.

  ‘And by pushing on like madmen every day,’ I continued, ‘without the time or energy to even look around or stop to explore or take photos, we’re missing out on what we came here for really—we’re here for the adventure, surely, not just to get to a particular point on the map?’

  It was a pivotal moment. ‘That’s right,’ Clark said, and after a lengthy discussion, during which our morale escalated enormously, I summarised our new philosophy.

  ‘Right, so from tomorrow onwards, we’ll keep going, get as far as we can each day but when we see something interesting, we’ll take the time out to investigate it—guilt free. Yep?’ I looked at Clark.

  ‘Yep,’ he agreed, smiling for the first time all day.

  DAY 15: We’re not going to make it

  We slumbered until 9 am this morning, then treated ourselves to brekky in bed, revelling in our new-found freedom. We even took the time to photograph and film the breakfast procedure, something we’d been meaning to do for a while. While both secretly nursing guilt at having accepted our ‘failure’ already, externally our morale has never been higher, and we are actually excited again about heading onwards, to see and explore new places, rather than dreading waking to the continued, impossible struggle each day.

  Hauling along the esker we came upon a decaying muskox. After nervously checking around for lurking predators, we took some photos and headed off. ‘The wind’s finally shifted …’ Clark noted brightly, the breeze now blowing at our backs. Some twenty minutes later we paused, confused.

  ‘Where’s the esker go now?’ I dug out our GPS, marked a waypoint, and got a direction. It pointed behind us. Our brows knitted together trying to understand what was going on.

  ‘What, we’re supposed to be going … back that way!?’ Clark said incredulously.

  We checked again. ‘Um, apparently,’ I managed, utterly bewildered and disorientated. ‘But we just came from that way. Didn’t we?’

  We decided to trust the GPS, turn around, and head back the way we’d just come. It felt all wrong for the first few hundred metres but gradually started making sense. ‘Wow!’ Clark gasped. ‘We must have totally walked off in the opposite direction after filming that muskox!’ It was hard to believe. ‘So I guess the wind didn’t shift at all, then.’

  Six kilometres later, the esker petered out as the land gave way to ocean on the north-eastern shoreline of the island’s eastern flange. ‘The coast!’ Clark shouted in an attempt to sound elated. ‘It’s not quite what we imagined, is it,’ he added, visions of us paddling along the shore fading as we gazed out over a haphazard mudflat punctuated by shallow pools and stranded hunks of ice as far out as we could see.

  ‘Bummer!’ I laughed. ‘It looks like a cool place to explore, anyway!’ Moments later I found a fossil ammonite and Clark a fossilised bit of coral while setting up the bear alarm around the campsite.

  I set off towards the distant ‘ocean’ to fish, can of bear spray in my pocket, but after spotting a large shaggy brown mass lumbering towards me,
hurried back to camp, tail between my legs. Binoculars revealed it only to be a muskox, so I set out again, but this time bringing my shotgun. One day we’re going to get caught out. Half an hour later I still hadn’t found anywhere deep enough to fish, and returned empty-handed, my stomach growling with hunger.

  After dinner—dehydrated ‘savoury Italian pasta with beef’—we checked our emails. We received a lot of encouraging emails, and one not very encouraging one from my dad. Huddled in our sleeping bags we both leaned inwards to read the letter. Backed up by a plethora of calculations and averages on our distances so far, he basically pointed out that there was zero chance we would make it to the far side of the island, and went on to list various reasons for our getting picked up by seaplane in the next few days.

  It was a very gentle, logical email, but it was still painful to read. ‘Luckily we’ve already accepted that we’re not going to make it!’ Clark said, a little indignantly.

  ‘But why on earth would we get picked up now, though? We may as well keep going until our allotted 65 days run out—getting all the photos and videos we want, and live the experience!’

  ‘Your dad’s just being a dad, Chris,’ Clark grinned. ‘Of course he wants us home!’

  DAY 16: Enough’s enough

  We actually went for a walk this morning, leaving our PACs back at camp. Not being shackled to a quarter of a ton makes a huge difference. This really is a beautiful part of the world. We justified it as a recce trip to check out terrain conditions ahead, but really we just needed to escape for a while, to clear our heads.

  Hopping out onto some pack ice, we dangled the fishing lure pathetically in about 60 centimetres of water. It’s all so shallow around here. Clear blue skies, temperature about 3 degrees above zero—the ice all around us sparkling as it melted in the sun. ‘If we just keep hauling for 65 days, though,’ I said, suddenly thinking aloud, ‘I wonder where we’ll be when we need to get picked up.’