By Design

The field hands stood anxiously on the door step waiting for Mister Paladin to come. His missus had answered their knocking as she was up and about seeing to first breakfast.

“Something amiss, lads?” their boss asked as he hoisted his remaining loose brace over his left shoulder.

“Aye, Mister Paladin. There’s . . . well, there’s eh . . . something right strange in the lower wheat field, sir.”

“Ain’t seen nothing like it ever afore, sir.”

“Ya’d best come and see for yerself, Mister Paladin, and you too, Mister Brandybuck, sir, seeing as you o’er see the Hall’s crop lands, maybe you’ve seen the like.”

The hands were all talking at once. Saradoc and his family were visiting Whitwell farm and he and Paladin had both intended to look over the fields this morning anyway.

“Aye,” spoke up Tolley, the stable manager. “That would be good, sirs. You can see it right well from the edge of the hill back o’ the stables. “Seems I recall we had somethin’ like this happen back when your da and mine were the ones workin’ this farm, Mister Paladin. Ya’d best come and see.”

The hobbits all tramped through the front doors of the stable, down the long center aisle, then out through the back. Merry and Pippin were tagging along.

“There ya have it, sirs!” Rolo, the head field hand said as he pointed.

There was an intricate swirling pattern stamped into the wheat field.

The help were all wide eyed and more than a bit frightened, muttering amongst themselves. “Faerie folk?” “Must be faerie folk.” “Right spooky, it is.”

Tolley spoke to his boss, who was also a good friend as they had grown up together on this farm. “Do you remember, sir? I seem to recollect somethin’ a great deal like this happenin’ back when we were tweens. Though I’ve no’ seen the like o’ it since.”

Paladin and Saradoc looked at each other, but had nothing to say.

Merry and Pippin had peered around the adults before casting quick looks at each other then running silently to a tree at the far end of the hill top. They were out of breath when they reached the spot about halfway up the tree where there was a gap in the branches that faced out toward the wheat field.

“Merry . . .”

“Shush, Pip! I’m looking. I’m . . . I’m thinking.”

Pippin waited a few moments.

“Merry?”

His cousin didn’t answer.

“Merry, there’s more.”

“I know,” Merry could only whisper in return.

They had had fun in the moonlight the night before. Earlier that spring, Pippin had noticed that the sledge they used for hauling rocks out of the fields made an interesting trail when ever it went through the old grass at the edge of the field, and he’d had an idea for some fun. He made a smaller version of the sledge, it being nothing more than a few boards hooked together edge to edge to form a pallet with one end being worked into a bit of a curl at the front to make it pull through the soil and foliage easier. Pippin’s was small enough to be easily carried into the field . . . not dragged into the field.

When Merry arrived with his family for their visit he had quickly agreed to drawing the design and helping his cousin press it into the wheat. It had been a simple design. Just a couple of circles and some lines. They hadn’t wanted to damage too much of the crop. A couple of circles and a few lines with no lines or trails leading up to them from the edges of the field. That had been the tricky part, but hobbit lads do go light on their feet. Merry, who was already the heavier of the two having filled his pockets with rocks for the bit of extra effect, sat on the sledge while directing Pip as he pulled the sledge over the two foot tall wheat stems.

But their design was not what they saw in the morning light.

There was more.

Paladin and Saradoc knew their lads were up to something, and they were quite pleased when they discovered what it was. They had enjoyed the effect the prank had produced when they did it as lads. From the dark of the stable doorway they watched their sons press their design into the crop and slink back into the house . . . then they added some pressings of their own.

But that design was not what they saw in the morning light.

There was more.

“What ya be thinkin’, Mister Paladin, sir?” one of the hands asked, noting that his boss and Mister Saradoc had yet to say a word. They were simply standing there looking from the field to each other, then back again.

If they had been standing in the field itself, on that crystal blue, bright morning; if they had been near the hedge row at the eastern edge of the field and if they had listened very hard . . .

. . . they might have heard laughter.