Soup Mining in Equestria

by Emil

Rating: everyone
Tags: Griffons, Slice of Life, Minotaur, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Lemon Hearts, Original Character
Length: 19334

A spiritual sequel/expansion to Admiral Biscuit's brilliantly odd The Soup Must Flow, wherein Equestria contains soup mines from which soup can be pumped like crude oil.

Admiral Biscuit's The Soup Must Flow stated that "Few ponies sitting down to a bowl of fresh cazuela ever think about the soup pipeline."

Spuds Terkel, reporter for the common pony, is here to profile the workers at the starting point of the pipeline, and quickly finds out that there's a lot more that goes into it than one would initially expect. He finds himself talking not only to soup miners, but also lumberjacks, distance runners, cooks, charcoal burners, and more. And not just ponies, but even the occasional griffon, mule, and minotaur expat.

This entire story is a tribute to Biscuit’s brilliantly odd idea and to his and Pineta’s expository stories, and stems from a comment I made on TSMF.

Additional thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle, my pre-reader and editor. He has greatly improved the fluency of this story. Any remaining mistakes are mine, not his.

Published 2025-02-03 02:40:00 UTC
Last updated 2025-02-17 01:29:34 UTC

Prologue

Soup.

Almost all Equestrians eat it every day, especially during these coldest periods of wintertime. Two weeks past Hearth’s Warming, few of us think about the process by which it reaches the soup faucets in our homes or our favorite restaurants. Nor do any of us know for certain how the great soup deposits underground came into being. Even the former Diarchs have said that they remember trips to the soup springs when they were fillies, carrying buckets to collect the creamy mushroom chowders that bubbled up to the surface from deep underground. A handful of gastronomists speculate that much of it was Discord’s doing, but the partial historical records from the pre-Discordian era indicate that soup had been gathered long before the draconequus appeared.

The more fragmentary records from Tirek’s first appearance a millennium before the reign of Discord mention natural sources of minestrone and split pea, and most modern food historians support the hypothesis that the seeming oddity of large reservoirs of tasty liquid sustenance locked within geologic structures are the result of the titanic uncontrolled magical forces unleashed worldwide approximately four millennia ago, during the legendary war in which the semi-mythical Mag’ne and her allies defeated Grogar.

Whatever their origins, it is difficult to overstate the effect of soup mines on the history of modern Equestria. I am reminded of this as my train to the Western Territories steams past Goat War Field. Certainly, the Grogarian Hypothesis for geologic soup origin seems persuasive as I look out my passenger car’s windows at the rugged badlands where the final battle occurred, as Goat War Field’s soup deposits were three times as large as the next largest soupfield ever discovered and therefore a natural place for soup mining to have started almost two centuries ago.

Only a few soup derricks, the so-called “nodding donkey” pumpjack rigs, can still be seen pumping at Goat War. Its production now is a mere trickle compared to the great gushers of tomato-based soups that it once provided. Most of the easily pumpable soup had been removed decades ago, leaving only smaller deposits barely worth the bits required to extract them. The train station that we briefly stop at boards and debarks only a few ponies; a far cry from a century ago when the soupfield was the main reason the entire Western Line of Equestrian Railways was built. It is no exaggeration to say that Goat War’s soup spurred both unusually rapid population growth in Equestria as well as the rapid development of the railroad industry.

The Western Line now extends far past my destination, the Pea Ridge Soupfield, to Appleloosa and the Mild West. “But why would you go to Pea Ridge?” one might ask. After all, pumping at Pea Ridge – once the second-largest soupfield in Equestria – stopped four decades ago and now it’s just another tapped out field like Goat War, isn’t it?

Perhaps not, if some ponies have their way.

Three days ago, I had just been seated at the Sandwich Sorcerer when the conversation at the table next to me began to increase in volume and enthusiasm. A quick inquiry revealed that the unicorn and pegasus sitting there were Lemon Hearts, an assistant professor at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, and Boundary Layer, the leader of a prospecting team for Manehattan Soup and Stew Shipping, often simply called M3S. I gave my name and asked what they were so excited about.

“Spuds Turkel...you’re that reporter, aren’t you?” said the unicorn. “You should come out and take a look at what we’re doing.”

“Come out where, and doing what?” I replied.

“You know how ponies say that Pea Ridge is dead?” asked Lemon Hearts.

Boundary Layer looks straight at me and declared, “We’re bringing it back.”

Author's Note

Notes for the Prologue, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 can be found here.

Chapter 1: Arrival

The Western line ran three trains a day departing Manehattan. I caught the regularly scheduled 5:30 PM out, but a monster incident delayed the train at Ponyville station for almost two hours and we didn’t reach Pea Ridge until just past 10. Fortunately, I was able to telegram ahead during the delay to inform Lemon Hearts and Boundary Layer of my expected much-later time of arrival. Despite the passenger compartments being half-full, I was the only one to get off the train at Pea Ridge, where Boundary Layer and an enormous minotaur met me at the station. As we exchanged greetings, I noticed the minotaur unloading bound stacks of newspaper off one of the cargo hauler cars, enough to fill the big pushcart sitting next to one of the station benches. It seemed odd to me, as Pea Ridge’s workers surely didn’t need that many reading copies.

Upon learning that I had only brought a single suitcase, Boundary turned to his companion and said, “Tonny, you can just put Mr. Turkel’s suitcase on top of the papers. We’ll walk back to the Pav since I’ve got to talk to some of the night shift anyways, and head to the bunkhouses from there.”

The giant minotaur – over a head taller than most adult bulls, and proportionally wider – nodded and easily hefted my large suitcase and carefully placed it atop the cart. As we departed the station, he pushed the full load along without apparent effort. Boundary asked, “How was the trip, Mr. Turkel? Feel free to call me Bounder; it’s what most of the work crews do. We’re headed to what we just call the Pavilion, or the Pav for short. We put it up to use as an all-purpose gathering spot, mess hall, and office.”

“Call me Spuds. I don’t mind train travel, normally, but I’m starting to reconsider that stretch of track through Ponyville. I’m just glad that they got the manticores that wandered out of the Everfree off the tracks before the train actually got there,” I replied.

Mounted on a pole at a corner of the pushcart was a magical light globe, a common device for providing illumination at night. I suspected it was for my benefit, as my companions seemed familiar enough with the path that they could’ve followed it in the dark. We set off at a brisk trot against the chill of the early January night. It was cold enough that I was glad I was wearing a sweater and hat; both of my companions wore vests. As we covered the trail’s mile and a quarter over to the Pav, I was struck by the fact that we appeared to be walking through groves of slightly peculiar trees.

Noticing my glances, Boundary said, “Most ponies don’t realize it, but ideally, soup mines are found in forested areas. Or at least, places that can support a timber farm. Coppicing trees is a common practice. Manehattan Soup and Stew Shipping even has our own teams of arborists, and some mining teams get used to partnering with particular forestry teams. I know the major competitors to M3S have their own in-house lumberjacks as well. We need the wood in order to drive the steam engines that run the pumpjacks, and just about every large soupfield was either found underneath a forest or else the companies brought the forests there.”

Boundary continued, “It’s not just the prospectors and soupjacks working out here. We’ve got to have an entire team of creatures set up in our own little integrated ecosystem in order to make soup flow. Once we give you the basics tomorrow of how we’re trying to extract soup from a dry field, you’ll soon realize what else needs to be done to get things from within a mine to your kitchen tap.”

We rounded another small grove and I could see the Pavilion a couple hundred yards further down, underneath a bright light that must have been mounted on a pole atop its roof as a sort of beacon. On an overcast night, even without any guiding stars, a pony on the ground would have no problem seeing it from two or three miles away. Though the trees might block direct sight, the slight glow would tell them roughly in what direction to go. Pegasi cruising several hundred feet above ground would certainly be able to spot the beacon from ten times that distance.

“As you’re probably aware, we stop pumping a soup mine when extraction starts costing more bits than the soup is worth. But that doesn’t mean there’s no soup left. And very often, the rock around which the soup was found – the soup dome – is crusted with dried-out soup. Dehydrated soup concentrate, or soupbrick, as it’s more commonly called. And in some cases, the would-be mine was dried out even before it was discovered. In some places like Pea Ridge, there were both some excellent liquid mines as well as dried-out domes that never produced pumpable soup but contain loads of soupbrick,” said Boundary as we reached the Pav.

