//------------------------------// // Reducing the Sap // Story: Spring Comes to Snow Hill // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// The air felt especially cold to Maple Leaf, and despite his bravado the night before, he wore his blanket to the outhouse. Even so, he was shivering when he came back inside; instead of getting in his own bed, he climbed up on his sister’s and curled up alongside her. She cracked open an eye. “I hope you kicked all the snow off your fetlocks and aren't dripping it on my blankets.” “Of course I did,” he insisted. “Bet you forgot.” She lifted her head up to look, and Maple pulled his hooves under the covers before she could get a look at them. “Thought so.” “They mostly dripped on the floor.” “Betcha wish you hadn't got trimmed.” “I guess.” He rolled on his stomach—a mistake; now his cold, wet fetlocks were practically touching bare skin. “Ought to get up anyways. Early pony gets the sap.” “Can’t we stay in bed a little bit longer?” “Alright, fine. Until we hear them getting up.” Maple burrowed under the covers. “Don't tell Dad.” “I won't. Promise.” She bopped his nose lightly with a hoof. “Betcha you'll start warming up when you start moving around.” “I hope so.” • • • The family parted ways at the barn—Sugar and Winter went off to the grove, while Maple and Red went to the saphouse. The path hadn’t been cleared, so he followed along in his father’s hoofprints. “Looking forward to the fire?” He nodded. “Me, too. Feels like it’s properly spring when we start reducing the sap.” Red reached up and pulled open the door to the saphouse. “Get the boiler doors open, and start building a fire in there, just like you would in the stove. Fire starts from the near end, and then the draft to the chimney’ll help pull it along. I’ll bring in more wood.” The boiler doors were stiff from disuse, and squealed in protest as he tugged them open. Unlike the kitchen stove, the firebox was deep and shallow, and he quickly discovered that his foreleg wasn’t long enough to push wood all the way to the back, no matter how hard he tried. “Was this designed by a unicorn?” Maple wondered aloud as he shoved a log as far in as he could. Red laughed. “A sensible pony who didn't want to gather more firewood than she had to, I'll wager. Try using the fire rake to push 'em to the corner—that's how I did it when I was a colt.” Working with the fire rake was awkward, and even Maple wasn’t entirely satisfied with his work when he had the firebox full. Red examined it for a moment, and then closed the door nearest the chimney. “Might as well get it going.” Maple nodded, and dragged his shoe across the flint on the end of the firebox until a shower of sparks finally landed in the tinder. “Blow on it,” Red said. “Real gentle, until it gets going.” For several minutes, he blew life into the fire, fighting the cold metal trying to suck the heat out of it and the smoke trying to suffocate it, until the flames started to crackle and pop. “Now we've got something,” Red said. “Enough to set the dampers and get a draft going, I reckon.” Maple stood next to the firebox in an attempt to get warm, but Red was having none of that and pushed him towards the door. “Your mother and sister are out there in snow up to their bellies, so you're gonna pull your weight here, else you'll be back with them. Gotta start pumping sap into the tank.” The sap traveled from the holding tank through a hoof-operated rocker pump, then into a small primer tank which emptied into the evaporator. It took 134 pumps before the sap started splashing into the tank. Maple counted every one. He stopped counting when he got to a thousand. The muscles in his right foreleg were burning, and he finally had to switch to his left. By the time the preheating pan was full, he'd mastered the art of switching legs without breaking rhythm. He could still feel the pump pushing back against his hooves as he stumbled back into the saphouse, worried his weakened legs might betray him and pitch him muzzle-first into the snow. Maple Leaf didn’t get any time to relax—he’d thought that there would be nothing to do while waiting for the sap to boil, but he was wrong. “Now we need some fresh balsam fronds,” Red said. The last thing Maple wanted to do after using the pump was walking. “How come we didn’t get them yesterday? There’s plenty of fir trees around the maple grove.” “They’ve got to be fresh, ‘cause oil in the needles keeps the sap from foaming and boiling over. Go ahead and take my knife. And only cut off little fronds so you don’t hurt the tree.” There weren’t any fir trees near the saphouse, and Maple was halfway to the maple grove before he found one that was in reasonably shallow snow. Even so, he had to force his way through a couple of drifts. He almost dropped the knife, and if he had it might have been lost until the spring. By the time he got back, the inside of the saphouse had turned into a sauna. Steam was rolling off the evaporator, and the heat paradoxically made him shiver. Red quickly examined the fronds, and nodded. “Good; those’ll do fine. Put them on the workbench, then I’ll show you how to move the sap to the next evaporator. First thing to do is open the transfer pipe.” Red pointed to a ball valve on the bottom of the boiler. “And then we add more sap to the preheater.” Maple’s ears drooped. More sap meant more pumping. Red smiled. “It’ll warm you back up.” He nodded and went back outside. Working in the saphouse wasn’t as much fun as he’d thought it would be. • • • Maple knew that a watched pot never boiled—mom and Winter said that often enough—but the boiler was a very different animal. For the first time today, he was grateful for having been shorn. Steam billowed up out of the evaporator, and he was constantly leaning over it to skim off the foam or rub the balsam across the top. In between, he took quick trips outside to bring in more wood for the firebox and to pump more sap into the primer tank. When the second pan finally reduced down to the halfway point, he cracked open the valve to transfer it to the third, jerking back in surprise as the metal creaked and popped. Once the second compartment was nearly empty, he closed the valve again and opened the piping from the first, and then it was time to go back outside and run the pump again. Red finally returned with the latest load of cans on the sledge, but his workload barely lightened. The twice-reduced sap got transferred to the finishing tank, and then he got sent outside to cool off and to start piling snow around their holding tank—if the sap warmed up too much before it got reduced, it would spoil. Then it was back to the steam of the saphouse with more logs to feed the insatiable maw of the firebox.