by Chris Bray
The next ‘morning’ we were back at the hangar, assembling the wheels onto our PACs and sticking on sponsor logos. We triumphantly wheeled our contraptions, now resembling over-branded Formula-1 racing cars, out onto the road. ‘Shall we see how they go over the tundra?’ Clark asked hesitantly. Looking back, it was absurd, but we decided not to—the tundra seemed particularly lumpy just here and we didn’t want to break anything unnecessarily. We amused ourselves instead by giving each other chariot rides until Brent turned up.
‘So these are the PACs, hey? Wow. Boy they look heavy …’ This wasn’t exactly the comment we were angling for from our Arctic mentor, especially considering the PACs were still completely empty. He swung himself into the harness and led one of our precious unscratched babies off the road and onto the open tundra. We held our breaths. The PAC joggled around behind him, clanking and rattling alarmingly, but thankfully nothing actually fell off. ‘I guess it’ll settle down a bit under load,’ Brent called back. ‘I can see a few issues with it, but I kinda like it …’
Once back at Doug’s, we immediately sought to answer a nagging question: ‘Do you think all this gear is going to actually fit inside the PACs?’ We literally had no idea if it would. As we carried drybag after drybag out of the cabin and placed it beside the PACs, we started to have serious doubts. There really was a lot of gear and food—we’d never actually seen it all piled together in one place before. It was one of those silent moments where neither of us said much, and we just started stuffing bags inside every hatch, anxious to see how much of it was going to remain sitting on the tundra. ‘We don’t really need a tripod each, do we?’ No, we didn’t. We also didn’t need the two harmonicas that we’d earlier convinced ourselves would come in handy at the end of a long day of hauling. We left them on Doug’s table, along with several other last-minute equipment list casualties.
Amazingly, everything important fitted inside the PACs, just. We shot each other a classic ‘well, that was lucky’ nod of approval, and unloaded everything back into Doug’s house. While all this was going on, we had a constant stream of visitors dropping by to ogle our famed wheeled kayaks and help with the last to-do’s.
‘Hmm, I was thinking they were going to be more like kayaks …’ It was Fred Hamilton, the floatplane pilot, leaning out of his truck. ‘I’m not sure how we’ll go fitting them on the planes, actually. We’ll see, eh?’ For a passing comment, it could hardly have been more pivotal, but he seemed content to cross this bridge when he came to it, and drove off before the power of speech returned to us.
‘It’ll be okay,’ Clark managed at last.
‘It better be okay!’ I added, laughing. ‘There’s no other way we can get out to our start point!’
‘We could haul there …’ Clark offered, and while he said it as a joke, we both cringed a little inside. Nothing—absolutely nothing— was certain.
A little after lunch, Clark and I were doing some last-minute provisioning at the supermarket when a group of Inuit girls ran up to us, pointing. ‘I saw you on TV last night,’ one said, grinning. ‘You were on the news.’ It was the first we’d heard of it. ‘You’re setting out on your trip today,’ she announced, and giggling, they all scampered away.
‘Ha—I wish!’ I said to Clark, visualising all the things we still needed to do and test, including checking to see if the PACs even floated under the weight of all the gear, and if they still leaked. ‘But maybe we should try and find Fred and see if we can book our flight for tomorrow evening, or the day after?’
‘Speak of the devil,’ Clark said, nodding as Fred strode out of the store behind us.
‘Hey, boys! Been looking for you about that flight, fitting those huge kayaks on the side of the plane—’ A mounting, paralysing dread poured into my stomach as he continued. ‘I’ve been thinking, and, argh … I reckon it’ll be okay.’ A calming relief washed over us, but it was short-lived. ‘We’ll fly you out at seven this arvo—but bring them down a little early, just in case we need to think of something else.’
‘This arvo!?’ I echoed, taken aback.
‘Seven pm,’ Fred confirmed. ‘There’s a good break in the weather and I’ve got both planes free this evening so we can do it in one go—can’t say if we’ll get another chance this week. You are ready to go, right? I saw it on the news?’
