It takes Madkam Deva only 20 paces off a dirt footpath cutting through a verdant forest to find the place where large orange ants crawl over a dark maroon stain. Another bloodstain is a few metres away. This is where he saw one villager cut down by police bullets, and then a second collapsing onto the forest floor, he said.
'I'm scared they'll come after me now,' said Mr Deva, who doesn't know his age but guesses he is around 20. Pointing to a pink scar, he said a bullet grazed his right forearm but he managed to escape the barrage of gunfire.
His account of what happened in this remote corner of eastern India on January 8 boils down to this - that police rounded up 24 tribal villagers, told them they were going to a station about 10km away for questioning, and then lined them up for execution en route. Five, including Mr Deva, escaped.
Police Superintendent Rahul Sharma, the top officer in the Dantewara district of southern Chhatisgarh, one of the least developed states in India, provides an account as detailed and vivid as Mr Deva's, and completely contradictory.
'It was a very genuine encounter,' said Mr Sharma, who recounted how his men came upon a group of armed Maoists and engaged them in a firefight. No police were killed, though he said one policeman took shrapnel in his hand from a grenade.
Numbering in the thousands every year, 'encounters' or 'encounter killings' are shootouts between Indian police or the army and any criminal element, whether terrorists or petty thieves. They can also be stage-managed, as in when police place a gun in the hands of a dead person, leading to the popular phrase 'fake encounters'.
India's limited forensics capabilities make investigating the claims of either side - if there are two sides left standing - hard to verify. And the national media often repeats the police's version of events, allying itself with a middle class that is increasingly fearful of rising crime and terrorism; India ranks second only to Iraq in the number of deaths from terrorist attacks.