The Tiger (32 page)

By the time Andrei had drawn even with Tsepalev’s shelter, the tiger would have tapered his awareness down to a single taut beam of consciousness, and the intensity of this attention, boring into its target like a laser, would have been an almost palpable thing, imperturbable: a reality unto itself. The hunt—like lovemaking—occurs in a timeless zone where all external measures temporarily cease to apply. It is a ritual of concentration that determines life and death for all concerned.

Though death was close and breathing, Andrei had other things on his mind. As the gap between the tiger and himself closed to one of seconds, he may have had an inkling that something wasn’t quite right; perhaps a bird sounded an alarm; maybe he glanced around, but judging from the tracks nothing in his gait betrayed uncertainty. Meanwhile, the tiger gathered himself, manifesting anticipation in its purest form: his eyes riveted on their target as he flexed and set his paws, compensating for any irregularity in the ground beneath; the hips rising slightly as he loaded and aimed the missile of himself, while that hawser of a tail twitched like a broken power line. There was the moment when impulse and prey aligned in the tiger’s mind, and then a roar filled the forest with the force of an angry god.

Caught off guard and off balance, Andrei, whose life was finished though his heart still beat, swiveled slightly to the left. He would have been amazed to hear and see this avatar of doom so unbelievably close and closing fast. More amazing is the young man’s composure and muscle memory: left shoulder dropping to shed the gun strap as the left hand twists the rifle forward and up; the right index finger hooking and hauling back the bolt as both hands, together now, guide the rifle butt to his right shoulder. The target is the hardest kind: head-on and airborne, an arcing blur of fire and ice, black and ocher haloed in glittering snow. Andrei’s finger on the trigger, squeezing—tighter now—Yopt! The bowel-loosening realization that the magic has failed. Polny pizdets. Nothing exists now but the tiger, filling his field of vision like a bad accident, like the end of the world: a pair of blazing yellow lanterns over a temple door framed with ivory columns.

For most of our history, we have been occupied with the cracking of codes—from deciphering patterns in the weather, the water, the land, and the stars, to parsing the nuanced behaviors of friend and foe, predator and prey. Furthermore, we are compelled to share our discoveries in the form of stories. Much is made of the fact that ours is the only species that does this, that the essence of who and what we understand ourselves to be was first borne orally and aurally: from mouth to ear to memory. This is so, but before we learned to tell stories, we learned to read them. In other words, we learned to track. The first letter of the first word of the first recorded story was written—“printed”—not by us, but by an animal. These signs and symbols left in mud, sand, leaves, and snow represent proto-alphabets. Often smeared, fragmented, and confused by weather, time, and other animals, these cryptograms were life-and-death exercises in abstract thinking. This skill, the reading of tracks in order to procure food, or identify the presence of a dangerous animal, may in fact be “the oldest profession.”

Like our own texts, these “early works” are linear and continuous with their own punctuation and grammar. Plot, tense, gender, age, health, relationships, and emotional states can all be determined from these durable records. In this sense, The Jungle Book is our story, too: just as Mowgli was schooled by wild animals, so in many ways were we. The notion that it was animals who taught us to read may seem counterintuitive, but listening to skilled hunters analyze tiger sign is not that different from listening to literature majors deconstruct a short story. Both are sorting through minutiae, down to the specific placement and inflection of individual elements, in order to determine motive, subtext, and narrative arc. An individual track may have its own accent or diacritical marks that distinguish the intent of a foot, or even a single step, from the others. On an active game trail, as in one of Tolstoy’s novels, multiple plots and characters can overlap with daunting subtlety, pathos, or hair-raising drama. Deciphering these palimpsests can be more difficult than reading crossed letters* from the Victorian era, and harder to follow than the most obscure experimental fiction. However, with practice, as Henno Martin wrote in The Sheltering Desert, “you learn to read the writing of hoof, claw and pad.3 In fact before long you are reading their message almost subconsciously.”

