Apple Bloom stepped out of Sugar Belle’s Cafe one morning to find an old mare sitting on a rocking chair near one of the tables.
“Hi, there,” she said. “I’m Apple Bloom.”
“Oh, hi,” croaked the old mare. “They call me Old Lady Cooper.”
“Nice to meet ya,” Apple Bloom smiled. “Um, are you here for breakfast?”
“No,” Old Lady Cooper shook her head. “I came here to live out my retirement in shame.”
As was usual whenever she encountered a pony with a cutie mark problem, Apple Bloom was torn between excitement and concern.
“What did you used to do?” she asked.
“Nothing, really,” frowned Old Lady Cooper. “I could never do what my cutie mark told me.”
She stopped rocking in her chair for a moment and shuffled over a bit. Apple Bloom could see a sideways cow symbol on the old mare’s flank.
*****
“In my young days,” Old Lady Cooper began, recommencing rocking in her chair, “I was intrigued by a myth. I was told that cows stand up when they sleep, and that hoodlums would sneak into fields during the night and push them over. Of course, I was curious, so I snuck into a field of cows one night, but I found them all lying down.”
“Oh, cows only stand up while they sleep when they’re spending the night in a barn,” said Apple Bloom, remembering the countless occasions when Sweet Apple Acres would stable livestock in transit.
“Yeah, I found that out later,” nodded Old Lady Cooper. “In my local farm, the barn was too cramped for the cows to lie down. And to me, that meant very little space for a cow to be tipped over. But I was so obsessed with giving it a try. So I made a plan. I hung around in the barn before the farmhooves locked it up, and then I refilled the food troughs on the outside perimeter of the cow pen. All the cows ate a second helping, and then went to sleep, standing up, all lined up along the fence.”
Apple Bloom couldn’t help but chuckle. “You played dominoes with a herd of cows?”
“And after I escaped from the barn before the farmers could catch me, my cutie mark appeared.” Old Lady Cooper stopped rocking and allowed Apple Bloom another look at the sideways cow on her flank. “Ever since that night, nopony in a rural town or area trusted me. Ranchers and drovers would watch me like a hawk. When I grew up, I was forced to move to a big city. I never had an outlet for my hobby again.”
*****
Apple Bloom sighed. “This is strange. Surely a pony couldn’t get a cutie mark for being a hoodlum.”
“Speaking of hoodlums,” Old Lady Cooper raised on eyebrow, “what were you doing in my cottage?”
“Uh…”
Big Macintosh came out of the Cafe.
“Oh,” grunted Old Lady Cooper. “I’m in front of the wrong cottage again, aren’t I?”
“Eeeyup,” nodded Big Mac. “Uh, breakfast’s on the table, Apple Bloom.”
Apple Bloom was about to ask if Old Lady Cooper could join them, but something about Big Mac’s expression suggested he wasn’t keen on that.
“The thing about Old Lady Cooper,” he said when he and Apple Bloom were inside the Cafe and the door shut, “is she’s kinda like this Village’s version of Granny Smith. Her mind’s gone, and she’s got no strength left.”
“So? She’s still got a cutie mark problem,” insisted Apple Bloom.
*****
Undeterred, Apple Bloom told Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle about Old Lady Cooper during breakfast.
“A sideways cow?” asked Sweetie Belle.
Apple Bloom nodded.
“I can’t see what else that could mean,” Scootaloo scratched her head. “Old Lady Cooper’s unique talent probably is cow tipping.”
After they finished breakfast, they sat at that table thinking and discussing Old Lady Cooper’s cutie mark conundrum for hours.
“Any requests for lunch?” Sugar Belle asked them.
The Crusaders hadn’t even realised it was nearly lunchtime.
“How about chocolate feathers and gingerbread mares?” Scootaloo suggested.
*****
When Sugar Belle brought lunch to the table, instead of eating them, the Crusaders made a miniature pen using the chocolate feathers as a fence, and stood the gingerbread mares in it.
“What are you doing?” Sugar Belle.
“We’re trying to find a way cow tipping could be beneficial,” said Sweetie Belle.
“Oh,” blinked Sugar Belle. “Well if you come up with anything, let me know, and I’ll pass the word along.”
The Crusaders spent several minutes toying with their little cattle pen set-up, recreating to the best of their ability the domino effect Old Lady Cooper had told Apple Bloom about, and trying to spot a way it could benefit livestock and caretakers. As the minutes ticked by, chunks of the fence disappeared, and most of the gingerbread mares heads were bitten off.
“I think,” Sweetie Belle said at last, “that after Old Lady Cooper was done with them, the cows were able to lie down and sleep, just like they would have done outside in a field.”
*****
It was the best they could come up with before the fence and herd were all eaten, so they left the table at last to have a word with Old Lady Cooper. They could see through the window that she’d sine left.
“Where does Old Lady Cooper live?” Apple Bloom asked.
