Chapter 1

27 April 2011Sarah M

Editor’s note: Following in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, the blog team begins, with this entry, a novella, published in 6 weekly instalments. See you next week for Emily J’s Chapter 2!

“So when do we get to see some narwhals?”

It was an honest question, albeit an over-asked one. They’d been driving for days on what had been promisingly introduced by Steve as an “ultimate adventure vacation”—which Eugene later discovered was a jazzy way to say “road-trip”. True, the chicken bingo in Calmar and Corner Gas museum in Rouleau had been quite entertaining, but most of it, so far, had consisted of long hours staring at road lines, blasting Sunset Rubdown on the car stereo, and munching on snack packets of spam flavoured macadamia nuts and soylent green.

   It was now four o’clock on Tuesday, the day after they had been scheduled to arrive at the sea, but there was still not a drop of water in sight apart from the brooding gray columns on the horizon. As Eugene popped another macadamia nut into his mouth, wincing at the taste and pondering the blatant lack of narwhals (as an avid marine biologist specializing in tusks, this was, truthfully, his main reason for coming on the trip), Steve turned up the music one more notch and considered kicking Eugene out at the next gas station. The overnight stop in Nazko for the annual Bigfoot Festival had seemed fun at the time, but now Steve found himself wishing they hadn’t dawdled so much on getting to the coast—he wasn’t sure if they’d still make it in time for the event.

Steve and Eugene had been friends for years—since the day they’d rescued that mother raccoon and her litter from a flaming train car—but after six days and fourteen hundred kilometres, they weren’t sure how they’d lasted this long.

“Are you sure we’re still on the right road?”

“You tell me. Didn’t you check the map fifteen minutes ago?”

Eugene pulled the paper maze of roads that he’d been examining compulsively and sporadically in his duty as navigator. Matching a coming route marker—Range Road 436—with his map, he easily found their position.

“Uh, Steve? We might have a problem.”

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