The Tiger (24 page)

Has he read this, too? Does he know?

In Primorye, between 1970 and 1994, there were six recorded tiger attacks that were classified as “unprovoked”; in four of them, the tiger appeared to hunt the victims as if they were prey. However, it is difficult to ascertain from the data how the prior history, or momentary desperation, of these animals might have predisposed them to hunt people. According to Suvorov, attacks on patrolling border guards were “entirely ordinary occurrences” during this period.11

Earlier data—from mid-century and back—is patchy at best, but for what it’s worth no incidents of man eating were recorded anywhere in the Russian Far East from the 1920s through the 1950s (probably because the Amur tiger population was at an all-time low). In any case, most early attack reports are anecdotal accounts collected by travelers and, with the exception of the German lepidopterist whose remains were identified only by his butterfly net and jacket buttons, they tended to involve solitary Russian hunters, or Korean and Chinese ginseng collectors and railway workers, some of whom were reportedly snatched from their own beds. Chinese gold miners would also have been among the victims of an atypical rash of attacks reported by the famed Russian explorer Nikolai “Give me a company of soldiers and I’ll conquer China” Przhevalski.12 According to Przhevalski, twenty-one men were killed and six more were wounded by tigers on the Shkotovka River in southern Primorye in 1867.

Regardless of whether Trush’s, Smirnov’s, or Vasily Dunkai’s scenario is closer to the truth, Markov had reason to believe the tiger might pursue him. It is not known exactly how long he remained sequestered after shooting the tiger, but on the morning of December 3, something emboldened—or compelled—Markov to leave his cabin and make the risky journey over to the Amba River, three and a half miles away. Perhaps he was searching for his dogs, or he may have been looking for backup to finish off the tiger. Whether the profit motive entered into his calculations is not known. However, Markov did not go immediately to see his friend Ivan Dunkai, but instead went northeast, to visit Dunkai’s son (and Vasily’s brother) Mikhail. Mikhail was never interviewed by Inspection Tiger, but in May 2008 he described the last time he saw Markov.

Mikhail Dunkai is in his early fifties, and he is a hunter and trapper like his father and brother. He is short and thickly set with a shock of black hair that falls across his forehead in bangs, the only straight line on an otherwise round face. Dark eyes glimmer through folded lids. Like his father, he had a good relationship with Markov and, over the years, they had shared meals, vodka, and each other’s cabins. Markov arrived at Mikhail’s cabin on the Amba shortly before noon on the 3rd, and he was clearly upset. “He was angry with the tiger,” Mikhail recalled as he stood in a recently thawed dirt track dotted with puddles and cow pats that serves as one of Krasny Yar’s main streets. “He was swearing at him; he was saying that we should kill, destroy, and wipe out the tigers. ‘There are too many of them,’ he said. I could see that he was really worried: he didn’t want to drink or eat anything; he didn’t even have tea. He was just smoking cigarettes—one after another, one after another, and complaining that they were too weak. ‘Let’s roll them with makhorka,’* he said. He was smoking constantly for a half an hour.”

Many Udeghe and Nanai, including Mikhail Dunkai, feel about tigers the same way Pyotr Zhorkin did: that if one has set its sights on you, there is little you can do to alter the outcome. “He was doomed,” Mikhail said simply. “You could tell by looking in his eyes. They were strange and empty when I was talking with him: dead-looking. This tiger was probably angry and vindictive, and Markiz probably struck a wrong chord with him. Personally, I think he was trying to shoot the tiger, and this tiger didn’t forgive him. If the tiger had felt that it was his fault—if he had killed a dog or done something else wrong—then he would have gone away.”

Anthropologists who write about indigenous peoples often note their tendency to anthropomorphize the animals around them. Even though !Kung and Nanai hunters (among countless others) have used this approach to great effect while hunting, the ascription of recognizable emotions and motives to animals causes problems for Western scholars, not least because they are awfully hard to prove in a lab or defend in a dissertation. Such claims are what lawyers and philosophers refer to as “arguments from inference”: anecdotal and unprovable. Under these circumstances, the potential for hair-splitting, semantic quibbling, and “definition objection” is endless, but it also misses the point: these feelings of trans-species understanding and communication have less to do with animals being humanized, or humans being “animalized,” than with all parties simply being sensitized to nuances of the other’s presence and behavior. If you spend most of your life in a natural environment, intimately connected with, and dependent upon, the animals around you, you will undoubtedly—necessarily—feel a certain kinship with those creatures, even if you have no conscious intention of doing so.

