I
The Infant Tree wasn’t anything too strange, once you got used to it.
This wasn’t to be confused with “The Foaling Tree”—the tree under whose boughs the Apple mares of Sweet Apple Acres traditionally gave birth—this was a tree of a different strain.
Applejack didn’t hate The Infant Tree. In fact, she loved it. She had to.
It was the end of summer. While Big Mac and Apple Bloom started in on the first rounds of the applebucking season, Applejack knew that she had to attend to The Infant Tree first.
And that was something she did hate, if she was being honest.
The first thing that she always noticed about it, long before she could see its gnarled branches and long, unearthly and too-bright leaves, was the stench. Acrid and penetrating, it carried the smell of pungent ammonia and ureas to the nostrils of whichever pony was unlucky enough to be downwind of it. That was almost always Applejack.
Still, she had heard complaints of passersby before. Embarrassed, she knew she couldn’t lie to them, so she always deferred to a stony silence and a willful ignorance of their questions about the source. And always knew that time of year was approaching.
Indeed, it was impossible to miss the precise timing of the day to deal with The Infant Tree. Without fail, and like clockwork, it was on the first day of Applebucking season that The Infant Tree was ripe.
She crested the small knoll that led to the row of trees that it grew alongside. The apple trees that surrounded it certainly didn’t seem to mind its presence. If anything, the ones in the general vicinity of it grew stronger and healthier than any other apple trees in the whole of Sweet Apple Acres. The ones directly adjacent more than any; they towered an extra ten or fifteen feet above any of the other tallest trees out there, producing bigger, riper, fuller, and more perfect apples.
But they were always sour. Their taste was always too overpowering, their juice too acidic, and the smell. The smell was almost as strong as The Infant Tree’s itself. The Apple Family knew better than to harvest these apples for anypony’s consumption. These apples, despite their tantalizing appearance and over-abundance, always fell from the branches to rot on the ground. Maybe that’s why the smell was so bad.
Perhaps the size of these trees in this part of the orchard was a blessing. They obscured it from view, so at least only the Apples knew of its existence thus far. That didn’t change the fact that Applejack still needed to tend to it every year, and she tended to it alone.
But that was okay. She didn’t mind it, really. It was just another chore to attend to, just another motion of upkeep on the farm.
She had grown close enough that the smell was causing her eyes to water. She could see the tree now, underneath the boughs of the surrounding trees heavy with their poisoned fruit. Its height was normal for that of an apple tree, dwarfed by the monstrously sized ones around it. If anything, that made it almost appear positively minute.
Splorch.
Applejack shuddered at the feeling of the muddy, soggy ground beneath her hoof. She would never, ever get used to that. Still: only part of the job.
The ground around The Infant Tree in roughly a twenty-foot radius was fetid and waterlogged. The grass seemed to gain no purchase here. They had not appreciated the same boost in life that the trees that fell within its bounds. In fact, for some reason, the only plant life that grew at all were the trees that had all been planted long before The Infant Tree had been planted.
She slowly trudged on, coughing from the stinging sensation that always accompanied the stench whenever she got this close. It burned the inside of her nose, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.
Applejack rooted around in her saddlebag briefly and produced a clothespin. It hurt, pinching down on her muzzle, and barely did anything to abate the smell—but a brief respite was better than nothing at all. Besides, the rough clamping of it on her snout was at the very least a minor distraction.
She nearly stumbled over one of the gnarled roots that jutted from the sodden ground. Yelping softly, she caught herself, and hoped her saddlebag wouldn’t fall. That had happened one year. She had burned the saddlebag. The smell would have never come out.
To her eternal gratitude, it had not slipped from her back. That would have been irksome; she needed it to carry back the tree’s fruit. She could carry them back in her hooves, but to her infinite shame, she felt filthy touching them longer than she had to.
Clunk.
She had started walking again, and was so consumed in the smell and her own thoughts of revulsion at what was to come that she had walked headlong right into its trunk. She recoiled. Not from the pain, as the dull throbbing had a similar effect to the pinch of the clothespin (which thankfully had not been knocked loose by her collision), but because The Infant Tree always throbbed back whenever she touched its trunk.
Applejack slowly looked up and cringed involuntarily, as she always did when she had to gaze into its branches.
