The large boat gently rocked over the waters of the lake as it sailed to its destination with Rainbow Dash onboard. She was like a speck on it, the railings on the side more than double her height while the gaps between the bars were wide enough for her to walk through if she wanted to. When she had first flown aboard it and waited for Captain Gollak and the others to load up she had checked things out like the steering wheel, rudder, chains and ropes that went over the sides but were currently rolled up on deck, cabins, anchor, the grated cargo hatch in the center of the top deck, and of course the huge masts and sails. Now she stood at the bow of the boat with Gollak and the two of them watched the waters part in front of them while the Mammoth of the Blue made its short journey.
“So what do you think of our ship now that you’ve gotten a closer look?” Gollak asked her.
Rainbow Dash blinked, the edge of the bow wide enough for her to sit on with no problem. “Hmm… I don’t really know a whole lot about boats and stuff so I can’t really say. I’m more familiar with airships than ship ships.”
“Airships?”
“Uh, yeah. Like normal boats, except they fly,” Rainbow told him to the absolute best of her ability. “And not as big.”
“Fly, huh?” Gollak said as he looked up at the sky. “As you can probably tell we mammoths are not exactly masters of the air. It must feel amazing to be able to fly through the sky and do whatever you want.”
Rainbow Dash grinned and flapped her wings, flying up in front of the bow for a second. “Oh yeah, believe me when I tell you that there’s nothing better than flying.”
“Not all ponies fly though, do they? Your story in the paper mentioned earth ponies and unicorns too. Our old books mentioned ponies that could do magic, but you don’t seem to be able to use it.”
“Yeah. Pegasi like me can fly and unicorns do magic. Earth ponies don’t do either.”
Gollak got a contemplative look. “I suppose we mammoths are more like earth ponies then. There are some old stories and legends about mammoths using magic but there’s nothing like that in this city. And we fly about as well as a brick.”
“I wouldn’t mind being as strong as you guys are but yeah, I still definitely wouldn’t give up my flying for anything,” Rainbow Dash said as she landed back on the ship.
The cold breeze that swept over the lake ruffled Rainbow Dash’s mane and she couldn’t help but shiver. Gollak seemed unaffected but she couldn’t say she was surprised by that. These guys must handle the cold better than even any yak did. Speaking of the cold though this whole ship must’ve been covered in ice and snow early in the morning, his crew had to have gone over it before she and Larkon arrived or the thing would’ve been too frozen over to sail.
“Are we almost to the kelp farms?” Dash asked. She couldn’t tell at all where they might be, the whole lake looked the same across the surface. Dark and deep.
“Just about, we’ll drop anchor once there and start harvesting,” Gollak told her.
“How do you harvest it anyways?”
“Kelp grows from the bottom of the lake in long strands. Once our ship anchors in the right position in the middle of the farms we go down and cut the longest strands, putting them into nets and hauling them aboard the ship to take them back to harbor.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Rainbow Dash waved her hooves in front of her. “How do you go down and cut it? Are you saying you swim down there in that water?”
“Did you think mammoths can’t swim?” Gollak smiled slightly.
“Uhh… I’ll say I didn’t really expect it too much? And if it’s already all underwater you must have to dive pretty far.”
Gollak tapped his chest. “All mammoths have quite excellent lung capacity.”
“I guess I’ve gotta take your word for it...” Rainbow Dash looked down the side of the ship at the cold water. The thought of mammoths swimming down there was almost laughable but it would probably be a little rude if she said that.
In a minute longer their ship came to rest in the middle of the lake, the kelp must’ve been down there but the water was too dark for her to really see into it. Gollak gave the order and the anchor was dropped, the long chain rattling its holding chamber the whole time it descended. Thanks to how deep the lake was they just had to stand around for a moment until the chain stopped with the anchor finally resting at the bottom and holding the Mammoth of the Blue safely in place.
“Alright, get on out here you lazy bums!” Captain Gollak shouted.
