Excerpt from The Book Carriers, by Uladzimir Karatkevich, translated from Belarusian

‘The pine forest is for praying, the birch forest is for lovemaking, the oak forest is for raising willpower to a higher level, the spruce forest is for dealing with the Devil’.

This forest was spruce.

It stretched for almost thirty miles, every mile of which was marked by the hum of the wind in the treetops and a silence at its floor, carpeted with mossy tree branches and faded sprigs, with rare clearings of hummocky peat bogs and black brooks.

Here everything grew slowly, fighting for every breath, for every ray, and so the fly agaric mushrooms were blood-red and spruce-needle-covered red milkcaps, when kicked, oozed russet blood.

About halfway through, the forest’s hum was momentarily interrupted by the chime of a creek and then went on for a good fifteen miles. And everything on the other side of the creek was the same – but different as well.

For there lay Prussia.

The spruces there were the same but different, since they were Prussian, and the moss was Prussian, and the milkcaps were Prussian, and the forest’s hum was Prussian too.

So when a local peasant saw a hummock bejeweled with cranberries, he would also compare the berries to drops of blood, but he meant Prussian blood.