First Appearance

FIRST APPEARANCE (Chapter 1) maverick's fourth story

Copyright (c) maverick 2003. All rights reserved.

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The first thing that sticks in my mind from that day was when Stephen Palmer, a guy in the next year up from me, called out, "Hey, look at that. It's like a piece fell off the sun."

We'd all looked upwards, squinting from the chill of the Arctic wind. The pale disc of the sun hung low in the sky above the desert of tundra ahead of us; a cold white disc shining weakly through the steely grey cloud. I saw, and a chill unrelated to the iciness of the air as I did so, that the sun wasn't circular: it was as if one side of it had been damaged.

Another boy, nearer to me, had laughed and said, "Yeah. It's like someone took a bite out of it."

But the notch was too small for that; too small even to be a nibble. A tiny part of the circumference was indented, that was all. Like a saucer that had been knocked and had chipped on one side.

Mr Vaughan, our teacher and the leader of our group, came walking towards us, wondering why we'd stopped; why we hadn't been keeping up with him. He turned to look at the sky, to see what we were looking at.

He stared at it for a few seconds, shielding his eyes as the sun intermittently broke through the clouds that rose like smoke across it. Then he turned back to face us, grinning and with an expression full of delight.

Palmer said, "It's an eclipse, right?"

Vaughan nodded, "Yeah..." but then his smiled faded and his eyes lost their sparkle. He seemed to have remembered something significant.

He looked back up at it and muttered, "Except there's more to it than that... if I'm getting the date and time right..." He was speaking more to himself than to us. His voice was faint and distracted.

Someone asked, "What do you mean, 'there's more to it than that'?"

He looked around at the eight of us, standing around him like we were his disciples, and seemed to remember where he was; who he was talking to.

He smiled. "I used to be into eclipses. Years ago."

He was a young guy; barely in his mid-twenties. He hadn't been alive long enough to have been into something years ago.

"I think we're seeing the first eclipse of a saros cycle. We're pretty lucky... it's kind of a rare event... at least it's rare for a group of people to be around to see it."

I didn't know what he meant and looked back up at the pale, ashen disc of the sun, trying to see something that made it special. The piece missing from its edge was getting smaller. The eclipse was all but over. If this was special I figured we must have missed the special part.

He went on, "We just happen to be at exactly the right place to see it. And the date rings vague bells... when I was about eighteen I'd have given just about anything to see what we're looking at..."

John Franklin said, "But it's over. There wasn't anything to see."

Vaughan laughed. "Yeah. But it's just being born... this is just the beginning..."

Most of us looked up again, wondering if maybe there was more to come. Fireworks shooting out from it or something.

But Vaughan explained, "That's the point. In eighteen years time, the shadow of this eclipse will be back. Part of the same cycle. A few thousand miles south east of here but still within the Arctic Circle. That time a little more of the moon will cover the sun and it'll last a few seconds longer."

Anderson muttered, "Ooh wow. Book me in to see that one, sir." Vaughan ignored him except for a slight smirk. He tended to ignore most of the crap Anderson came out with.

Vaughan went on, "And then in another eighteen years, somewhere in Siberia maybe, it'll be back again. And then, in another eighteen, it'll reappear in Alaska. And it'll visit our planet every eighteen years, drifting slowly southwards across the surface and getting longer and longer and with more and more of the sun getting covered by the moon.

"In a few hundred years, when it's as far south as London and New York, if they still exist, the moon will eat so much from the sun that only a thin arc of light remain will in the sky. And then, eighteen years later, the eclipse will become total for just a few brief seconds."

We stared up at the sun, its white watery disc moving through the clouds like it was sailing on them, watching as the last speck of the moon's silhouette moved away from it. Watching the sun become whole again.

"It'll continue moving southward," he continued, "returning every eighteen years a few thousand miles east of its last visit, becoming more and more spectacular as it matures. By the twenty-eighth century the brief eclipse you just saw will have developed to a total time of three hours, with seven or eight minutes of darkness at its climax. To the people watching it in as it moves across Africa or South America - or even if seen only by fish, whales and birds as it sweeps across the Indian Ocean or Pacific - it will be magnificent."