The Infant Tree was a tree that hung ripe with fetuses.
They hung there in there amniotic sacs, umbilical cords connecting to where the branches grazed their topsides. They jiggled in each breeze that cut through the orchard, the darkened silhouettes of gestating foals within suspended as if weightless in their centers. The ones that were closest to ripeness adorned the lower branches, sagging a bit with more obvious heft. A tiny blessing for Applejack this year.
The further one looked up into the tree, the more the "fruit" became obscured with leaves. She hadn’t made the obvious and most frightening mistake yet, but Applejack did always fear a year where she missed one, and wasn’t around for when a sac broke. This meant she spent several of the first part of the season returning to the tree to make certain this was never the case.
The first time she'd imagined missing one, her stomach had turned harder than if she had gotten a full and unfiltered whiff of the tree's overpowering odor.
Another small bit of luck in her favor this year—only two that seemed ready to pop. Gently, she lifted her hooves and felt around the bottom of the closest one. A tremble ran through her as the slick sac pressed into her hooves, and a lurch rolled through her stomach. She hadn’t always been able to do this without vomiting.
It pulsed like she held a heart in her hooves. She could see the tiny pony inside wriggling, squirming, writhing—yes, it was definitely trying to break free. She quickly dropped down, and curled her head to her saddlebag, producing a small, sharp knife.
With expert precision, she slowly leveled the blade against the side of the sac. Careful not to press down too harshly, she dragged it along the edge of the “fruit”, amniotic fluid beading at the incision mark. The foal thrashed around with growing intensity inside its home—like it could feel what she was doing. Maybe it could. Applejack definitely didn’t want to think about that.
She pulled the blade away, rearing back onto her hind legs as she carefully placed her hooves back under the sac. Now she just had to slowly spread it apart, and deliver the foal.
The foal had other plans. In its thrashing, a hoof connected right to where Applejack had weakened the membrane. It split open and a geyser of powerful-smelling liquid torrented out. Applejack gasped, the knife clattering from her mouth and sinking blade-first into one of the roots of the tree. She kept her hooves braced beneath it, the slightly-sticky liquid gushing down her hooves and forelegs.
She was quite proud of herself for not vomiting now.
Applejack gently peeled the remnants of the sac off the foal, exposing what she now saw was a little yellow colt to the world for the first time. His umbilical was still attached to the branch, and without the knife, which she usually used to cut them free...
She couldn’t exactly just leave him dangling there to grab it. Closing her eyes, she quaked, and swallowed hard as her stomach lurched again. Applejack knew what she had to do.
She leaned forward, and opened her mouth.
Mother mares do this all the time, she told herself as her teeth connected with the umbilical cord. The rubbery feel of it between her teeth, the sharp tang of amniotic residue on her tongue—
She gagged, and felt bile well in the back of her throat. She swallowed hard, and forced it back down. She couldn’t have that happen now.
Her teeth ground and tore into the umbilical, Applejack jerking and yanking her head to help break it. Her jaws were crushing down with as much force as she could muster. She was doing such a sloppy job.
At last, though, she felt her teeth connect with one another, and the foal slipped into her hooves. Its small eyes opened, and its mouth followed suit. The tiny colt let out a wailing cry into the air, taking its first breaths in heaving gasps. Applejack almost wanted to join in sobbing, but she was far too exhausted.
“Here ya go,” she said in what she had hoped would be a comforting tone. It came out as a hoarse whisper. Cringing at the sound, she slipped the foal into the side of her saddlebag opposite to the one that she had carried the tools in. It had been lined with soft wool blankets, carefully curated to be as comfortable as possible for their journey back.
The shining flash of silver caught her tired eyes. Applejack looked down; the blade of the knife was still embedded in one of the roots of the tree. Kneeling shakily, she took the hilt in her mouth and yanked it out in a single motion.
At first, there was nothing there. Slowly but surely, however, the wound left in the wood oozed a thick, crimson liquid.
Every leaf shook and the great trunk creaked and groaned, as if suffering the exertion of a strong wind. But no such breeze could be felt within the sickly shade.
Applejack stared at The Infant Tree, aghast, and then promptly turned tail and galloped back towards the farmstead as quickly as she could while still minding the whimpering and wailing foal in her saddlebag.