They began at the site of the first breakdown. Ray asked Tom to stand where the tractor's front wheels had stopped and remember its direction of travel. Tom pointed toward the road, then walked a few paces to the visible depression left after recovery. Ray drove a flag into firm ground beside it. They repeated the process at the spot where Gary's tire had blown and again near the rental's last tracks. The flags were placed far enough from the disturbed areas that no one had to stand on ground that might be unstable.
Ray walked to the field entrance and turned around. "Look at them," he said.
Tom did. At first he saw three orange pieces of tape lifting in the breeze, each tied to a separate mistake. Then his eye connected them, and the pattern appeared with the sudden clarity of a hidden shape emerging from a puzzle. The markers ran diagonally from an old fence post near the road toward the lower ground by the creek. They occupied a strip perhaps thirty feet wide, cutting across the north-south rows instead of following them.
"I didn't line them up that way," Tom said.
"Neither did I."
"Maybe it's how the passes happened to fall."
Ray shook his head. "Three separate machines, three separate passes, one diagonal path. That's more than a coincidence worth ignoring." He pointed to the depressions around the marked spots.
"And notice how the wheel tracks deepen before the damage. Each wheel went down farther than it should have, then met resistance again. That's the part I'm interested in."
Tom crouched near the first impression, careful not to step onto it. The track began as a normal tread pattern, grew deeper over several feet, and ended in disturbed earth where the old machine had stopped. At Gary's location, the marks suggested the tire had struck a sharp change in support rather than anything protruding above the ground. The rental had left a deeper hollow on one side, followed by heavy marks where a drive wheel appeared to have caught the firmer surface beyond it. Suddenly each piece of damaged metal suggested an event in the field rather than an event inside a machine.
"I've driven across here for thirty years," Tom said. "My father drove it before me. We disked it, chiseled it, harvested it. I've never had a wheel disappear into the ground."
"What was different this year?" Ray asked.
Tom almost answered that nothing was different, but the heavier planter sat in his mind like an unwelcome witness. He described the twenty-four-row unit, its loaded weight, and the extra ballast the tractors carried to pull it safely. Ray listened, then asked about rainfall in March. Tom remembered saturated headlands, water standing longer than usual near the creek, and days when they had delayed field preparation because the soil would not support machinery cleanly.