The Tiger (33 page)

Disarmed and desperate, Khobitnov swung his right fist, but the tigress simply caught it like a dog snapping at a fly and crushed it. Still trying to stave off the inevitable, he jammed his left arm into her mouth and attempted to reach his pistol with his now punctured hand. The tigress crushed his arm as well, impaling it with her remaining fangs and shattering the bones. At that point, Khobitnov’s partner hit the tigress with a dose of pepper spray and she leaped off him, fleeing into the forest. The entire encounter lasted less than five seconds.

When the tigress was later trapped, it was discovered that not only was she old and sick, but her teeth were rotten and she was missing several toes. She had been killing livestock because there was nothing else she was capable of subduing. Although she wouldn’t have lasted the winter, this sorry creature was still a match for two experienced hunters. She was put down by lethal injection. Meanwhile, in addition to the stitches, screws, and cast, Khobitnov ended up contracting gangrene.

The lesson from this mishap is one the renowned tiger researcher John Seidensticker tries hard to impress upon his students working in the field: “Don’t ever assume anything with tigers.”5 Everyone who works closely with these animals emphasizes the importance of approaching them on an individual basis. Tiger behavior is influenced by age, health, history, stress levels, and place in the local pecking order, among numerous other factors, and like us they are capable of very perplexing behavior. Generally speaking, the more intelligent an animal, the more “character” it is likely to have.

In December 2001, John Goodrich, the field coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Siberian Tiger Project, encountered what he described as an “extreme, crazy tigress” at a logging camp near the village of Pilana. “She chewed up chainsaws,” he recalled, “stole a gas can and chewed that up, covered herself in gas. Then she attacked a logger.” With life as difficult as it is in the forest, and with so many other things to focus on, the motive to do things like this is hard to ascribe to anything other than rage, desperation, or insanity—all of which lie well within the tiger’s emotive spectrum. Inspection Tiger was called to the site immediately and the tigress charged them as well. After wounding her, the inspectors tracked her, only to find she had doubled back and set up an ambush. This is where they found her, poised to attack, covered in a light dusting of snow. She had died waiting for them.

Trush was concerned that the Panchelaza tiger might be waiting for him, too. The tiger knew Trush and some of his men “personally” now, and, collectively, the team smelled of weapons, cigarettes, and dogs just as Markov and Pochepnya had. It also seemed that his wounds were healing; Trush noted less blood in the tracks on the Takhalo than he had observed at Markov’s. At the same time, the right forepaw was still dragging in the snow: the bleeding may have stopped, but the damage was done. Sometime before noon on the previous day—the 15th—the tiger had crossed back over the Takhalo by Tsepalev’s shelter and ascended a steep, rocky bluff covered in ice and snow. There were easier routes available, but the tiger chose not to use them. For a person, this would have been a hand-over-hand scramble. The shortest day of the year was less than a week away so night fell early, and, after following the trail for several hundred yards, the men turned back. But they had the information they needed. There is no easier trail to follow than fresh tracks in fresh snow, and now, Trush had the permit, the manpower, and the motive. It was no longer a question of if, just a question of when.

* In order to save on paper and postage, nineteenth-century correspondents would fill a page, turn it ninety degrees, and continue, thus crossing one line of text with another.

Mountains are the more beautiful

After the sun has gone down

And it is

Twilight. Boy,

Watch out for tigers, now.

Let’s not

Wander about in the field.YUN SǒN-DO (1587–1671),“Sunset”1

HERDED TOGETHER IN THE DARK LIKE BISON, WOODSTOVES BLAZING, the Kungs seemed like conveyances from another age. Just down the road was the village, still but for the chimney smoke and the anxious pacing of the dogs. Behind locked doors, their owners’ lives were suspended, minds awash in unsettling thoughts. Meanwhile, in the river below, fish hung motionless in the dark, countering the current beneath two feet of ice, and finding in that dense and steady resistance a perfect equilibrium. But there was more down there besides—subtle disturbances passing through on their serpentine journey out of the mountains: Takhalo to Bikin, Ussuri to Amur, and on to the ice-choked bottleneck of Tartar Strait, past Sakhalin to the open sea. Along with Andrei Pochepnya’s rifle was the rippled memory of a tiger Sasha Dvornik once sought to disorient and drown with his motorboat. A standard maneuver in the river poacher’s repertoire, it works like a charm with deer. But deer can’t leap like dolphins from deep water, and it seems that tigers can.

