The grass crunched under young hooves. Big Macintosh wiped his brow and gazed at the white haze that was the morning sky. There were no clouds in sight, nor were there any pegasus ponies about.
“Of all the days they pick to have a strike,” he muttered.
Granny Smith used to tell stories about days when the sun seemed to burst with far more energy, like a fire that had found a new pile of timber. It wasn’t clear what did it. Some said Celestia did not always have control over it, but then some folk would say things like that, wouldn’t they? They failed to see the bigger picture, and what would it be if every year was the same? Big Macintosh asked himself questions like this as he stepped across the Sweet Apple Acres threshold.
Even with the Stetson hat drooping over his short, boyish muzzle, his neck was already slick with sweat. His horse collar slid and slipped over his matted mane, catching his straw locks in its splinters and making him itch uncomfortably. Yet even as his twiggy legs mechanically swung over the curve of the hill, there were sinewy bulges that rippled along the limbs.
“Don’t forget Winona!” shouted Granny Smith.
Frantic barking met his ears. Big Macintosh whisked his head round, and had barely lifted the brim of his hat off his face when a black-and-white blur came bounding across the yard to meet him. Beyond them, Big Macintosh saw the reassuring mountain that was Sweet Apple Acres’ barn, and Granny Smith peering out of the kitchen window.
“An’ make sure y’all are back before noon, y’hear? Or you won’t hear the end of it from me! This ain’t the season to be testin’ your mettle, y’know.” Granny Smith grunted as she shifted the bundle in her hooves from one foreleg to the other.
“Got it, Granny!” Big Mac said, trying to fend off the licks and jumps of Winona. “But what’s Winona for?”
“Well, Ma and Pa ain’t aroun’ to keep an eye on you, an’ Ah got mah hooves full with little AJ here.”
The bundle began to bawl.
“Now, settle down,” Granny murmured to the crying bundle. “Your big brother’ll be back soon, AJ.” To Big Mac, she said, “Now, Ah’m puttin’ a lot of faith in you, Big Macintosh. Young’un, you gotta make me happy it’s earned, you hear?”
Big Mac, who had finally pushed Winona off his face, saluted. “Got it, Granny! An’ don’t worry. Ah’ll get every last bit done before the end of the day! It’ll be like Ma an’ Pa were already back from Manehattan!”
Even from a distance, he could make out the approval in her sagging smile, and she shut the window.
Winona stirred dry leaves under her paws as she ran between the rows of trees. Big Mac tried not to notice as he set out the buckets under the dangling red apples, but as she began nudging and knocking them with her passing, he gritted his teeth.
“Winona,” he said.
Winona kept on bounding around. The sheer pleasure of being outside was one thing, but the sheer pleasure of being yelled at made her jump higher and bark louder.
It would’ve worked if Ma had done it, Big Mac thought. He sighed at the canopy.
“Winona!”
The border collie acknowledged this by trying to leap at his face.
“Not the hat!” he shouted. The Stetson settled among the leaves.
As though fearful it would vanish within seconds, Big Mac seized it between his teeth, and braced every muscle in his face against the blasts of doggy breath as Winona tried to lick his face.
“Winona!” He yelled – dropping the hat again – and stamped his hoof. “WINONA!”
Winona stopped barking, and simply stared at him.
Big Mac pushed her front paws off his chest – leaving tiny cuts as he did so – and picked up and dusted the Stetson with his hooves.
“Now lookee here,” he said, “this is Pa’s hat. Pa’s hat, see? He gave it to me, an’ he ain’t never done that before. That means Ah’m in charge of the farm, cos Pa and Ma ain’t here, an’ Granny Smith’s gotta look after AJ.”
Winona simply stared at him in canine puzzlement.
“That means you do what Ah say, cos Ah gotta bring in the apples like Ma and Pa do.” Big Mac paused to ram the hat over his ears. “So do what Ah say! Understand?”
Winona blinked at him. Then she began panting, and yipped as though a telling off from a pony was the utmost peak of nirvana.
Big Mac groaned. He wished his boyish voice was already gone. Pa with his big, booming baritone would’ve commanded the utmost respect for those words, and Pa and Ma had accents that reached back to the beginning of farming.
“Now,” he continued, “buckin’ time.”
The first column of bark stretched from roots to sky. Big Mac tried to straighten up as he aimed his first kick. Jus’ practisin’, he thought. Ah’m jus’ gonna practise firs’.
He was scrunched up behind his hooves, with his legs folded as tightly as possible, and the skin on his bones pinched between every bendable part of his body. Big Mac tried to balance on his two front hooves, and stumbled once or twice when his rear legs nearly swung up and over his rump.
Winona scampered across the bushes to his right, presumably to seek unadulterated bliss from chasing a blue jay’s shadow. Big Mac blushed deep red, even under his thick, crimson fur.
He struck with as much of his body as he could, but the joints rebounded and he felt himself fall flat onto his face. The tree twanged like a towering ruler. A few branches rustled overhead.