The wind whistled around us, freezing our ears and making our noses turn pink, as we stared up at the sun's disc, listening to him. For a guy more used to teaching fifth-form Physics, he had a captivating way with words.

"And today is its birth date. Pity we didn't pack a bottle of champagne."

When it became obvious that Vaughan had said all he was going to, our eyes moved from the sun back to him. I could tell he was grinning even though the after-image of the sun's disc made a dark purple ball hover in front of his face.

I looked around: at the wind making waves through the rough mossy plants on the endless plain and at the leaden clouds above us, moving as one sheet like they were frozen together. What a bleak place in which to be born!

We set off again, walking north-eastwards towards our next intended camp and our third night away from civilisation.

Throughout the afternoon, as we walked across the flat, desolate tundra, my mind kept returning to the eclipse, unable to let it go.

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.

For my part, I hadn't even thought about masturbation as being an issue while sharing a tent - like I said, I hadn't done much more than fiddled with my occasional erections up until then - but the prospect of being in such close confines with other boys and men had definitely been on my mind in the lead-up to the trip. So, even for me, it was nice to hear him talking so nonchalantly about the fact we were going to be so intimate together: yes, we're gonna see each other doing things friends aren't usually party to, but if our teacher could be cool with that, maybe we all could...

Vaughan reiterated, "But seriously, lads, don't stay out of the tent any longer than necessary... I don't want to find one of you frozen solid in the morning with your dick in your hand..."

No doubt as a result of Vaughan's directness, that night the guys in my tent proved to be a lot more relaxed about sharing a tent with other lads than they probably would have been otherwise. Undressing together in its close stuffy confines wasn't as embarrassing as it might have been and the inevitable poking of elbows and knees into each other's crotches and arses as we clambered into our sleeping bags was more funny than awkward.

Anderson lightened the mood further by telling us that his cock was so big that he'd need the space of a double sleeping bag if he was going to wank. That started a totally unserious comparison of the size of our bulges through our underwear, by the end of which our reservations were all but forgotten.

We talked until after around eleven, when Connell called over to us to get some rest, and then whispered for another hour or so after that. At about midnight, we giggled to hear sounds of masturbation coming from one of the other tents and then Palmer declared he might "need to do the same" before he could get some sleep.

But I don't think anything happened inside our tent on that first night, and if it did I must have fallen asleep before it had started. We'd walked a long way that day and I was pretty exhausted. The ground was hard and uncomfortable and the air was so cold that our breath condensed on every surface like dew, but sleep came easily nonetheless.

I woke up with Palmer's cock almost poking me in the face. The morning sun was shining in through the side of the tent that Josh and I were lying on. I squinted in the brightness to see what was going on. Palmer was pulling on a clean teeshirt, unaware that I was waking up and unaware that his semi-erect cock was swinging around in front of me like a fat, swollen pendulum.

Anderson was talking about a dream he'd had about a girl from the sixth form. Even in my state of semi-consciousness I was aware that he was probably making it up.

The sun had warmed the inside of the tent, and the air was heavy with the smell of sweat and that sharp, thick odour you find in male locker rooms. A lot of the latter, I realised, was probably due to my nose being so close to Palmer's exposed crotch.

I thought, "I don't want to even think about what we're all gonna smell like in ten days time!"

I looked over at Anderson who was pulling off the vest he'd worn overnight. His erection was full and proud: seven or eight inches of it curving upwards from his densely hairy balls. I figured that his talk of his supposed erotic dream was his way of making light of his state of arousal.

Just then the tent doors were pulled open, the ripping Velcro making the sound of tearing canvas.

Vaughan stuck his head in and said, "You guys up?"

Anderson didn't attempt to cover his erection, as I would have done, and Vaughan looked down at it and grinned. He said, "Ah yeah... looks like you definitely are..."

Anderson grinned back. "Looks like he wants to be your friend, sir. He's smiling up at you..."

Vaughan threw him a look of amused consternation. "Get something on, Rob. It's a bit chilly out here..."

Then he withdrew and refastened the Velcro strips on the doors.

Palmer said, "You know what we've gotta do next, don't you?"

