Chapter 2: Winter Warfare and a Wife

My name is Otto Hayar. Our whole family worked for the same company. I did odd jobs like sweeping, trash cleanup, and unloading delivery trucks; up until I was 18 and allowed to do the dangerous and better-paying logging work. My older sister Anika answered the telephone and helped with paperwork in the company office. Our older brother Lars was a mechanic and Father led the logging team I had joined recently.

A lot of what my team did was heavy work that required strong muscles and powerful machines. To those unfamiliar with the process, it looks simple. Cut a tree down, remove the branches, then drag it to where it can be loaded on a truck. Now imagine doing it in deep snow, a kilometer from the closest road, next to a cliff, and occasionally with near-zero visibility. Just avoiding injury or death can be challenging some days.

I was a beginner and did the running around for Father and the rest of our team. I brought tools, fuel, and lunch to the more experienced men. I did most of the simple but unpleasant tasks, like clearing snow and ice off the vehicles and sharpening the saw chains.

There were only elementary and middle schools in our area. We would have needed to go 150 kilometers each way if we wanted to attend high school, which wasn’t worth it. In the remote towns in the North, if you could read and do basic math you usually got by fine.

At home we alternated between speaking Swedish, English, and Russian, in addition to our native tongue, Ostnordic. We hadn’t gone to high school but were far from stupid.

She had passed away nine Winters ago, but thanks to Great-grandmother my family was more capable than most. She had been a medic and saved many soldiers who fought against the Russians early in the Second World War. She told us a lot of stories about the old days. Her favorite was a small group of men hiding on the side of a mountain as they saw a Russian column approach. Our soldiers only had rifles and three shells left for their light field gun. Just the six of them gave 300 Russians a terrible time; even with their machine guns, truckloads of supplies, and four tanks.

They waited until all the vehicles were in a valley between two tall mountains. They aimed carefully and fired their cannon at the engine of the tank in the lead. The flaming behemoth completely blocked the road.

Our men ducked into a depression in the ground. The Russians stopped and fired thousands of shots, in every direction. When the Russians finished shooting and tried to find a way to move the wrecked tank, our men dragged their cannon through the woods and shot out a track on the tank at the back of the line. All thirty Russian vehicles were trapped, and the closest town was over twenty kilometers away. The Russians wasted thousands more bullets, while our six hid in a ditch.

They waited in the woods until the Soviets made camp. The Russians set up tents, posted guards, and looked ready to hold out against anything that might come their way. They even had heavy mortars and a pair of anti-aircraft guns. They relaxed and their cook made supper.

Our sergeant decided that instead of knocking out another tank, they would use their last precious cannon shell in a better way. They aimed and waited for the perfect moment.

When dinner was ready, the Russian cook had the enemy soldiers line up. The first bowl was being filled as our cannon fired. Dozens were splattered with hot stew, as the huge soup kettle exploded.

They had a cold, hungry, and sleepless night. Before our men skied out of the area, they sniped at the Russians until the sun started coming up, firing a single shot every minute or two to keep the enemy from getting any sleep.

The Russians lost the burned-out tank and at least sixty men, for the price of abandoning a field gun that was out of ammunition anyway. I didn’t envy the ones who had to fix a broken tank track on a 30 below day, while our snipers might have been watching them. Great-grandmother’s sister married the sergeant later. That story always made me smile, no matter how bad my day was.

I knew that eventually we lost. It was still very inspiring that with only 30,000 soldiers and forty armored vehicles, we held out against their thousand tanks and half a million men for a year. Their brilliant strategy that finally defeated us? They sent another half million soldiers. Very, very Russian. Simple, wasteful, and crude; but it worked.

Compared to most other nations the Russians can fight in Winter, but Ostnordians are born for it. If it were water instead of Winter, they were bears who could swim, but we were the sharks.

The recent war had been going on two weeks before we heard the Corporates were near our province. My family did the best we could to prepare. My Father Aatz and his co-workers used their saws and heavy equipment to destroy bridges and railroad tracks, in addition to blocking roads with large trees or rockslides. My siblings and I planned many ambush positions and escape routes, and got our supplies ready.

Father was on his Logmeister, a tracked vehicle with claw and chainsaw arms on the front of it, cutting an ancient fir. We watched the huge tree fall across the road near our cabin as the first of the Corporate Army Inc. tanks came around the bend. Father tried driving the ponderously slow machine the few hundred meters home and the tank fired. The Logmeister disappeared in a cloud of smoke and flame.