The large wooden structure was open-columned on three sides with a smaller solid-wood section on the fourth. Heavy canvas curtains hung from the rafters between the columns blocked most of the wind and kept the interior much warmer than the outside, though still cool compared to a farmhouse. Upon entering through the only section with the curtains halfway down, I saw it was filled with rows of wooden tables and benches that could easily seat a couple hundred ponies with plenty of clear space to spare. But at this late hour, there were only nine ponies – and one griffon – around. Perhaps twenty large light globes on the exterior posts of the pavilion provided steady if subdued light. About twice that number were mounted on interior posts, but almost all of those were no longer lit.

What a few hours ago must have been a roaring fire within a large stone pit at the center of the pavilion had burned down to a low smolder, but still provided light and warmth to a muscular stallion lying face-down upon a padded massage bench next to it and the light purple pegasus mare digging her hooves into the muscles along his hips. A few smaller fire pits around the pavilion were already completely out. A pair of teenaged colts looked to be almost finished with cleaning the tables and sweeping the floors.

Underneath the only table still well-lit by light globes, an earth pony mare and a griffon tom in their middle years were poring over a laminated map and discussing something in low voices. The griffon held an orange grease pencil in his right foreclaw, making a few markings on the map while the tan-colored mare worked an abacus.

“Spuds, I’ve got to check in with some of the evening shift,” Boundary nodded at the remaining four ponies waiting at a table near the enclosed section. “You can take a look around the Pav, but don’t bother anyone since they’re probably wrapping up for the day. This will just take a few minutes, and then you, me, and Tonny can head to the bunkhouse.”

I took his suggestion. The first thing that caught my eye was the large map, bulletin board, and chalkboard taking up much of the enclosure wall facing us. The map was more than three times the length and height of a pony and appeared to depict all of Pea Ridge; the distance from the train station near the far right of the map to the little wooden model of the Pav wasn’t even a sixth of the way across. Little grid marks at the top and side provided an easy way of referring to map coordinates, while pins held down colored string that seemed to mark off potential areas for mining.

The bulletin board seemed to be fairly typical for a moderately-sized community. A large calendar listed a number of events but using mostly two and three-letter acronyms; clearly, anyone reading it would be expected to know what they referred to. A smaller number of other standard informative postings were pinned to the board, but the notifications that changed on a daily or weekly basis appeared to be written on the chalkboard. Most notable of these was the slightly cryptic declaration in the top right corner reading “Team of the Month: Shorty’s. They chose cherry pasties and deep-fried tofu.”

A table just in front of the wall held a detail map, with colored strings that allowed me to easily tell which part of the big map it corresponded to. On the detail map were a couple dozen little pins with flags on them. The pictures on each flag appeared to be one or more cutie marks, so perhaps this indicated which ponies were working in which location the next day. Oddly, one flag’s pair of marks appeared to be a bull’s horns and three chess pawns, and another included a set of talons alongside what looked like lumberjack-related marks. I guessed that those flags might be for the teams that Tonny and the griffon were on.

Against the nearest support post, directly opposite the bulletin board, was a large, well-crafted grandfather clock. Leaving the table and walking past the large fire pit and the massage table to the far end of the Pav, I noticed another table next to a support post; on top of the table was a silver trophy cup upon a fine walnut base. A base plate on its front declared it the “Warden Pear Memorial Boules Trophy” with smaller plates on the left side indicating the pairs who won it the previous four years. Mounted on the support post itself was a framed display holding a Celestial Cross medal and a portrait of a middle-aged earth pony in a Royal Guards dress uniform, and another frame with the Alicorns’ Feathers medal.

The boules trophy could be explained by the markings and boards I saw on the floor past the support post, as it appeared that the area could be quickly converted to set up four boules courts. But why was the highest medal for gallantry in service to Equestria, and the highest group commendation to civilians in a war zone, displayed with the trophy? I mentally filed this away to ask about at an appropriate time.

Circling back around, I passed a shelf holding a variety of board games, and a table with chessboard markings already burned into the wood. Standing up against another two interior support columns were well-made quads of thin but tall chestnut bookshelves. Each sported closeable wood-framed doors with glass panel inserts to let one see the contents inside. A quick inspection revealed a wide variety of both fiction and nonfiction. Oddly, one entire shelf appeared to be filled with books on chess theory.

I gave the griffon and mare working over their map a wide berth, not wanting to disturb them. I completed my loop as Boundary Layer was finishing his instructions.

“—and if nothing else needs to be done, you two can sit in the lean-to and start on sharpening up the axes and saws so the regulars can get through that faster next morning.” Two ponies nodded and trotted off, one picking up a covered basket as he did so. The other two he had been talking to went through a door into the enclosed portion of the building; as they did so, I could see desks and office furniture within the room they entered.

“Ahh, perfect timing,” said Boundary Layer as he turned back to me. “Let’s head to the bunkhouse.” He led the way out of the Pav toward a pair of distant lights as Tonny and I followed along, the minotaur carrying not just my suitcase but a dozen fascines of sticks tied into an even larger bundle. A hundred and fifty yards away were a couple of single-story dormitories with a slight upward bump in the middle of each. The lights I had seen were a light globe mounted at the apex of a flagpole atop each dorm, similar to but less luminous than the one atop the Pav. As we approached, I saw that each building was made up largely of brick, with a slightly-slanted wooden roof further overlaid with thatch. The windows were small and shuttered against the cold. A half-dozen chimneys poked up from the structure, with a particularly large example at the rear of each dorm.

We entered through the main double doors, which seemed to have been built a couple feet taller than usual. Bounder noticed my glance up and smirked. “I had our chief architect and construction manager Piano Slab design the central areas of the dorms to comfortably accommodate all hundred and ten creatures on the team and their families – including those of us who are absurdly tall and wide – so they can walk right in without scraping their horns.” The pegasus and minotaur shared a laugh as we walked into a large high-ceilinged room with three sofas, some comfortable plush chairs around a coffee table, a large bookshelf, a card table, and a writing desk. The entire area was brightly illuminated by light globes at the four corners and a lit fireplace in the back of the room. Near the roaring fire was an earth pony curled up on one of the plush chairs and reading a novel.

Just inside the entrance, Bounder pointed at a door to my right. “Mud room’s through that door, if you come in really dirty for some reason and need an initial hose-off. Go through that and there’s the main bathroom with showers, a communal bath, and toilets. There’s another entrance to the main bathroom off the hallway we’ll go down.”

Waving his hoof around to encompass the entire room, he continued, “This is the main lounge. Creatures who aren’t interested in the activity at the Pav that night often hang out here. We keep a couple of light globes on even if everyone has left for their own room. That cabinet over at the far wall is the snack cabinet for anyone who’s hungry after hours. Crackers, peanut butter, bread, jam. It also holds a few extra light globes that someone can take back to their room for a smidgen more light if they want to do a little table work in privacy.”

“Given how it's well below freezing outside, it’s surprisingly warm in here, even with that fireplace going,” I said.

“You should ask Piano Slab about his design sometime. It’s brilliant. If you want to shower before bed, we’ve even got hot water.”

“Speaking of hot water,” Tonny said in a surprisingly quiet voice as he put down my suitcase, “I better get down to my room and make sure that the main fireplace is going strong before bedtime. It’s going to get even colder the next few hours, so we’re going to want plenty of heat coming through the floors tonight.”

With that cryptic statement, the minotaur walked off down the hall and entered the door at the far end. Boundary Layer led me to a room about halfway down. “Here you go, Spuds, room eight. You’re in luck; as the only guest, you get a room with a bed meant for two ponies! If you need anything, I’m in room forty-one all the way at the other end of the hall, and there’s also usually going to be someone out in the lounge at all hours. We’re on a winter schedule and I’d suggest getting up around the sunrise at 7:45 or shortly after that; breakfast at the Pav starts 7:30 and goes until 9.”