Up above, the world was frozen hard and waiting. And through it came the tiger, hunting, eyes alight. Stepping gingerly over the ice and plowing through the drifts, there was in its progress something relentless and mechanical: the clouds of steam chugging, enginelike, from its nostrils, translucent whiskers laced with hoarfrost from its own hot breath. Inside Trush’s Kung, men sat jammed hip to hip on the makeshift bunks, rifles cleaned and ready in the rack on the wall, a kettle steaming on the woodstove by the door.

Kungs are essentially self-propelled versions of the caravans Markov and the loggers used, and Inspection Tiger’s had been modified to serve as patrol vehicles, personnel carriers, dormitories, dining halls, arms caches, and war rooms rolled into one. On the night of the 16th, Trush’s vehicle was dedicated to the latter purpose. “Schetinin got us all together and told us to find the tiger and destroy him,” recalled Vladimir Shibnev, one of the local hunting inspectors who had been called in to assist. “I argued with him: I said, ‘Do you have any idea what it means to follow tiger tracks in December? A tiger is not a sable who walks a few miles and is done. This tiger could be fifty miles away by now; it could be a hundred and fifty miles away.’ ”

Shibnev worked with Yevgeny Smirnov in Field Group Taiga, a small team of dedicated hunting inspectors who, in addition to being skilled hunters and trackers, were based right on the Bikin. They knew the area intimately and took a proprietary interest in it, both personally and professionally. Shibnev was Russian, but he had been raised on the river in close proximity to the Udeghe and Nanai. Shibnev’s father and uncle had both done military service in the Far East, and they had been so inspired by the country—and by Arseniev’s descriptions of it—that in 1939 they persuaded their entire family to move out to this lush frontier on the far side of Siberia. Shibnev’s father worked on the Bikin as a fur and forest product buyer, and his uncle became a respected naturalist and author who specialized in the Bikin ecosystem. Shibnev’s mother taught school on a Nanai collective farm. As a result, Shibnev, a wise and handsome man who exudes a calm vitality, has an exceptionally good feel for the area and its inhabitants. At fifty, he was the oldest member of the hunting team, and he could remember the valley before the loggers came, when it was virtually roadless and thick with game. “Children who are born here are like wolf cubs,” Shibnev explained. “Our parents would go to work, and we would roam the river. Back then, everyone used to get around in boats.”

Tigers were seldom seen in those days, but Shibnev became familiar with Nanai beliefs about them almost by osmosis: “The tiger was considered a protector, a just animal,” he said. “If you were to hurt or kill one, it would take revenge against you and your family. There was a story about a man who killed a tiger and then his entire family died. It was perceived that the tiger’s spirit avenged itself on that family.” It wasn’t until the late 1960s, when the first major logging road was pushed through the Bikin valley, that Shibnev saw a tiger for himself. “It was a feeling of joy and exaltation at the same time,” he recalled. “It was a sense, not so much of fear, but of respect or awe. I thought it was the czar of all animals.”

From childhood, Shibnev had wanted to become a forest ranger, but his parents talked him out of it, and it wasn’t until 1992 that he was finally able to fulfill his dream. It was in this capacity that he ran into Markov for the first time: “He was a poacher, but I kind of liked him,” Shibnev recalled. “He was reasonable. Later, when he decided to move to the taiga on a more or less permanent basis, that’s when I heard he wanted to poach tigers.”

For reasons that remain unexplained, Field Group Taiga had been notified of the Markov investigation on December 6, the same day Inspection Tiger arrived, but never formally included in it. “We were alerted,” explained Field Group Taiga’s leader, Yevgeny Smirnov, “and we sat on our rucksacks for the entire day [waiting to be picked up], but in the end they took a police officer with them. People who’d never seen a tiger in their lives ended up working on that case. They were walking around in the forest with pistols like they were hunting a criminal. Had they come to me right away, it would have become obvious immediately that it was not a tigress [as Trush had originally thought] but a tiger.”