I swallowed hard and looked at Clark. ‘Yeah. Well, we can be, anyway …’
Panic. ‘Let’s split up!’ I said. ‘You run and start shooting the stock footage to send back for Sky News, and I’ll fill in that “we’ve gone hiking” form for the police. Then we’ll load the PACs up, and our test paddle can be around to the floatplane base. Let’s go go go!’
Clark hobbled off as fast as the near terminally infected blister on his heel would permit, and I wheezed my way to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) building through the drizzling rain. Just what the doctor ordered. Neither of us had been able to shake our colds.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ the RCMP officer said, nodding, ‘anyone going “out on the land” should fill in one of these forms stating where you’re going, when you’ll be back. So how many days are you going … hunting, or, what are you doing again?’ She looked at me.
‘Er, my friend and I are going to try and cross the whole island; we think it might take about two months.’
‘Wow, that’s a seriously long hunting trip!’ she exclaimed.
‘Oh, we’re not hunting …’
She looked perplexed. ‘What are you doing then? Fishing?’
‘Um, no,’ I ventured, ‘we’re just … walking,’ I finished lamely, and at once was struck by the complete idiocy of the whole undertaking. Pointless or not, time was of the essence, and I didn’t have time to psychoanalyse myself any further. I filled in the form, and hurried back to Doug’s, where Clark was frantically loading the PACs.
Eventually we wedged the last hatch closed, and pulled them towards the water’s edge. They were impossibly heavy, and, disconcertingly, we had to take it in turns helping each other to roll them to the shore. Once there, we were faced with a new problem. To convert the PACs from wheeled mode to kayak mode, we had to somehow pull the axle out from underneath, gently lower the PAC to the ground, lift the pivoting wheel arms up on each side, and re-slide the axle back through, linking the two now across the top of the kayak. Considering that each PAC now weighed 250 kilograms, simply getting Clark to ‘hold it up’ while I withdrew the axle just wasn’t going to work.
‘Damn! We’re going to have to unload and re-load both PACs each time we get into, and out of, every single lake? SHIT! That’ll take forever!’ Clearly we should have seen this one coming, and it served as an unwelcome reminder of just how untested our systems were. After lightening the load by a few token bags of chocolate and other supplies, Clark did a pretty good impersonation of Clark Kent by momentarily supporting—and then hastily lowering to the ground—about 180 kilograms as I did the conversion.
‘Great, and now we just drag them the last bit into the water …’ Clark said with a wry smile, knowing full well how impossible this would be. With a horrible grinding, screeching noise we struggled them at last into the water, leaving behind a confetti trail of flecks of orange paint and aluminium filings. With a great deal of trepidation, we gently eased ourselves into our PACs and tentatively pushed off.
‘God, they sit so low in the water!’ I commented, balancing myself so water wouldn’t lap in either side.
‘Yeah, but they do actually float,’ Clark observed, ‘so that’s good. Right, let’s get them to the floatplane base, we’re already late!’
To our great relief, the PACs did indeed fit alongside the plane’s floats, and after giving mine a cursory wiggle, Fred proclaimed, ‘It’ll be okay,’ and clambered up inside the plane. Ahead, Clark’s PAC was already lashed to the other plane.
This was it. It was time to go. As we hugged our adopted parents Phil and Liz goodbye, Liz pushed a warm paper bag into my hands. ‘I baked you some
muffins,’ she said. ‘They’ll be your last taste of homely comfort.’ With that, Clark and I squished in beside our respective pilots and clanked the little door closed.
At the push of a button, the engine sputtered into life, quickly rising to a deafening roar, the whole plane humming as we taxied out into the bay. ‘All right, let’s see if we can lift off with all this load,’ Fred shouted, sounding genuinely interested, and flung open the throttle.
Vibrating so hard I could barely see, the plane surged through the water, slowly gaining speed. The sound of rushing water gradually gave way to the slap-slap-slapping of the wave crests as we scampered along the surface like some ungainly bird, before at long last we lumbered into the air.
‘Great!’ shouted Fred. After eighteen days waiting in Cambridge Bay, we were finally on our way!
