By Eben van Tonder
The year was 1723, and the Wechsel mountains stood silent, brooding over Styria like ancient gods who had not yet forgotten their worshippers. The stone ridges curled and dipped like sleeping dragons, their backs cloaked in forests of beech and spruce, of Schwarzföhren and Lärchen. Fog draped over the summits like linen left out to dry by a ghostly hand. Far to the east, through the breaks in the cloud, you could see the distant outlines of Hungary. To the south, Carinthia. And beyond, the unknown.
In the midst of this ancient land, on a day kissed by the early breath of winter, Kristi and Eben moved their cattle down from the high summer Alm. The animals followed the sunken tracks of the Hohlweg—ancient hollow ways worn into the earth over centuries by hooves and wheels, paths that remembered the Celts and Romans and the farmers of a thousand autumns.
Kristi walked ahead. She moved with the certainty of someone who had always belonged here. Her long blond hair caught in the wind and her eyes, glacial blue, scanned the land as if greeting old friends. She knew every rock, every twist of the Hohlweg, every tree that leaned over the path like a grandparent watching children return from play.
Eben followed beside her, silent, in awe of the land and of her. He had travelled far to reach this place—his blood bore the memory of Africa, where his great-grandfather once manned a cannon aboard a VOC ship and later planted vineyards and maize in the red soil of the Cape. But something had pulled him north, over oceans and ranges, and it had led him to Kristi.
He looked at her now, not just as a woman, but as a force. Wild. Free. Her spirit stitched into these mountains. She was not just from here—she was here.
“Kristi,” he said, his voice low and reverent, “sometimes I think this love… it was forged before memory. When the first wolves showed us how to be a pair. We were watching even then.”
She turned slightly, her voice wrapped in the dialect of these hills. “Ja, mei Eben… wir san net z’ammgschweißt, mir san z’schmolzn mitanaund. A wia a Legierung.”
(Yes, my Eben… we are not just fused together, we have melted into one. Like an alloy.)
He stopped. The cattle continued down the path, bells ringing gently like wind chimes in the fog.
“Yes! Something remarkable happened between us! I agree!”
“And when we part,” Kristi said, voice quiet now, “It is not only pain… it’s a wound. A gaping, open wound… like the mountain has been split apart.”
“I know,” Eben said. “When I’m away on business… with the pork buyers, the cattle men… all I feel is your absence. Like missing a limb. The longing is unbearable.”
“It becomes a force,” she said. “A power. An Urgewalt.”
“A torrent,” Eben nodded. “But not one that carries us away. We are the flood. We sweep.”
The cattle meandered down, their warm breath mingling with the fog, following Kristi as if tethered to her spirit. The Hohlweg sank deeper here, hedged by moss-covered stones and overgrown elder. Birds flitted between the branches—Zaunkönig, Buchfink, and Eichelhäher—their song mingling with the wind. A red deer startled nearby, vanishing into the thicket.
Stone markers lined the way, weathered by centuries, carved with forgotten runes. Some bore the sun-wheel, some the antlered god of the forest. They whispered of the time before the church bells rang in these valleys, when the people still left offerings to the Wilde Jagd and heard voices in the wind.
Kristi placed her hand on one of the stones. “Des is a uralter Platz,” she said. (This is an ancient place.)
“I feel it,” Eben said. “It feels like our love belongs here. Like it remembers.”
“I always knew,” she said. “Even before we met… I cried at the thought of ever parting from you. And I didn’t even know your name.”
“I remember you saying that,” Eben replied. “But even in my wildest dreams I never imagined this. There was no frame of reference. Then reality came. And it was… like glimpsing heaven. Like standing in front of the raw face of eternity.”
“No poem could capture it,” Kristi whispered. “No song could hold it.”
They walked on. The cattle rustled in the brush behind them. The path narrowed and they came to a small bridge over a stream, its stones slick with moss. Kristi paused.
“You remember the bridge?” she asked. “When I came back from shopping and you were waiting…”
“I will never forget it,” Eben said. “The smell of firewood… your footsteps… and then your eyes. That moment is carved into my soul.”
“You are the love of my life, Eben. Not just of this life. Of all my lives.”
He took her hand.
“And you are my everything. My moment-by-moment longing. My fierce and gentle flame.”
In that place—where deer still roamed, where the trees bore witness, where gods had once stood—they were more than man and woman. Their love was ancient and furious, a force of nature that echoed through the peaks and into the valleys. They were not new. They had returned.
And when he left again, when the cattle were folded into the warm dark of the barns and the markets in Vienna called, the pain of parting would be as wild as the wind.
But so too would be their reunion.
Because theirs was a love from before the written word. A love older than the stones.
A love remembered by the Hohlwege of Wechsel.
