Dragonflies hovered above it through summer.
Frogs filled the evenings with noise.
For decades, the pond had simply been there.
Nobody remembered digging it.
Nobody remembered stocking it.
Nobody questioned why it existed exactly where it did.
That changed for Eli in August.
He had been repairing a broken insulator on the electric fence when he noticed the water touching a clump of sedge that he remembered growing well above the summer shoreline.
He stood there for a while.
Then he looked at the old cedar post fifteen feet farther up the bank.
Warren had once told him that post marked where an older fence crossed before the pasture had been reconfigured.
Eli found a tape measure in the side-by-side.
From the cedar post to the current waterline, the distance was eleven feet, eight inches.
He wrote the number inside the small notebook he carried in his back pocket.
He did not think much of it at first.
Summer storms had been heavy.
The creek had run high twice.
The low fields remained wet longer than normal.
Still, one week later, Eli measured again.
Ten feet, eleven inches.
Then ten feet, two.
By early September, the shoreline had moved more than two feet toward the post.
What bothered Eli was not simply that the pond had grown.
It was where it had grown.
The western and southern banks looked almost unchanged.
The expansion happened primarily along the northeastern corner, where the ground sloped only slightly and should have distributed water more evenly.
Instead, the pond seemed to be pulling itself toward one particular area.