“What we do is reliant on steam,” Lemon Hearts said, “and so we’ll start by showing you what our arborist teams do.”

Waving over at the crew finishing their breakfast at the far end of the Pav, she shouted “Hey Bartlett! Got someone for you to talk to!”

A light green Earth pony walked over. He was in early middle age, slightly above average height, still clearly in excellent shape but without the cocksure strut of the younger workers. This was a confident pony who knew his skill and no longer needed to put on airs. We bumped hooves. “Spuds Terkel,” I said, “Call me Spuds.”

I saw a spark of recognition in his eyes. “Ahhh, the everypony’s columnist! I’m Bartlett. Bartlett Pear,” he said with a distinct Manehattan accent. “I’m in charge of the arborist crews working on this project.”

Lemon Hearts said “Bartlett, Spuds here is looking to write about what we’re doing here at Pea Ridge. Bounder and I want him to see every link of the chain, and that starts with your team and how they work with the trees here to get us the lumber and charcoal we need.”

“Sure thing. We’re currently at woodlot Bravo-Twelve. I’ll show him around, then send him over to Mazz’s team doing burns at Bravo-Thirteen,” Bartlett turned back towards his workers and shouted “Oi! Finish up, we get moving in a couple minutes. Apprentices, load paper!”

At that odd final instruction, I saw Tonny stand up and walk over to the cart. With the minotaur went a half-dozen young-looking ponies, most with the gangly look of colts and fillies in their mid to late teens. Each apprentice fitted a pair of carry bags across their back, and Tonny loaded bundles of newspaper on each side. Though he took care to balance the load so that the ponies would have an even trot and bigger ponies got more bundles, it was clear the minotaur was also giving each young worker enough weight to make their personal carry strenuous.

Bartlett grinned at me. “It builds muscle.”

“What are you doing with all those papers?” I asked.

“You’ll see. We do get a few copies of the Manehattan Times and the Canterlot Herald each day for reading, but we need way more than that for processing. So the unsold copies, and ones tossed into a paper bin, we get all those a day or two after.”

As the colts and fillies began trotting off, the cart still looked close to two-thirds full. As I was about to ask whether they would have to make another couple of trips, Tonny took out and unfolded a pack frame from the cart. Stacking the remaining papers upon it, he checked the straps, squatted down, and put his arms through. Standing smoothly, the massive bull began trotting after the apprentices with seemingly less strain than the teenagers were under.

I let out a low, slow whistle. “I know a few minotaurs pretty well, and I’m acquaintances with many more. I’ve been to Mazein several times, went to watch some of the pankration matches at the Stadium of Asterion whenever I could. And that bull may well be the strongest one I’ve ever seen.”

Bartlett nodded. “He’s a fine worker. But if he doesn’t want to talk, don’t bug him, you get me? Tonny says he has his quiet here.”

I followed the group of workers on a brisk fifteen-minute walk to Bravo-Twelve. Many of them stopped here, but some continued onward. As the ponies, griffon, and minotaur got back to work, Bartlett asked me to take a look at one of the clusters of tree trunks that made up the majority of this section of forest. Oak, with four trunks – each about a foot in diameter – extending out from a large base and reaching high into the air. Higher than almost all Manehattan buildings, I guessed.

“Now, take a look at one of these,” said Bartlett as he motioned me to follow him to a large stump that had once held five trunks, each about the size of the ones from the live tree I had just inspected. As I got closer, I could see dozens of small shoots rising up out of the four cut-off trunks. A background part of my brain registered that there was now a faint but steady noise in the air, the sound of something hitting wood every few seconds.

“This stool – that’s what we call the live stump after we cut off the trunks – was cut about three months ago. See how we’ve already got these little shoots? Some of them will grow together as we get a couple decades in, but they’ll form several trunks just like before. This system of cutting down of trees and regrowing shoots is called coppicing. It lets us grow quite a bit more wood per acre than we could ordinarily. We’ve got oak, chestnut, and alder here being coppiced, about a third of each.

“Oak is best for heavy construction. Chestnut is softer and lighter, and is good for furniture as well as for having snacks in season. We’re at the tail end of it now; one of our cooks, Apple Clanger, has all the apprentices gathering up bags of chestnuts for her and she’s got a huge serving bowl at the Pav for people to grab a snack from anytime. Alder isn’t as useful in construction or furniture as the rest, but it’s by far the fastest-growing and if all we need is firewood and charcoal, it’s the best choice.”

I took a closer look at the foot-high shoots. “How long does it take before you re-cut?” I asked.

“In places where there’s plenty of Earth ponies living nearby and we have a good Cornucopia Effect going, we usually want to coppice oak every three decades. Chestnut and alder come in at about half that; they grow faster than oak but we also prefer to harvest when their trunks are a bit smaller. Without the Cornucopia, coppice cycles would take about twice as long.

