The Tiger (34 page)

Markov, Ivan Dunkai, and their hermit neighbor all shared the same predicament—along with just about everyone in Sobolonye—and each had to make his own accommodation with the tigers. Smirnov had no doubt that Markov’s accommodation had involved killing them. “I knew that he was catching tiger cubs,” said Smirnov. “He ate the meat and sold the skins. I was trying to hunt him down myself. If it weren’t for the tiger, I’d have gotten him sooner or later. The tiger beat me to it.”

This tiger, with his appetite, confrontational attack style, and growing comfort in the world of men, now combined elements of both human and animal predators. And so did Smirnov. Each, in his way, was a traumatized refugee caught in a limbo between the human and animal worlds. That limbo had now become a death zone, and Smirnov, perhaps more than anyone else on the team, was ideally suited to function within it.

Along with Vladimir Shibnev, Smirnov also worked with Yuri Pionka. Pionka is an Udeghe from Krasny Yar, an expert hunter, boat builder, and ski maker who knew the Bikin as well as anyone around. He was the only native on either team, and his role was complicated by something his father had impressed upon him since he was a boy: “The tiger is your god.”

Until now, this fact had never posed a problem. “I never got involved in any conflict situations with tigers,” Pionka explained. “Udeghe people think carefully before they do any harm to a tiger.”

But when Field Group Taiga got the call from Schetinin, Pionka’s father was far upriver trapping sable and could not advise his son on what to do. As an inspector, Pionka had a responsibility to his team and to his community, and he had to reconcile this with his responsibilities to his father and to his people’s beliefs. Fortunately, there was an escape clause when it came to tigers: god or no god, there were limits to what his subjects had to endure. It was clear that this tiger was an amba in its most destructive manifestation and, when such a creature began killing people, blood vengeance was an appropriate response. The same went for human murderers, and this form of justice was practiced by the Udeghe at least into the 1930s.

Depending on the situation, a hero, a shaman, or other clan members might have intervened in a case like this, but such events were extremely rare and any precedents had receded into the realm of folklore. In 1997, there was one surviving shamanka living in Krasny Yar and, though she had the all-important drum, the serpent belt hung with cone-shaped bells, and even a tiger effigy, she was extremely elderly and this situation was beyond her spiritual writ. But there was also the feeling in Krasny Yar that this wasn’t an Udeghe problem. “If tigers liked eating people, they would eat us all,” said Pionka’s neighbor Vasily Dunkai, who is himself an aspiring shaman. “This tiger knew who injured him. The tiger is a very clever predator with a very big brain; he can tell apart who is darker and who is lighter, plus every man has his own distinct smell. That’s why he didn’t eat my dad [Ivan] or my brother [Mikhail]. He ate the people who harmed him: he ate Russians.”

Vasily Dunkai had a point: even though there were plenty of Udeghe and Nanai in the Bikin valley, the tiger’s targets had, thus far, all been Russian. And this posed another problem for Yuri Pionka: by entering into this conflict, he risked drawing that dangerous energy onto himself and his family. The story of Uza and the egule offered a possible solution, but no one alive had what it took to master such a creature the way Uza had. However, since the days of Uza, a new and powerful magic had become available, and it had done more to change the relationship between humans and tigers in the Russian Far East than anything except the attitude of the people who introduced it. Pionka had some of this magic in the form of an SKS semiautomatic rifle, a gun that was invented to kill humans, but which worked on tigers, and which gave those who wielded it an unprecedented—one could say heroic—confidence.

In most places, including Russia, there is an inverted correlation between the rise of firearms and the fall of traditional beliefs. Firearms, especially those like the SKS, made certain kinds of shamanic intervention obsolete, and they did so by functioning much as shamans do—that is, by harnessing powerful natural forces and concentrating them into a supernatural form, which can then be channeled through the hands of a human being. It is no coincidence that the rifle combines the elemental mastery of the shaman with the superhuman might of the hero. Hunters and warriors have always dreamed of this and, in this sense, the SKS was a dream come true. After making its debut in the Russian army at the end of World War II, it was replaced by the simpler and more versatile AK-47. However, the SKS remained available as military surplus and, over time, it became the weapon of choice for serious Russian hunters and game wardens; everyone in Field Group Taiga had one, and the same went for Inspection Tiger. Armed with such a weapon, any man could be an Uza.