I entered my guest room to find a double bed, a wardrobe, a chair, and a small table. The furniture was unadorned wood, though the craftsmanship was excellent. The sheets, blankets, towels, and the mug on the table were similarly plain but well-made. Tapping the small light globe on the table to turn it on, it didn’t quite provide enough light for easy reading and seemed to be meant to give off the minimum light needed to accomplish basic tasks. Probably why Bounder had told me about the extras in the lounge. The room itself was small with little space not taken up by the furniture, but gave off a safe and comfortable feel similar to the no-frills guest rooms used by seasonal laborers at rural earth pony farmhouses.

Despite the lack of a fireplace, the room was indeed warm, and I doubted I would even need all the blankets. As I put my suitcase atop the shelf in the wardrobe, I got the feeling that I would be talking to a lot more ponies – creatures – than I had initially expected. But that could wait, I decided. It was time for a shower, then bed.

Chapter 2: Breakfast demonstration

My alarm clock woke me up at 7:45 like Boundary Layer suggested. I had thought about trying to wake up earlier to see a full morning’s operations, but realized that I might want to have a better idea of what actually happened first. As I completed my morning preparations and exited the bathroom, I encountered Bounder coming down the hall.

“I’m about to head to the Pav, if you want to join me for breakfast. Lemon Hearts should be there and we can give you a basic rundown.”

“Sure, that’d be great,” I replied, “I just need to stop in to my room to grab my saddlebag with my notepads and pencils.”

As we walked over to the Pav, I noticed ponies both solo and in little groups also heading from the bunkhouses to breakfast. Most wore some combination of vests and hats against the cold. Nearly every pony also wore adjustable tool bands near their forehooves; such bands were a sign of skilled manual labor. The tool bands and their straps allowed ponies to attach and lock tools in order to exert force in a magnitude and direction not easily done with hooves alone. Many earth ponies preferred to use mouthgrips when possible, but there were certainly times when one would want to keep their mouth as far away as possible from something nasty.

We got into the breakfast line as Bounder told me about what was left in Pea Ridge. “The liquid soup was almost entirely pumped out, it’s true. What liquid is left isn’t economically worth recovering. But Pea Ridge has tremendous amounts of completely dry, nearly rock-hard chunks of solid material that used to be liquid soup.”

He piled his plate high with soy sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and pancakes as he continued, “Soupbrick is, shall we say, an underutilized potential resource. Most soup fields have some mines that are heavily soupbrick, or have even completely dried out into soupbrick. Best estimates are that even the easily pumpable fields will have some soupbrick deposits. Pea Ridge, for example, is suspected to contain soupbrick deposits that could rehydrate in a volume of anywhere from twenty to forty percent of its original liquid soup.”

“I’ve heard that ponies can dig out blocks of hardened concentrated soupbrick like that at a few surface mines,” I commented as I loaded my own plate. “But it sounds like that’s not a big industry.”

“Exactly. And those open-pit surface mines are few and far between because even when the lode is near the surface and the concentrate can be rehydrated into acceptably palatable soup, digging for soupbrick with picks and drills and shovels is serious toil! To make things worse, most soup mines are far enough underground that a dried-out dome full of soupbrick would be difficult to even reach. Then the effort and cost involved in removing overburden and potentially having to build a mining tunnel far outweigh the soup yield, especially because unlike the few mountainous coal mines Equestria has, we’d mostly be digging down instead of in.

“But, what if we didn’t need to send ponies – or others – down to drill and dig out the soupbrick? Despite the name, dehydrated soup concentrate isn’t always found in mostly flat brick-like pieces. Sometimes they could just be lattices of dried out soup, like stalactites and stalagmites in caves. What if we could turn it liquid again?” asked Boundary Layer as we approached the table where Lemon Hearts was seated next to a boxy contraption. The mare was munching on soy sausage pigs-in-a-blanket, the pancakes drowning in lemon curd.

Finishing her bite, Lemon Hearts picked up from Bounder, “We call the process we’ve come up with in-situ leaching. You know how your instant soup packets require heat and liquid to dissolve the soupbrick? Just pouring water, even boiling water, down a borehole into a dried-out soup dome wouldn’t work. There simply isn’t enough heat content in the water to dissolve more than a small portion of soupbrick, and a lot of the heat will quickly transfer to the surrounding rock. And even if a little of the soupbrick dissolves, trying to use a pumpjack with that much more solid material in place is nearly impossible.

“But boil water into wet steam, and it carries a lot more heat. When using a properly designed boiler, we can even superheat the wet steam into dry steam, bringing it to temperatures well above the boiling point. We’ll use a boiler and borehole to dump in eight times as much heat as just boiling-temperature water. That steam will eventually either displace or warm the cold air of the empty soup dome with relatively little transmission to the surrounding rock. It will raise the overall temperature to a point where the condensing steam, coupled with the boiling-temperature water it condenses into, will be able to finally break apart the soupbrick and liquefy it. Or at least liquefy much of it, with the rest dissolved into smallish pieces that the pumpjack can handle. Once we pump some of the reconstituted soup out, we can also pump still more steam in to keep the heat up and continue the dissolving process.”

Lemon Hearts gestures over at the small mine model next to her. It was clearly built just for the purpose of demonstrating the new technique and sat upon a sturdy metal cart. The bulk of it resembled a transparent crystal cube with each edge about half a yard long, with five of its six sides solid. The top was removable, and heavy. It resembled a well-crafted crystal plug nearly a third of the height of the cube, with a pair of cylindrical holes drilled down on opposite corners of the plug as tiny boreholes. Lemon Hearts’s horn glowed, and the plug smoothly slid up and out of the cube. Meanwhile, a rectangular lattice block – on closer inspection, made up of miniscule “bars” of dehydrated split pea soupbrick connected together – was levitated into the bottom of the cube. The plug was replaced as Boundary Layer wheeled over a small water-tube boiler, barely the size of a large adult pony. The steam exit tube of the boiler was connected into one of the holes in the plug. Lemon Hearts attached a miniature walking beam pumpjack to the other hole.

The transparency of the cube meant that I could watch the entire process take place on a small scale while eating. Boundary Layer checked to make sure the boiler tank was full of water, then opened up the boiler door and scooped in a load of lump charcoal. Lemon Hearts poured some vegetable oil onto a large piece, lit the chunk with a spark of her horn, and tossed the flaming carbonized wood into the boiler furnace and closed the door. We soon heard the tinkling sound of igniting charcoal as the pile began to burn. Five minutes later, we watched as the first trickle of steam flowed out from the metal pipe and down the plug’s simulated borehole. For the next quarter of an hour, we watched steam flow into the artificial crystal mine, gradually fogging the crystal slightly and sometimes condensing upon the bars of dehydrated soup lattice, then dripping down to collect on the crystal floor. I could imagine the steam slowly seeping into and through the soupbrick, gradually weakening the structure.

There was a sudden small splash within the cube. Lemon Hearts pointed, and I could see that a part of the soupbrick lattice had given way. That small piece began to dissolve in the still-boiling water condensed at the bottom of the cube. Over the next half-hour, the remainder of the lattice fell apart as steam continued to flood into the crystal chamber. Once the lattice had broken apart into pieces, Lemon Hearts turned on the pumpjack and it began to suck hot soup out from the now partially-flooded miniature mine and depositing it into a waiting cup.

At a nod from Boundary Layer, I inspected the contents of the cup. Unevenly mixed, to be sure, but it did resemble split pea soup. I took a sip of the slightly chunky green liquid, and while the underlying taste itself was similar to what I was used to from my home soup faucet, the consistency was lacking and there were a few small chunks of concentrate still floating within. On the whole, it resembled what might come of a foal’s first attempt at adding boiling water to the “instant soup for one” packages of single-serving soupbrick while not following all the instructions. Flawed, yes, but not irredeemably so and putting the mixture in a blender for a bit then reboiling would likely turn out a perfectly acceptable soup.

“Show me more,” I say.

Author's Note

Click here for the notes to the prologue and first two chapters!

Chapter 3: In a Grove

“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!

Chapter 4: Preparing For Fire

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.

Interlude 1: Lunchtime

I turned around in time to see an ice-blue pegasus mare wearing a pair of saddlebags descend below the tree level back around where Tonny and Wood Pusher were splitting logs.