“The stools that this team has been cutting have been growing for sixty-five to seventy years – ones that were ready to cut back when Pea Ridge was abandoned. Some of the other teams further out will be working on thinner trunks from stands that were in the middle of the growth cycle when work here stopped, so ones that are about forty years old. You remember how some of the groves you walked past on the way from the train station were so tall that if the leaves hadn’t fallen yet, the tree canopies would’ve blocked out the Sun? That’s what we refer to as an ‘overstood’ coppice. Not much grows in their shade. And that leads to a less vibrant environment for the animals. Just all around not very nice for sapients, animals, or plants. Kind of depressing, you get me? So we first brought down and processed the coppiced trees nearest the Pav, to rejuvenate the forest a bit, nearest where we spend a lot of our time,” Bartlett explained.

“Once we cleared out the area within maybe a hundred yards of the Pav,” he continued, “we decided to work on the areas at or near where we intended to run our steam injection wells. The first couple months that we worked out here, we had to pull plenty of stumps after cutting the trunks. Had to make space for them to bring in the steam engines and walking-beam pumpjacks. We don’t pull nearly as many now, but we do have to pull some tomorrow to clear some open space. Ugh, stump removal. What a pain in the flank.

“You might also have noticed that there are some single-trunk trees around, usually much bigger than the trunks from coppiced stools. We call those singles ‘standards’ and let them grow. Most of our standards are oak, with a few chestnuts. There are some standards at Pea Ridge that date from long before anypony knew there was soup underneath the ground here! Trunks from coppices often aren’t all that straight, and sometimes we harvest before the woodgrain is tight. That’s probably about two-thirds of our coppice trunks; they’re fine for ordinary burning and for making charcoal, but they’re not good for when we need to make actual boards and posts to build things.

“So they kept some ‘standards’ and sometimes even planted a few. We won’t harvest the really big old oaks and chestnuts that have been here for at least three centuries, but we’ve got plenty of standards around ranging from about four to twenty-five decades that we can harvest as needed. Still would prefer to let the older trees keep growing, and maybe we can, but sometimes we’ll need to put up a structure like the Pav,” Bartlett concluded.

He led me over to where a felling team of four ponies and a griffon were working on a five-trunked chestnut stool, one of the largest ones in this grove. Around them were many more trunks and a half-dozen newly cleared stools. “Here’s our first stop, one of our felling teams. Short Kerf’s in charge of this one.”

Two trunks of the chestnut had already been felled, while the griffon and two of the ponies were working on a third trunk. The other two ponies were working on a felled trunk a safe distance away from the stool, using saws and hatchets to remove limbs from the trunks.

“Limbing is something that gets overlooked a lot.” Bartlett nodded at the Earth pony and unicorn working together with a two-creature crosscut saw, the Earth pony with a mouthgrip and the unicorn with their horn’s field.

“Before we can make use of the trunk, we’ve got to get rid of the branches. It’s true that the trunk is the part that’s the most useful, but no lumberjack would let the limbs go to waste. And getting those primary branches off can be surprisingly dangerous, because if they’re supporting any weight from the felled trunk, they could be under compression. Cutting the branch off releases that tension, and both the branch and the trunk could jump in unexpected ways. A creature’s got to be at least a journeymare before we let them cut primary limbs without supervision; it might not seem as risky as an Earth pony or unicorn working up high on a live tree, but that perceived safety can get a lot of unsupervised apprentices hurt.”

The crosscutters sawed through one of the largest lower branches, about two hooves thick and itself containing a number of smaller branches. The two of them used shoulder and field to push the removed branch a couple yards away from the trunk, then moved up the trunk to begin work on the next branch. After the pair briefly inspected the lay of the branch, they applied the saw and in short order that branch too was felled and moved.

“What do you use the branches for,” I asked.

“Well, the bigger thick ones like this five-incher here,” Bartlett gestured to the first one I had seen them cut off, “we’ll remove the smaller branches coming off it and treat it like a very small trunk that won’t require any more splitting; many main branches are already roughly billet-sized. But the small branches, ones which are less than a hoof wide, we’ll often just use as firewood for cooking or for heating our bunkhouses. Every couple of stools, the apprentices will gather up all the small branches and haul them off for more processing. We'll eventually bundle and trim them into short fascines. Bundle them tight enough and they’ll provide almost as much heat as a bavin of equivalent size while selling quite a bit cheaper. Still, if we look at cost and energy per unit weight, most ponies prefer to buy bavins over fascines even though they’re at least a third more expensive. I think it’s because a big log rather than a bundle of little sticks just looks better in the fireplace.”

“Is all of this going to go to charcoal and firewood?” I asked.

“No, later on we’ll actually be felling quite a few of the standards- especially the ones planted near the start of Pea Ridge over a century ago- for typical lumber products like boards and poles. And the better-formed of the overstood oak and chestnut trunks will go towards products too.

“Still, we’re working almost entirely with coppices now and I’d say that eighty percent of what we’re cutting down this next year is going to be used for mining, either as dry wood or as charcoal. We’re producing far more charcoal per day than we’re using right now, since we’ll need it if this works out and we start drilling more mines. There’s a whole supply chain to manage; I’m sure Bounder and Lemon are going to have you talk to Cookie about that later on.”

