The Tiger (30 page)

“We were neighbors,” explained Leonid Lopatin, “but as we say, ‘Somebody else’s family is like a dark forest.’ ” Now the darkness in the Pochepnyas’ private forest was revealing itself in some disturbing ways. Their anguish was compounded by the fact that all their neighbors had managed to keep their own children home and safe, and this knowledge became a gulf between them. Alone on the far side, the Pochepnyas replayed the previous week in a vicious feedback loop that left them beseeching the cosmos for some way to reclaim those lost days. Their sorrow and discord touched everyone around them, not least because it resonated so closely with their own. Neighbors shook their heads and clucked their tongues, but they also feared for their lives.

“People stopped going into the taiga,” said Lopatin, recalling the week of December 15. “Hunters who had been upriver came back to the village; loggers were afraid to work. It had a big impact on the people. Something like this might have happened a very long time ago, but nobody can remember. The relationship between the people and the tiger changed.”

“Many people have seen tigers, or bumped into them, but there were never any conflicts,” insisted Andrei Onofreychuk. “It might happen that a tiger would snatch a dog right in front of a person, but they never hunted people. They had their standards, so to say.”

Once again, Kuzmich was commissioned to build a coffin though there was little to put in it, and once again, a fire was laid in the graveyard to thaw the frozen ground. This time, it was Leonid Lopatin who would bring the wood on his Buran, glancing behind him as he went, a rifle slung from his shoulder. The survivors were clinging to symbol and gesture now because there was little else except for anger and blame. There seemed to be no shortage of these, and both landed squarely on the shoulders of Yuri Trush and Inspection Tiger. “They should have shot the tiger right away!” said Onofreychuk, still bitter after nearly a decade. “They could have caught her that day, but because they let her go another person died—only then they moved a peg!”

“People were not happy about it,” said Danila Zaitsev. “They should have tracked him right away. He killed a man, plus he was injured. They could have done it right away.”

“Somebody told me that in India they won’t shoot a tiger until it has eaten four people,” Sasha Dvornik told the filmmaker Sasha Snow in 2004. “Before then it’s not considered a man-eater. Well, I recommend them to bring their own children to feed the tiger. The authorities are responsible for the death of Andrei Pochepnya. It was obvious the tiger was a cannibal; they should have killed it immediately. After Andrei was killed, I thought we should catch those inspectors and beat the crap out of them.”

When news of Pochepnya’s death reached Yuri Trush in Luchegorsk, on the afternoon of the 15th, it upset him deeply. Even now, when he recalls it, he must work fiercely to master his emotions. In Trush’s eyes, Andrei Pochepnya was an “innocent,” the same age as his own son. As Andrei had said himself, he had no quarrel with this tiger. Khomenko’s death, of course, had been impossible to anticipate, and so, even, had Markov’s. But Andrei’s was preventable, and this fact was like acid in the collective wound. Trush couldn’t help revisiting that pivotal moment when he and Lazurenko had that hot track back at Markov’s cabin: “The situation was very difficult and tense,” Trush recalled. “What we saw there made quite an impression on us: it was like a horror film; we were all in shock. But had I seen the tiger at that moment, I am sure my hand would not have trembled. I was certain that animal had to be killed.”

In the end, though, Trush had decided not to pursue it. That had been a tough call and now he had the thankless task of being the go-between for Inspection Tiger and the traumatized citizenry of Sobolonye. Even after reinforcements arrived, Trush was still the point man—the name and face everyone knew. Complicating matters was the fact that Trush and his men had cited so many locals for poaching and possession of illegal firearms. It put him in the impossible position of being both an adversary and a savior; for some, he became a scapegoat. Markov’s wife, along with a number of other villagers, was holding Trush personally responsible for Sobolonye’s misery. “She was pouring mud on me as if the tiger was my personal property, saying it was all my fault that it got away and that all this happened,” said Trush, recalling their first meeting. “She claimed that Markov hadn’t shot at the tiger—that the tiger had just attacked him. She was shouting so much that I wasn’t able to explain the situation to her properly. I thought she was having a mental breakdown as a result of her husband’s death, and she was blaming us for it.”