“What’s going on?” I asked Bartlett.

“It’s lunchtime,” Bartlett replied. “Our work patterns change during different times of the year. During the winter months, we’ve got less daylight but by nature of the season the work is often more strenuous, making for shorter but more intense workdays. So rather than going back to the Pav for lunch, we get lunch dropped off on-site. Come on, let’s head back there.”

I noticed that the rhythmic splitting sounds had stopped. By the time Bartlett and I had returned to the splitting team, there were fifteen other creatures there, and one bright green teenaged filly was bringing a very small raincloud down toward us. The saddlebags were sitting on the big stump and Gavin was inspecting the contents. Buckthorn Puller had opened up the shed and was pushing out a cart holding a couple dozen wooden mugs; two other ponies were rolling out firkins marked ‘small beer.’

The tiny raincloud was placed over a metal washtub. A stomp from the filly got a small but steady stream of water going, allowing workers to rinse off any particularly unwelcome detritus off their hooves.

“There’s a dozen in each bag, so counting Spuds, we’ll still have three extra,” announced Gavin. “The ones with cheese are in the red bag, the ones without in the brown one.”

The tom turned to me and said, “You’ll be having a traditional miner’s lunch, Spuds! Doesn’t matter if it’s mining for soup, coal, iron, or gold, we all eat pasties! Do you prefer yours with or without cheese?”

“I don’t mind either way. But what’s a pasty?” I asked.

Gavin pulled out a roughly semicircular baked good, holding it by the pronounced crimp on the outside curve. It somewhat resembled the large calzones sold in the streets and restaurants of Manehattan, though it appeared to have a heavier and denser outside.

As he handed it to me, the griffon proclaimed in his resonant baritone, “A complete meal in a convenient package! Hold it by the crimp; the end with the heavier dough knob on the crimp is the ‘bottom’ of the pasty. That’s there so that even if a miner has dirty claws or hooves or hands, they can hold it by the crimp on the bottom end and just toss the bottom away afterwards! Start eating from the top. It’s a thick and heavy shortcrust pastry around a filling, in this case fried tofu, cheese, potato, and a little onion, bell pepper, and carrot, with a few herbs and spices. That’s most of it. When you get to the bottom, there’s a section filled with a cherry mixture like you’d find in a cherry pie!”

Short Kerf collected his own lunch, saying “The pasty is arguably the griffons’ biggest contribution to mining life. Carry it in a small saddlebag, and it’s a nutritious high-energy meal that will stay warm for hours while also helping keep the miner warm! It’s too bad we’ll never know who was the tom or hen who first came up with it, because they should get a statue from at least five centuries’ worth of miners and lumberjacks. But it was a donkey who, in my opinion, put the perfecting touches on it about three hundred years ago by realizing that they could put an additional crust piece inside to allow for separation into a lunch part and a dessert part. About that time, pasties spread to also become a staple food of lumberjacks and pegasus long-distance couriers.”

“Griffon long-distance couriers too,” said Gavin. “In fact, it’s a point of pride for a courier – whether pegasus or griffon – to be able to ‘do the fives’, meaning that they can deliver a five-pound packet of messages – or as in the initial journey, medicine vials – across five hundred miles of wasteland and make the return trip within twenty-five hours, carrying their own supplies of five quart-sized waterskins and five pasties. It requires a combination of speed, physical and mental stamina, load-bearing ability, and the feel for air currents to get the best flight efficiency.”

I asked, “Twenty-five hours? Why not twenty-four?”

Gavin smirked. “Five squared.”

Short Kerf continued as he got himself a mug of small beer, “You’ll sometimes hear this two-part kind of pasty called a ‘clanger’. One of our cooks, Apple Clanger, is actually named for it. She’s the daughter of a soup miner and a coal miner, and you won’t find anyone who makes a better pasty than Clangy.

“The usual lunch drink in the field is small beer. Due to the nature of brewing, it’s a safe drink when local water sources are potentially dirty or diseased. Water here at Pea Ridge is fine, but we still go with it because it provides a few more calories. No chance of inebriation though! The alcohol content of small beer is about a tenth of normal beer, so it’s literally impossible for a healthy adult to fit enough small beer into their belly fast enough to even feel a buzz!”

As the lumberjacks broke up into small groups and I sat down with Bartlett, Short Kerf, Gavin, and Tonny, I noticed that instead of the one pasty that everyone else had, Tonny was holding four. With a practiced eye, he carefully broke them apart, removing the dessert sections with the crust divider intact and then tossing those pieces over to a group of three of the younger workers.

“Not a fan of dessert?” I asked as the bull took a large bite from the remaining savory section of his first pasty.

“Oh, I like dessert,” Tonny chuckled quietly. “I like it a little too much, really. But you know how it goes, Mr. Spuds. A bull – or a stallion – gets on the wrong side of thirty, they need to start watching their diet a little more if they want to keep their body in first-class condition. So a couple years ago, I made the decision to skip high-sugar foods at breakfast and lunch most days. Give it to the apprentices whose metabolisms can still do double desserts every meal without the slightest ill effects. Tartarus chain it, some of these apprentices and younger jacks are still at the stage where they can eat an entire pie and it comes out as muscle instead of fat!”

“Aren’t you all lumberjacks?” I asked. I took another bite of my pasty. The tofu, cheese, potato, and hints of other vegetables and herbs blended perfectly with the crust. I was going to have to see if any local places made them when I went home.

“Yes and no,” said Bartlett, “Tonny is referring to ‘jack’ in this sense as a rank. In this type of profession, the starting rank is apprentice, followed by ‘jack’ as in soupjack or lumberjack. A forestry apprentice graduates from apprentice when they’ve demonstrated competency in one forestry task like limbing or felling, developing skills in a couple other forestry tasks, and meet certain other basic requirements. That usually takes between a year and a half and four years, though most have the forestry skills down within two and it depends on those other factors.

“A good worker interested in advancement can make journeymare – the term is used whether mare or stallion – after about three to six years of being a jack. A journeymare is either an expert at one task or quite good at two or three, competent at several others, and generally means they can just walk into any soup mining or forestry team and be able to contribute from day one.

“Not everyone reaches the rank of master, and many who have or could develop that level of skill don’t go after the title because most masters have the responsibility of leading a team. It usually takes at least six years and more often a decade to go from journeymare to master; the fastest I’ve known is our lead charcoal burner Mazz who was an apprentice at fifteen, jack at seventeen, journeymare at nineteen, and got his mastery at twenty-three! Mazzy was a prodigy; he’s now what we unofficially call a senior master, one of the best in the nation at what they do and someone who’s actively pushing their field forward.”

I finished the savory portion of my pasty as Short Kerf added “Occasionally, someone gets promoted to master without demonstrating great expertise in any particular subfield.” He waved his half-finished pasty at Gavin. “We’ve nominated Gavvy here even though he doesn’t have master-level skill at any one thing. The trick about Gavvy is that he’s rated a journeymare in a boatload of different things! What is it now, lumberjacking, timber-frame building, pipe fitting, and drill-and-pump operation? And I know Cookie Clicker thinks you’re pretty comparable to someone with bachelor’s degrees in soup prospecting and accounting.”

The griffon nodded. “Yup. I’ve almost got everything I need.”

“That’s pretty impressive!” I said. “Why do you need such a wide variety of skills?”

Between bites of the cherry end of his pasty, Gavin said, “The Griffish Kingdoms are sort of a craphole. You know this, I know this, everyone knows this even if few griffons want to admit it. We lag behind other countries and city-states in all sorts of things, from agriculture to engineering to our literacy rate. But there’s a few of us who want to do something about it.

“The plan I had nearly two decades ago was to come to Equestria and learn the soup mining business, all parts of it. And then I’d recruit a team to go back to the Kingdoms and start up soup mining there. Soup mining is almost nonexistent and they’re still gathering soup via naturally-occurring springs back home. We get proof of concept, start training a few teams over half a decade and expand the industry, and we’ll be feeding tens of thousands of griffs a decade after that.

“I’m about three years away from heading back with a team. Bounder’s all in favor of this; there’s already a half-dozen ponies here ready to come along with me. But to do so, I’ve got to be at least familiar with all of the relevant jobs – though things will be much easier with Bucky heading up the forestry team.”

