c.2009 New York Times News Service@

LYKOSHINO, Russia - Rudolf Denyayev climbed over a small ridge on Friday night and saw the whole disaster spread out before him: train passengers wandering blindly, luggage tossed in all directions, screams coming from the derailed cars.

These were the frozen hours after a bomb devastated a luxury train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing more than 25 people, and before the country rushed to help.

The explosion took place deep in the forest, as the train sped past a power station and a small painted wooden house where an elderly woman lives alone. Because the area is so remote, people from nearby towns got to the site hours before rescue workers, and some of the grimmest work - sorting the dead from the living - fell to them.

By the time Denyayev was down the hill, some passengers had straggled out of three derailed cars, some barefoot and some barely dressed, as if they had just gone to sleep to the quiet rhythm of the train. They didn't seem to know what was going on, Denyayev recalled in an interview on Saturday night.

Anatoly Myagchenkov, a tractor driver who made it to the site with two friends, noticed that he was stepping on passports, money and cell phones as he approached the overturned train cars. He held onto the back of a friend's sweater. It took all his concentration to keep from stepping on a body.

''Everyone thought no one was coming," said Myagchenkov, 30. "The passengers thought I was one of them. Those who couldn't stand, we took out the window. We put the living on one side, the corpses on the other."

The next 24 hours would bring wave upon wave of strangeness to this village near the crash site where weathered wooden houses evoke another century. Around 30 rescue cars were immobilized in the mud as they struggled to reach the wounded over country roads; reporters made the two-mile trek from a nearby road, walking along the train tracks.

Then federal agents began visiting residents of Lykoshino one by one, asking them if they had seen anyone unusual - in particular, anyone who appeared to be from the Caucasus region in southern Russia, which includes Chechnya. Muslim extremists from the Caucasus have for years been waging an insurgency and have been responsible for many, but not all, terrorist acts elsewhere in Russia in recent years.

Rumors circulated all day, said Denyayev, 38. Some said four young men from the Caucasus had been renting a room from a local man - something that would stand out in Lykoshino, which has dwindled to a population of 600, most of them pensioners.

The work, for those first hours, was agonizingly slow. Myagenchok spent three hours taking apart train seats, and he estimates that he withdrew 13 bodies in that time. While trying to clear a car of shards of twisted metal, he bent down and realized that what he was looking at was a piece of a human brain.

When he headed home, spent, he said he met the first column of ambulances to arrive.

But even inside his warm house - where earlier in the day he had celebrated his daughter's second birthday - he could not shake the picture of the train car from his mind, and he lay awake until morning.

A day later, Myagenchov's face was still slack with shock from what he had seen. Asked what should happen to the people who bombed the train, he answered quickly and quietly.

''They should be shot," he said.