On the night of December 16, there were eight armed men packed into the back of Trush’s Kung. In addition to Schetinin, Trush, Lazurenko, and Gorborukov were Vitaly Timchenko, an inspector from Vladivostok, Andrei Kopayev, leader of the neighboring Kirovsky Inspection Tiger unit, as well as Shibnev and Pionka from Field Group Taiga. Smirnov and Gorunov had gone home for the night, as had Denis Burukhin. Lazurenko cooked dinner on the Kung’s wood stove. With images from the Pochepnya site roaming through their minds and conversation, they made their plan of attack. “Everyone was quite agitated,” recalled Trush. “Everyone was emotional. We all agreed that the tiger had to be destroyed and the discussion boiled down to what would be the fastest and most efficient way of doing it.”

Initially, Schetinin and his men had to decide whether to proceed with an aerial hunt via helicopter, set cage traps, or stick with a more traditional tracking operation. Within the intimate confines of the Kung there existed a kind of democracy. Each participant had an opportunity to voice his opinion, and pros and cons were weighed on their relative merits. Even so, it wasn’t a long conversation. The helicopter hunt was dismissed quickly, not just because of expense, but because of the dense forest cover in the Bikin valley. The chances of spotting a tiger from the air were slim, and even then it would have to be the right tiger, a difficult determination to make from a hundred yards above the ground. Steel cage traps didn’t make sense for this situation either; they were available, but it would take days to truck them into the valley and put them in place. Traps of this kind ran the added risk of catching the wrong tigers and injuring them, and thus adding more dangerous tigers to the population. Lazurenko recalled a trapping incident in which a tigress had fought so hard to escape that she had broken her canines on the bars.

The options continued to narrow steadily: the terrain was too steep and the ground cover too thick here for skis, or snowmobiles, both of which were far better suited to river travel and the surrounding swamps. Someone threw out the idea of a bulldozer, which went nowhere. Weighing heavy on the men’s minds was the fact that, with every passing day, the chances of another attack increased exponentially, and it was soon agreed that the fastest and surest method for finding this tiger would be to hunt him the same way the Yankovskys had more than a century earlier—on foot with dogs. Such was the nature of this tiger and his “operating environment” that, even though the people hunting him had access to air and ground support, lethal weapons, radios, maps, and centuries of accumulated hunting experience, they were forced to proceed on the tiger’s terms. This wasn’t the fault of the hunters; it was because effective predators excel at engineering situations that skew the odds in their favor, and this is what the tiger had managed to do, even though he was injured and, most likely, in unfamiliar territory.

That evening, it was determined that they would hunt the tiger using two four-man teams. The strategy was simple, involving a kind of roving pincer movement: while one team tracked the tiger step for step, exerting steady pressure from behind, the other team would drive the surrounding logging roads, searching the edges for signs of the tiger as well as humans who could be at risk. Shibnev was correct in that tigers can cover huge distances in a short period when they need to, but this is rare; major relocations are usually caused by natural catastrophes like fires and plagues. War can cause this, too, and so can a concerted hunt, but on December 16, the tiger was close by, and he was the one who was hunting.

A strange feature of the ordeal in Sobolonye was that although the village was well populated with hunters, many of them professionals, only one of them volunteered to assist Inspection Tiger in the hunt. This was striking for a couple of reasons, the first being that it was they and their neighbors who had already lost the most to this tiger, and who had the most yet to lose. But another, more ironic, is that among these reluctant hunters were men who may have had more tiger hunting experience than anyone in Inspection Tiger. Sasha Dvornik had actually admitted to shooting a tiger once “long ago,” but, if Trush’s information was correct, there were others as well; Zaitsev, for one, was a prime suspect. Unlike Andrei Onofreychuk, Zaitsev had the skill, drive, and discipline for such a task, and also the means to get a dead tiger out of the forest. One reason he may not have stepped forward is because of his history with Yuri Trush, who had busted him once under rather comical circumstances: after luring Zaitsev out of hiding by imitating the call of a rutting elk, he added insult to injury by confiscating his gun and ammunition.

