(COLD/Posting #3). This 3rd episode gets Ewald back on his impossibly long 5000+ mile journey home, after he's saved by a Siberian shaman.

Interesting book on Siberian shamanism: <https://www.amazon.com/Shamans-Siberian-Spirituality-Western-Imagination/dp/1847250270>).

Amazon Customer

5-STARS.

If you enjoy historical fiction blended with a mystical twist like I do, you will enjoy COLD. Set against the frigid Siberian winter, a WWI German prisoner suddenly finds his gulag deserted by his Russian captors and sets out to trek his way home to Germany. His journey is one of survival of the human spirit and serendipitous meetings along the way. I was drawn in by the storyline and couldn't put it down.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076VBJB62

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(COLD/Posting #3).

(The story continues…(see basic STORY SYNOPSIS below, copied off of book: <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076VBJB62> ).

What was hard to imagine while writing this fantasy was how my father survived his WWI Siberian experience in his early 20’s, heading home after across Siberia right after living in a prison camp for 4 years. He wouldn’t have had good supplies (no suitable winter clothes, no food, no tools…) to travel in sub-zero conditions without the extreme help from someone.

So reaching this spot in the story suddenly generated a female Shaman character–– I‘d heard of ‘shamans in Siberia,’ so that knowledge helped create that kind of person. In any case, as you’ll read here, he desperately needed everything she could give, including her love.

The story picks up just after she’s opened the door to her cabin, letting my “father character” bust in, door slammed to cut off a pack of wolves only seconds from attacking.

He’s now sitting at her table, being fed.

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(EPISODES ARE FROM MY BOOK, “COLD, the 1918-19 Siberian Escape of Captain Ewald Loeffler.” See amazon site here, for a more detailed SYNOPSIS: <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076VBJB62>)

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(COLD/Posting #3).

I’m telling the story in the 1st person voice of my father:

In any case, maybe it was my lack of female contact that intensified my energy toward this woman who saved me, but who can say. I felt a friendship growing from almost the first second I dove into that cabin and made her acquaintance. Because so little time had passed since she had grabbed me and pulled me inside, I was still reeling from her strong grip.

She set a bowl of some kind of meat stew before me at the thick wooden table and I sat down. I tried not to outrace my caution. I knew that too much food, too fast after several days of absence, could shock the body – even kill it –if care wasn’t exercised. So, with a spoonful in front of my lips I first blew breaths to cool it down, then sipped slowly. She ate too, after separating her hair, moving it back past her shoulders. Again I took notice of her – a full face with attractive eyes, nice jaw, hollow checks, as was fashionable in some society circles. Her face held a beauty that was undeniable. My excitement at being hosted by such a marvelous creature of God was only increasing. My life in her hands.

Thankfully, she tolerated the extended length of time I played with my food, eventually finishing half the bowl. Lifting the empty bowls off the table she deposited them into the washing trough, returning with a rag to clean up and remove crumbs. Her arm passed close across me, bringing her hair in contact with my cheek in a wisp of fragrance. It wasn't perfume but her own smell, I guess. When she turned to look at me for just a second, I pulled her head to mine, kissing her lips. She didn't resist. I think she expected it, had read my mind at the very beginning, like I had read hers.

Within minutes she had helped me undress while shedding her own layers of clothes. With a wetted cloth she then cleansed me of my camping grime, while making the procedure a tantalizing game. She adroitly maintained the desire that burned between us, timing things perfectly. Bedding together finally beneath furry blankets, we clutched and kissed furiously. In fractions of an hour I had gone from being almost eaten by wolves to making love to a beautiful woman in her warm cabin.

I was an old man of 21, old beyond my years for the prison camp depravations. But in her arms I returned, if only momentarily, to my biological age, becoming a good lover and match for the young Russian girl who saved my life. She was much younger than I first suspected. 19 or even 20? She was lithe, with the smoothest skin I’d ever touched. Night fell, unnoticed, and I slept soundly, delivered from frozen horrors just outside.

She – the lovely woman who saved me – spoke very few Russian words I could understand. The rest, a regional dialect, was new to me. I tried to respond in my best ‘prison’ and schoolboy Russian, not sure what was being communicated.. But in the days that followed I somehow learned how this young woman had found herself alone in a cabin without a man – no father, brother, or husband – until my arrival. Through her sign language and a blend of her tribal dialect and what I understood in Russian, I came to understand that she had spent recent time fending for herself after her father had fallen sick and died. I also learned that young man from the nearby village had expressed his desire to marry her, but then he had been killed when he was run down by a pack of wolves while trying to supply rabbits for the stewpot. She explained that he died ‘before his purpose had been revealed.’ Believe it or not, this concept of ‘fate’ had been communicated between us without a common language. Between running her finger along my palm – following my lifeline with her nails, pointing to her hands, adding certain signs, symbols and drawings she’d collected, helped bring our conversation to these spiritual points.