His crew assembled on the deck while Rainbow Dash watched, one by one they removed their caps and stood by the railing where a number of chain and rope pulleys sat. Some of them brought, knives, clippers, and nets with them. Rainbow Dash checked out the pulleys and glanced at Gollak.
“You use those to lower yourselves down to the water and pull yourselves back up?” She asked.
“Well… there’s two ways to get down to the water from the deck. A boring way and a fun way. Do you want to see the fun way?” A wide grin cracked up the side of his face as he said that, his eyes sparkling with devilish mischief.
Raindow Dash snorted. “Is the sky blue?”
“Hehe,” Gollak chuckled. “Word of warning, you may come to regret your decision in a moment.” He sucked in a deep breath and bellowed- “CANNONBALL!”
The huge mammoth captain threw off his jacket and jumped over the side of the ship, tucking in his trunk and legs and plummeting to the cold water.
And considering he weighed about six tons when he hit the water it created a massive tidal wave that shot up over the edge of the boat before peaking and getting ready to cascade back down onto the deck. Right where Rainbow Dash was.
The pegasus blinked. “Oh.”
The freezing cold water smashed down on top of her, washing her across the deck and into the railing on the other side of the ship. Soaked. Drenched. Wet down to the bone. The lake water flattened her hair and mane completely, making her look like a wet cat when she finally stood up on her wobbly hooves. Her whole body was shivering and she trembled the whole way back over to the other side of the ship where she hopped up onto the edge and looked down at Gollak. The captain was swimming around, doing a backstroke and grinning up at her.
“G-G-Good one. N-N-Nice s-splash,” Rainbow Dash stuttered.
“That’ll get you used to the cold up here! Hahaha!” He guffawed and turned onto his stomach, paddling towards the mid of the ship. “The rest of you hurry down here now too!” He yelled at the crew.
Unlike the captain they brought their tools and themselves down using the pulleys, holding onto the chains and ropes as they were lowered one by one to the water. Each mammoth then dove in and got to work. If Rainbow Dash looked really hard now, thanks to all the breaking in the water, she could see some of the stalks of kelp below the surface. It was almost just a big green mass with how many stalks there were and how close it all was together. And how long did the individual strands go? This lake had to be incredibly deep and if the kelp grew from the lakebed…
“Mammoths! Dive!” Gollak yelled.
The crew of mammoths all dove below the water, bringing their trimmers with them while allowing the huge nets to float on top of the kelp farm. It was strange watching them swim so lightly through that cold water, large brown shapes right under the surface, moving with a deftness she hadn’t seen from any mammoth on land. They practically danced below the water and were able to swim much swifter than she had expected. Despite their weight their powerful legs and trunks worked to propel them while they traveled below the surface of the lake. She saw groups of two or three at a time getting together, holding a stalk in place while one went down to cut it and the other two would swim back up to the net to throw it inside.
She almost forgot about how cold and wet she was watching them. It was strangely mesmerizing.
They held their saws and other cutting implements in their trunks when they dove. For more than once Rainbow Dash found herself appreciating how useful those things were. Carrying, grasping, pointing, mammoth’s trunks excelled at it all. Because they were all muscle they had the kind of reach and flexibility that even griffon or dragon arms didn’t have, along with incredible strength and dexterity because of that pure musculature.
She didn’t think something as boring on paper as farming (sorry Applejack) could actually be so interesting to her. But Larkon had turned out to be right.
Stalk after stalk of kelp kept coming up to the surface where it was deposited in the net, each one was dozens of feet long from where the mammoths had cut it. Already they had enough where they could’ve fed all of Ponyville but the nets weren’t even half full.
Gollak’s head emerged from the surface of the water and he took a deep breath, grinning up at her. “You’re not bored are you?”
“I’m more wet than bored right now,” she snorted.
“I can see that, but we still have quite a bit more harvesting to do. What say you join us? You don’t want to just sit around up there watching the whole time, do you?”
“What, you mean like actually swimming down there and cutting the kelp with you guys?” Rainbow Dash wasn’t so sure about that.