We watched as the other three members of the felling team worked on the third trunk. Two Earth ponies had cut out a wedge from the trunk. The cross-section of the wedge looked like an isosceles right triangle, with its hoof-wide base horizontal across the trunk and the diagonal of the wedge at a forty-five-degree angle.

“That’s the face cut,” said Bartlett. “It will guide the direction that the tree falls in. You’ll notice that they’ve moved on to cut from the other side, a horizontal cut about a quarter of a hoof above the bottom of the face cut. We call that the back cut, or felling cut. To cut a tree down right, we want to make the back cut most of the way through the trunk, leaving a bit of space between it and the face cut. Then the weight of the trunk will fall in the direction of the face cut, with a small amount of the uncut trunk there left as the hinge to get it to come down safely.”

I looked at the trunk again, picturing all that weight coming down on a pony. “In what ways could it come down unsafely?”

Bartlett gave a short, barking laugh. “Usually, it does what we call a barber chair. The face cut doesn’t work as it’s meant to or the lumberjack leaves too much of a hinge uncut, and then the tree starts splitting vertically right down the middle along the grain. Part of the tree falls towards the hinge, but the back part just gets levered up like an old-timey barber’s chair being tilted so a stallion can get a shave. The trunk can really go just about any which way after that, and if you’ve got that much weight being moved around without any control...well, if it’s a really bad day, a barber chairing tree can kill a pony before they know what hit ‘em.

“Buckthorn Puller here once saw a crew botch felling a six hundred year old oak. Thing was nearly eleven feet wide and two hundred feet tall, and when it barber chaired, that monster was a hundred and eighty tons of out of control timber. The myth of lumberjacking ponies being fearless? Ha! Any pony who doesn’t feel their stomach drop to their hooves when they see ten-plus tons of wood ready to snap and fall any which way is an idiot.

“That danger’s why lumber teams love having ponies with not just a lumberjacking mark, but a tree felling mark like Short Kerf over there,” Bartlett gestured at the farther of the two Earth ponies working a two-creature crosscut saw near the base of the trunk.

“They get a sort of feel if the face cut or back cut is off, and we can get everyone to move away so we can reevaluate before cutting further. And just to be safe, Gavin is putting a couple of chains around the trunk. Any crew chief with a brain puts safety first.”

I watched as the griffon – the same one I saw last night at the Pav, I realized – finished firmly looping a length of chain about a ponylength above the back cut and secured it with a padlock; another loop further down was just a few hooves above the steadily growing back cut. “The chains will hold the trunk together just in case?”

“Yup, any careful felling team is going to use light chains even if we’re cutting down comparatively small trunks like these. If they used heavy chains, nobody in that crew of idiots Bucky saw would’ve had to go to the hospital. I like hiring griffons; their claws make a lot of this kind of work easier. They generally can’t reach the speeds pegasi can, but they tend to be quite a bit bigger and stronger. Doesn’t make much of a difference with these smallish trunks from coppices, but if we’re felling a trunk two feet wide or bigger, one griffon can usually pull as much as two pegasi.”

Gavin gave the lock an experimental yank, then landed near us and picked up a coil of heavy rope. “Pull? What are you doing with that?” I asked.

He pointed a claw at the canopy of the trunk and responded in a pleasant baritone. “Gonna loop and tie this around the trunk and one of the topmost branches. Then when we’re ready to fell the tree, I’m going to be several yards above and to the face-side of the tree, with the other end of the rope. I’ll start pulling to make sure that we get the trunk falling in the direction we want it to.” With that, the griffon took off.

I watched as Gavin tied off the rope, probably some eighty feet in the air. As he finished, he called out “Shorty! Bucky! Rope secured, ready on your mark!”

Meanwhile, Short Kerf and Buckthorn Puller were finishing off the back cut. Within half a minute, Short Kerf called back, “Last cut’s coming up, Gavvy! Ready to haul in fifteen!”

The two Earth ponies tugged the crosscut saw between them six more times, then backed off while pulling the saw out. Lowering the saw, Short Kerf shouted “Mark!” and the griffon began tugging on the end of the rope.

The tree would surely have fallen on its own, but the extra muscle accelerated the process of getting the full weight of the trunk over the hinge. As the sound of wood cracking filled the air, Gavin dropped the rope and flew backwards and upwards, getting further clear of the falling trunk. No cracks appeared near the chains, indicating a clean break and fall, as two and a half tons of chestnut came crashing down to the forest floor. All five of the crew went over to check the trunk and its branches, and when nothing seemed amiss, they took hold of the still-attached rope and dragged the trunk away from the stool. Once that was accomplished, they once again split into felling and limbing groups and began the process all over again.

“You’ve seen the results of coppicing, and how we harvest from a coppice,” Bartlett told me. “Now let’s go look at what happens next.”

Author's Note

Click for the notes for Chapter 3!