Trush and his men had opened the White Book at mid-chapter, and now they had to place themselves in the story. This isn’t something one does lightly in the taiga: the reader must commit to becoming a character, too, with no assurance of how the story will end. There, on that blinding winter afternoon at the foot of the Takhalo, began a struggle for control of the narrative. This had happened at least once already, two weeks earlier, when Markov had been drawn into the story; though he had managed to shift its direction, he had failed to control it—the tiger had seen to that. Once again, the tiger was in charge, as he was accustomed to being. There are conventions in the tracking narrative just as there are in any literary form, and tigers employ different ones than deer or boar or humans. While one can usually make predictions, based on these, about how a particular plotline will unfold, this tiger defied the formula to the point that it occupied a genre of its own. To begin with, there is usually no ambiguity in the taiga about who is hunting whom, but in this story, that wasn’t the case.

Even as the men read his tracks, the tiger could have been nearby, reading them, deciding how or when to work them into the plot. Tigers, of course, are experts at this game, and they use the same methods humans do: pick up the trail of potential prey by scent, sight, or knowledge of its habits; follow it in order to get a feel for where it is going; and then, in effect, read ahead and wait for the prey to arrive. End of story.

As far as the tiger was concerned, Andrei Pochepnya was simply one more episode—like a character in a murder mystery who is introduced and dispatched solely for the purpose of driving the plot forward. Who would be next was a question of some interest to the tiger, but of even greater interest to Trush and Schetinin, who could not allow it to be answered. Ultimately, there was only one way to prevent it. “For a week I had been thinking about it,” said Schetinin, recalling the first stage of the hunt. “I was trying to think like an injured tiger, trying to imagine where an injured tiger was most likely to go.”

A homicide detective would have been doing the same thing, but the detective operates in a world of coherent social codes where all but the most deranged understand there will be consequences. The tiger’s world, by contrast, is not only amoral but peculiarly consequence-free, and this—the atavistic certainty that there is nothing out there more lethal than itself—is the apex predator’s greatest weakness. The coyote is a gifted hunter, but it knows that if it fails to take proper precautions it can easily become prey. Even leopards, arguably the deadliest cats on earth, understand that they hunt on a continuum. A tiger, on the other hand, will, with sufficient provocation, charge a moving car. This doesn’t mean that a tiger will not learn to be cautious in the face of certain threats, but these hazards typically have more to do with competition than with predation. Trush and his men needed to capitalize on this inborn confidence, even though doing so ensured that conflict was inevitable: once the tiger understood that he was being hunted, his response would not be to flee deeper into the taiga, it would be to confront his pursuers and liquidate them. The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.

In February 2002, a former member of Inspection Tiger named Anatoli Khobitnov found the end of a tiger trail not far from Luchegorsk. The subsequent encounter gave him the distinction of being one of the few people on earth who has been literally nose-to-nose with a wild tiger and managed to walk away. The road to Khobitnov’s hometown in Terney, a picturesque fishing village on the outer edge of the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik, is narrow and serpentine, and there are moments among those green ridges covered in birch, oak, and pine when you could swear you were in New England, somewhere between the Berkshires and the White Mountains. But this illusion dissolves as soon as you cross the bridge over Tigrine Creek or pass through villages with names like Transformation and Little Stone by the Sea. Traveling these quiet back roads—the only roads—it is hard to tell what era one is in. Nestled in the valleys are squat villages that, with the exception of cars and the occasional satellite dish, have changed little since Arseniev passed through. The houses are still trimmed in gingerbread and painted in wavering shades of slate blue, mustard yellow, and verdigris. In summer, the picketed yards are still planted to the doorsills with potatoes and, in winter, buried to the windowsills in snow. Their inhabitants may smoke cigarettes rolled with newspaper, and most of the young and disenchanted have left.

Khobitnov is fortunate in that he has, despite multiple puncture wounds and broken bones, managed to live a relatively normal life, though his path to the present has been anything but normal. A former Muscovite who turned sixty in 2008, Khobitnov has been on the Far East coast for more than half his life, working in fishing and hunting management, and also with Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich on the Siberian Tiger Project. During this time, he has had dozens of tiger encounters, his first occurring shortly after he arrived in the spring of 1974. “About three days after I got here,” he recalled, “a lot of snow fell and a neighbor invited me to go down to the ocean. We went to the ocean and saw a tiger!” Seeing this storied creature on the edge of his known world evoked “such joy,” recalled Khobitnov. “The tiger is the symbol of Primorye.”

