First Appearance (Chapter 1)

I wondered if the others in our group had been as affected by it as I had. They seemed more quiet, most of them silent, and tended to stay further apart than was usual, as if immersed in their own thoughts.

But it seemed unlikely that boys like Anderson and Robson, usually so derisive of those among us who expressed our appreciation of the landscapes we traversed, would be moved to silence by the tiny chink the sun had so briefly lost. If the bleakness of the plain, stretching darkly and ominously out in front of us, couldn't stir up emotions inside them, an eclipse so partial as to be next to invisible hardly would.

I thought about what had happened the previous night. Stuff that we d been getting up to in our four man tent long after Mr Connell, the other teacher supervising our trip, had called out from the tent he and Vaughan were sharing that we should switch off our torches and get some sleep. Maybe Anderson was quiet because he was thinking about that; maybe he felt he and Palmer had gone too far.

*****

It had started on the first night we'd set up a camp, fifteen miles north of the small isolated airstrip we'd been left on. The way things turned out, my friend Josh and I had ended up sharing with Palmer and Anderson, both of whom were from classes further up the school than us.

Vaughan had made it clear that he didn't mind what went on in the tents after lights out as long as we didn't break any of his 'three basic rules': no noise, no leaving the tent without taking a two-way radio, and no relighting the camp fire. He had explained to us the rationale behind each rule and how they made good survival sense.

Someone had joked, "Yeah, and rule number four is no wanking in the tents."

Connell had looked a bit embarrassed but Vaughan had smiled along with the laughter from the rest of us.

He'd said, "Well, I don't mind if you guys want to follow that rule in your tents but there's no way I am in mine."

We'd laughed again and Connell had looked a little surprised at Vaughan's candour.

Vaughan noticed this and became less jovial. "No. Seriously, you guys. We're all gonna be spending a lot of time together over the next ten days. It's gonna be difficult to get a proper wash and we're gonna be very close to each other. We're gonna have to get used to that pretty quickly."

A silent nod of assent ran through the group. We'd all known exactly what we were getting into when we'd signed up for this.

"And we can't afford to get uptight about bodily functions. There are no public conveniences on the tundra and there aren't many opportunities for privacy. So if you've never seen a guy taking a crap or having a wank up until now, well I guess you're soon going to!"

Robson made a comment about the lads in his tent having to go outside if they wanted to 'beat the badger' as he put it. Someone asked if he'd have to take the two-way radio and there were a few jokes about what would happen if a guy accidentally switched it on while he was in full swing.

I kept out of it. I wasn't sure how to take all this. I wasn't particularly hung up about the idea of masturbation: I just didn't enjoy doing it back then. I'd played with my dick a few times - rubbed it against my pillow and whacked it around with my fingers like I was playing tennis with it - and both of those had felt good. But whenever I'd tried to grip it in my fist and pull at it, copying the gestures of other lads making 'wanker' signs to each other, it had started to hurt after a few seconds. I'd never even been close to the thing they called 'cumming' and I'd began to wonder if maybe it just didn't happen to some guys.

So I kept well out of the jokes and comments, although I thought they were quite funny and laughed along with everyone else. Jokes about guys' hands sticking frozen around their dicks or of arcs of semen freezing into solid fountains in mid-air were made funnier by their being said openly in front of a couple of our teachers.

Vaughan intervened, "Seriously, lads, I don't want you creeping around outside the tents in the night. I mean, the jokes are funny but there's a high risk of hypothermia out here. It can get as low as minus twenty even in summer this far North. If you're gonna get hung up about being around other guys all the time, you shouldn't be signing up for Arctic expeditions."

"What if we wanna take a piss or somethin'?" Adams asked.

"Yeah. You can nip out for a minute or so, but masturbation takes a bit longer than that... a lot longer than that when it's too cold to take your gloves off..."

A low chuckle ran through the group and then Robson asked, a look of feigned disgust on his face, "So we just lie around pulling our puds together...?"

Vaughan smiled. "Well, that's up to you guys... I prefer a more discrete fumbling in my sleeping bag when I think the other guys in my tent are asleep. But if you want to stroke together as a group... that's fine by me."

We all laughed and Robson, although smiling, went a bit red. I glanced at Josh and saw that he was looking at me. He was wide-eyed with delight, his expression saying, "He's just admitted that he wanks! A teacher! This is so cool! Wait 'til we get back to school..."

Vaughan laughed, probably at the combination of amusement and discomfort that the faces of most of the lads in the group were showing. Connell, on the other hand, looked slightly tense: I guess, even as an experienced hiker, he wasn't used to having unspoken rules like these openly discussed.

Vaughan went on, "Actually, if you'd have let me know I could have brought my webcam along. Could have set up tentcam.com... could have made myself a fortune..."

Again we all laughed. He was trying to put us at our ease and I guess it was working. Most guys were looking more relaxed at having Vaughan, in effect, giving the thumbs up to the continuation of a habit which, from jokes and comments I'd heard, seemed almost universal among guys.