Wolf Spiders Run The Cranberry Bogs
Admiral Biscuit
I hadn’t intended to get a job at a cranberry bog. Not until I met Foxberry.
Like a lot of young stallions who didn’t live on a farm, I set out across Equestria to find myself. I knew the Royal Guard wasn’t for me but that still left a lot of options open. My parents and grandparents hadn’t ever really wandered very far from home, but I wanted to see the world before I settled down.
I found myself on a train platform in the town of Beckwith, a northeastern town near the coast. After stretching my legs on the platform, I penned a postcard to my parents and mailed it at the train station, then set out on hoof to see if I could find a job for a few days before I got bored with Beckwith and decided to move on. I’d already planned to ride to the extreme northern end of the rail system just to say I’d done it, and then work my way down the coast for the rest of the summer, working as needed and lazing on beaches. I’d intended to winter down south and then—well, my plans hadn’t included ‘then’ in them.
Some small towns were welcoming to strangers; others not so much. Sometimes it was hard to find a job, even for a day or a half-day. Farming communities were good, though; there were always weeds to pull or crops to move around or wagons to tow, and I could do all those things. I hadn’t thought to carry a harness with me, but I was a smaller stallion and a mare’s harness would fit me in a pinch.
Most towns had a job board near their town square, and Beckwith was no different. I found an opportunity at a cranberry bog, which piqued my interest. I liked cranberry jelly and cranberry sauce, and I’d never seen an actual cranberry or tasted one fresh off the plant. That was always a job perk of working on a farm, sampling the crops fresh from the field.
There weren’t directions to the farm, but that was okay. The locals pointed me in the right direction and assured me that I couldn’t miss it.
The cranberry jelly and cranberry sauce I’d eaten were a distinct color of red, and I knew I’d found the right place when I saw a field of bushes chock-full of red berries.
Several ponies were working in the fields, and one of them caught my eye right away, a well-muscled mare with a juniper-green coat and an almost white mane.
There were other, closer ponies I could have talked to, but I wanted to know if her voice was as beautiful as the rest of her, so I moved into the field, being cautious where I set my hooves. “Who do I got to ask for a job?”
“Me.” She stuck her hoof out, and I bumped it. “I’m Foxberry, and this is my bog.”
“It looks nice.” I wasn’t sure why she called it a bog, since the soil underhoof was firm, but I was sure I’d find out in time. “I’ve never seen cranberries on the vine before.”
“Wonderful fruit,” she said. “They’re full of vitamins and minerals. Before I offer you a job, though, I gotta ask you how you feel about spiders. You’re not afraid of them, are you?”
I squared myself up and puffed out my chest. “No, of course not.”
“’Cause the wolf spiders keep the insects at bay. Lots of bugs like cranberries, too.”
I nodded my head. I’d worked on plenty of farms before, and it was a constant battle with weeds and bugs.
I’d only intended to stay in Beckwith for a few days, enough time to refill my bit purse and then move on. But Foxberry was cute and funny and smelled nice and I just wanted to spend more time around her, so I stayed on longer than I’d intended, watching as the berries grew and ripened. Sometimes I’d see wolf spiders scurrying around, and they didn’t bother me at all. They mostly tried to avoid me anyway.
Saturday nights, she had a picnic for everypony, and she even had cranberry juice and cranberry wine to drink. We all sat around a campfire and sang songs and looked up at Luna’s stars all spread overhead. As the night drew on and the fire burned low, our voices grew silent and were replaced with the rhythmic chirping of crickets and the throaty drone of bullfrogs. Fireflies danced around like embers from the fire, and I was content—I felt like I belonged.
As I drifted off to sleep in the bunkhouse, I thought about the way the shadows had played through her mane, how the firelight had reflected in her eyes, how her singing voice was even more beautiful than her laugh.
Every week I trekked into town and wrote another postcard home, and then as the summer days grew longer, I began to send entire letters, trying to capture the feel of a cranberry bog or the satisfaction of a day’s fruitful labors or the lilting laugh Foxberry had. The way the sun brightened both the fruit and also Foxberry’s mane. How herons sometimes stood in the ditches that surrounded the cranberry fields, even though there were no fish to be found there, or how relaxing it was to splash around in those same ditches to cool off before going back into the fields again.
Besides weeding and caring for the plants, there were always other duties. Wagon duty rotated between ponies, carrying weeds to the compost piles mostly but sometimes going into town and hauling back supplies.
I’d worked on farms before, and most of them had barns full of implements. I had enough experience to at least have a reasonable idea what a machine might do.
There weren’t any cranberry harvesting machines.