Sugar Belle told them. “But you probably won’t find her there. She’s always turning up in front of somepony’s cottage, but hardly ever her own.”
Sure enough, when the Crusaders walked out into the street, they spotted Old Lady Cooper rocking in her chair on the porch in front of Double Diamond’s cottage.
“Hi, Old Lady Cooper. We’ve figured out how your unique talent isn’t a bad thing,” smiled Apple Bloom when she and her friends approached her. “When you played dominoes with those cows, they were able to lie down in that cramped pen instead of spending the whole night on their hooves.”
“Yeah. Your cutie mark doesn’t make you a troublemaker,” said Scootaloo. “It means you’ve discovered an efficient and comfortable way of stabling cows.”
*****
Old Lady Cooper didn’t look pleased at all.
“What’s the matter?” asked Apple Bloom. “You’re not a hoodlum afterall.”
“Thanks all the same,” Old Lady Cooper cracked a half-hearted smile, “but this doesn’t help me now. Just look at me. My old aching bones couldn’t move a moth. And it ain’t just my bones that aren’t as quick as they were in my youth. My mind’s slipping in my old age. I mean I don’t even remember who you are, but apparently you know me.”
Apple Bloom hadn’t really processed how elderly Old Lady Cooper was that morning.
“I didn’t realise,” she faltered, “what you meant by shameful retirement.”
“Well,” Sweetie tried to bring some positivity back to the conversation, “we could always pass this information on to farmers and ranchers. That’d be a benefit to Equestria.”
“That’s fine,” sighed Old Lady Cooper sullenly.
Apple Bloom shook her head. “That’s not good enough, Sweetie. She’d still not be involved with it.”
“But what can be done about that?” asked Scootaloo. “In her frail and senile age, it’ll be impossible for her to do the work.”
“She’s been obsessed with cow tipping all her life,” said Apple Bloom resolutely. “We’ve got to come up with some way she can finally do duty by her cutie mark.”
*****
Their chance came sooner than expected. The Crusaders ventured back to the Cafe, expecting another long hard think. They arrived to find Big Mac carrying a box of nails to the barn door out back.
“Sugar Belle told me you three were playing with your food during lunch and it gave her an idea,” he told them, “for how to boost our revenue.”
“What’s that?” asked Apple Bloom.
“I’m gonna build a pen,” said Big Mac, “and we’re gonna rent it to ranchers and drovers who might want a place to stable their livestock for a night or two. Just like we did at Sweet Apple Acres.”
The Crusaders were excited.
*****
At first, Big Mac was starting to have second thoughts. There wasn’t room for a large pen in the barn. The only decent space was in the backyard.
“It’ll be fine,” Apple Bloom insisted.
A week had passed before a customer approached Big Mac asking him to stable a herd of cattle for a night. Apple Bloom helped Big Mac drive the cows to the pen; it was an unusual sight for Sugar Belle’s customers to see cows walking single file through the Cafe. Big Mac spotted Old Lady Cooper in her rocking chair outside the barn door along the way, but kept his concentration of herding the cattle into the pen.
“That’s funny,” he said. “I thought I left the food troughs in the center of the pen.”
Apple Bloom glanced at Old Lady Cooper and grinned.
“Well they’re just as well beside the fences, right?” she asked her big brother.
“I guess,” Big Mac shrugged.
And he closed the gate, walked past the old unicorn rocking in her chair, and fetched the hay to fill the troughs.
*****
When the Sun was setting, and the loaded troughs were emptied by the now-sleepy cows, Big Mac was slightly concerned to see Old Lady Cooper was still rocking back and forth in the yard. Then, when the cows were all sound asleep, and still standing, Old Lady Cooper’s horn lit up.
“Uh, what are you…?” Big Mac yelped.
Big Mac had never noticed Old Lady Cooper’s cutie mark before now; the light from her horn brought it into sharp focus through the rocking chair’s foreleg rest rungs. Big Mac was on the verge of shooing Old Lady Cooper away, but the sight of Apple Bloom standing in the barn doorway and gesturing to him halted him.
“Let her do what her cutie mark says,” she said quietly to him, as she and her fellow Crusaders watched from the doorway.
Old Lady Cooper’s old aching bones and joints might have hindered her in her winter years, but her magic was still sufficient. She levitated one of the troughs, and let it hover next to one of the sleeping standing cows. Then she used the floating trough to shove it over.
*****
Big Mac and the Crusaders watched, torn between amusement and concern, as one cow knocked over another, who knocked over another, and so on, until they all fell like dominoes. Most of the cows sturred and unleashed a bemused “Moo”, but it wasn’t long before they were all fast asleep again, all lying comfortably down this time. Before Old Lady Cooper’s horn stopped glowing, Apple Bloom could see her broad satisfied smile illuminated in the nighttime darkness.
“I want you all to promise,” she said to Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, and Big Macintosh, “that for the rest of Old Lady Cooper’s life, the art of stable cow tipping will be a secret. It’ll only be done by her here in this Village.”