Chapter One

Trespass

Ebert Gausel: June 1937
With a sigh I lowered myself down onto a boulder. I wiped my brow with my sleeve. Below me, lay the steep forested slopes of one of the upper branches of Bavaria's Brunnen Valley. As I tried to catch my breath, I pulled the cork from my water bottle, and took a drink.
I stretched my aching legs and soaked up the view. I was high, almost to that point where the soft greens of the deciduous oaks, sycamores, and elms, were replaced by the stiff majesty of the pines that covered a thick band of the higher slopes. It had rained the night before and the crystal sharpness of the Alpine air was so clear it seemed I could reach out and touch the ragged slopes on the other side of the valley.
The hammering in my chest finally eased, allowing me to breathe more easily. I took a cloth from my rucksack and wiped a few imaginary specks of dust from the barrel of my new Mauser 8 millimeter hunting rifle. I was still absurdly pleased with the engineered grace of this deadly melding of walnut and steel. At a month's wages, it was an object hard enough won to be treasured.
For over an hour, I had climbed all the way up from where I had left my car in the wooded shade of a steep little lane. I had not been rewarded for my efforts by as much as the sight of a rabbit. My prowess as a hunter seemed at stake. I desperately needed to find something to shoot. Even if only to prove to my friend, Erich Trinkhaus, I was not the inept Berlin boy he had jokingly claimed I was. The smirk on his normally friendly face the night before still rankled.
After a few minutes, deciding the view alone made the climb worthwhile, and feeling moderately content, I brought my Mauser up to my shoulder. Squinting, I peered through my telescopic sight, scanning the slopes below. I muttered crossly to myself, ‘Well, Ebert Gausel, you are a prize fathead.’
For perhaps a hundred meters below me, snaking up the slope between the trees, lay a well-worn path. It climbed across the slope, roughly paralleling the route I had laboriously climbed over to get to my vantage point.
An hour's scramble would have been transformed to a comfortable stroll, had I seen it before. Perhaps Trinkhaus had something, it seemed I was no mountain man, not that I would ever admit as much to him.
Still peering through the scope, I traced the line of the path back down the slope. As I looked I glimpsed, for a moment, a bobbing movement. It baffled me. I stared harder. Suddenly it made sense, someone's head was appearing over a fold in the ground. With a growing sense of curiosity, I squinted into my scope to see who was coming.
After a moment I could see it was a girl. At first she was hard to see, as she was a long way off and as she moved along the path, she kept disappearing and reappearing behind trees and the wrinkles of the mountain side. I felt puzzled; it seemed she was coming surprisingly quickly up the slope. Initially I thought it was a trick of looking through the scope, but then as she drew closer I realized she was actually loping up the path.
I watched as the girl continued to move closer. Now I could see she was wearing a sleeveless white cotton top and brief black shorts, possibly a League of German Girls sport uniform. While at a distance, I could see she was tall and slim, and as she drew still nearer, I could make out that she had blonde hair firmly tied back in a bun. I guessed from her hairstyle and appearance that she was probably in her late teens, or possibly early twenties.
I was amazed, she was actually still running, albeit slowly now, up such a steep and long path. Her stamina must be extraordinary.
This Diana of the forest was watching the path, her gaze fixed to the loose surface in front of her, so she had not seen me. As she came closer, I made the most of the voyeuristic pleasure derived from watching an attractive young woman. The uniform, with its brief shorts, showed off her shapely long legs and her tight little top did nothing to hide the appealing bounce of pert but full breasts.
I hoped she would glance up, but as she almost drew level with me she disappeared behind a clump of sycamores that clung tenaciously to the slope. Sighing with disappointment, I had hoped to complete my titillation by watching what I suspected would be a shapely bottom. I shifted my focus away from the point where the girl disappeared. I traced the line of the path to where it reappeared further up the slope. I focused on where she should appear, waiting patiently.