Anderson pulled a clean pair of underwear from his rucksack. "I'm all too aware, Stephen."

Palmer went on, "Well I'd try and lose the woody if I were you. Guys are gonna start talking if you're flying at full mast while we're all sitting around taking a dump..."

Anderson laughed. "I reckon the sight we're about to see will be a sure-fire passion-killer if the cold air isn't enough..." Then he laughed louder. "Although, actually, the sight of you guys crapping might be kind of... interesting..."

Palmer looked horrified and Anderson punched him in the shoulder, "Hey, I'm just fucking joking, okay?"

Anderson manoeuvred himself into a position to pull his underwear over his feet. I got glimpses of his arse, the crack of which betrayed a generous sprouting of hair. His cock swayed around in front of him like a branch in the wind.

After a minute or so, Palmer broke the silence, pulling on a shirt. "Come to think of it," he said in a low, almost inaudible voice, "it makes sense to - you know - sort ourselves out last thing at night..."

Anderson pulled his boxer-briefs up his thighs, struggling to confine his large rod-like cock within their tight gusset. He asked, "How d'you mean?"

Palmer grinned and became a little coy. Almost in a whisper, he said, "You know... having a wank..."

Anderson grinned back. "Oh right. Why?"

Palmer started pulling his trousers on, finding it difficult to force his feet into the folds of the thick material. "Well... if we're gonna have to show just about everything to the other guys... it kinda makes sense to... you know... relieve ourselves so that we don't throw a stiffy at an embarrassing moment...?"

Anderson grinned. "Yeah. I guess."

Palmer went on, "I mean it's something guys need to do. You heard what Vaughan said. It's just like a biological function; like taking a piss."

I was intrigued by all this. I'd had friends to stay over with me loads of time, but those were boys of a similar age to myself and, like me, probably not in the habit of masturbating yet. But Palmer was a year older than me, Anderson two, and the idea of them needing to relieve themselves sexually belonged to an adult, and at that time alien, world.

They finished off dressing, pulling on their thick padded jackets, and, grabbing their soaps and towels and toilet rolls, headed out through the door.

After they'd left, I got out of my sleeping bag and felt an icy draught against my bare legs from where Palmer hadn't fastened the flaps of the door properly. It was obviously close to freezing point outside.

I closed the door more securely and pulled my briefs off to change for the day. As I did so, I nudged Josh to wake him up. "Hey Josh - it's morning, mate."

He was sleeping on his side, his face directed away from me. He grunted but I could see that he didn't open his eyes.

I realised his body was shaking slightly and thought there might be something wrong with him. Vaughan had told us a lot about hypothermia and how to spot the warning signs. Maybe Josh, being next to the side of the tent, had caught a chill.

I shook his shoulder gently. "Hey Josh. Wake up."

His shoulder and forearm were really vibrating. He was also breathing faster than normal. Maybe he was in a fit or something.

I knelt over him so I could see more of his face and said, "Come on, mate..."

He didn't open his eyes. He kept shaking inside his sleeping bag, his breathing getting gradually faster, and grunted, "Fuck off..."

I was confused. Josh never spoke to me like that; he didn't speak to anyone like that.

I asked, "Are you okay? What are you doing?"

He kept shaking, his arm vibrating like he was scratching himself or something; his rhythm getting faster.

"You know what I'm doing... fuck off and leave me alone..." His eyes were still closed but his expression was angry; his mouth almost a snarl. He was almost panting and found it difficult to complete what he'd said in one breath.

I was a bit shocked by Josh's behaviour. This was so unlike his normal, laid-back manner. I wondered if I ought to fetch Mr Vaughan. Josh might be seriously sick.

I heard a slight slapping sound: skin against skin. Like a gentle applause coming from within the thick folds of his sleeping bag.

Then, as I stared at him, wondering what was happening to him, his eyes tightened like he was in pain and he gasped. At the same moment, his hips started bucking, making his whole sleeping bag move to the same rhythm of his arm.

I smiled. It was a joke. "He's pretending to 'cum'," I thought. One of our friends did the same act, impersonating his older brother who he'd supposedly overheard having sex. But in Josh's case the acting was more understated; less embellished and theatrical.