Ah heard something! He quickly got to his hooves. Ah heard somethin’ hit the bucket!
Big Mac almost tripped over his own hooves as he hurried over to the bucket. Opposite him, Winona burst through the bushes and raced him to the wooden rim.
“Ah did it!” he shouted. “Ah bucked mah firs’ apple tree! D’you see it, Winona? D’you see it? D’you see… it…”
His smile boiled away into the heat haze around him. Five apples sat, slightly shrivelled, at the bottom of the bucket, looking lost.
He glanced back up at the tree. Dozens of self-contented red eyes seemed to peer back at him, wondering what all the ghastly noise was about. The heat of their eyes on him, more than the heat of the sun, made his ears wilt and reach down to cover his eyes.
Winona glanced over to him, and barked for more. Big Mac sighed, and turned his back to the tree for a second buck. Another shudder went through his body. Another smattering of apples dropped into the bucket.
“OK,” he said, looking across. “Maybe third time’s lucky, like Granny says? Winona, no, put that down!”
She lifted her head out of the bucket, and drool oozed around the apple impaled between her canine teeth. Even now, her tail writhed in ecstasy.
“That ain’t a chew toy! Give me that!” Big Mac’s hooves were a blur, but Winona had already turned tail and ploughed through the bushes.
Big Mac felt the headache moving in already. Overhead, the sun beat down on him and squeezed and stretched his dank skin until he simply couldn’t gallop anymore.
He tripped and fell into a pile of leaves. The gambolling figure of Winona ran around him like a demented moon around a boiling planet, and Big Mac pushed the hat off his eyes again.
“Fine,” he gasped between breaths. “Fine. You... You can… keep… that one.”
Big Mac ambled back to buck the tree again. He felt as though he was looking at a gigantic pillar of rock. The leaves turned to crisps, and slices of white sunlight peered through the mass of dead greenery. Big Mac scratched his legs feverishly.
“Well,” he managed to say, “Granny Smith always said, them as don’t buck the trees don’t get any apple pie.”
This ain’t how it’s supposed to go, he thought, and he turned redder at his own childishness. He didn’t dare think what Granny Smith would think if she could see him now. Her own son’s son, and he could barely make a kick better than a unicorn’s. Grandpa would turn in his grave.
Tired, sweating, and while shaking off what was rapidly becoming a migraine, Big Mac turned around and braced himself for the next kick.
Further along the rows of browning apple trees, and darting from bush to bush, what looked like a bright yellow insect paused and hovered beneath a low-hanging braeburn.
Honeysuckle’s antennae twitched and caressed the fruit. The taste of the skin was of crumpled papyrus, and when she prodded the fruit with all six of her ballerina legs, the flesh collapsed and died. A tiny gnat zipped out of a hole in its side and buzzed at her in protest. Large, dragonfly-like wings buzzed back, and the gnat retreated to its hidey-hole.
The flutter pony sighed and zipped smartly over open ground. With nothing but the scent of rotting apple flesh all around her, she had to rely on getting close to the fruits for tests, and every time she shot across a clearing, her body shivered with the touch of phantom jaws closing in.
Fewer and fewer flutter ponies were getting back home as it was. Even now, some part of her mind kept moaning and whimpering, and wishing that the rest of her had just stayed quiet.
Let someone else go out, it had said, and was still saying. You kept quiet when Rosedust offered, and she never returned.
Honeysuckle’s wings flushed red with fury, and she tried to drown out the voice with a louder buzz.
Rosedust’s disappearance was still the talk of the family. Back in the paper nest, they’d still be whispering and chatting about it. Nothing consequential; just endless wonderings over what she might have met, and why her years of dealing with the outside world would fail her. It was as if Rosedust had merely given a disappointing performance at a game.
She’d joined in more than once, but even then she could sense them trying to avoid something. It was like talking endlessly about Rosedust would convince them it hadn’t been such a shock.
Honeysuckle landed on a twig, and stared at a suspiciously green leaf hanging nearby. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d found greenery staring back at her.
While her eyes and antennae strained for the slightest off detail – and as her hairy feelers skimmed through the air for anything other than the dead fruit smell – Honeysuckle’s mind dwelled on her sisters’ faces.
They had gathered around in the dark recesses of the nest beneath the paper house, where the paper gave way to soil that oozed underfoot. It was utterly dark, but as the long threads protruding from above their wide eyes entwined, she could feel the twisting of her sisters’ discomfort.
Go to Sweet Apple Acres.
Gall Sting had been the one to give the commands. She sat there, a squat, bulbous acorn of a flutter pony, silently letting her antennae drift over the squabbling and the buzzing of their sisters. Honeysuckle had not spoken, nor had she taken her eyes off Gall Sting, the eldest sister. Finally, the chitin creaked, the sisters fell silent, and the eldest sister had cleared her throat.
Go to Sweet Apple Acres.
