As we had agreed, at 10 a.m. the day after next, I rang Emma's bell. Dressed in jeans, solid boots and a flannel shirt, she was ready for our adventure. I drove the Unimog out of the garage and helped Emma load an ice chest and empty boxes on its tray. Then we drove leisurely off.
I knew the way because Helmut had taken me up to his hunt and forest two years ago. It was also in the Unimog which was, Helmut explained, his favourite, work-related, all-purpose vehicle.
The hunt was some forty kilometres from our town, with the last four kilometres a steep and stony logging track up the side valley of a side valley. The hut, just past the tree line, used to be a shepherd's summer hut. Helmut had rebuilt it to provide a reasonably comfortable shelter for himself and up to four hunting companions.
During the drive, Emma told me that Helmut had only once taken her up to show her his hut. After his death, it was partly disinterest and partly that she had no truck licence that stopped her from driving up in the Unimog. So, she had not familiarised herself with what was now her possession or saw where Helmut had his hunting accident.
It was just another thing that they never shared, she said. He would have not allowed her to get a licence to drive his Unimog or join him on his hunt or involve herself as a partner in his construction enterprise. But he was happy enough that people saw her driving around in his Mercedes 300.
Emma shrugged her shoulders:
"So, you see, Tom, why I am getting rid of everything that was his. I must, if I want to be free. Would you like this truck, Tom?"
Getting suddenly jolted in her seat, Emma burst into laughter. I had just turned the truck onto the final track. I put her in low gear. Then, being gentle on the accelerator and light on the steering -- as I had been taught -- I let the Unimog find the best way over the path's rocks and ruts.
When we pulled up at the hut, we at once slipped into our all-weather coats. It was cold and the grey; the overcast sky promised no improvement. Everything about and around the hut was in good order and when Emma unlocked the door, the same was true for the hut's inside.
Emma nodded and told me that Helmut employed a local pensioner to keep an eye on his hunt and look after the hut. After Helmut's death, she continued to send him a monthly cheque.
She looked around, grinned, and cuddled up to me:
"There isn't much to do for us here. We could go straight home again. Should we, Tom?"
I had to point out to her that we had to inspect her forest and that after doing this, she would be hungry and tired. So, I would need to feed her and tuck her into bed.
Emma was easily convinced. After taking the ice chest and other provisions into the hut, we sat down at the table with a cup of coffee from the thermos and brought sandwiches for lunch. Looking around, I was impressed. During my practicums in forestry, I spent many nights in isolated huts. None of them had offered the comforts of Helmut's rebuilt retreat.
The back section was partly partitioned off and had two bunk beds. The much larger front part of the hut had a corner bench - with the longer part wide enough to serve as a bed - and a sizeable table and two chairs. On the opposite side was a wooden chest, half a metre high with its lid secured with a padlock. Next to it was a rustic-looking sideboard, with various cooking and serving utensils on top and on its shelves, and an attached basin with a bucket underneath. In the corner was a large, modern wood heater that doubled as a stove. And next to it was a neat stack of wood.
I reprimanded Emma for lying that we had to rough it up here; the bunk beds especially, I said, with me sleeping on top, looked very comfortable. In response, Emma kicked me in the shin under the table.
I, somewhat stubbornly, insisted on having an 'expert's' look at the forest, knowing well that I would hardly discover anything different from what was said in the property's papers. Emma, equally stubborn -- she claimed it would rain -- refused to join me.
When I returned, just as the rain set in, I could report that I had found a significant number of mature larch trees that could be harvested without affecting the forest as primarily a hunting domain. Their valuable timber would fetch a high price.
Emma listened politely and said she would inform the solicitor.
While I was gone, she had also been busy. She grinned mischievously when I noticed what she had done.
Emma had shifted the bunk beds' mattresses to the floor, covered them with blankets, and spread out the beds' eight pillows. She had created, with obviously wicked intent, what looked to me not only like a children's playpen. Remembering Emma's ideas of play, at once awakened my cock.
Emma had also found the key to Helmut's 'treasure' chest on the truck's keyring.
Its lid was open, and I took a cursory look. In the two-thirds larger of the two compartments were a dozen or so bottles. Some of them were wine but most of them were of Enzian Schnapps, the 60% proof local hunters preferred in their traditional celebrations.
