As we left Short Kerf’s team, I became more aware of the slow, rhythmic sound of chopping, the echoing crack of an axe hitting wood every five seconds. A minute’s walk toward the steady beat brought us over to where more lumberjacks were working on a cluster of felled trunks and their accompanying branches. I was introduced to Berry Chop, a deep purple unicorn mare who was the leader for this team. Clearly, once Short Kerf and the other tree fellers finished downing the stools in an area, Berry Chop’s team moved in.

“We’re the ones who actually get the lumber ready for whatever it's meant to become,” said Berry. “Before any of the felling teams get to work, we’ve gone through to identify which trunks are acceptable for boards and other products, and what’s only good for burning. This week, we’re working only on the big burner trees.”

There were maybe fifteen trunks that seemed largely intact, though with notches cut into them every sixteen inches or so, and four more being worked. Each of those four trunks was being broken down by two more ponies, the pairs steadily pulling a crosscut saw back and forth over a notch. Slowly they worked through the entire log, leaving the cut rounds in place. Many trunks had obviously already been processed, with a great mound of cut trunk sections stacked high further into the clearing. As I watched, a unicorn toting a pair of buckets on a carrying pole walked past the cut trunks, using their field to gather the sawdust and put it into a bucket.

“You’ll usually hear about ponies bucking trees in the sense of kicking them to bring their ripe fruit down,” said Berry. “But when we talk about bucking here, we mean bucking logs- chopping or cutting them into usable lengths. For firewood, the standard length is sixteen inches. That size works for charcoal burns too, so we keep with it. A notch to show where each cut needs to go, then it’s just a matter of actually sawing through. It’s easy enough that we have apprentices do a lot of it.”

A little ways away behind the mound of bucked trunk sections and a small shed, next to the wide stump of a fallen standard and a large pile of bucked trunks, stood the sources of the rhythmic chopping. A gangly teenaged unicorn – strangely, with a cutie mark showing a trio of chess pawns – levitated a bucked section of foot-plus thick trunk onto the stump as Tonny lifted a gigantic splitting maul, then the minotaur brought it down to split the trunk cleanly in two.

As Tonny gathered the maul and began lifting again, the colt’s mahogany-colored telekinetic field moved one of the halves to the side while rotating the one still on the stump by about ninety degrees. The next swing split the half-log into quarter-log pieces. As the maul went up, the field placed the split quarter-logs onto an orderly pile on the other side of the stump while simultaneously positioning the other half back on the stump. Another clean *thwock*. The muscular arms flexed and the axe rose again, as the field stacked the wooden pieces then lifted the next bucked log, once more positioning it perfectly upon the stump. Down came the maul.

It was hypnotic watching the splitting team work. Every movement precise in both space and time, with that metronomic *thwock* of wood every five seconds.

I didn’t realize I had spoken my thoughts aloud until I heard Bartlett’s barking laugh. “I get you, Spuds. It’s been five minutes we’ve been watching Wood Pusher and Tonny. Berry’s already trotted off to get back to work, if you didn’t notice. Can set your watch by these two. And they can keep it up all day.”

“Something tells me that both of those things aren’t as easy to find as one might guess,” I said.

“True enough. Splitting larger trunks is one of the tasks that we ponies aren’t as efficient at. You look at the motion needed to split a trunk down the grain, and we’re not very suited for it. Lift a heavy maul, bring it down straight. It’s too big to attach properly to the standard fetlock tool-grips, and using a double-fetlock-grip is awkward even if some ponies try to work that way.

“A maul – sometimes you’ll hear it called a splitting axe - is built different from a felling axe. Much heavier, and it’s blunter and longer-handled. Meant for splitting along the grain, not cutting into the grain. Could rig up a machine to do the splitting; many teams do that rather than doing it by hand or hoof. A weighted wedge-like splitting blade mounted between vertical rails, put a log in place, pull a cord attached to a pulley to lift the blade, release and drop. It works and one of our other crews half a mile down do it that way, but Tonny and Woody are easily three times as fast, can keep it up half again as long as a rail-and-pulley four-pony crew, and are more powerful and precise too.”

We watched as the maul came down again and again. “That beast that he’s swinging; we had it custom-forged. Twice as long of an edge means he can split wider trunks than a pony. Being nine times as heavy as a typical pony’s maul gives it far more momentum. And his height lets gravity do even more of the work for him. That extra size, weight, and swing distance means it cleaves through even a thick trunk of knotty wood when a pony’s maul might get stuck and require another stroke or two – if the pony can split the trunk at all.”

The nut-brown of Wood Pusher’s telekinetic field stacked the split wood, then moved the next section of trunk into place, rotating it slightly. Bartlett continued, “And that there’s attention to detail. Puts each piece in the same place each time, rotates it so the grain or a crack’s lined up right where the maul comes down. A smart splitter appreciates someone who can place the log right where they want it, lets them bring their full force to bear without wasting any effort. These two, occasionally they’ll go an entire shift without having to take a second swing on a log. Most teams can’t go fifteen minutes without a second stroke or drop! Good thing is, Bounder pays top wages to get and keep top workers. And he’ll take on and keep some apprentices that most prospecting bosses won’t.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

Bartlett let out his short, barking laugh again. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find out tonight after dinner.”

