Four days had passed by and Deshavi was now walking on her own. She had been nothing, but a hassle! She wouldn't talk and at first she had refused to eat, that is until Trent had threatened to hold her down and force feed her. From then on she had eaten regularly enough.
We weren't the men, who had raped and mistreated her, but she treated us as such. Her treatment of me, however was mild in comparison to how she treated Trent. She wouldn't let him within 10 feet of her. My patience was beginning to fray with her, but I continued to preach loving self reserve to myself, in my actions toward her.
Trent had withdrawn into a depressed reclusive state and he kept off to himself. I was the only one, who daily sought to engage either of them, often to no avail. As best as I could tell Deshavi was mending up well. She wouldn't let me close enough to check on anything. Her fever seemed to be gone and that was what I took the most comfort in from a distance.
No fever meant no infections, at least on the surface. Inside she was a different story. As of yet she hadn't proven suicidal, but I knew that she was contemplating it. I knew I would have been in her place, if I'd suffered what she had.
She'd only been walking for two days now and we had taken our trek south at a slower pace. Going slower had helped me have the time to augment our dwindling food supply along the way. It hadn't been much. Some nuts and late-season berries was about it. I'd been lucky knocking a few squirrels loose from their perches with well thrown rocks. While I didn't feel any pursuit of us was close at hand, I still wasn't going to risk a rifle shot at any of the larger prey that we had seen, such as red deer or wild boar. The echo of a shot can carry a long distance. It would have been a different story, if I still had my pistol with the silencer on the end, but I had lost it in the escape, as Trent had his. All we had were our rifles, some grenades, and our knives. One thing was for sure, we were ill-prepared to spend the winter in Siberia.
I had already made up my mind that we were pressing on through. We might have to fight our way through some early snows, but there was no way we were going to stay held up here and outlast a long cold Russian winter.