In the smaller well were two boxes of cartridges, a carton of cigarettes, a camera, a binocular, four books, two leather folders, and a shoe-box-size wooden cassette.
Emma had taken out and was reading what looked to me like a diary or logbook. She looked up at me and said, "Helmut led a life up here I knew nothing about."
Outside the rain had set in and the light was fading. I got the fire going in the stove and lit the kerosene lamp over the table and the one over the side port. Their soft light and the radiating warmth and crackling of the heater quickly set up an ambience of safety and comfort.
In the ice chest were luckily the bacon and eggs and the rye bread loaf that I needed to prepare my planned wood-cutters evening meal. On the wall over the sideboard hung a large, properly seasoned pan and soon the hut was filled with the homely smell of frying bacon.
Emma set the table, and in the mood of the occasion, left the champagne in the ice box and instead put a bottle of Helmut's Enzian on the table.
We were hungry and thoroughly enjoyed our meal, even soaking up the tasty fat at the bottom of the pan with our bread. The schnapps -- we took to it in not quite delicate sips -- proved the perfect stomach settler.
Eventually, Emma raised her glass for a toast, "To you, Tom." She paused, "If you were my husband, I would never let you sell our hut!"
"Even with its pit toilet outside and only a sponge bath inside?" I joked and nodded at the basin and the large hot water jug sitting at the back of the stove. Emma looked and burst into a giggle at my good boy coyness in not referring openly to her -- or our -- hygienic needs:
"So, you have prepared for us a hot water sponge bath?... With it, I think, we'll have as much fun as in the shower back home.... Where did you learn this? Not from your timber-getters!... You brutes did not wash from one week to the next."
I mumbled a non-excuse and got up to clear the table and restoke the fire. Emma fetched the cassette from the chest. On opening it, she saw that it was tightly packed with photos.
She pulled the lamp down closer to the table. When I returned from my tasks, she pulled me down next to her.
The first dozen or so photos, with dates on their backs, were records of hunting kills and of little interest to us.
The next three, though, shocked momentarily both Emma and me. They were of Kate, taken as her expression and body language showed, possibly against her will. They were, for me -- for Emma they were only a surprise - shockingly revealing.
Emma placed them in the sequence they were in the box on the table.
The first one shows Kate climbing out of the Unimog parked outside the hut. She laughs but wags an admonishing finger at Helmut. He must have gone down on a knee, perhaps to capture her parting legs as she struggled out of the truck.
Unwilling or not, Kate showed more than just legs. Not only had the sliding from her seat bunched her skirt high up on her thighs, it had also pressed her fully exposed crotch against the front of her panties. With the light white material stretched over the contours and into the slit of her shapely-lush pussy, Kate's arrival was erotically charged.
The second picture has Kate sitting on the bench near the hut's door. She is no longer in the conventional -- if disarrayed - streetwear of her arrival in the first picture. With boots on her stretched-out legs, she is wearing now brief, tight-fitting over her crotch, shorts. Her midriff is bare as are her more than half exposed boobs under a loosely tied-up blouse. Kate -- in her provocatively sexy get-up which she must have brought -- seemed to have just returned from a hot ramble through the woods with her host.
Kate hated -- as the photo shows -- to have the last shot taken. It provoked Emma into a rather cruel reaction. She giggled, then said, "Helmut was no gentleman. Unlike you, he took no care of what a lady needs after getting fucked."
The picture showed Kate, barefoot, in a man's unbuttoned shirt that hid as she turned in a shock away from the water trough outside, only one of her ample breasts. But it reached down to her pubes and covered half of her voluptuous ass. Judging by the light, it was perhaps late afternoon. In her hand, stretched in protest against the camera, is a washcloth. It was, I thought, while cruel, an erotically charged conclusion to the other two prints. Combined, they left for us nothing to the imagination.
Emma had turned the photos looking for a date. There was none. Then she said, quietly, with no sign of anger:
"I had no idea Helmut continued his affair with Kate, her being married and a mother."
"How do you know these photos were not taken long ago?"
"Kate's hair; she only changed to this style two years ago. They were probably up here early last summer. And he did not need to seduce her, did he? So, besides their fucking up here, they would have met and fucked regularly at other times too.
