S White - Hermit

Dana joined Bill in looming over Mike’s shoulder. She was trying not to shake, nervous about what Nathan Whittler’s home would be like. She didn’t want it to look bad for him: squalid, somehow, or amateurish. She found herself hoping the others would look at Nathan’s efforts with admiration. It was proprietorial on her part, and maybe inappropriate, but she felt it nonetheless. It had only been a few hours since she took the call at sunrise, but she was so drawn in that the Whittler case now drowned out almost anything else.

Almost anything.

‘Where’s this feed from?’ asked Mike.

‘Dakota Line,’ replied Dana.

‘Why’s it called that?’

‘Oh, I know that one,’ interjected Bill. ‘Didn’t you do it at school?’

Mike held his hands open in ignorance.

‘Right, so the Dakota brothers owned all this stretch of land: the chain of lakes, and about a click either side, down towards the Old Mill Road. This is, oh, well over a hundred years ago. Eighteen nineties, I think. One day, one of them discovers a few crumbs of gold in the river. People are finding gold all over Australia around this time, so they think it’s a new rush. One wants it for himself, but the other Dakota says, “Share.” Well, they can’t agree like two adults so they split the land in two, with the boundary running down the middle of the river. That way, they each have an equal shot at further gold – which, ironically, neither ever finds. They hammered spikes into the middle of the riverbed all the way down, to mark the border – hence, the Dakota Line.’

Mike shrugged. ‘Cool story, bro.’

The video had been emailed: an initial edit that was simply streaming the footage from Stuart’s helmet cam. It was barely thirty minutes old. The audio was scratchy and sometimes the images broke up or jammed for a second. The flaws gave the evidence a retro feel in an age of high-definition digital, as though it had regressed to match the era when Nathan had begun his new life.

Stuart was at the front of the inflatable canoe, the helicopter nowhere to be seen. Ahead of them Piermont Lake narrowed sharply to the north; bubbling white water glided towards them from green folds of thick foliage. The current didn’t look that strong, but they could hear Stuart’s grunts with each paddle stroke. Overhead they got occasional subliminal flashes of silver from a blue sky as the small drone flew back and forth in a rudimentary search grid.

Now the canoe was simply holding station; small half-paddles kept them around twenty metres from the bank. Stuart took a slow sweep in either direction to show the context. The lake appeared maybe two kilometres long. On one side, forest-cloaked low hills slid to the shoreline. Pines curled outwards and upwards over the water, their reflections flickering. On the other side the shore was mainly reeds seething in the breeze, with a couple of small areas of grass further south. Some black swans and a couple of herons prodded and nodded in the shallows. Not a soul and, when Stuart looked up to locate the drone, no sign of any jet trail, either. To Dana, it seemed bucolic and beguiling. She thought back to Nathan’s quest for ‘nothingness’.

There was an indistinct shout, and then a mixture of static and chatter on the radio attached to Stuart’s shoulder. He gave a little commentary.

‘So, Al’s picked up something on the drone. Thinks he can see a canoe, might be tethered. He’s going to guide me in. This might be it, boys and girls: a hit first time of asking.’

The canoe zigzagged, the current faster the nearer he came to two large rock formations, each about nine metres high, rounded at the top like an elephant’s profile. They appeared to be jammed together, with a faster flow of water around the right edge. The drone shivered directly above them.

Stuart found some deeper, darker water under the first rock’s overhang. He abandoned the paddle and started to hand-walk along the rock’s surface, effectively dragging the canoe with his fingers. On the audio they could hear the steady rush of fast water – it wrenched Dana back to sunrise and she had to swallow hard. She glanced across to Bill, who, thankfully, hadn’t noticed her anxiety.

The footage juddered as Stuart fought the current. ‘Gotta be a way in… somewhere. I don’t think our man’s doing kayak rolls to get in; must be a way that leaves him dry.’ The three of them twitched and leaned in unison with the camera.

‘Ah, gotcha! Oh man, that’s clever, that’s really clever.’

The folds of the two rocks parted slightly in an ‘L’ shape. The tail of the ‘L’ allowed the canoe to float through with about twenty centimetres to spare above it. The vertical part of the space, while it curved a little, allowed Stuart to ride through by turning sideways; they saw the camera bounce slightly as it nudged the rock and heard the rustle of Stuart’s back against the wall as he passed through the gap.

The entrance had enough arc that Stuart could no longer see back to the lake. He emerged into a pool of quiet water lit by a vertical breach – almost a natural chimney – about four metres in diameter. Sunlight bounced down and on to the surface of the pool, reflecting back in a series of shimmering gold lines on the overhangs. Stuart grabbed at the camera – they could see his fingers swamp the lens. He held it in front of him and swept a 360. The little landing area to the right held a Canadian canoe: originally red, it had been carelessly painted with some kind of dark paint, possibly a waterproof primer. The paint might have been simply to break up the shape for camouflage rather than change the colour itself.

The canoe was tethered against a flat rock, a natural stepping stone. Beyond this was the entrance to the cave itself, which was around two metres high and just as wide. The floor looked like stone giving way to sand. The rest of the 360 was sheer rock face, sweeping upwards. Except for another gap to one side, starting at head height. Perhaps fifty centimetres wide, it was plugged by several heavy branches: Dana guessed that might be a land entrance.

‘Yeah, I’m going to get out of the canoe and step around for you. The picture might not be ideal coz I’ll need the torchlight to see anything, but I’ll give you a guided tour. Back in a moment. Don’t touch that dial.’

Mike turned and gave a grinning thumbs-up to Dana. ‘Your guess was right. Score one for the Russo.’

She nodded. ‘Looks that way.’

It was a strange mix of elation and trepidation. Dana was thrilled to have found Nathan’s cave and she knew this provided the rich mix of information that would change her strategy completely: it was the break she needed to open him up some more. But she knew him well enough to understand his intense humiliation when he found out everyone had seen inside his little world. She knew what she’d feel if anyone was broadcasting from inside her home: Nathan would suffer even more acutely.

After some shuffling, the video restarted with a view of Stuart’s boots. He tugged the camera upwards until it showed a view of the pool.

‘Ah, welcome, one and all. So, this water entrance. It’s genius. You wouldn’t find it unless you were right by it and searching for this kind of thing. If Al hadn’t seen the canoe from the drone, I probably wouldn’t have found the way in. May be tricky in flood, or in winter with any ice – the water’s fairly calm here, so it would ice up before the lake itself. But unless you actually witness anyone coming or going, you’d never find it.’

The camera swung vertically in a drunken loop. ‘Up there he has daylight, and about… two, three hours of sunlight; more in summer. Again, any kind of height and all you’d see looking down is rock and water. It’s only because the drone was so low it had the angle to see the canoe.’