The young woman, calling herself ‘Nanra’ (taken from Nanra-naw I later learned), excused herself to the kitchen area, to make us some hot tea. Waiting for the water to boil, thoughts of purpose in life and fate lingered. My purpose? Why had I been selected to be saved and ushered into the safety and warmth of the cabin, not lying dead on the battlefield, or eaten?. Maybe my purpose, at least temporarily, was to make her feel loved and whole again. Can a person's entire purpose be centered on improving someone else’s? When you give love and it's reciprocated, the sun is brighter and no amount of clouds and fog can dim that inner illumination. That's how it was for us, the newly minted lovers.

We were suddenly a couple, inhabiting a house, sharing food and shelter and warmth. Since the caveman days these things were what all men needed to be happy, and we had them. Wolves howling outside meant nothing to us. Nanra had filled the sides of the fireplace with enough dry logs to wait out the attackers. And the food was plentiful; she’d gathered turnips, other edible roots, and had stored them carefully on shelves.

We looked out the window slots together and laughed at the upset, four-legged creatures, as they sniffed around, nipped each other, turned this way and that before finally following the lead male back to the woods a couple hundred feet away. When the coast was clear I went out and grabbed another armful of cut logs to place on the hearth. We lived in this heaven together for almost two months before my purpose required a departure.

3.

After about 50 days I could feel my angst increase, because the weather had begun to change, if ever so slightly. My lover could sense something almost before I did. She made comments about the distance I still had to go to return to my family (she had a roughed-out map of Siberia and Europe), voicing my thoughts before they had emerged from my consciousness. Why did she say that, I wondered? Was she trying to get rid of me? No, that wasn't it. She just knew. She had read my future. I had been told about such Siberian shamans while in the camp, had laughed along with the others. But for some reason I hadn't connected Nanra to that description. Sure, I had watched her mix the ingredients for our stews and had marveled at her cooking skills as she stirred the pot, but in the books I’d seen, witches were always portrayed as craggy old women. Never had a spry young woman like Nanra been pictured. Now, however, over time, I saw my mate more clearly. She was a new generation of shaman, born to it through centuries. She had saved me, healed me through food and lovemaking, had embraced me and refueled me for my mission ahead. From the very beginning she had known I would be moving on. So I wasn’t terribly surprised when she communicated that I’d be leaving in two days. She had held up two fingers so there wasn’t any confusion about the timetable.

Just before she completed the packing of my kitbag, filling it with as much food and sleeping cloth as could be fit inside, she took my hand and touched it to her belly. Although I couldn’t detect a bulge, it hit me squarely that my lover was indicating a pregnancy. She was with child. I would be a father. Father and deserter. I'll admit that the news was shocking. Thoughts immediately filled my brain. I must stay, must help with the birth, must assist in the raising of the child. But Nanra ended all my musing when she explained through a rapid series of hand signals, tribal expressions aided by pictorial drawings, that a German child would be very unwelcome in her village and country. She diagramed that as soon as I was gone, on my way back to Germany, the child would miraculously revert to Russian, with full credentials for a happy life. It was really that simple. I would be best serving the child by disappearing (her drawing showed my footprints in snow, leading away from the cabin...). Hard as it was, I finally accepted that that was the right thing to do. My job was to extricate myself from all the love and warmth and security, pack up and exit. And, believe me, it took all my concentration and resolve to do that.

We said our goodbye at the door. We kissed. Since I was fully clothed for the cold, with coat and backpack, I started sweating almost immediately. She easily read my thoughts once again, slipped the latch and exposed us both to the sub-freezing elements. A final hug and I was expelled. I looked back, once, at the cabin chimney, watching the smoke swirl into the sky. My purpose? Still unknown. My job? To walk 5000-plus kilometers without perishing.

With each foot step away from Nanra I repeated the resolve of saving my family. Step–I'm, step–saving, step–my, step–family. That cadence helped me make good time. Very shortly I was quite a few kilometers away from the warm homestead to which I’d become accustomed. You've certainly heard of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Well, I can now attest to the psychological and physical pain they must have endured. And yet mine was more severe, because I didn't have a companion anymore, someone to love, complain to or commiserate with.

Step, step, step, step.

Even though I was now certainly four or five kilometers closer to Germany, a sizable portion of my consciousness lingered back at the cabin. I could sense the texture of logs to keep out the cold, smell that decay of mud-soaked rice stalks stuffed into the cracks to ward off any drafts, intermingled with the intoxicating fumes of fresh cooking. But looking around at my present circumstances, staring out at the endless snow and trees reaching far off in the distance, my sane mind knew that the only real smells I had left were that of super-cold winds and snow furling by.

There was no sap in the air, no female aroma, and no smoke from any fire. Deeper memories of Nanra continued to barge into my mind.

(To be continued…)

(COLD/Posting #4 next)