Honeysuckle was now the one to rise in protest. Sweet Apple Acres was too far away. It would mean hours of flying across open country, with every chance of being snagged in a spider’s web or seized by a passing sparrow. Even one apple was too heavy for one flutter pony to carry. She’d be dead before she could lug it back.
Gall Sting had plaited her own antennae around Honeysuckle’s. It didn’t squeeze, but any attempt to back out would be met with firm resistance.
The sun is too hot. There’s not enough food out in the open anymore. Too many of us are dying, and not enough are bringing back food. Go to Sweet Apple Acres.
And that was it. Gall Sting had told her what her future was.
Satisfied that the leaf wasn’t about to sprout pincers and attack her, Honeysuckle rose and gave it a kick as she passed. Save for the chance of being first-born, Gall Sting would never have been the best fed, the first to food, or the one to act as a matriarch in their mother’s absence.
Honeysuckle wished their birth orders had been switched. She’d missed out by mere seconds.
To her surprise, she was feeling her wings sag. Normally, a gentle breeze would be enough to give her a bit of a push, but the air was dead. She gulped a bit more – the better to inflate and stretch her shrivelling wings – and perched between the gnarls of a trunk.
The woods simply boiled in silence. Honeysuckle tried to focus on the distant birdsong, but every ounce of focus was like shifting a clutter of knives around her skull. Her wings were too numb to feel anything, having been baked senseless by the heat haze.
“This is your fault, Rosedust,” she muttered to the spongy bark. “You just had to be the best, didn’t you? And I just happened to be next.”
Despite the venom in her spitting voice, Honeysuckle gave herself a smack around the face.
“Don’t you ever say that again,” she said.
We’ll get out of this, she thought. Every hive has its difficult times. All-Mother herself had to travel across the sea to reach here and escape the First Famine.
Something clicked.
Honeysuckle bristled and began frantically glancing about her.
All-Mother, she thought – her own mother had told her to think the words rather than speak them, for obvious reasons – I beseech you, worthless insect as I am. Let me join the Hive Of The Sky. Let my spirit swarm with my sisters and brothers.
A second click made her stop. That was the nice thing about flutter pony prayers; they were short.
Let me not get horribly mangled and chewed to a pulp, she added. This part wasn’t in the official version.
Honeysuckle waited. She was never sure whether keeping still or darting away was worse. There never seemed to be just one way to deal with the Things of the Bush.
What would Rosedust do?
By the time she felt the thoughts rush to get to her legs, a third click came right by her antenna. She darted off the trunk and pumped her wings as frantically as she could.
If this is it, then at least make it quick.
Soon, she stopped and spun around to check. The tree across the clearing hadn’t moved. Not a leaf stirred.
Honeysuckle banked sharply, and the fourth click deafened her.
Right beside her was a bulging red apple. Honeysuckle hovered warily some distance from it, trying to pick out anything odd, and first noticed the two twiggy feelers protruding from the red mass. A pair of goggling orbs faded into view, and she saw red move across red, a faint shadow marking its passage. The antennae glowed and what had been a red bulge was washed clean of its disguise by a wave of magic.
Honeysuckle landed hurriedly on a nearby leaf and flared her wings out. What looked at first like an angry emerald with grasshopper legs leaped from the apple, and crashed onto a bigger leaf nearby.
An applehopper.
Towering above her, its plated bulk squashing any chance of a future, the applehopper bristled. Its mouthparts scraped and clicked against each other with all the subtlety of a cutlery set. Its legs threatened to snap.
Honeysuckle’s wings flared and closed. The applehopper’s own armoured wing-covers stretched out, and for a moment Honeysuckle almost imagined a great pair of jaws ready to snap around her thorax with a crunch.
She flared and closed again, trying to drain her wings of anything other than pure white as she did so. Her eyes never left the applehopper’s own bulging ones. She could almost imagine the ghost of Rosedust staring at the back of her head, silently pursing her lips.
Honeysuckle felt a bead of sweat tickle the side of her face. Not now. Don’t fumble this. Don’t try to break away. It’ll snatch you out the air before you’ve made so much as an inch.
It signalled back, but the wings were noticeably slower in spreading out, and did not return to rest. Honeysuckle flared, and had barely returned her wings back to rest when she flared again. Surely, in that monster’s vapid and goofy stare, it could see what she was doing?
“Don’t…” she whispered quietly to her legs, which began quivering in panic. “Don’t…”
She closed her eyes, and hoped to Hive Heaven Rosedust wouldn’t be too harsh on her in the afterlife.
The joints in its grotesque and backward-facing limbs relaxed. A couple of dismissive waves of its front legs were followed by a small click of its mouthparts. Honeysuckle opened her eyes and recognized her cue.
Even with the blood-rush beginning to ebb in her whirring wings, she took off too fast, and could almost hear Rosedust tutting after her.
The flash of green and the thump of a body hitting the leaf behind her were just for show. She was already a vanishing dot further down the aisle.
Honeysuckle glanced around, and was already trying to forget that she’d even made a prayer.
“Darn you, Rosedust,” she breathed to thin air. “Why didn’t you get back?”