Gollak nodded. “Of course! Why not? You’re already soaked, you’re not getting any wetter already are you? Come down and see what it’s really like to do this job.”
She shivered some more just looking down at the water. Rainbow Dash wasn’t afraid of anything but she wasn’t sure how well she could swim in water that cold. If she actually jumped down there… the cold she was feeling now wouldn’t even compare to the sudden shock of being submerged. Her wings might seize up, she might even get sick later.
But this was still the kind of thing she wanted to do. Experience new things and all that. And it was something that would be difficult for her, so even more reason to try it.
Rainbow Dash sucked in a breath and leaped off the side of the ship. She folded her wings tightly to her sides and dropped like a falcon diving for prey. The first second she hit it and broke the surface she almost didn’t feel anything. But once she slowed down and was floating a few feet down, bubbles leaking from her mouth, the cold hit her like a spike and she instantly shot back up to the surface of the nearly freezing lake on reflex.
“Bwah!” Rainbow Dash gasped as her wet head shot above the water, her legs and wings treading water beneath her to keep her afloat and try to warm up her body.
“Hahahaha, cold enough for you?” Gollak laughed as he swam over to her.
She glared at him. “N-N-No!” Her chattering teeth almost clamped down on her tongue a few times.
“Don’t worry, just keep moving around and I’m sure your body will adjust soon,” Gollak said as he swam over to where the kelp harvesting was going on. “Come on! I’ll have someone give you a pair of shears and you can go down and make some cuts of your own. Don’t try and act tough if you need to come up for some air though, we wouldn’t want anyone getting hurt.”
“R-Right,” Dash paddled her way behind him.
Some of the other mammoths surfaced to put kelp in the nets and Gollak whistled to get their attention. “Hey! Give Rainbow Dash here some extra shears!”
The sailors looked a little surprised to see Rainbow Dash swimming in this icy water with them but they quickly obeyed their captain’s orders and swam over to her. One of the mammoths held a pair of large clippers with his trunk and gave them to her. Thanks to the size difference between ponies and mammoths they were more like large hedge clippers to her than anything. Once she held them in her hooves and the mammoth let go she had to swim harder to keep the clippers from pulling her below water.
“Are you alright? They’re not too heavy?” Gollak asked her. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t really thinking about that...”
“I’m fine,” Rainbow Dash said through gritted teeth as she struggled to stay afloat, her wings splashing about on top of the water.
“I’ll keep an eye on you when you dive down just to be sure,” Gollak said.
Rainbow nodded. “How far do I go before I start cutting?”
“Stalks are cut in fifty foot lengths. So for some you may need to dive a good sixty feet. Can you handle that?”
“Definitely.”
Her reply was swift and confident but to tell the truth she wasn’t sure if she actually could. Rainbow Dash knew she had a really strong lung capacity but with the weight of the clippers and the coldness of the water it would be a little different than going for a dive in one of the ponds or lakes around Ponyville. She had already accepted the challenge by jumping in here and she definitely wasn’t going to let anyone think she was a coward but the fact was she was still a pegasus and not a hippogriff. Rainbow Dash looked down at the water, still dark, still cold, but she could see the stalks of kelp waving down there now.
Her mind was made up, with a deep breath she dunked her head below the freezing water and swam for some of the longest strands.
It was actually clearer and easier for her to see when she was submerged than when she was above water. She let herself glide through the water while holding the clippers out in front of her. Thanks to their shape they actually cut through the water just as easily and didn’t drag her or anything so long as she was holding them straight. Rainbow Dash could be thankful the rest of her body was perfectly streamlined as well.
She could now see the swimming mammoths so much easier too, they practically flew around the field of kelp that grew in this cold water. Some of them grabbed ten or so strands at once in their trunk, bunching them together, and waited for someone else to come over and cut them. Well there was no way she was going to let a big mammoth outswim her. Even if it wasn’t her thing her pride would be shattered if these bulky creatures performed better than her underwater.