Bartlett told me “Buckthorn Puller just achieved his mastery six months ago. Starting this spring, he’ll begin recruiting his own work crew, most likely younger jacks and journeymares who will want the adventure of heading to the Kingdoms to pioneer soup mining there. In fact, it’s likely that a few of our current apprentices will join him once they– ”

We were interrupted by the bright green filly’s shout of “OH YEAH? BET!” from the direction of the three apprentices who Tonny had tossed his dessert portions to. Three of the pieces had been eaten and the fourth piece sat between the teenagers. As we watched, one of the two colts took the remaining cherry end and knob and stuffed the entire thing into his mouth at once. Clearly, this method of consumption was the condition for getting the extra dessert.

As we watched the colt try unsuccessfully to chew the pasty, Bartlett facehooved, Gavin exasperatedly muttered “teenagers!” and Tonny winced slightly before deliberately assuming a studiously neutral expression.

Impressively, the bull managed to maintain his expression even after the colt snorted several fragments of cherry pasty out his nostrils, as Gavin kept muttering, “well, at least I won’t need to use the Haymlich maneuver on him again.”

Short Kerf turned to me and said, “About those ‘other requirements’ besides forestry or mining skill that gets somecreature promoted from apprentice to jack? Chief among those is the ability to consistently avoid being a moron. I think someone or someones just had their promotion clock moved back a few months.”

Author's Note

Click here for the notes to Interlude #1!

Other story notes: We'll be switching between Chapters, which will usually involve the actual work, and Interludes, which will cover downtime. Though this whole story is worldbuilding to a large degree, it is being written so the Interludes are more like character studies.

Chapter 5: The Charcoal Burners

After lunch, Bartlett and I followed the stone-boat procession for half a furlong to another clearing with two long rows of brick hemispheres ahead of us, each a little over twenty feet wide and about ten feet high with maybe a three feet long and six feet tall entryway with double iron doors. A quick count showed eighteen in each row, some with thin streamers of white or bluish smoke coming from a small opening in their roof.

As we approached the nearest of the hemispheres, a tall black unicorn stallion with a seemingly perpetual frown walked over. Bartlett said, “Spuds, this is Mazz. Well, he’s really Mazzini, but everyone calls him Mazz or Mazzy. He’s the head of our charcoal production team and one of the most innovative burners around. I’ll leave you with him until dinnertime.” Bartlett trotted back in the direction of the forestry teams.

Mazz nodded curtly at me and we bumped hooves. He said in a rumbling bass voice, “Bounder said you might be talking to us charcoal burners. What do you already know about charcoal burning?”

“Very little,” I said. “Just that ponies use kilns or woodpiles to heat wood for days, and somehow it turns into charcoal.”

Mazz snorted. “Well, it really is that simple, if you had to give a ten-second explanation. For the one-minute explanation, heating wood without oxygen results in a process called pyrolysis, not the combustive burning you see in a fireplace. Pyrolysis of wood gets rid of some volatile stuff like water, wood alcohol, wood acid, and wood tars. That leaves charred carbon pieces that burn hotter and cleaner than dry wood while being much less dense. Those burning properties make it essential for forging and smithing tasks, as well as being a useful component in steelmaking. So the trick is, we need a way to heat dry wood without exposing it to enough oxygen to cause combustion instead of pyrolysis.”

He gestured at the rows of brick hemispheres. “These are charcoal batteries. A battery is a series of kilns for burning wood into charcoal, usually at least a dozen of them because of burning and cooling times. A team of four ponies should be able to handle a single battery of fourteen to eighteen kilns; we prefer to set up three batteries in one location and assign a dozen or so ponies – creatures,” he corrected himself, “to work it. One master, with two to four journeymares to help supervise another seven to ten general forestry jacks and maybe a couple of apprentices. We’ve already got two batteries set up here; we’ll be building a third once the next shipment of materials arrives by train.”

“Let me walk you through the process for a single battery. We’ll need to start in the middle of it, literally, because of where we are in the cycle. Let’s head over here, where they’re most of the way through with loading. We fit about thirty tons of dry wood in there, and that obviously takes some time to get inside.” Mazz led me over to the sixth kiln, which was being loaded with logs from a pair of stone-boats.

Three ponies were carrying logs in through the kiln’s short arched doorway tunnel, with a pair of outward-swinging metal doors wide open. I could hear two more ponies working inside, and spotted the glow of a unicorn’s field through the doorway. As one of the stone-boats was emptied, another heavily loaded one arrived behind a pair of muscular Earth pony mares. The mares unclipped themselves from the harness of their stone-boat, proceeded to the empty one to clip themselves in, and began dragging it back to the wood-drying sheds that I had seen not long ago.

“We use some long, smaller sticks to form a base – usually some of the branches that we get from the arborist teams – then fill the kiln up almost all the way with logs,” said Mazz. “That way, the logs don’t directly touch the ground. We just leave a single empty column in the middle, right below the ‘eye’ – the hole in the top of the kiln. That column’s about a foot and a quarter wide, same width as the eye, with a few vertical wooden poles to provide some structure.

“Immediately around that empty column, leaning against the poles, go a couple layers of bucked pieces of firewood. Starting maybe two feet out from the center, just outside the firewood against the poles, go big, wide logs, fat trunks that were unsplit. The hottest temperatures in the kiln are near the center. If we put the big trunks on the outer part near the kiln wall, they won’t get hot enough to pyrolize all the way through. By the time we get five feet from the center, we’ve got to use small trunks and split logs. Seven feet out, it’s all split logs.

I remarked, “I wouldn’t have expected there to be so much thought going into how to lay out wood inside the kiln! It’s impressive how much detail you put into this!”

Mazz wryly rumbled, “All it takes is one creature getting a good idea every decade and having it spread, and you’re going to make quite a few advancements over the centuries. Another advancement is, there’s ten small holes, each about hoof-sized, spaced around the bottom of the kiln with little shallow trenches leading to the empty column. Those provide a small amount of air intake, while the eye is for exiting smoke. It’s an easy, durable design. Mostly, it’s just bricks with a mud mortar, and those two steel doors. We don’t even need to use steel doors; old-time ponies could mud-brick up the entrance and crack it open each use if they didn’t have sufficient metal.

“Looks like they’re maybe five minutes from finishing loading. After that, we’ll close the doors, pour a pint of cooking oil onto each of a dozen fascines, then have a pegasus drop the fascines in through the eye, stacking them atop each other with maybe a foot of clearance to the eye. Once that’s done, we get a different pegasus to go up there with a lit stick and toss it into the eye, igniting the fascines.

“Charcoal burning was invented by earth ponies. Back when teams were entirely earth ponies, they’d just have to toss a lit stick into the eye, then wait. It’d be too dangerous to try to climb up onto the kiln while it’s firing. But with pegasi, they can fly twenty, thirty feet above the kiln and look down into the eye to see how the fascines are burning. If the burning column looks like it’s running low, they can just toss two or three more fascines in through the eye.

“Thing is, we want pyrolysis, not combustion. So we want to heat things up, but have as few of the logs combust as possible since we want to turn those into giant lumps of charcoal. Sure, we know that some logs will be set alight by the fascines, and some of that has to happen for sufficient heating. That’s what the bucked firewood just around the center is for. But by tossing in those extra fascines every so often, we’re burning fewer logs by keeping that central column literally burning hot with sticks, and making sure that the large trunk pieces get turned into charcoal.

“Once the fire in the central column’s been going a few hours and some of the other firewood around it has begun to combust, there’s been enough heat given out that the kiln walls really start warming. It takes some time for that double layer of bricks to heat up, but once it does, it’ll stay hot for a damn long time untouched.

“We’ve even been experimenting with using slightly different wood arrangements inside the kiln, see if we can find a better way to get that initial heating up going,” Mazz concluded.

I watched as the loaders finished stacking wood inside the kiln, then doing a final inspection. “What do you mean by a different wood arrangement?”

Mazz gestured at one of the small holes at the base of the kiln. “Well, we want to get the whole pile of wood up to temp as fast as we can, with as little combustion as possible. So I decided to see what happens if we didn’t just burn from the central column outward.