After five or ten seconds, his hips stopped thrusting and the rhythm of his arm slowed to a mere shudder and then stopped altogether. I expected him to turn to me and laugh but he just lay there, eyes closed, recovering his breath.

I moved away from him, still confused, and fished a pair of clean briefs out from my rucksack. Josh croaked from his sleeping bag, "What time is it?"

I found my watch. "Seven thirty eight."

I looked over at him, my underwear in my hand. He was rubbing his eyes, pretending nothing had happened.

Then he unzipped the side of his sleeping bag and got out from it. I saw that his briefs were pulled down slightly and that his cock was sticking out from between the bottom of his teeshirt and the waistband of his briefs. It was semi-stiff and looked very large; much larger than my own looked back then when it was in a similar state.

He reached forward to his rucksack and I saw that his right hand glistened like it was wet. Then I saw that the tip of his cock was also wet, and the bottom of his teeshirt had splashes and dribbles on it.

An unusual smell, thick and heavy, seemed to rapidly fill the air inside the tent. It was a smell with which I'd become very familiar with in the confines of the tent over the next ten days, but at that time I had no idea what it was.

I asked, "Did you piss in your sleeping bag, Josh?"

He grabbed something from his rucksack and wiped his hand on it. "Uh?"

I grinned. "Or do you just get really sweaty down there?"

He dabbed at his cock, gently drying the head of it. I looked down at it and noticed that the wetness he was wiping off was thicker and more gooey than sweat or piss. It was more like snot; like partially set jelly but creamy in colour.

I laughed, "It's like your dick sneezed."

He looked at me and glared. "What the fuck's wrong with you this morning, Stu? You know what I was doing... it's not like there's anything wrong with it..."

I guess I just stared at him, looking dopey.

He said, more gently, "You heard what Vaughan said... when you're living so closely with other guys you're gonna see them wanking sometimes... there's no need making a big deal of it..."

I flushed with embarrassment. "Oh right... yeah... sorry... I didn't realise that's what you were doing..."

He threw me a sceptical look. "What did you think I was doing?"

"I dunno... I thought you were ill or something..."

He hitched his teeshirt up a little and dried more of the sticky-looking white stuff from around his pubic hair. He smiled slightly and asked, "You thought I was ill?"

"Yeah... I dunno... the way you were breathing so quickly and the way your hips were kinda thrashing around, I guess..."

He looked up at me, his smile fading. "Everyone does that when they wank..." His expression was faintly confrontational; like I'd suggested there was something odd about him. He asked, "Don't you?"

I shrugged. "I've never really done it, actually. It feels too weird when I try..."

He stared at me incredulously and I felt embarrassed about what I'd just said.

I quickly added, "I mean... I'm probably just not doing it the right way..."

He kept staring at me and I felt my face flush.

I said, "Don't, like, tell anyone..."

He shook his head. Then he started pulling his briefs off. I saw that his cock was now totally limp and hung down over the top of his sparsely haired balls. He said, "Guys start at different ages. It's no big deal. I shouldn't have got arsey with you when I was doing it. I thought you were pissing about... trying to annoy me or something..."

"I honestly didn't know what you were doing..."

He pulled off his teeshirt. There were still a few dribbles of thick liquid on his belly and he wiped them off with his teeshirt before throwing it onto his sleeping bag.

Now we were both naked, kneeling in front of each other, looking at each other's bodies. Although Josh was my good friend, up until then I'd never been naked with him. At school, we did sport at different times and so had never had to shower or get changed together. We didn't stay over at each other houses. So shared nudity had never been part of our relationship.

But now that we were in this situation, we were both surprisingly comfortable with it. We were good mates; the fact we had our dicks out together, as Anderson would have put it, wasn't an issue.

I saw that Josh's body, like mine, was thin and firm. Muscle was starting to develop on both of us in areas which had, in previous years, remained stubbornly lean despite hours of labour. His underarm hair was thick and bushy, like mine, but we differed in that his chest was smooth whereas mine had a central clump of thin, soft hair.