As we droned over the barren landscape, I was again struck by just how empty it was. I wasn’t expecting great blankets of animals shuffling across the tundra, although I thought I might be able to at least spot a few muskox—but there was nothing. Kilometre after kilometre of nothing. Just a patchwork of lakes and swamp. After twenty minutes or so of this, my eye was drawn along a snaking gravel pathway, raised a little above the swampy tundra. ‘What’s that?’ I shouted, pointing.
‘That’s an esker,’ Fred said by way of explanation.
‘What’s an esker?’ I bellowed.
‘It’s where a river used to flow underneath a glacier,’ he shouted. ‘The glaciers are all long gone, but what you’re left with are these raised riverbeds—like roads.’ They were indeed like roads. ‘You should follow them, where you can,’ he added, tapping his map and passing it to me. Trying to hold the vibrating map steady enough to read, I saw a winding, intermittent hatched trail.
‘I thought they were cliffs!’ I shouted.
‘What?’ Fred leant closer.
‘Nothing …’ I said, my mind reeling. The esker symbol really did look very similar to those used to indicate cliffs on other maps I’d seen, and Clark and I had laboriously planned our whole route to avoid them at all costs. Great. Yet another shining example of how ignorant and unprepared we were for the situation in which we’d soon find ourselves. Just ahead I could see Clark’s plane, and I wondered if he was feeling as insecure as I was.
‘There’s the coast,’ Fred indicated. As we flew towards our start point—the most easterly tip of the island—we could see the entire coastline was jam-packed with buckled sheets of ice. ‘We need open water to land,’ Fred shouted, straining to see along the shoreline. After a few minutes, he swung the plane around, heading inland again. ‘Sorry, Chris, it’s going to have to be this lake.’
After a quick fly-over to check the lake didn’t look too shallow, he squared the plane for landing, and we swooped in, rattling at last to a halt. ‘All right, let’s unload!’ he said, climbing out of the cockpit. Ahead of us, with their plane already drifted against the shore, Clark and his pilot were ferrying armfuls of gear onto the tundra.
Lastly we unlashed the PACs and pushed them ashore. Both, we noticed, had water sloshing around inside them from our earlier test paddle. ‘I guess they … um … still leak then,’ Clark said brightly.
We posed with the pilots for a photo, and shook their hands. ‘Well, boys,’ Fred said heavily, ‘you’ve got guts, that’s all I can say. This is bear country. I do wish you the best of luck, but, to be honest, I don’t expect to see either of you two alive again.’
With that, they turned away, and in a blast of freezing prop wash and spray, they were gone, taking all our confidence with them.
DAY 1 (30 July 2005): Alone in the Arctic
The silence was deafening.
We stood there, watching the spot where the planes had vanished, and, all at once, we were surrounded by the vacuum of complete isolation. Neither of us spoke a word for several seconds as reality sank in: we were standing there, completely alone, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest human, and—as the pilot had kindly reminded us—in ‘bear country’. We dug out both shotguns from the mountain of equipment lying in front of us, filled our pockets with bullets and munched quietly on Liz’s muffins—their comforting warmth all but drained away—all the while continually scanning our surroundings, searching for the polar bears we could feel watching us.
I turned on our GPS and waited for a fix. ‘Damn—we’re more than 2 kilometres from our start point, ’ I said, wincing. ‘Oh, and guess what?’ I was grinning now. ‘You know our wonderfully planned route, carefully avoiding all those cliffs on the maps?’
‘Yes?’ Clark said, steeling himself for more bad news.
‘Yeah, turns out they’re “eskers”—like pebble highways—so that’s our route plan out the window.’
Our sense of inadequacy and alienation was complete, and there was nothing else we could do but laugh, and laugh. It felt good, actually, and right then, a whole lot of pent-up worry and stress just seemed to fall away.
At long last, after thirteen months of dreaming and planning, after having our hopes smashed and having to rebuild them more times than we can count, we are, finally, here, on our own in the middle of the Arctic, forced to rely on no one but ourselves. Our world has shrunk to simply include ourselves, and whatever we remembered to pack in that pile of gear. The next two months will be a challenge—a great adventure—but unlike some of the incompetent people we’ve been forced to deal with to get this far, I know that I can trust Clark, and trust myself. Provided we keep alert and our gear doesn’t break, I am confident we’ll get to the far side of the island. We just have to take it one day at a time.