Trush wasn’t far off the mark, but that wasn’t the end of it. As if on cue, a newspaper article appeared with the nasty headline “Tiger Eats While ‘Tigers’ Drink,” and it wouldn’t be the last. Word was getting around. The situation was no longer simply a safety issue: Inspection Tiger’s credibility was at stake, and so was Trush’s reputation. This tiger was going to die, even if killing it was Trush’s final act.

Within twenty-four hours of the discovery of Pochepnya’s body, two Kungs and a pickup truck filled with armed men had converged on Sobolonye. Multiple checkpoints were established on roads leading toward the village, warning travelers away. The show of force was unprecedented for a tiger attack, and a passerby could have been forgiven for thinking that a terrorist cell had just been discovered in Sobolonye. Not only was this response a clear indication of how serious the authorities were about preventing any further loss of life, it was also a measure of their respect for their adversary. Nobody was underestimating this animal’s capability now, nor misconstruing its intention. This was a creature who disappeared and reappeared at will, apparently for the purpose of attacking experienced hunters face-to-face and eating them. In spite of its injuries, it was able to travel day and night through arctic cold. If this had occurred at any other point in human-tiger history, such a creature would have been described as having supernatural powers—an egule if ever there was one.

The reinforcements had arrived from as far away as Vladivostok, a long day’s drive to the south. Along with members of other Inspection Tiger units came the boss himself, Vladimir Schetinin, a man known to friend and foe alike as the General. Schetinin had acquired this nickname due to his fondness for military regalia and dramatic officers’ hats that made him appear much taller than he was. As the chief of Inspection Tiger, he was the one person in Primorye with the authority to issue a shooting order for an Amur tiger. Schetinin is of the same generation as Ivan Dunkai and Dmitri Pikunov, and the fact that he survived Stalin’s purges is a minor miracle. Fully a head shorter than Trush, he has a long pewter gray beard and flowing hair that give him the look of an Orthodox priest—an impression that evaporates the moment he opens his mouth. He takes two tea bags in a four-ounce cup and he doesn’t mince words: when a pair of earnest British journalists once asked him how he thought the tigers could be saved, his answer, “AIDS,” caught them off guard.

“But don’t you care about people?” one of them asked.

“Not really,” he replied. “Especially not the Chinese.”

China’s powerful presence and close proximity are volatile issues in Primorye where many residents feel as Schetinin does. Prior to the reopening of the Chinese border following Gorbachev’s rapprochement with Beijing in 1989, commercial tiger poaching was virtually unknown in Russia. Since then, the export of Primorye’s natural resources—in all their forms and shades of legality—has exploded while local Russians have found themselves completely overmatched by the Chinese: their hustle, their business acumen, and their insatiable appetite for everything from ginseng and sea cucumbers to Amur tigers and Slavic prostitutes. In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: “Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”2

Today, the imbalance between Russia and China is a near total reversal of what it was a century ago when China was referred to as “the Sick Man of the Far East.” Now the same is said of the Russians, and it is they who live in fear of being overwhelmed. The hemorrhaging of natural resources from every port and border crossing is one reason Primorye still has the feel of a colonial outpost—one that, despite its wealth and ecological importance, gets short shrift from the distant capital. In Asia today, wildlife trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry, and roughly three quarters of all trafficked wildlife ends up in China, which has become a black hole for many endangered species. As Primorye’s irreplaceable patrimony—the best timber, caviar, and animals—flows out, its citizens eagerly accept second-rate surplus in return: the cars are cast-offs from Japan, the buses are rejects from fleets in South Korea, and China provides cheap polyester clothes and fresh fruit suffused with pesticides and heavy metals. Import regulations put Russians in the humiliating role of mules to bring the dry goods in.

Even as the number of Russians in the Far East decreases steadily due to high mortality and relocation, shabby Chinese border towns that might have hosted ten or twenty thousand people prior to perestroika have mushroomed into gleaming centers of commerce with ten times their former population and more on the way. Carefully coached and chaperoned groups of Russian shoppers—powered by beer breakfasts—make day trips to these emerging cities in order to buy all the things the former Soviet Union’s national industry and distribution system now fails to provide. Meanwhile, North Korea, at the very bottom of the pecking order, supplies what amounts to slave labor, much of it to the logging industry. “What went wrong in the Russian Far East?”3 wondered John Stephan in his comprehensive history of the region. “Why did it not develop like British Columbia or Hokkaido? How did such a rich land and littoral, settled by such talented and hardworking people, and bordering on such dynamic economies, present a spectacle redolent of a Third World basket case?”