Before I could ask him to elaborate, another pair of apprentices, dragging a stone-boat, came up next to the pile of split wood and began to load it. Bartlett said “After the wood’s split, we’ve got to do a bit more before being able to use or process it. We’ve found that it’s most efficient to do the next steps in a more centralized way, so everything within a furlong will be taken there instead. We expect pairs to be able to drag about seven firkins each trip, but it’s a simple task and we tend to rotate new apprentices through. Come on, let’s follow them over.”

It ended up being only a half-furlong before we came upon a good-sized clearing. Lined up on one side of it were five sprawling woodsheds, each looking like they could hold several dozen cords of neatly stacked split wood under their roofs. Two of them were already full, and a third was more than halfway filled, with the wood stacked lengthwise across the longer side of the sheds, so that when we faced the wide rear opening, I could see thousands of log-ends with their quarter or half-circle of age rings. Within the mostly-full fourth shed was an enormous pile of smaller branches, the largest of which were no more than a hoof wide and the smallest as thin as a pencil. As we approached the third shed, I could feel a moderate, steady breeze hitting me in the face. It went on and on, suggesting that this was some artificial working by pegasi.

“Looks like large-scale wood drying,” I said.

“Exactly that. We’re far enough away from other settlements that the weather around here is wild, and it’d cost way too many bits to get the weather crews we’d need. So we do many things mostly the old Earth pony way, with woodsheds, helped along by a little pegasus or unicorn magic. If we just left the split logs to sit, it’d usually take most of a year for them to dry out. But get a couple pegasi to set up and renew a steady breeze each day and we cut that to about three weeks.

“Most city ponies don’t realize just how much of the weight of freshly-cut green wood is water. After a three week breezing period, a log loses nearly a quarter of its weight! Makes it much easier to transport if you’re using it for firewood.

“But more than that, once the water is removed, there’s just more heat released from the same log if it’s dry. Less of the energy of burning goes into evaporating the moisture from the log, and more into heating your house or your food. Compared to green wood, dry wood provides half again as much heat for the same weight. You work for a big city paper now, but are you from a farm, Spuds?”

“Yeah. Maybe I’m a bit misnamed, I’m the only one in my family without a farming or farming-related mark,” I gestured at the newspaper mark on my flank, “But I remember from my foalhood on the farm that a wagonload of green wood was a lot harder to tow than seasoned wood.”

“Drying’s even more important for what we’ll look at after this. Often, the bark falls right off the log and that makes processing the wood easier. But you asked about what we do with smaller branches? Come around to the other side of this shed.”

Bartlett led us around the fourth shed, to where six ponies – four earth ponies, a pegasus, and a unicorn - were at work making fascines. Two of them were loading finished fascines onto a partially loaded stone-boat. One pony was neatly laying out yard-long pairs of rods with a couple feet of hemp rope running perpendicularly through a hole in the center of each rod, forming a long row of ten pairs. Two pieces of thinner hemp cord were placed next to each pair of rods. Meanwhile, the last three ponies were carrying yard-long branches out and placing them in piles upon the horizontal rope, parallel to the rods.

The stone-boat loaders and the rod layer finished about the same time, then they formed a trio at one of the bundles. The wood carriers did likewise, with one pony at each rod and the third pony with two lengths of hemp cord. Lifting the rods, the two ponies turned them and pulled, compressing the pile of sticks between the rope and forming a tight bundle with little air between the sticks. The third pony then tied off the bundle near each end with the hemp cord, finishing the fascine. The other two dropped the rods and all moved on to the next stick pile.

This process was repeated until eight of the ten fascines were finished, then I saw one of the former wood carriers head back to straighten out and reset the rods and collect more precut hemp cord from a nearby pile. As the last two fascines were tied off, the former rod layer and one of the loaders went back to collect and load finished fascines, while the other former loader joined the wood carriers. We could still hear, faintly, the steady chop of Tonny and Wood Pusher splitting logs.

“They rotate. The rod layer gets a bit of a breather, and this ensures that everypony gets practice with every task.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I asked after another minute, “But is this sort of like a dance? If every lumberjack knows what they’re doing, and they get things done in just the right steps and time, then...there’s this rhythm. Like the cycle between jobs here, or the log splitting, or even the ponies pulling on a two-pony saw. And the stick binders here, I thought it even seemed like they were moving aligned with the beat that Tonny and Wood Pusher were setting with their maul and logs.”

“Ha! They didn’t give you that Muleitzer Prize for nothing! Most creatures don’t see the dance until it’s pointed out to them, and most that do don’t see it this fast! I’ve talked about it with Lemon Hearts before. She thinks that every job might have a type of harmony that workers can get into when things are going right. Someone new joins the group or we have to break in an apprentice, and the rhythm gets thrown off until everyone gets used to each other.

“Anyway, this part of the dance only happens when we’ve accumulated enough of the smaller branches, which doesn’t happen every day, unlike using logs. Stone-boatloads of sticks come in, a couple ponies trim the longer ones down to standard length, and pile them up in the shed. Shed starts filling up, we start bundling. We end up using just about all of the fascines here on-site. Like I said, the pony customer prefers burning big logs or products that come from big logs. The really small sticks, which can’t even be bundled into fascines? Not really good for anything but tinder.”

As Bartlett finished speaking, the fascine team had finished loading the three stone-boats and had begun clipping themselves to their harnesses. Then, I noticed one of the loaders suddenly pointing at something up in the air behind me, and the team halted clipping their harnesses and instead unclipped themselves.

Author's Note

Click here for the notes to Chapter 4.