When asked why they didn’t participate in the hunt, or initiate one themselves, Zaitsev, Lopatin, and others said, variously, that they weren’t invited; they didn’t have the right kind of guns; the guns they had were illegal and would have been confiscated; that they couldn’t hunt the tiger themselves because it was a protected species. There were grains of truth in all of these claims, but underlying them was a lack of collective morale, distrust of authority, and an ingrained passivity that is one of the enduring legacies of State-enforced disempowerment. But one cannot discount the villagers’ well-founded fear and common sense. This tiger was not some geriatric livestock killer; he was a highly motivated man-eater that weighed as much as three men and seemed to specialize in killing hunters just like themselves.

In the end, the only villager to step forward and offer his services was Andrei Pochepnya’s best friend, Denis Burukhin. Burukhin’s gun was illegal, like just about everyone else’s, but this didn’t stop him, and Trush wisely let it go, not least because he sympathized deeply with Burukhin’s wish to avenge his friends. From a team-building point of view, Burukhin, young as he was, was a fortuitous addition: not only was he a war veteran with more high-stakes shooting experience than most of the older men on the team, but he knew this stretch of river inside and out. Furthermore, as a friend of both victims, he was highly motivated to track this tiger down.

With the checkpoints in place, Inspection Tiger took a head count, trying to determine who from the village might still be in the taiga. There was a real urgency to this task because the tiger was doing the same thing. The tiger clearly understood—had probably always understood—the relationship between humans and their cabins, but they had a new significance now, a new place in the tiger’s umwelt. Until two weeks ago, human settlements, which advertised themselves from far away with their outhouses, woodstoves, vehicles, and barking dogs, would have been places to avoid. Now, despite a lifetime of training and a virtual eternity of instinct, the tiger was actively seeking them out.

On two out of three occasions the tiger had experienced success by waiting near a cabin—like a cat at a mousehole only on a grand and sinister scale. His terrible patience had paid off: two kills out of three attempts is a phenomenal success rate for a tiger. This tiger, disabled in the dead of winter during a reportedly bad year for his traditional prey, was staring death in the face. Under the circumstances, he had no choice but to make an extraordinary accommodation. Despite the fact that he had been taught to hunt wild game and had been using those methods and prey species to feed himself ever since leaving his mother, the tiger had, in only a matter of days, developed an entirely different hunting strategy and killing technique, both of which were perfectly suited to a food source with which he had no prior experience as prey. Apparently, necessity is the mother of invention for tigers, too.

Hunger and revenge are not desires that human beings usually experience at the same time, but these primordial drives appeared to merge in the mind and body of this tiger such that one evolved almost seamlessly into the other. The killing and consumption of Markov may have accidentally satisfied two unrelated impulses: the neutralizing of a threat and competitor, and an easy meal. But tigers are quick studies and they are, in their way, analytical: there is no doubt that they absorb and remember relevant data and learn from their experiences, accidental or otherwise. If they produce successful results, the tiger will seek to re-create those circumstances as closely as possible. Humans, this tiger had discovered (or perhaps had always known), were as easy as dogs to locate and kill. If the wind was wrong and the tiger couldn’t smell them, he could still hear them, and that sound carried a compelling new message. Now, a person stepping outside to split a few sticks of kindling might as well be ringing a dinner bell. As he proceeded systematically from dwelling to dwelling, the tiger was, in essence, running a trapline of human beings.

If [the tiger] is in state y at time n, then the probability that it moves to state x at time n + 1 depends only on the current state.“Markov’s Theory of Connected Events,”

ANDREI MARKOV, mathematicianIf you’re afraid of the wolf, stay out of the forest.Russian Proverb

THE MEN SPENT THE NIGHT IN THE KUNGS, ON THE ROAD ABOVE THE confluence of the Takhalo and Bikin, inside heavy cloth sleeping bags that might have been state-of-the-art during the Great Patriotic War. Once the fire in the little stove burned down, the Kung itself had little in the way of insulation to fend off the all-consuming cold. There was a stable high pressure system hanging over Primorye that week and the weather was, for the most part, clear and dry; at night, the temperatures were bottoming out in the negative forties. When it gets this cold, things we take for granted start behaving in strange ways: eyelids can freeze shut; a truck’s cast iron transmission housing can shatter like a china dish. Under these circumstances, warmth takes on a significance closer to oxygen, becoming a crucial ingredient for life that must be carefully monitored and conserved. This only served to underscore the extraordinary fortitude of the animal these men sought.