To a man, everyone in Field Group Taiga saw Inspection Tiger as outsiders—poachers, as it were, on their territory. One of Inspection Tiger’s greatest disadvantages was the size of its teams’ jurisdictions. Trush’s Bikin unit was responsible for the entire northwest corner of Primorye, which included nearly a hundred miles of the Chinese border along the Ussuri River. This meant they had a general understanding of their region, but sometimes lacked deep knowledge of specific areas. On the middle Bikin, the Tigers’ responsibilities overlapped with those of Field Group Taiga. The tensions this created were analogous to those occurring between local police and federal investigators: whereas Field Group Taiga was a small agency with limited power, Inspection Tiger operated on a larger scale with more resources and a higher profile. These imbalances, along with assorted interpersonal dynamics, made for some hard feelings, but after Pochepnya’s death there was no more room for turf wars or jealousy; Vladimir Schetinin simply needed the best men he could get, and Field Group Taiga had them. He called Yevgeny Smirnov.

Smirnov is a former Muscovite who exiled himself to Krasny Yar, and he is a force to be reckoned with. After doing hard time in the army under vague circumstances, he took a job as a night policeman in Moscow. This is a seriously dangerous occupation in which violent confrontations are commonplace, and Smirnov—lean, muscular, with a pale, rawboned face enlivened by piercing blue eyes—faced them head-on. However, the combination of this and his experiences in the army took its toll. “My life kind of cornered me,” he said in the living room of his airy and immaculate log home overlooking the Bikin. “The military training came back to haunt me, and my nerves gave out: there were occasions when people would come up behind me and, before I knew it, they would be lying on the ground. I realized that the further away I was from people, the better it would be for everyone. That’s why I got into hunting management. I found out about Krasny Yar in the Lenin Library in Moscow.”

Smirnov married a Udeghe woman and has been living and working on the Bikin since 1979. He has had many encounters with tigers, but his approach to these meetings is radically different from that of his neighbors. When a questionnaire was sent around to local hunters seeking advice on what people should do if they ran into a tiger, Smirnov ignored the list of carefully crafted questions and scrawled SHOW NO FEAR across the blank side. Smirnov approaches tigers the same way he approached hooligans in the back alleys of Moscow. “An animal is an animal,” he said simply. “A predator can smell fear very well. If you show fear, you’re finished.

“I have four tigers in my hunting area right now,” he added, by way of example. “I know them by their faces, and they certainly know me. Well, last year [2006], the younger female thought I was in her way, so she wanted to mess with my psyche a little bit. She started following me all the time, growling at me; she tried to grab my dog. Well, I went fishing in the early autumn; the bushes still had leaves, and my dog went ahead of me. Just as I was approaching a bend in the trail, the dog came running back; I looked up and saw the tigress flying through the air about fifteen feet away. She was after my dog, and I threw myself at her, swearing and trying to smack her with my fishing rod. She changed direction in midair and landed. I tried again to smack her on the nose and just missed her. She ran away and, since then, not only has she stopped showing up at the cabin, she keeps her distance from me. She was trying to get me to leave the area, but when we got face-to-face and she saw that I was not afraid of her, she started avoiding me.

“Over time, I realized that if you have accumulated more anger inside yourself than a tiger has in him, the tiger will be afraid of you. Really, quite literally so. When a tiger is coming at you, you can gauge very well by his facial expression what he wants from you. You can judge by his eyes and ears. One cannot read bears like that. So, a tiger is coming toward you: if you see that his ears are down, that’s not a good sign. Then you have to look him in the eye with all the rage you can muster and the tiger will stop and back off. You don’t shout or scream—just look him in the eye, but with such hate that he would turn around and go away. After one, two, three times, they leave you alone.”

Smirnov may as well have been quoting Henry V:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,2

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.

This strategy, as combative as it seems, is motivated by pragmatism, not bravado. Like any of us, Smirnov is using the tools at his disposal, and his include the same bestial ferocity that kept him alive in the army and on the back streets of Moscow. Smirnov is a protector of the forest and an admirer of tigers, but he has had to find a way to live within the confines of their domain. He summed up this dilemma with a poignant rhetorical question: “So, that tigress—she wanted to kick me out of the taiga. But where would I go?”