“Most ponies are happy to just keep doing what works. Pah! Once they’re journeymares or close to it, I don’t want anyone on my crew to mindlessly follow a procedure just because! I want them to improve the process, not just use the process! Keeping that central column fueled with fascines is something that we started trying once I got my first pegasus worker, and it’s meant that we can use a thinner layer of firewood around the column and put more big trunks in to pyrolize.

“My team leaders and I talked it over with Lemmy – that is, Lemon Hearts – a couple years ago, and decided to see what happens if we intentionally set some fascines near the air holes so they could combust, and more rapidly heat up part of the kiln from the base. Get it so we can load more big wood pieces and require less bucking and sawing.”

The loaders finished their inspection and trotted out as I asked, “Any results so far? Two years seems like quite a bit of time.”

“It’s definitely longer than what most people might expect! But we need to carry out, at minimum, a hundred firings to get sufficient data. It’s too easy for a single firing, or even a few firings, to be affected by something else, especially as we’ve worked in three different places the past couple years. We’ve got the batteries here testing our last set of configurations at this location, and we’re finally about to resolve this. The frontrunner so far is to have a half-dozen fascines each at four of the ten air holes; and it’s given a shade over three and a half percent more charcoal yield than only having an initial burn in the central column.”

As a pegasus apprentice colt began carrying up and dropping fascines into the kiln’s eye, Mazz grumbled, “And don’t think three and a half is piddling! Thirty tons of wood go in, standard yield was a bit under nine tons of lump charcoal and now we’ll get about nine-and-a-quarter. Profit margins can be thin in this business, so averaging an extra ten or eleven sacks of lump charcoal with each burn helps give us a safety net.”

We watched as the colt moved away and a pegasus filly flew over to drop a torch into the kiln’s eye. As she backed off, we could see an occasional lick of flame come up out of the eye. Within a minute, I could hear the crackle of igniting wood. Within a few more, I saw a thin stream of white smoke flow up from the eye.

“Just a little white smoke so far,” said Mazz. “If you kept watching, you’d see that smoke stream get both wider and denser. By denser, I mean you’d barely be able to see through it to the other side. White smoke means that we’re getting combustion, and the temperature in the kiln’s slowly going up. It gets hot enough, any remaining moisture from the dried logs gets steamed away. Some other components of the wood, like the wood acids and vinegars and alcohols, also end up getting vaporized. Ideally, the wood alcohol and vinegars also ignite to raise the temperature even more, rather than going up with the smoke.

“Let’s move a couple kilns further up. Now, this one here’s got some changing color in the smoke. Look how it’s not all white anymore, it’s like a blue and white swirl. And we go one more up and it’s all blue smoke. Blue smoke is great! It means we’re getting pyrolysis with very little combustion and the wood is turning into charcoal.”

Mazz led me up to the final kiln in the battery. “Once the blue smoke stops, pyrolysis is finished and the wood inside has reached maximum carbonization. This one’s been burning for six days and the smoke just stopped an hour ago. Now we’ve got to wait for the kiln and its contents to cool down enough for us to safely remove the charcoal. During the early days of Earth pony operated kilns, they had to wait days and days. Now though...” he gestured at two pegasi approaching with small rainclouds.

“Rain cooling?” I asked.

“A very light rain, to start. We first close up the kiln’s eye and all other airholes, and then we have the clouds produce barely a misty drizzle. We want a slow and steady lowering of the temperature, not just dumping a flood onto the kiln and damaging bricks via thermal shock. We’re going to walk back down to the fourth kiln – the one right before the one you saw loaded and fired – next. You’ll notice larger, steadier rains coming down on the first three kilns as we cool them off.”

As we walked back down the battery, I did in fact notice the increased amounts of rain over the first three kilns. The third in particular was a steady, ongoing shower, and as I watched, a pegasus came over with more raincloud material to emplace. But the fourth was dry, and some of the crew of ponies I had seen loading logs into the sixth kiln were now wearing masks over their muzzles and loading filled burlap bags onto stone-boats. Mazz went over to a small supply shed and came out with a mask for me.

“Put this over your muzzle. We’re going to take a look at what they’re doing inside the kiln.”

“I’ve got a question. If you’re using rain cooling, the outside of the kiln is going to be damp with water. Won’t it take some of the heat to steam that off and get the bricks to temperature?” I asked.

“You’re a sharp one!” Mazz barked. “It does indeed! But that’s another experiment that was done a long time ago, nearly a century even. And repeated every so often in different climes. The general result is that when we’re in a timber-rich area, the extra loads we can get after saving time in rain cooling easily outweigh the extra energy and time to redry the kiln, especially with pegasi-set breezes to help the drying.”

As we went in, I noticed that the air inside the kiln was still noticeably warmer than the chill outside. Two earth ponies with snow shovels attached to their fetlock tool-bands were scooping up charcoal and tossing it onto a diagonally-mounted mesh frame, where the large pieces would slide down into a sack held up by the telekinetic field of a unicorn. When the sack was full, the unicorn placed it aside for others to carry it out to the waiting stone-boats.

As the charcoal burners continued to empty the fourth kiln of the split logs turned lump charcoal, I noticed that a small amount of black detritus remained on the ground or fell through the mesh. Still more of it shook off the large pieces of lump charcoal when the sacks were placed onto the ground. I expected that a similar process would occur when they loaded the sacks onto the stone-boats or unloaded the charcoal at the storage sheds near the steam injectors.

“What do you do with those little charcoal pieces that fall or crumble off when you’re moving the big lumps?” I asked Mazz.

“The charcoal fragments? We call those fines, and usually about ten percent of the charcoal produced in the brick kilns is fines. Say nine-tenths of a ton, each burn. Maybe another five percent become fines in the process of transport. And nearly everything from the metal retorts – we’ll look at those later – comes out as fines, because we use those to process bark and twigs. So call it a bit over twenty percent inefficiency of what we get from burning,” Mazz groused.

“Charcoal fines are the annoyance of everypony who works producing or transporting charcoal, and have been for hundreds of years. Twenty percent lost is a big hit to the profit margins! Since fines range in size anywhere from a shooter marble down to tiny pieces that are just about dust, they’re too small to burn in any conventional fashion. Try to light a pile of fines and you’ll just end up with heated air currents sending charcoal and carbon dust into the air and all over everything. Few ponies are willing to buy fines! We do manage to get use out of them with a little more work, even if it’s in a less efficient and versatile manner.

“The first part of the job is unicorn work, usually. The fines sweeper doesn’t need to have good or even average field strength, but their field dexterity will need to be decent. Once the lump charcoal is cleared out of a kiln or drying shed, the sweeper goes in and telekinetically sweeps up all the fines and puts them into barrels. The goal is to recover about 80% of the fines in the kiln. They’ll do the same with the fines that accumulate on the bottom of a wagon or cart. A unicorn using their field is a lot faster than an earth pony or pegasus using a broom and dustpan, and we learned the hard way not to let pegasi try to use wind to funnel it all up!

“As for what we do with fines? Follow me,” Mazz said as he led us out of the kiln.

Author's Note

Click here for the notes to Chapter 5.

Chapter 6: The Princess of Manehattan

Mazz led me about a hundred yards away from the kiln batteries, over to where a curious metal machine was set up next to an array of barrels, a small cabinet on wheels, and a washtub. At one end of the machine was an open-top feed tank that looked to hold about twenty gallons, connected to a large funnel beneath it. That funnel led into a metal contraption built around a cylinder twice the length of a pony and approximately the width of a pony’s barrel. Mounted just off the side of the machine was a treadmill, with sturdy belts attached to drive whatever mechanical parts were inside the machine.

He flipped open a hatch on the top of the cylinder. “This is a briquette extruder. See, inside here’s a screw press that can compact whatever loose material we feed in. The treadmill drives this rotating screw that compacts the feed, squeezes out the water, and really packs the mix together before extruding it. Lastly, it cuts off the extruded piece at a certain length. These two drive belts work together to provide the mechanical advantage and can be adjusted to apply far more force than a pony can by hoof.

