Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

The Hermit of the Hills

Nels came to the Quarter with three others in the early years of the century trying his luck on a quarter section. The other three sent for their families after they had broken the land and thrown up a shack, later ordering homes from the Eaton’s catalogue when they had money from a couple of harvests and their second quarter was handed over. Even after he got his second quarter Nels continued in the same shack, building a more permanent structure only after his first decade on the land. Many of the neighbours said this was little better than the shack he had been living in, though it did at least have a wood floor and a cellar. 

Nels was always a friendly presence, happy to chat with anyone in town, available to help with harvest or any work really. His neighbours looked forward to his regular visits to spend an evening at cards and he called three or four families once a week. As more settlers arrived, people wondered when he would marry. Many of the other bachelors who came in those years did find wives, either among the locals or from their original homes. Nels did not though, never going with any of the local girls, even when others encouraged him to. After a time all that sort of talk stopped as people accepted things for what they were.  

He never left the Quarter after homesteading, not even during the ten years of drought when so many others abandoned their farms, some not even leaving word or a forwarding address. More left with the second great war, travelling to far-flung lands and more still in the years after. The automobile was coming in wide use then and highways were being built. There were new opportunities everywhere. The Quarter was somehow both larger and smaller as a result. Fewer homesteads dotted the landscape and the farms were getting larger, while it was now possible to travel across most of its length in the space of an afternoon.  

People saw less of Nels as the years went on. Several of the families he stopped in to play cards with had moved on after the war. Tractors and other machines meant that agriculture was no longer a communal activity, though he did still drive truck for a couple of neighbours. Folks started talking about him differently too, though he hadn’t changed much. He was a man of his era, a time now past, when people were willing to throw away the lives they had been living, leave it all behind and take a chance on a far away land with no guarantees. Everyone was settled now, knowing nothing else and of the place in a way that Nels, and those who had arrived with him, could never be.  

At some point people began calling him the Hermit of the Hills, though he was always about and his half section was not especially hilly. Older siblings told younger ones about the terrible things that would happen if you wandered onto his land or into his house, which hid a portal to another demon-filled world in the cellar. If Nels knew about these stories he never said. He got diabetes in his later years and one of his feet took an infection which he neglected. Doctors took the leg to try to save him, but it was too late.  

He willed his land to one of the neighbours, the son of one of the men he’d come out with. Nels had always called on them for visits, so the first time they set foot in his house was after he died. It was a ramshackle place, as to be expected given he’d built it himself. The yard was littered with old pieces of equipment collected in piles that they supposed had some sort of logic to them. None of that surprised them, but what filled the cellar and one wall of his shop did. Hundreds of urns and vases and bowls, made from scrap metal and whatever else Nels had at hand. They were all finely made, intricate designs carved or painted on them. Beautiful in their strange way. Of another world.