Copyright 2021 by Limnophile
Permission granted to print or repost for non-commercial use if the author is credited.
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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, shoveling snow, and unloading delivery trucks; up until I was 18 and allowed to do the dangerous and well-paying logging work. My older sister Anika answered the telephone and helped with paperwork in the office. Our older brother 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, ten kilometers from the closest road, next to a cliff, with nearly zero visibility. Just avoiding serious 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 saws.
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, the 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 forty 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.
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.
I knew that eventually we lost. It was still inspiring that with only 40,000 soldiers and almost no tanks to speak of, we held out a year against their thousand tanks and half a million men.
Their brilliant strategy that finally defeated us?
They sent another million soldiers. Very, very Russian. Simple, wasteful, and crude; but it worked.
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The recent war had been going on two months 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 block roads, while my siblings and I got 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 slow machine the few hundred meters home and the tank fired. The Logmeister disappeared in a cloud of smoke. When we could see again, the machine was flaming rubble and he had vanished.