“It’s like when you use a jack to lift up your cart to fix a wheel. You turn the crank a dozen times, moving the handle several feet in rotation for the jack to boost your cart an inch. The mechanical work done’s the same, and in exchange for the force multiplier, you need to move the crank a much greater distance. Ahh, here come Pearly and Daley now. I’ll leave you to these experts while I go talk to Bartlett about the other charcoal burner teams and our overall progress so far this week.” Mazz waved to the approaching mares, then walked off.

“Pearly Waltz?!” I exclaimed in surprise. “What are you doing here?!” The slim beige mare and her bouncing honey-nut tail was well-known to sports fans and Manehattanites. Having won four of the past five Manehattan Marathons, she’d earned the nickname the “Princess of Manehattan” after her third straight win.

Her results at the two other “marathon major” races included two wins at Fillydelphia and three victories at Trottingham. Nine majors in the past five years – when her closest rival only had three, and nopony else more than one – was two more than anyone else had managed in any five-year stretch in the three-century-long history of organized distance racing. When added to her Equestrian Games gold medal in marathon and two wins in the Summer Sunup-to-Sundown Distance Challenge, she was considered by most fans to be not only the best long-distance runner alive, but probably the best of all time. Only the greater totals of Quick Stepper’s fourteen majors and three golds, and Flying Fin’s four Summers, over far longer careers, left any doubt. Pearly could expect having another seven to ten years in or near her prime to chase them down, and I expected her to succeed.

I’d first interviewed her a little over five years ago, when she was virtually unknown outside her home village of Owl’s Hollow. At the time, it was a pony-interest story about a small-town elementary school teacher running the Manehattan Marathon for the first time. The week after my profile of her was printed, she won in record-setting time. I interviewed Pearly after her first three victories and her lone Manehattan defeat, but I was hospitalized during last year’s race and hadn’t seen her in twenty moons.

Pearly and a tall gray pegasus mare approached me, the gray mare carrying a half-dozen metal canteens slung over her back. “Hi Spuds! Nice to see you again! I’ve been making briquettes for about a year and a half now with Rose Dale. Daley’s the mixer who’s really the skill behind this machine. I have the easy job. All I do is trot and canter and sometimes gallop.”

Rose Dale laughed. “I have the easy job. All I do is make sure things get mixed in the right proportion and stir a bit, and Pearly does all the running that makes the screw press go.”

I laughed too. “Well, if you both think you have the easy job, that’s perfect! What are you mixing?”

“Come over to the barrels and see. But first, do you want a cup of coffee? Or maybe water?” The mare unslung the canteens, and I noticed that five were striped with blue and one with brown.

“No thanks,” I replied.

“It’s here if you change your mind,” she said as she opened the wheeled cabinet. Inside was a small tool set, a shelf of clean coffee mugs, and three boxes of sugar cubes.

Pouring herself a cup and adding eight(!) sugar cubes, Rose Dale led me over to the barrel arrangement, laid out atop the grass in five rows. As she removed the head from each barrel at the front of a row, she said, “This first one is bigger charcoal fines. All the fines that are bigger than a pea. This second one is the finer charcoal fines. Fine finey fines. Careful you don’t get your muzzle too close and accidentally inhale a bit of charcoal dust! Third one’s sawdust and wood shavings. Fourth is wet-pulped newsprint, and the last is water.”

She took a sip of coffee and waved the mug at the barrels. “You’ll notice there are way more barrels of fines, especially the fine fines...“ she giggled “...than there are of sawdust, pulp, or water. That’s because the fines are really what we’re trying to make product out of, and the sawdust and wet paper pulp are mostly just there as binding materials.”

Both Pearly and Rose put on muzzle masks, so I did the same. Rose’s resembled what the kiln unloaders and I were wearing, a feed-bag that covered her nostrils and mouth, but Pearly’s looked like a full-on plague doctor’s helmet-mask and beak. At my raised eyebrow, Pearly said “Neither of us want to inhale any charcoal dust, but I’m much pickier about it than Daley is. I’ve even gotten a unicorn to cast a dust-blocking spell on all my masks. On Daley’s too.”

“Ahhh, you can tell the difference, I can’t,” chuckled Rose. “Besides, mine is easy on and easy off. If I wear one of yours, it’d take me half a minute if I wanted a sip of coffee. Spuds, stay clear of the tub and the intake and you’ll be okay.”

The tall pegasus picked up a bucket, perhaps two gallons in size, and hovered over the barrel with the larger fines. She scooped the bucket into the barrel of large fines twice, dumping the contents out into the big washtub. Next went a bucket of sawdust and wood shavings, sprinkled atop the pebbly charcoal. She used a chipped half-gallon mug – a super-sized coffee cup being repurposed, I realized – to pull two scoops of wet gray goop from the paper pulp barrel, splattering the oatmeal-like substance into the tub. Next went a mug of water. Finally, she put three more bucketfuls of small, dusty fines into the tub before leaving the bucket atop the barrel. Stirring the mixture with a wooden paddle, the tub’s contents reached a chunky consistency within a minute.

Going back to the barrels, Rose twice repeated the entire process of adding their contents to the tub and stirring. After the third batch had been stirred, she muttered, “Colder today. Dryer, too,” before adding another mug of pulp and two mugs from the water barrel. A couple more minutes of stirring later, and she took the paddle out, went to fill another pair of half-gallon mugs with smaller fines and water, and placed them on a ledge next to the extruder’s feed tank.

Meanwhile, Pearly had been stretching and limbering up. Noticing Rose putting the mugs next to the feeder, Pearly turned to me and said, “Those mugs are for last-minute adjustments. Feel free to ask me questions at any time.” As Rose filled a different bucket with the tub mixture and flew up to dump it into the feeder tank, Pearly got onto the treadmill and began to walk. After Rose made three more trips, the sound coming from the extruder changed and the treadmill suddenly seemed to lightly resist moving.

Pearly picked up her pace to a steady trot, clearly having to put in a little more effort than if she were trotting on the ground. Rose put a final three buckets of the mix into the feeder, then headed back to the barrel of large fines to begin adding more material to the half-full tub.

As Pearly continued to trot, I could see a few drops of dirty water begin to drip out from a hole in the bottom of the screw press. A little later, a small black cylinder began emerging from the extruder. Perhaps an inch and a half wide, about three inches of length came out before a rotating blade inside the extruder cut the briquette off. Once it did so, a new briquette began to exit the extruder. I picked up the briquette and gave it a close look. While slightly damp, it was clearly in one piece and showed no signs of breaking apart with casual handling. A few light taps with my hoof didn’t break it either.

“It takes some effort to snap it,” called Rose Dale as she took up the wooden paddle to start stirring again. “That press packs tight. It’ll be even tougher after a couple days of air-drying to get rid of most of the moisture. We only need wet pulp in order to get the initial mixing and binding going. After the starch in the pulp fully sets with the sawdust and fines, it doesn’t need the moisture anymore.”

Pearly added, “Besides, a lot of residual moisture means that more of the burning briquette’s heat will go into evaporating moisture rather than heating whatever it is we want to heat. Everything here’s going to go into producing steam. But if we end up with excess, Bounder and Bartlett will probably sell some briquettes to Equestrian Railways and use all the lump charcoal here. Lump burns hotter than briquettes or wood and is more energy-dense by weight if not necessarily by volume.”

“What do you mean by energy dense?” I asked.

Rose Dale was bringing another bucket up to pour into the feeder. “Some things provide more heat per pound when burned. One of the reasons why locomotives often use coal, and charcoal briquettes, is because both of those give out more heat than an equivalent weight of wood while also taking up less space – lump charcoal takes up more space per pound. Charcoal burns faster than wood too. Wood’s cheaper, but since a locomotive only has so much storage room or weight capacity in its tender, the engineers will want to keep some charcoal briquettes or coal around just in case. So when a train really needs that extra oomph fast, it’s going to be a few firkins of the black stuff going into the engine’s firebox.”

Pearly picked up the explanation. “It takes about four pounds of lump to equal five pounds of briquettes or eight pounds of dry wood for heat. Lump’s the pure stuff. You saw Daley dumping in sawdust and shavings for structure and paper pulp for binder. Those ingredients don’t give off near the energy that charcoal does. But since all those charcoal fines and a lot of the sawdust would mostly go to waste otherwise, it’s almost like getting something from nothing.”

