Two men possessed by their visions square off like Charolais bulls over who owns a Minnesota mineral spring. Dr. Robert Hartwell returns home from San Francisco driven to open a meditation center at the spring and finds the road to his property gated and closed. Justin Taylor claims the spring as part of his ranch when he bought it from a farmer who used Hartwell's land and got title by adverse possession.

The farmer has since moved on and Hartwell's lawyer asks Boston Meade to find the farmer because the claim is a fraud. What starts as a small favor soon possesses Boston through weeks of dead-end interviews with neighbors who tell him little. In the details of everyday farming, he discovers that adverse possession hides something more dangerous than rutting bulls.