Suddenly, I stared open-mouthed with surprise. Trotting down the path in the opposite direction was a huge wild boar, the menace of its ugly tusked face almost palpable, even at my distance. It took me a moment to grasp, the girl and the beast were on a collision course. I realized with a surge of alarm, the girl was in real danger. I frantically worked the bolt on my rifle to chamber a round, but I was too late, even as I brought my sight to bear the animal disappeared from view as well.
Leaving my rucksack and bottle where they lay, I began an awkward run diagonally down and across the slope. It was rough ground, littered with boulders and branches, with the encumbrance of the rifle I could not make anything like the speed I wished. My heart jumped with alarm, as the terrifying sound of a woman's scream rang across the valley.
I almost tumbled the final few meters onto the path, a surface of packed clay and gravel. My rifle held out in front of me, I hurried up the way as quickly as I could. As I went, I could hear the angry grunting of the brute. Terrible images filled my mind. A beast that large was easily able to savage someone to death.
I rounded a bend in the path and sighted my quarry. The boar had its front legs resting up against the bole of a good-sized oak that grew down slope of the path. I was amazed at the size of the animal, two hundred kilograms, or more, I guessed. It seemed to bristle with menace as it peered up into the tree. I breathed a sigh of relief. From my position I could see the girl's legs hanging down from a branch. She was perhaps three meters up. She must have gone up that tree like a frightened squirrel.
I dropped to my knee and brought my rifle up to my shoulder. Breathing out slowly I sighted just behind the beast's shoulder and gently squeezed the trigger, the rifle thumped against my shoulder. There was a puff of dust from the beast's side as the bullet tore into its flank and the roar of the rifle rang across the valley, echoing and re-echoing. I worked the bolt to chamber a second round, just in case my first shot had not done the trick, but the animal went straight down in a heap.
I clicked on the rifle's safety catch and strode up the path towards my victim. I felt like a hero, as I marched toward the fair damsel I had saved. But much to my surprise, the damsel was not having any of it. The girl quickly dropped down a couple of branches before lowering herself to the ground. She bent over the pig before straightening up and fixing her gaze on me. ‘You useless maniac, what the hell do you think you were doing?’
She was furious, I stumbled to a halt totally speechless and just stared at her. Everything about her conspired to undermine me. I had expected relief and gratitude, instead I was confronted with towering rage. She was, as I had thought probably around her late teens, and as I had seen from a distance, attractive. Extraordinarily beautiful would be more accurate, with an exquisite face, from which flashed the most amazing blue eyes. In contrast, her outpouring of fury was anything but angelic. My dumb silence only drove her to new heights of passion, a tirade delivered in the accent of a Bavarian peasant, ‘I asked you, what the hell you thought you were doing?’
I felt totally off balance; she was simply magnificent in her anger. I had never seen a more remarkable girl. It was a thrill just to watch her, yet her unreasonable reaction was vexing, frustrating. With difficulty I found my tongue, ‘I was trying to save you from the brute.’
‘Save me? I was perfectly safe in the tree, a few minutes at the most and it would have wandered off.’
‘It attacked you.’
‘Only because I surprised it! They are really very shy. We are down to two breeding boars in this valley because of poaching. No, now one thanks to your imbecilic act.’
Now it was my turn to become angry, ‘Now listen here, I was trying to help.’
‘No! You listen! You are trespassing on private land. You have destroyed a valuable animal, and the gamekeeper I passed at the bottom of the hill will already be on his way up here to see who is shooting. So if you don't want to get into any more trouble this morning get lost. Get the fuck out of here!’
‘Well,...’ I was surprised, I couldn't recall ever having been sworn at by a girl, ‘I'm going.’
‘Yes go, fucking go!’
This last delivered in a shriek of fury.
I looked back once, as I rounded the bend that took me out of sight. She was standing with her hands on her hips still glaring at me. I groaned with frustration, what an infuriating experience. I had never been abused in such a way by any female, girl or woman, not even my sister. Still bemused, I began the climb back up to where I had dropped my things.