The North Field
Set in Riverbend Springs
When Grandpa Walter handed me the farm, he had one piece of advice: “Don’t plough the north field.”
Riverbend Springs was a peaceful place—rolling hills, creeks winding through green meadows, and fields that stretched out like a painter’s canvas. I’d just arrived to take over Grandpa’s legacy, but his advice lingered in my mind. He didn’t explain why, just repeated those six words whenever I asked about it. "Don’t plough the north field."
At first, I thought it was just a superstition. After all, it was a beautiful piece of land, and it seemed like a waste to leave it barren. Sure, it hadn’t been worked for years, but it had rich soil, the kind every farmer dreams of. The field was thick with overgrown grass, knee-high in places, with wildflowers poking up here and there. It looked like it had been left untouched for decades—like nature had slowly reclaimed it. Still, there was something about it that made me feel it could be revived with a little work.
I started getting to work on the rest of the farm, picking up a few contracts to get some cash flowing. With a new Fendt tractor and a used combine, I figured I was on track to make this place thrive.
But the north field still called to me. It was hard to ignore, especially with the season starting to shift toward planting.
One crisp morning, I hooked up the plough and decided to take a crack at it. I figured there was nothing to lose, and maybe Grandpa was just being overprotective. As the plough cut into the soil, something didn’t feel right. The earth turned a little too easily, as if it hadn’t been disturbed in years—but that wasn’t the strange part.
No, the weird part came after I hit a small patch near the center of the field. The soil… it wasn’t the same. It was almost like it was sticky. The plough didn’t slide through as it should have, and I had to apply extra pressure to get it moving.
I tried to shake it off, telling myself it was just an odd patch of ground. But the more I worked, the more I realized the soil was actually starting to clump together—strangely, almost like it was absorbing moisture out of thin air. My tractor started to overheat, too, for no reason. The cooling system was fine, but it kept running hot. I checked the hydraulics, the engine, everything. Nothing was wrong, but the tractor struggled with each pass.
I decided to call it a day and leave the rest for tomorrow.
But when I came back the next morning, something was off. The soil… it was like I had never been there. The clumps I had created the day before were gone, and in their place, there was fresh grass—short, not as thick as before, but covering the ground like the land had healed overnight. It wasn’t the tall, wild grass that had grown there before, but the field was far from empty. The soil was still firm, but it looked like the land had just covered itself up as if trying to erase all signs of what I had done.
I couldn’t understand it. I had spent hours working the ground, but now it seemed like none of it had happened. I tried ploughing again, but the tractor slipped more than before, and the soil still felt oddly resistant. The compacted spots from the day before? They were gone. The land had practically reset itself, covering over any trace of my work.
That’s when I started to feel uneasy.
I called Grandpa.
When he answered, his voice was tight. “You ploughed it, didn’t you?”
I told him what I’d found, and his silence on the other end told me everything I needed to know.
“That field was never meant to be worked,” he said. “It was part of an old research project, some government experiment. They used it for testing soil treatments—chemical treatments that no one ever finished. I thought I could just leave it alone and keep getting paid, but once you stir it up, that’s it. The soil reacts. It’s like it’s been waiting for someone to disturb it.”
He went on to explain how the researchers had left the land in a state that was… unstable, to say the least. The soil treatments had altered the ground in ways that couldn’t be reversed. Ploughing it only triggered the soil to begin reacting, pushing out the chemicals that had been buried in the dirt.
Now I had no choice. The north field was dead. It was a mess that couldn’t be fixed—not with a plough, not with a tiller, not with anything.
I fenced it off, posted a sign, and made sure no one would go near it again. The rest of the farm was fine. The other fields thrived, my animals were healthy, and the crops were good. But that patch of land? It was a constant reminder.
Whenever I passed by, I could feel the weight of Grandpa’s warning. Something about that soil was unnatural, and I’d made the mistake of disturbing it.
So, I keep my distance. I’ll plant everywhere else, harvest all the crops I need, but the north field? That’s one place I’ll never touch again.
