The train cab was capped tightly, enclosed and stuffy. As the engine heated up, Hugo and his companions—Lieutenant Gordon, Private Wodziczko, and the others crawling past the tender—began to feel adventurous camaraderie. That Gordon had located the previous engineers’ tot of vodka stashed above the cab’s forward window helped immeasurably.

The train rolled out of the yards and down the only set of tracks that led from town. Which was fortuitous, because the Americans had no idea where they were going. The city quickly fell away, lumber yards and train maintenance pits replaced by tumbledown peasant shacks, and then trees. Hugo felt like an expert, however, as the first distance marker, and then the second, flew past. “Those are versts,” he said with pride. “Two-thirds of a mile.”

“I know that,” said the tiny Wodziczko, whose admiration for Lieutenant Gordon admitted no light to shine on anyone else. “Everyone knows that.”

Hugo put his hands on his hips. “You keep watching the pressure gauge, Wodziczko.”

“Don’t show off, Hugo,” said Lieutenant Gordon, rocking on his heels. “And don’t give orders, either.” Then there was agreement between Gordon and Wodziczko that everyone knew how long a verst was, and to pass the vodka.

The tender was full of stone pine, which burned with fierce heat yet took ages to consume. Hugo’s anger at Gordon’s lordly ways and Wodziczko’s desire to caddy for officers was eclipsed by the excitement of pursuit, even at such a slow pace, across the foreign territory. Hugo—who didn’t drink—was bouncing on his engineer’s chair, making noises with his cheeks that echoed the sound of the driving wheels. The trees—for that was the entirety of the view—did not whistle by in a blur, but their passage was intoxicating. Hugo pulled the whistle chain, hoping for a basso announcement to the Bolos that the United States was on their tail. Instead, the sound was swallowed as if some vast biblical sea creature had already opened its awesome and awaiting mouth.

The train was rolling through the forest, with tall and dark spruce, alders, and endless pine trees, massive, shoulder to shoulder, frowning giants whose roots clutched at trackless miles of swamp. Hugo wanted to see something else, something other than forest, and yet there was no escape. The tracks curved gently left, or gently right, but still there was no view other than what was quickly becoming unbearable. As the twentieth and twenty-fifth verst markers rumbled by, the forest had begun to work a strange and malicious magic upon the train crew. Without a word on the subject passing from man to man, they realized where the forests of fairy tales had come from.

“Hugo?” Gordon leaned against the engineer’s cab with folded arms. “Just for the sake of asking, how do we turn this thing around?”