Rainbow Dash swam towards a stalk that was waving just a few feet below the surface. With clippers in her hooves she dove down its length, letting the weight of the clippers do most of the work so she could conserve energy and air for when she was swimming back up. Her lungs might’ve been way smaller than the mammoths but she probably didn’t need to take such big breaths or expend nearly as much energy with every movement. That probably gave her the advantage.
She was completely numb thanks to the cold of the water though and the act of using the clippers might be difficult when she finally got to the right length of the stalk. Bubbles escaped past her lips and she had to fight the reflex to open up her mouth to try and breath in some more air. Panic wouldn’t do her any good down here. It wouldn’t be long before her lungs started burning as she ran out of air but Rainbow Dash could handle that. She wasn’t going back to the surface until she had this stalk cut.
However it got harder for her to see the further down she went as less light was able to penetrate this deeply into the water. The mammoths swimming with her became nothing more than dark shapes, phantoms in the water.
That darkness didn’t even compare to the absolute darkness she saw staring down at the depths of the lake though. The more she looked down the more it seemed like it was just a black hole making up the bottom of the lake, so imperviously black it was. Stalks of kelp just flat out disappeared into nothingness. It was more like looking into the night sky than into any lake or river or even ocean that she had seen before.
A sudden jet of bubbles from her nostrils brought her back into reality. She hadn’t even realized she had just been absently floating there. Rainbow needed to focus and cut the stalk before she ran out of breath, looking back up to the surface she gauged that she was about down to where she needed to be. Moving the heavy clippers made her feel sluggish in the water but she pulled them to the stalk and opened them up. Even in the near darkness here the light still glinted off of the razor sharp blades. Rainbow Dash had to be careful when she cut the kelp, else the stalk would float away completely and she might lose it in the darkness.
The cold and the air in her lungs were mere after thoughts now. She just wanted to succeed at this challenge.
Rainbow Dash used her wings to steady herself in the water, flapping in unison while her hooves paddled slightly to keep her right where she wanted to be. She pushed the blades of the clippers forward so the stalk was right between them and didn’t stop until it hit the back of the blades so she could apply the most force to it and stay at her most stable.
Her limbs trembled as she pressed the handles of the clippers together to cut the stalk, she had to grit her teeth and accidentally let out a bit of air when the blades dug into the fibrous stalk. She struggled for but a second until the blades shut closed with a muffled snip and the stalk was cut cleanly in two. In an instant, Rainbow Dash dropped one hoof from the clippers and grabbed the stalk, bringing it back and pressing it against her neck, holding it in the crook so it didn’t float away.
She had done it. Now she just needed to swim back to the surface with the small amount of air she had left.
That proved a little harder than going down thanks to the weight of the clippers and the awkwardness of the long kelp. But Rainbow Dash managed to make it work. She was the most awesome pony ever after all.
Still, she couldn’t help getting just a tiny bit manic the closer and closer the surface approached. When her head breached the water she took a huge gulp of air, her lungs working in overdrive and her heart hammering in her chest. She flailed around for a bit until she felt a strong trunk wrap around her body and Captain Gollak lifted her out of the water and deposited her on his back while he tread in place. Another sailor came by and quickly grabbed Dash’s stalk, herding it to the nets.
Rainbow Dash sat on his back, holding onto the clippers like they were some sort of treasure.
“You did well,” Gollak said even though he couldn’t turn to face her.
Her teeth clattered a bit and she took a few laboring breaths of fresh lake air. “I’m cold...”
Gollak chuckled. “Hmhm, I bet you are. Go dry yourself off below deck and fly around for a bit. It will be some time before we’re done. I hope you enjoyed yourself.”
“More or less… just a lot colder and wetter than I normally like to be,” Rainbow Dash panted and lifted off him, flying back on top of the ship with the clippers. She dumped them the moment she got onboard and shook herself like a dog. The best she could do until she found a towel somewhere. Pausing before she went to look down in the hold for one, she looked back down at the swimming mammoths. The crew still harvesting kelp while they swam like experts in that freezing water. She wondered how else these mammoths could surprise her?