Born in Belarus and raised in a small community just outside of Brasłaŭ. I grew up in a poor family with little money, my parents could not put me through school so I learned all I know from home being taught by my mother and father. My dad used to take me on hunting and fishing trips from the age of 5 so I could learn to provide for myself and in the future provide for my family. Whilst my mother, a wise woman who could predict how the world was going to be like many years in the future, did her best at teaching me English, basic knowledge of math and many other things I missed due to not being able to go to school. Of course the education I acquired was not as good as one I could have gotten in school, but it was enough for me to not be some hillbilly from the forest that lacks the basic human thought process and I was grateful to my mother for pushing me all those years.


And so I grew up, became a man, watched my parents wither away in old age and lived the life I was taught to live, although alone. Being alone for all those years took a toll on me, my parents taught me how to take care of myself, but I did not get much experience with people during all those years in the forest or in the house studying, put simply, I had no friends, and quite honestly I did not know how to make some either. Until one night I bumped into a man during a night time walk in the park. I was walking around wondering what to do with my life, and it seemed that he was doing the same. We sat down on a park bench and talked, for hours. And that's how I met my first friend that I ended up loving like a brother, and formed a true connection. We ended up getting together on the regular, just sitting around talking. He had an interesting life with a very different upbringing from me, which I believe is the reason we could talk for days without getting tired of it. I showed him my life, he showed me his. We went on hunting trips at least twice a month, then 3 times a month, then 4. He had been searching for a job he loved for years, and without even realizing that it was a job, he fell in love with hunting. Before we even knew it, every hunting trip we went on we went together, of course the start was rough since he had never even held a gun in his life, and lets not even talk about his tracking skills. But that was fine, because for the first time in my life, I had someone to do those things with, and he had found a job he loved. But happiness from such a thing did not last long for us, we challenged ourselves to beat our old records over and over, until there were no bigger animals to hunt, and no bigger fish to catch. After quite a few years of sitting in the cabin being pretty much cut off from the outside world for most of it, we drove ourselves insane with the idea of never being able to break another one of our records, over a long period of time those had become the only moments we had truly felt happiness and we didn't even realize that. Until one faithful night, when I saw a dream of something my mother had once told me about, Eikthyrnir, an old deer from the tales of the nords from centuries back. In the dream I saw him, standing in a meadow, eating the plentiful herbs that were laid out like the most beautiful painting that I have ever seen. He did not seem to see or sense me at first, until a thunder from the skies rang through my ears and in an instant, Eikthyrnir had turned and was staring into my soul. In that instant I woke up, not afraid of what I had just seen, but instead, I felt like I had seen my purpose in life, seen what I had to do and where I had to go. I woke Vadim up instantly and told him of my dream, told him of what we had to do and where we had to go. And by that point we were both just the right amount of fucked in the head to not even doubt it, so we started planning.


And so began our trip, we did not have too much money, but we had plenty of meat, Leather and just about anything else you can get from an animal. We went to the town, and Vadim used his people skills to strike some deals with the locals as I watched. We made deal for some old soviet era lada that was on its deathbed, but we didn't expect much more from what we had. We planned to drive that thing to the coast of Lithuania and figure out a way onto a boat from there. Crossing the border wasn't really an issue with corrupt border guards on both sides, but of course our luck ran out about 50km from the coast when our car broke down, Vadim knew how to drive a car, but he had no idea about fixing those things, and me, I had never even learned how to drive. Of course nobody was gonna pick up some random dudes on the side of a road with rifle bags on their backs, so we had to spend a full day to walk the rest of the way. Once we reached Klaipėda, the port city on the western coast of Lithuania we started looking for a boat that we could board, we obviously couldn't do a commercial voyage with our gear so we had to come up with an alternative. On the first day we were too exhausted to go around looking for a man crazy enough to let random people with weapons onto their boat, so we used a big portion of the money we did have to get a room at a local motel, spent some more money on a couple of drinks at a local pub, and just sat there talking about the upcoming parts of the trip, for once we had something new to talk about, something we both were as enthusiastic about as we used to be about hunting back in the day, we had something else to be happy about other than breaking old records that nobody would even remember a couple of years from now. Weather we found a magic deer at our destination no longer mattered, it was the new experience and the new lands we truly needed. And turns out luck was with us on that night, a fisherman with a story as tragic as something you would have heard from the bards of the olden times overheard us talking and approached us. He had come here from Sweden, but not on purpose. He had lost his men to a storm less than a week ago, and needed some men to help him take the vessel home, she was a very old fishing boat built to be crewed by a minimum of five men. Although there was only three of us, we thought we could make it, just cut out a few responsibilities here and there and we'd be fine right? And so we started the voyage on the following day, with the seas calm and the howling of the wind as quiet as the squeak of a mouse, we crossed the Baltic to Sweden. During the crossing the captain had told us about his crew, and how he had to go to every single one of those families and tell them what had happened, even I with my little social experience knew how hard that was going to be, so we offered to go with him before we continued our journey, and once we were done  he could drop us somewhere near the border of Norway.  So that's what we did, we went through Sweden meeting the families of the ones that had been lost, we thought we would be there for the captain as emotional support, talk to him and help him through it as we went, but in reality those couple of days were some of the most silent days of my life, I did not know what to say, the reactions of the families one after another. It was heartbreaking. So once we had finished, he dropped us off at the tip of northern Sweden, and from there we walked. Looking for I don't know what, some kind of feeling I guess. And then I got it, the meadow from my dream, it was there, right before our eyes in real life, exactly the way I saw it. And that's where we set up camp, but of course we couldn't do without any civilization, so we looked for the closest road, and started heading towards the closest town  to us, some place called Nyheim. And that's the place we would get the supplies we needed for the next year as we spent our time looking for the majestic creature from my dreams. But as we all know now, the future had something else planned for us.

We didn't have long until the start of the pandemic hit us. At first we didn't think much of it, thought it was going to pass in a couple of months and life would be back to normal. But as things got worse and we heard the news about it all it just seemed smart to stay in our cabin in the woods that we had found abandoned when we first arrived, after all, Norway did have way better infection rates than any other country, even if it was through what they called "quarantine camps", it seemed the best place to be. All of it really feels like a dream thinking about it now, the "unknown mist", the bombing of Oslo...

But you know what they say.