The GPS coordinates that Darren had given us led to a kettle hole. I had enough geology to recognize it as a kettle, but that was as much as I knew, so George and I scrolled through websites on our phones, looking for more information. A kettle hole was a small lake, sometimes only a pool, left behind when glaciers departed. A piece of dead ice, surrounded and buried by sediment. The resulting hole transformed into ephemeral wetlands that, in high summer, could dry out completely when precipitation levels were low.
“It’s a pond,” said George.
I looked at him.
“It’s slightly more interesting than a pond. But I don’t see why we’re here, and I don’t see why we should mess with it.” He brandished his phone at me. “Everything I’ve read says they’re vulnerable to disturbance. That means us.”
“I’m not going to go squelching around in it!” I shot back, pre-emptively defensive. It was a small kettle, and exceedingly remote. It had taken us hours to drive to the closest road, and hours again of tramping over countryside to find. It was barely on the map — and checking the Department of Conservation website, I’d not been able to find it.
Looking back, that should have been a clue. If mirrors did nothing else, they showed us what we believed we looked like, and looking at the shimmering surface of this small body of water, fringed with turf-vegetation, tiny mosses and flowers like little white stars, I saw nothing but isolation and confusion.
“I guess I don’t understand what this has to do with climate,” I said, taking a muesli bar that George had ferreted out of his pack, and referring back to my phone. “In other places, warming temperatures have dried some of them up or increased temperatures in the upper levels and yeah, I can see that, but this one still looks fairly wet to me.” I navigated to a paper I’d found on South Island kettles. “Though it says here changing rainfall patterns can alter the diversity of the plants within the kettle. Not that I know what the vegetation’s supposed to look like.”
We looked at each other blankly.
“I don’t know why you’re staring at me,” said George. “Artist, remember? I can tell a karaka from a kōwhai, but that’s about it. You’re the scientist.”
“I work with jellyfish. In the ocean, which is very far from here,” I said. “Maybe we should, I don’t know, have a closer look?”
We walked around the kettle, trying to keep as much as possible to the surrounding tussocks that grew densely about the pool. The red, thick tussocks were not easy to walk through,, their grassy strands reaching up above my waist and obscuring the ground. Keeping to the tussocks didn’t give us the best view of the kettle, but any closer and we would have risked disturbing the miniature plants that fringed the water — the minute ferns and mosses and flowers that grew together in a tangled mat, and which would be more visible on the bottom of the kettle when the water dried out. Even walking as slowly as we were, trying not to miss anything, it only took a couple of minutes.
“No wonder this kettle’s not on the maps,” said George. “It’s tiny.”
“It’s probably also freezing,” I grumbled, wrestling my shirt over my head. There was a small break in the kettle plant turf, and it gave me the opportunity to look closer without the guilt of disturbing any more than necessary an already vulnerable site. “Don’t give me that look, I’m not going to stomp along the bottom or damage anything. I’m just going to stick my head in and take a quick look. Who knows how deep it is anyway.”
If I’d thought to test the water with my fingers first, we both would have got less of a shock. I inched on my belly to the edge and shoved my head under what appeared to be water — and came up immediately, shrieking, because water should have been wet and this wasn’t. There was no water on my face, no water in my eyes, and my hair didn’t form loose and floating tentacles. I scrambled back, fast, aided by George’s fingers hooked in my waistband as he hovered over me.
“It rippled!” he said. “It fucking rippled!” And not like water did. I saw for myself how it appeared from a distance when he found a small rock and tossed it at what appeared to be surface. The rock disappeared, and the water wavered — unnaturally so. I crawled back to the edge of the kettle and waved my hand in that surface. It, like my head, did not come away wet.
“I think it’s a hologram,” I said, sitting back on my knees. “I think … I just …” There were no words. George didn’t have any either, but he crouched next to me and waved his own hand, gingerly, in that apparent surface.
“I only brought water,” he said at last, doleful. “And electrolytes. I should have brought grog. Why didn’t I think to bring grog?”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I had a thylacine in my lap. Then there was the poison murder-bird. I should have known we’d need wine.”
“Wine, hell. I want something stronger than that.”
“Oh,” I said, drawing it out. “Wait till you see what’s inside the damn thing.”
“Spikes?” said George, in mournful tones, without the least hint of surprise. “An endless drop? A bear trap?”
“No bears in New Zealand,” I reminded him. Which was unnecessary; he was the one from here, and he’d made enough cracks over the years about the comparative lack of dangerous wildlife, but the two of us were too stunned to squabble. “Lovely thoughts, by the way. No, it’s worse than that.”
“I honestly don’t see how that’s possible,” said George, but he stretched out anyway, on his stomach, and I could see from the stiffness in his spine how he grimaced when his face went through that
