Archibald Walters was a hardworking man who was quite content with his ranch and what he could then provide. He'd been relatively supportive when Ben and Tyree became Thylacine Animalians and that parts of their small zoo became the command center for the small Animalian colony that grew in Alice Springs. The Animalians didn't live there, but many did work there and the relations they had with the rest of the people in the town were rather friendly. In this, he'd hoped that things would work out fairly well, as for the most part, there hadn't been any real attempt at going after Animalians by some kind of "anti-animal" hate group. His only private guess at this was that same groups had the idea of trying to get Animalians to be super-soldiers and play to their physical strengths.
The one thing that he did know of was that he had also had enough of a measure of success as a rancher that there would be rivals that either wanted something from his ranch or something else. Most of it had generally just been some kind of rivalry with the other ranchers, and within Alice Springs, things remained generally fairly friendly there. But the mystery gold nugget was something that had him wondering about all those sorts of things. Rivals that wanted his land for their ranches, or to expand their ranches. Rivals that might have had jealousy because he'd made a sale with his cattle that others couldn't close. People venting frustration over something else, like someone who was down on his luck and embraced some radical idea that it was okay to attack someone who was successful to cover up his own failings.
After all, why would someone leave a fairly decent sized gold nugget in the dirt on his ranch at a corner where someone, in this case Marla, an Animalian, would find it? He was sure there had to be something nefarious about this, and that was why he'd put in the security camera. He wasn't sure he'd actually catch the person who had left the nugget on his land, as once the Alice Springs police reported it, just about all of Australia learned of it and Marla's connection to its discovery soon saw Animalia Ambassadoria mention it as well. If it was an accident, which might still be possible, though, Archibald would have expected this person to have come forward rather quickly and provide a rational explanation as to how and why they'd lost the nugget on Archibald Walters' land. And while Archibald wasn't in constant contact with the local police, through the course of the summer since the nugget was found, they hadn't reported anything of that nature. It only confirmed to Archibald that the actual owner of the nugget had not come forward.
And if no one ever returned to his land, Archibald felt he'd have no trouble to worry about and he could let things go. In time, he could lower his worries over some rival coveting his land or his source of income and move on. However, not enough time had yet passed, and he would only get that relief once it had passed. Until then, checking what his camera recorded became a daily thing. During the day it recorded images in the standard sets of images that one would expect from a camera. After all, that area was not so cluttered with grass that a person could not be seen in the daylight. At night, the camera was designed to switch over to a night vision sight that might well have some element of infrared in the sights... or it could be some measure of filtration, since there was a streetlight not too far away. Archibald had merely trusted the man he'd talked to regarding the quality of the camera and how it would work at night and took the assurances that it would work.
"And now another day of seeing if anyone came by," Archibald said to himself as he came into his own private office to check his computer. The camera largely had a disk for the memory that would need to be changed periodically, but given that it was also pretty modern, it could broadcast what it recorded to his computer and Archibald accepted that. He'd managed email and many of the other things that came with the internet age, so he would figure all this out as well, and so far, things had worked fairly well.
So far, most of what he'd recorded had been neighbors and others from Alice Springs that might come to the area. Some was fairly innocent, such as occasionally seeing Marla or her husband/bond-mate leading their gym members by that area as part of their aerobics days and waiving to the camera as they went by. The silliest one was when a neighbor walked by with a sign and then held it up to the camera, which Archibald had to laugh at when he did see it. The sign read, "come by for beer and barbecue," and was an invitation he'd gotten earlier by phone. Those things were things that helped Archibald relax a bit, but there hadn't been enough of it to fully relax on, and he was still following things closely.
And then, as Archibald went over the camera footage for the past twenty-four hours, he fast-forwarded through much of the day. Largely only slowing down with anyone came by and speeding up again if Archibald could recognize those that were on the screen. And for a decent period of time, that seemed to be how the past twenty-four hours went. Archibald could watch as the sun came up, rose to its height as people went about their day, and then set. Once the sun went down, the camera's image shifted from a color image to one that was various shades of green, likely the "night vision" kicking in. Archibald also noticed that this didn't happen precisely at dusk, and this was something he had noticed over the past few days when checking these recordings. Often, even the streetlight came on before the camera switched to its night vision setting. But still, things often remained silent as that transition happened.
At first things seemed fairly normal, and Archibald felt that tonight's check would be no different than the other nights before. However, as the timer on the screen indicated that they'd gotten up to about just half an hour before Archibald turned his computer on, something did happen that was different. It was a lone man slowly approaching that corner of Archibald's ranch, but he'd come from OUTSIDE of town. He wore a heavy long-sleeved military style jacket, which Archibald found odd given the relatively warm weather. Technically it was the winter months for Australia and the southern hemisphere, but his part of the country was generally pretty warm all year around with lows in the forties and highs in the sixties this time of year. But maybe it was a fashion statement or something. Archibald slowed things down to pay close attention and get as much detail as he could.
The man's face was fairly round and worn, though he wore a fairly scruffy beard that he itched with one hand as he walked. He didn't look like anyone from Alice Springs and neither did he look like some kind of weird hippie or anything like that. It was more that he looked like some random vagrant just walking by. The one thing that was different was that his hair was fairly well combed, which contrasted with the rather unkept beard, and he thought he saw a diagonal scar going through one eyebrow, though it also seemed that his eyes weren't damaged. He approached the fence and looked into the property and even looked to the camera. He then pulled something from his pocket, and Archibald could see it was a rock, and it looked like it had some paper wrapped around it. It was then tossed onto his ranch, and he could tell it hit the pole his camera was planted on when the camera seemed to shake a bit and lose some of its focus. As things came back into focus, the man had now turned and was walking away, and this was where Archibald got his most definitive clue... a circular patch on the shoulder of the man's jacket.
The patch's colors couldn't be determined by the night-vision equipment, but the design was fairly obvious. The patch was circular and had a border going around that outside of the circle. Inside it was a stylized dog head, a map of Australia with two dots in the map, but not at locations that would be associated with Australia's capital or largest city. There was also a capital letter "a" on the patch. All of it was something he'd never seen before. A part of Archibald's mind wondered if this was some kind of anarchist, but then, Archibald had never really gotten involved in politics which wouldn't make him the target of an anarchist and at the same time, he'd known of no anarchist group that used a dog's head as a symbol.
"This will have to go to the police," Archibald said slowly, "particularly as what he tossed is probably a threat..."