The courtyard in front of Khobitnov’s low-slung house near the beach is the first indication that one is in the presence of a remarkable person. It is strewn with polished beach stones among which stands the bleached carcass of a driftwood tree. In its branches is an assemblage of bear skulls. Hanging from an upended beach log nearby are scores of carefully chosen stones, each meticulously wrapped with string in a variety of crisscross patterns. It is hard to say if these are shamanic devices or exercises in bricolage, but Khobitnov is a complex and gifted man and he has a grasp of both.

Khobitnov is almost exactly the same age as Yuri Trush; they are friends and, for a time, they overlapped in Inspection Tiger under Vladimir Schetinin, a man for whom Khobitnov maintains the utmost respect. Like Trush, Khobitnov developed an affinity for the forest while hunting with his father and, like him, he participated briefly in the commercial slaughter of saiga antelope on the steppes of Kazakhstan. As a young man, Khobitnov found a wolf cub in Moscow’s famous Zavidovsky hunting reserve (now a park) and raised it in his apartment, not far from the city center. After getting his degree from the Moscow Institute for Decorative and Applied Arts (now called the Moscow State University of Arts and Industry), he was hired by the Moscow mint, where he worked as an engraver rendering designs for coins, paper money, and government documents. His face looks as if it could have been made there, too: above his salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, the crow’s-feet and brow furrows are so deeply incised that they seem more the result of tools than time. It is hard to reconcile the detail and precision required of an engraver with the size of Khobitnov’s hands, which look as if they could palm a basketball, and yet evidence of his skill can be found throughout his home. In his free time, he builds hunting knives from scratch, shaping and engraving the steel, bone, and antler into works of art that look as if they should be in a gallery rather than hanging from someone’s belt. The number of Russians who have painted the Sea of Japan for its beauty alone can be counted on one hand, but Khobitnov does that, too. His works—mostly landscapes and marines—are distinctive for their detail and a tendency toward the miniature. “There is a high demand for artistry here,” wrote Chekhov on his journey to the Far East in 1890, “but God has not supplied the artists.”4 One has the sense that Anatoli Khobitnov could meet that demand single-handedly—in any medium.

Hunting poachers and tigers requires an entirely different skill set than making art; nonetheless, Khobitnov once shot a leaping tiger between the eyes at twenty-five yards, a feat more troubling than impressive until you realize that the tiger was seriously wounded and had been terrorizing a village for weeks, and that Khobitnov was wounded, too: he made the shot having taped his rifle onto the cast covering his broken left arm, which had been mauled three weeks earlier by a tigress.

The tigress that attacked Khobitnov had been asleep in the snow when he and his companion stumbled on her on that snowy afternoon. Based on the fluids they had seen staining her previous rest spots, they thought they had been following a nursing tigress, and they were hoping to locate her den. It wasn’t until later that they realized the fluid they were seeing was suppuration from the tigress’s mange-ridden skin. It is always a bad idea to surprise a napping tiger, even when that tiger is napping at death’s door, but by the time the men realized their mistake, there was only fifteen feet between them. The tigress awoke with a start, let loose a spine-rattling roar, and leaped at Khobitnov’s partner. Khobitnov was as surprised as the tigress and he performed one of those instinctive animal acts that make one proud to be human: he sacrificed himself by jumping in front of his unarmed companion. Khobitnov was armed, but with no time to take proper aim all he could do was thrust his rifle butt into the tigress’s face. The blow broke one of her fangs and the tigress responded by knocking Khobitnov off his feet with a stroke of her paw, sending his rifle flying. What happened next gave new life to the cliché “staring death in the face.” The tigress jumped on Khobitnov’s chest, giving him the extraordinary experience of looking up a tiger’s throat: nothing on the horizon but fangs and tongue and a cavernous black hole—the same picture early Christians painted of hell. What Khobitnov remembers most vividly is not the fear, or the pain, but the temperature—her “hot, hot breathing.”