A striking example of this unintended intimacy occurred in present-day Namibia in 1940. In May of that year, two German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, having already fled Nazi Germany, chose to disappear themselves in the desert rather than risk being interned in their host country (South Africa) as enemy aliens. The two men were experienced desert travelers and, after making careful preparations, they loaded a truck with bare necessities, including a dog named Otto, and descended into the vast and labyrinthine Kuiseb River canyon, 120 miles southwest of Windhoek. Always fearful of discovery, and at the mercy of hunger and thirst, they crept about like persecuted anchorites, living in caves and stone shelters, hunting game with strictly rationed ammunition, and sleeping by their kills to keep the hyenas away. For two and a half years, they survived in this desiccated underworld, an environment in which neither the plants nor the animals had changed significantly in a million years.

The Kuiseb canyon contained reservoirs of last resort and, when the waterholes on the plains above went dry, leopards, jackals, hyenas, ostriches, antelope, and zebra would descend to the canyon floor in order to search among the stones for springs and sumps. For Martin and Korn, a by-product of this self-imposed exile in a place devoid of other humans was total immersion into the animal world. As trained scientists, both men took a disciplined and energetic interest in their new circumstances, which Martin recounted in great detail in his memoir, The Sheltering Desert (1957). In it, he describes how they were forced to adapt to an elemental existence, which centered on a trinity of basic needs: safety, food, and water. But it had a surreal twist: a wind-powered generator enabled them to listen to the radio. There, in the desert fastness, where the Southern Cross gave shape to the night sky, herds of zebra clattered by in the dark, and thirst trumped all other concerns, news of the war in Europe intruded like distress calls from another planet. These men were, quite literally, caught between worlds. As wanted men, and refugees from twentieth-century fascism and war, they were forced to rediscover skills and instincts that had lain dormant since the Stone Age.

The Namib Desert is barren for much of the year, save for a few scattered bushes and trees, so Korn’s and Martin’s diet was heavily dependent on meat. As a result, animals became a central focus; they were mobile hubs around which their own lives revolved. Because their bullets were old and weak—to the point that they would bounce off the skulls of their prey—Martin and Korn had to creep within bow and arrow range to be assured of a kill. But even as their lives took on an increasingly savage and desperate cast, they were able to step back and observe their own behavior—as if they were researcher and subject rolled into one. “Our clothes, always stiff with blood and sweat, were torn and frayed from crawling over the sharp hot rubble,” wrote Martin.13 “After a while we gave up wearing trousers and stockings.… Using towels as loin-cloths we sat there and tore apart the ribs of an antelope … and gnawed away like carnivorous beasts.14 But our thoughts were freer and less oppressed than they had ever been, and later that evening Hermann’s violin sang triumphantly into the dark night around us.” At one point, Korn was moved to say, “My paleolithic soul feels at home here.”15

As they settled into the Namib’s ancient rhythms of flood and drought, hunting and repose, Martin and Korn studied the animals around them, and their social bonds, hierarchies, and interspecies dynamics became a source of fascination. Inevitably perhaps, both men began to identify with them. “They were like people you meet constantly in the street without knowing their names,” wrote Martin, “and we soon began to look on them as neighbors.”16 In essence, this desolate but surprisingly lively maze of boulder and scrub was a kind of communal umwelt and, in it, Martin and Korn developed a sense of deep, empathic familiarity with their cohabitants: “We learnt to recognise their mood and intentions from the way they held their heads, or set their hooves.17 We got to understand them and their behaviour as you get to understand your friends without the need of speech.… The longer we lived with animals the clearer it became to us that human and animal behaviour were very closely related.”18