Clark fumbled with the tent and eventually got it up fifteen minutes later, while I clumsily set up the perimeter bear alarm, trying not to notice the way the undulating ground left some sections of the tripwire skimming the ground, and others strung worryingly high over ditches. Oh well, I thought, a really big bear’d probably still bump into it anyway. I test-pulled the tripwire, and clapped my hands towards my ears to cover them, but no alarm went off. My stomach gave a little lurch of fear. I checked everything, reconnected the tripwire and tested it again. Silence. I couldn’t believe it—our bear alarm was broken!
Horrified, exhausted and more than a little scared, just before climbing inside our tent we loaded our shotguns, and Clark test-fired a bear-banger into the sky. We watched it whirl high into the air and explode, the crack sounding strangely truncated with nothing to echo off. We had meant it to be a warning—to scare off any bears lurking in the area—but regretted it instantly, now picturing the heads of every polar bear for miles around turning as one to look in our direction. Feeling increasingly vulnerable, we retreated inside the tent and lay there in our sleeping bags, our ears straining to hear approaching noises outside, waiting. Waiting to be consumed either by sleep, or by a fury of claws and teeth tearing through the side of the tent. Thankfully, we were so utterly spent that tranquillising sleep soon found us.
DAY 2: Sickeningly difficult
My surroundings only gradually filtered through as I rose from the murky depths of sleep this morning: snug inside a sleeping bag … in a tent … Arctic expedition … first night’s sleep … still alive!! With this last realisation came a surge of absolute elation. Never before have I revelled in the surprise of actually finding myself alive. It was definitely a positive start to our first day ‘out on the land’.
I set up the video camera and filmed Clark—steaming bowl of porridge in hand—confidently relating the day ahead. ‘Today, we’re going to pack up, walk a couple of kilometres to the start point in that direction, and organise ourselves …’ We divided the huge pile of gear and food in two, and loaded up our PACs. Each weighs a whopping 250 kilograms—that’s a quarter of a tonne, the equivalent of pulling a cart with three fully grown men standing on it. We clipped our harnesses into the hauling yoke, and ceremoniously shook hands—this was it, the moment we’d been waiting for. I shouldered my harness and leant forward.
Nothing moved.
I leant further. Nothing. I bent my knees, and leant right over—my nose only inches from the tundra, my arms reached right out in front to give maximum weight leverage, and, bunched like a human piston, slowly forced my legs to straighten. Ever so gradually, my PAC began to creep forward. Pausing, I turned to see how Clark was going, only to discover that once moving, my PAC didn’t want to stop, and instead, it flung me to the ground and then proceeded to try and run over me. Thus I quickly learned about momentum.
We thought dragging a truck tyre was hard work, but the superhuman effort required to advance our PACs even a few steps out here is just unbelievable; sickeningly difficult. All humour quickly drained away from the situation as we stood speechless with shock, our minds reeling, unable to come to terms with the thought of having to haul the carts even to our start point, let alone across the whole island. ‘One step at a time …’ we kept telling ourselves, ‘let’s just try and reach that patch of tundra over there …’ The very best we could manage was five, or perhaps ten steps at a time before we’d find ourselves standing groggily, gasping for air, and literally feeling like we were going to be sick.
Some 30 minutes later, I turned on the GPS to discover we’d managed a mere 70 metres. It was all too much. The lurching motion of the PAC snagging and releasing us, constantly throwing us off balance; its rattling, clanking and grinding; my own ragged breath unnaturally loud in my ears; sweat stinging my eyes and running to the tip of my nose, from where it splashed onto the endless sea of shattered limestone; my body almost horizontal with effort.
Both too exhausted and dizzy to go further, we stopped for an early lunch just short of the 100-metre mark, and collapsed against the side of our PACs. It was then that I noticed that the tow point—the part that joins my hauling arm to the PAC—was buckling. We’d built most of the PAC from aluminium, with a few exceptions including this hauling bracket which we’d built from steel, as it was the one thing we certainly couldn’t afford to have break. And here we were, less than 100 metres into a 1000-kilometre journey, and it was already breaking.