Like most farmponies, she used some of her land to plant pasture grasses for food; she had a small hay rake and a windrower; she had a broadcast seeder and a sulky plow and a spring-tooth harrow. She also had a rowboat and lots of rubber tubes and when I asked her what those were for, she just laughed and said that I’d find out when the cranberries were ripe.
Did she row around in the ditches during harvest time? That didn’t make any sense at all.
I’d stayed in one place long enough that my parents started sending letters back. First they were addressed ‘C/O Beckwith Train Station’ and then ‘C/O Foxberry Farm.’ It felt weird, being in one place long enough to get mail.
Foxberry plucked a ripe cranberry off the bush and held it delicately in her lips. She motioned for me to set my trowel down, and I did.
She held her head up, and all the other fieldhooves moved in, watching as she released it, dropping it neatly on the blade of my trowel. To my amazement, it bounced.
A cheer erupted from my fellows, but my eyes stayed on the berry. I’d never seen fruit bounce before.
“That’s how you know they’re ripe,” she said. “And that’s why some ponies call them bounceberries.” Foxberry lifted her head, and made her proclamation. “Tomorrow, we harvest.”
Then she started giving orders, like a general commanding her troops. Equipment needed to be marshaled, notice given at the train station for a box car . . . I was lost in the wonder of it, and she had to say my name twice before I realized she was talking to me.
I was to be on cranberry wrangling duty, whatever that was. They hardly needed to be wrangled; they were still on their bushes, although perhaps as they were harvested they bounced away.
After we were dismissed for the day, I thought about that; imagined a whole field of cranberries bouncing off, chased down by a group of ponies with cranberry nets. Cranberry nets were a thing; I was to be one of the ponies on net duty.
It was a great responsibility, and I vowed to not let a single cranberry escape.
I awoke to a strange new world. Leaving the bunkhouse was normal, although we were all more enthusiastic since there was a crop to be harvested. Months ago, I wouldn’t have ever thought that I would be looking forward to harvesting a field, but now I was.
We trekked to the barn, and I got my cranberry net. I couldn’t help but notice that the boat and most of the rubber tubes were gone, and when I first caught sight of the cranberry bog, I immediately saw what they were for. Foxberry had opened the gates on the irrigation ditches and flooded the field; all the bouncy berries had floated off their bushes and were now drifting throughout the bog.
Ponies with wagons were already lining up along the edge of the bog, barrel-deep in the water, and a few others were dragging the rubber tubes through the water, wrangling the cranberries.
Foxberry had her boat in the water, but she wasn’t in it; she was in the water and some trick of the morning light made her back look grey.
I remembered where the ditch was, and estimated that the water would be up to my chin if I waded through it, so I jumped off the bank and into the bog, moving towards the raft of cranberries. I didn’t need to be told what to do, it was obvious. Pick them up with the net, dump them in a wagon.
She was a shining beacon in a lake of cranberries, and I jumped in with no hesitation, net held in my mouth.
The water had covered the bushes, and the cranberries had floated free.
That wasn’t all that had floated free.
My attention was focused on Foxberry, on the ripe crop; I didn’t notice when I picked up the first spider, or the second, or the third . . . I was a quick learner, and I quickly learned that wolf spiders could swim, that they didn’t like to swim, and that they figured that climbing on something out of the water was better than swimming.
That weird trick of the light that I thought had made Foxberry’s back look grey wasn't a trick of the light at all; it was dozens and dozens of spiders, all seeking refuge from the water. They weren’t just on her back, either; they were crawling up her mane and perching atop her head, hundreds or thousands of them and as I waded closer, I began to become overrun with spiders, too. Spiders crawling up my legs, up my tail, even—
”I gotta ask you how you feel about spiders.”
We had an understanding, spiders and I. An uneasy truce. They could do their thing and leave me alone and I was fine with them, but this. This was too much, this was beyond the pale.
I only stopped galloping once I was safe inside the waiting room at the train station. The waiting room that was spider-free, the waiting room that was the intermediate stop to my destination of ‘anywhere but here.’ Cranberries, it turned out, came at a terrible cost.
The last spider vacated my body two stops down the line, and it wasn’t until the train arrived in Baltimare that I was reasonably confident I was spider-less. My seat-mate hadn’t said anything about spider refugees making a home in my mane, anyway, and I thought she would have.
I’d been intending to go south, ride along the coast and take whatever temporary jobs I could get; I’d intended to spend the rest of the time lazing on the beaches. And I could still do that. South was sunny and warm and the beaches were sandy and didn’t have spiders.
With no destination in mind, it had been easy to buy a ticket to anywhere but here, to get on a train, to settle in with fellow travelers and to let the conversation wash over me, to drift in and out as a seat-mate regales me with a tale I couldn’t care to remember. To watch the scenery blur by, trees and shrubs and bushes and buildings and fields and lakes and she should have warned me.