“You’re becoming an expert on more than running,” I chuckled.

Her voice came out evenly, as if she were sitting instead of moving at a brisk trot on the treadmill. “Feh, can’t help but pick up on stuff, what with the brains behind this operation talking shop all the time! Good thing I met Daley a couple years ago at the Equestrian Games, because now I’ve got a job that’s basically paying me to train rather than having to fit in workouts around job hours! Pays nearly twice the weekly wage that teaching elementary school did, with most expenses provided for! You know as well as I do that outside the Wonderbolts, hoofball, and buckball, even successful athletes need ‘real’ jobs. The year I won all three majors, the total prize money barely equaled what I made that year teaching.

“And powering this treadmill takes more effort than moving on dirt or on hard roads. So it’s a sort of resistance training. Every couple of weeks I’ll even use fetlock weights too. Running on any natural surface seems so much easier after this! Compared with two years ago, my trotting pace is about four seconds a mile faster, I can keep up a canter for an extra three minutes, and I can gallop for an extra fifteen or twenty seconds!

“Some ponies were saying I only won last spring because Cat’s Eye pulled out a few days before due to a bad cold. It’s true that none of the other runners were as fast as Cat plus I was having a very good day; I was five minutes clear of the field by the time I got to Central Park rather than running neck-and-neck. Didn’t even need to start my last canter before the Duck Pond; ended up not needing to gallop at all and still won by a minute and a half! But they’ll see, this time I’ll be able to start my final canter before we even get out of the Bridleway district. Making that very early attack a mile before the Bridleway-Central Park border will push Cat out of her comfort zone and leave her softened up for those final three miles winding through the park, and then I’m going to gallop the last seven furlongs instead of the last six to finish her off.

“That’s the plan, at least. I’m sure Cat will have something to say about it,” Pearly concluded.

As we talked, the wire basket that the extruded briquettes had been falling into had been filling up. Rose Dale trotted over to move it onto an empty stone-boat and emplace a new basket. As she did so, she said “I think you’ve seen just about a full production cycle, Spuds. It’s just rinse and repeat, with some water or coffee breaks.”

“How much do you two produce in a day of briquetting?” I asked.

“Depends on the day,” Pearly said. “Some days I train more for pure endurance, some days for trotting speed, some days for canters and gallops, and some for terrain. But it’s pretty normal for me to go 20 to 40 miles on this treadmill, which comes to between one-and-a-half to three tons of briquettes. I’ll use the treadmill five days most weeks, and most weeks I’ll run some hills on one other day. The last...“

She was interrupted by Rose Dale yelling, “Gallop thirty!” and immediately accelerated, as Rose kept yelling “Counting off! One Celestia! Two Celestia! Three Celestia...”

While galloping at close to full speed, Pearly wasn’t doing anything else but concentrating on her pace and her breathing. When Rose finished with “Thirty Celestia!” Pearly immediately dropped back to a canter for about twenty seconds, then back to her brisk trot. She was still breathing deep and hard, but the frequency of breaths dropped steadily.

Pearly finished, “The last day of the week is a rest day. Even earth ponies need to avoid overtraining. And in the two weeks leading up to a race, I’ll taper my training down so I’m at 100% energy that day.”

I noted that her trot was definitely taking more effort than it did before her gallop, and while her breathing had fallen back to her usual frequency, Pearly was clearly making an effort to take in more oxygen. “What was that ‘gallop thirty’ about?”

“This is one of the ways I’ve been switching things up. Daley thought that the reason why Cat beat me two years ago in Manehattan, and last year in Trottingham, might be because I wasn’t able to respond to changing race conditions. So by having these forced gallops partway through my workout, I get used to trotting under adverse conditions and I don’t need to just depend on keeping my trot steady almost the whole way.

“Daley will toss in anywhere from one to three other gallops today, and she can put in up to two extended canters. But we do set a maximum. That overtraining thing again. I completely expect her to give me the full treatment today, since it’s still a bit over two months before Manehattan kicks off the running season and the goal until a month before Manehattan is pure endurance work. And because I’ve got a massage booked with Lavender Hooves tonight.”

Rose Dale laughed and said “Yup, we’ve got a masseuse on staff. Two of them, really. Lavvy doubles as the aide for our medic-on-call, but she’s mainly around to give massages. A lot of mining and forestry work will really tire out a body, even an earth pony. When Bounder was putting together his first soup mining team, Auger talked him into hiring on a masseuse because – “ and here she briefly dropped her tone of voice in an imitation of a gruff old stallion, “Lad, getting a weekly massage makes me feel a decade younger! Bet a lot of your crew will like feeling younger too!

“Turns out that regular massages reduce soreness, soft tissue injury, and all the little niggles that anycreature over the age of twenty gets after a day or five of physical work. Cookie can probably tell you about injury rates and work-days saved and all that.”

By now, the stone-boat held four wire baskets of briquettes and Rose Dale was moving a fifth onto it. “Once this thing gets close to full, somepony will be by to haul it back over to the drying sheds, while dropping off an empty one here. We’ve got stone-boats everywhere!”

“The sheds are what, about a furlong away?” I asked.

“About that, yes. Figuring out where to put a battery of charcoal kilns is a surprisingly involved task. You’ve got to take into account where the wood’s coming from, where the pumpjacks or the shipping stations are, and where you can get good airflow to prevent the burny smell from polluting any nearby village or other housing. Not even Mazz likes sleeping with his nostrils full of smoke! Anyway, drink break!” As Rose Dale finished moving the basket, she went back to where she kept the canteens. She poured out two full and one half-full mug of water.

Pearly hopped off the treadmill and came over to grab a full mug. She sipped from it steadily as Rose Dale poured another half-mug of coffee, again adding an absurd amount of sugar. By the time Rose Dale had finished stirring and took her first sip of coffee, Pearly had finished both full mugs and was back on the treadmill.

“Not sure if you’ve kept up with the rule changes, but Manehattan, and just about every other marathon, now has mandated 45-second water breaks somewhere between miles 6 and 8 and miles 13 and 14, and a 30-second water break between miles 19 and 20,” explained Pearly. “This is mostly to formalize what good runners have been doing all along.

“The reason why it’s now formalized is that last year at the Trottingham Marathon, one stupid colt decided that he could shave some time by not taking any water breaks at all! It netted him maybe eighty or ninety seconds, sure, so he had caught up to those of us in the lead pack as we finished our final water break at mile 21 in front of the Princesses’ Medical Center of Trottingham University. It’s a good thing the next two miles wound around and through the TU campus, because he was looking unsteady before we had gone another mile and by the time we reached the turnoff from campus toward the Hockley Markets, he was swerving all over the road! Race officials had already taken note and were probably getting ready to step in!”

As she finished her coffee mug and started in on her water mug, Rose Dale picked up with “Lavvy and I were there as they passed by. It’s a good section to cheer on the leaders because they usually pick up to a canter as they exit the University Gate. Because the race route goes through Hockley Markets before winding back to the finish at Old Town Square, we could trot just a half-mile shortcut and reach a spot a furlong from the finish line, so we’d be able to wave Pearly on both places. But once Pearly and company broke into a canter, this poor dumb colt just passed out cold!

“Sure enough, race officials and EMTs swooped right in and got an IV going within a minute. And the TU hospital was right there. Turns out he’d be fine with a few days of rest and plenty of fluids, but it did sort of put a damper on the rest of the race,” Rose Dale snickered. “Especially because Cat’s Eye outsprinted Pearly to win by two seconds.”

Pearly laughed. “Ahhh, I’ll get her this year. You going to be covering Manehattan again, Spuds?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I sincerely replied. “Not unless I accidentally eat some baked bads again!”

As the mares continued to work, I excused myself to go sit on a stump maybe twenty yards away from them and pulled out my notebook to try to organize the notes that I had taken this morning and afternoon. And to organize my thoughts as well. There was a lot I had seen today, and it would take a while for me to digest it all.

Author's Note

Click here for the notes to Chapter 6! This chapter is the last "work" profile that Spuds has today. There will be a few interlude sections coming up before the next workday's chapters, where we get a better look at characters and what they do in their off hours.