I saw him look down at my cock, drawing comparisons, and I looked at his making my own. We were both hairy down there, though mine was perhaps slightly thicker, but that was where the similarities ended. His cock, even though flaccid, was large and thick and rested heavily on his small, insubstantial balls The colour of it was pink, no doubt from the attention it had just received from his hand, and his foreskin was slightly retracted exposing the moist tip of its round pink head.

My cock, on the other hand, was pale and small and looked thin alongside his. My foreskin was long and covered the head of my cock completely, giving the tip a round puckered mouth. My balls, though, beat his by a long stretch. They were bigger and protruded outward from between my thighs, looking ripe and round inside their tight bag. Like a couple of eggs next to his marbles.

He grinned. "Big balls."

I said, "Big dick."

He smiled more broadly. He liked the compliment.

Then he said, more seriously, "Maybe you're not ready to start wanking yet."

I was a little offended. "Sod off, Josh. Just 'cause my dick's not as big as yours. I mean... it gets pretty impressive once it wakes up..."

He chuckled. "Well, why do you think you can't do it?"

I considered the question for a couple of seconds. "I dunno... I do the action but it hurts after a minute or so..."

"What action?"

I was too embarrassed to wank in front of him so I made a masturbatory action against my crotch without actually touching my dick. My fingers curled around to form a schoolyard 'wanker' gesture, beating rapidly against my pubic bush.

He said, "Maybe you're being too rough. And maybe you shouldn't use all your fingers."

"How do you mean?" I asked. Then, feeling my face go a little red, and lowering my voice to a whisper, "How do you do it?"

He reached down and raised his limp cock upwards to show me. He whispered, "When I started, I just did this." He jerked his foreskin back and forth a little using his thumb and forefinger like a letter O. He held his other fingers outward, keeping them away from his cock.

He rolled his foreskin back and forth across his cock head a few times. The pink surface of the helmet was slimy and wet from the orgasm he'd just had. A white pearl of liquid grew from the thin slit at the tip of it as he gently masturbated the stem of it.

He said, "Then, as I got used to how it felt... I mean, like, over a few months... I started using all my fingers. I worked up to it, though. I didn't start out like that."

He furled the rest of his fingers around the stem of his cock and squeezed it inside them, continuing to slide his foreskin back and forth.

He went on, "And then I started getting faster. Up until then I'd been slow. I mean, when you first start wanking you've got be gentle 'til your dick gets used to it..."

He took his hand away from his dick and it stood upward from his balls. Half-erect.

I laughed. "Looks like you were enjoying that."

He grinned back and said, glancing down at my cock, "Likewise." I realised I was also in a state of semi-arousal. I hadn't been aware of it, but watching Josh masturbate had clearly had an effect on me.

Just then the doors of tent were yanked open and Anderson started crawling in.

Josh and I both struggled to pull our underwear on.

Anderson laughed. "'Ello 'ello 'ello. What's all this then? Having a little play together, were we?"

I heard Palmer call in from outside. "What's going on? What are they up to?"

Josh was pulling his briefs on, smiling and shaking his head. I wasn't able to look quite so indifferent. I was aware that my face was scarlet.

Anderson came in, putting his stuff back into his rucksack and starting to clear up the mess he'd left. Still laughing he said, "Don't let me interrupt you guys. I've plenty of spare tissue..."

Palmer also crawled in, grinning. He saw my cock, still half-erect, as I tried to pull my underwear on to cover it and then turned to see Josh's, also clearly semi-aroused, inside his tight-fitting briefs. He laughed and said, "Ooh... naughty boys."

I expected a lot more jokes and ridicule but none came. Josh and I got dressed and Palmer and Anderson told us what Connell and some of the other lads were cooking for breakfast. I realised that, even if Josh and I had been masturbating together, it was clearly not a big deal to Palmer and Anderson. An occasion which warranted a couple of facetious comments, yes, but not a major issue.

Even when we'd set off for the day, and Palmer was with his mates from the other tent and Anderson was pissing around with Robson, they still didn't return to the fact they thought they'd caught Josh and I wanking. It had been a non-event.

Within an hour or so the walk and the landscape had driven any lingering concerns and guilt from my mind altogether.

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To be continued

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