Martin was continually impressed by the subtlety of interaction and awareness he witnessed all around him: rival zebra stallions spelling each other at the same hole as they pawed away stones to access water; an ostrich hen spreading her wings to block the progress of other ostriches after detecting a remote hazard; a baboon dismantling a pair of binoculars by carefully unscrewing all the component parts; a hyena giving way to a leopard on the trail and, once the leopard was safely past, shrieking and yelping after it like a coward hurling insults. “It struck me,” Martin observed, “that the ‘all too human’ behaviour of men was in reality ‘all too animal.’ ”

However, Martin’s most surprising discoveries concerned the changes taking place in his own psyche: when they had first descended into the canyon, he found that his dreams focused on the people and places he had left behind. But as the months turned into years, “Animals began to play an increasing part in them and the distinction between human beings and animals became blurred.”19 Martin’s subconscious—his interior umwelt—was gradually recalibrating itself to match his new, if atavistic, reality. It was the kind of real-time immersion experiment that psychologists and anthropologists can only dream of, and it may shed some light on why the painted caves of southern Europe and the wall art of the Kalahari are so heavily weighted toward animals. “Perhaps,” speculated Martin, “this was the origin of mythology … in which human beings and animals mingle and merge into each other.”*20

Considering that it took a German-born urban academic only two years to (re)discover this connection at an impressively deep level (in an African canyon, no less), one can only imagine the profound sense of intimacy and understanding an indigenous hunter like Ivan or Mikhail Dunkai would possess after a lifetime in his native taiga. When one adds to this the fact that the Dunkais are drawing on centuries of communal memory and experience with local animals, their interpretation of human-tiger dynamics takes on a certain weight. “The tiger is strong, powerful and fair,” Mikhail Dunkai declared. “You have to respect him. You think he doesn’t understand the language, but he understands everything; he can read a person’s mind. So, if you start thinking, ‘He’s a bad tiger; I am not afraid of him,’ well, something bad will happen to you, and you’ll have only yourself to blame. The tiger will warn you first, but if you still don’t understand, then he will seriously punish you.”

Mikhail had an interesting take on the sharing of prey in the forest, and things might have gone better for Markov if he had known about it. “Once, a tiger killed a wild boar about ten yards from my cabin,” Mikhail began. “In the morning, I saw the dead boar and the tiger sitting nearby. So, I started talking to him: ‘The taiga is big,’ I said. ‘Why would you kill a boar right here? Go, enjoy the rest of the taiga, but don’t do this near my cabin.’ The tiger was sitting, listening, and then he left. Afterward, I saw that a part of the boar—the haunch—had been left for me; the rest of the boar was eaten and everything was cleaned by the tiger.

“But I didn’t take the meat,” said Mikhail, “because, if you take it, then you are in debt and have to give something back. So I said, ‘Thank you, but I have meat now. Don’t be insulted that I don’t take it. It was good of you to share with me.’ If you take meat from the tiger,” Mikhail explained, “you will feel that you owe him, and then you will be afraid of the tiger.”

The way Mikhail Dunkai saw it, accepting meat from a tiger is like accepting a favor from the Communist Party, or the mafia: once obligated, it can be very hard to extract oneself. Markov may not have fully grasped the nature of the contract he was entering into if, indeed, he helped himself to that tiger kill. Ivan Dunkai, being from an earlier generation, seemed to accept these rigorous terms, but his son clearly did not. That the tiger researcher Dmitri Pikunov was able to scavenge so successfully, and so safely, from tiger kills was most likely due to the fact that he didn’t go near a kill until he was sure the tiger was completely finished with it. The czar always eats first.

That Markov had become so entangled with this tiger seemed genuinely to surprise Mikhail Dunkai. “Markiz was a strong, good man,” he said in sum. “He was always optimistic, always kept his spirits up. He was honest. It’s hard to understand how it happened, but this situation with the tiger diverted him from the path of life. I tried to tell him that he should stay overnight, that he should take it easy, stop worrying, and think it over. I said, ‘If you didn’t do anything bad to him, he won’t do anything to you. Just don’t do
anything bad to him. Remember: you are living in the taiga. He can crush you.’ ”

But by then, the die was cast, and a facet of Markov’s own character may have sealed his fate. “If Markiz started something,” Mikhail said, “he usually finished it.”