When the smoke cleared and we could see again, the machine was flaming rubble and he had vanished. The tank tried driving over the meter-thick tree trunk but got stuck. The two other tanks and several vehicles full of soldiers stopped behind it.

Anika screamed as she took her rifle off the cabin wall and tried to run out to fight them, but Lars and I knew better. We grabbed her arms and dragged her away from the front door. There was no way a hunting rifle would hurt a tank, and a hundred or more versus three was unlikely to end well for us.

We grabbed the things we had prepared and ran out the back door. We threw on our packs, slung our rifles, and skied away as fast as we could. We made it half a kilometer before they got to the cabin and started shooting in our direction.

They were bad shots, firing at least fifty times before Lars yelled. I stopped to look and saw he had been hit in the left arm. I turned back to help but he yelled, “GO! Keep going!” I was emotionally torn and paused to decide. Lars was hit again, this time in the back. I heard a terrible gurgling noise as he coughed out a lot of blood, then fell over into the deep snow.

Anika led me away. We skied across a frozen river, knowing all but the lightest vehicles wouldn’t be able to follow. Even men on foot might break the ice. I’d love to see one of their tanks try to drive through bone-chilling water ten meters deep! We went another eight or nine kilometers, mostly downhill. We crossed the river again, then switched from skis to snowshoes and climbed uphill. After several more kilometers, we reached a small clearing deep in the woods.

As the sun started to go down we dug a snow cave, like Great-grandmother had taught father, and he had taught us when we were small children. We had a meal of crackers, sausage, and dried fruit. The temperature was -25c outside, but in our cave it was only slightly below freezing. To natives of Northern Ostnordia, that’s almost comfortable.

As usual, we spread out a plastic tarp on the snowy bottom of the cave, then a thin foam pad, our other tarp, then our second bedroll atop it. It was vital to reduce the amount of heat lost to the ground. The final layer below us would be a wool blanket. We had another wool blanket and a sheet of thin plastic we would cover ourselves with, to keep any drips from melting snow off. That was enough to keep us warm, if we wore our parkas and other clothes while we slept.

In the morning Anika still agreed, we were going to make the Corporates pay for what they did. They took half our family away, and we wanted revenge. She said we needed help and more information about what they were doing. We’d ski to the Soviet border and ask the Russians to help us. With their renewed dedication to socialism, we were sure they would at least give us jobs and a place to live while we prepared to fight back.

We had a few handfuls of trail mix for breakfast, then headed out. The closest Russian town was 200km from home, which would take us five or six good days of skiing. We had food for eight days and I wasn’t worried about the weather. The more snow fell or blew around, the easier it would be for us to hide.

Last January my older brother Lars and I had gotten lost and spent a week in the wild. Hunting and fishing were unreliable during Winter, and we went hungry a few days. It wasn’t fun but easily survivable, since we knew what we were doing. The truly bad part was Father scolding us about getting lost when we finally made it back.

On our second day Anika and I made good time, until the snowfall increased greatly. We could barely see our feet, much less the terrain ahead. We realized we might fall off a cliff or run into trees and get hurt if we kept going.

We built another snow cave, significantly larger than the previous one, since we had plenty of time before dark. The snow stopped as night fell, and the wind got much stronger. By the time we got ready for bed, the temperature had dropped to minus fifty outside.

Even in the cave, it was around minus ten, and slowly getting colder. We needed to leave a large enough air hole open to the outside, so we didn’t suffocate, but that let in a lot of the cold.

Anika told me, “You know the best way to stay warm at night. We’ll do it to survive.”

As I joined her in undressing, I said, “Right.” We laid on our sides in just our underwear, with our coats and other clothing piled on top of us, with me spooned behind her.

When we got too cold, she would masturbate as I humped her butt through my shorts. We needed to be careful not to climax or sweat much. Any liquid on our bodies would cool us even more. It was awkward doing that with my sister, but it had been even worse when my brother and I had needed to. Each time we woke up too cold, we repeated our abortive self-arousal sessions, every hour or so.

The heavy snowfall returned in the morning, but it warmed up a little. Since we couldn’t ski with near-zero visibility, we snowshoed several kilometers then spent half the day ice fishing. We weren’t travelling very fast, but we’d get there if we kept making progress. We built a wall of snow around a small area to block the wind and made a campfire. We shared some dried berries she found and a small fish I had caught for lunch. Anika caught a bigger one later, which we had for supper and breakfast the next morning.