There is no easy answer to this question, but the current situation is deeply painful to many Russians who maintain a bittersweet sense of national pride and—for those born before 1970 or so—a belief that they once represented the vanguard of a grand and noble social project. For Vladimir Schetinin, whose history with the State is checkered, to say the least, this erosion of status and order burns like an ulcer in his heart and mind, not least because of the toll it is taking on the taiga. Now, more than ever, his primary concern—with the possible exception of his grandchildren—is the fate of the Amur tiger and its far rarer cousin, the Amur leopard. The four-way tension between this, Moscow’s tiger killing protocol, his deeply felt responsibility to protect his men, and a need to reassure the public, would determine the fate of this tiger and the people around it.

In his capacity as chief of Inspection Tiger, Schetinin had sought to give his men all the tools at his disposal. This is why, moments after first hearing about the Markov attack from Trush on Friday the 5th, he had sent a fax to Moscow requesting a shooting permit for an Amur tiger. Though he had little information about the case at that point, Schetinin was familiar enough with federal bureaucracy to know that responses from the capital often took weeks, and he wanted to be covered. Even Schetinin’s critics were impressed when he received a telegram just four days later, on Tuesday, December 9, from Valentin Ilyashenko, the federal administrator of biological resources. It was brief and to the point: “This is to approve the shooting of the man-eating tiger in the area of the village, Sobolevka [a diminutive form of Sobolonye]. The official permit will be issued upon receipt of the shooting report.”

Sometimes, the system worked. On the same day as the telegram, a more formal document arrived by fax; this one bore all the appropriate seals and signatures, but it was inexplicably postdated, clearly stating that the hunt was to begin a week later, on December 16. Whether this delay was a clerical error, or intended to build in a cooling-off period in which nature could take its course, is not clear and, apparently, never was. While there was real concern for the safety of the local populace, there appeared to be no great urgency—at either end of the fax line—to hunt this tiger down. Ultimately, it was Schetinin’s call, and his official mandate was to protect the environment, specifically tigers. The last thing he wanted was to oversee the unnecessary shooting of another tiger, especially at a time when decades of hard work to restore a relict population was being undone before his eyes.

In addition to the logistical nightmare and cost of trying to find one possibly transient tiger among perhaps half a dozen or more living in the frozen wilderness around Sobolonye, there may have been another reason for Schetinin’s hesitation, and this concerned his personal history with the State. Schetinin’s sympathy for tigers—one could say his identification with them—goes deeper than that of most government employees, and this is because for years he ran the risk of being exterminated himself. Schetinin is a Cossack; his ancestors served in the Amur division of the Cossack army, which was instrumental in the annexation of Primorye.

In return for their service and loyalty to the czars, the Cossacks enjoyed a special status among Russians and were rewarded with land and a large measure of autonomy, but all this changed under communism. After the Revolution, their independence, fighting skill, and tribal solidarity were seen as threats to the Soviet State, and Stalin added them to his long list of enemies. In 1934, Schetinin’s paternal grandfather was conscripted to dig a clandestine tunnel under the Amur River, and his family never saw him again. Schetinin’s father was next: in 1938, at the peak of the Great Terror, he was relieved of his duties as a village postmaster and charged with “harmful activities related to untimely mail deliveries.” For this he was shot. The rest of the family was banished to a concentration camp in the Jewish Autonomous Region, a little known creation of Stalin’s intended to serve, oxymoronically, as a Soviet Zion for Russian Jews. It still exists today. Located on the Amur River between China and Khabarovsk Territory, it is hard to imagine a place further removed from the Holy Land. The regional flag depicts not a Magen David but a strangely familiar rainbow band on a plain white background; the regional coat of arms features, of all things, a tiger. At its peak, only about seventeen thousand Jews actually lived there and, during the purges, it became a catch-all for a wide variety of undesirables, including Cossacks. While still a boy, Schetinin was branded a “son of an enemy of the State,” a designation that would determine the course of his life. From his one surviving grandfather he received this stern advice: “Never tell anyone that you are a Kazak. Forget that word.”