The Tiger (35 page)

If the tiger slept at all, he did so alone, never seeking shelter beyond the cover of tree boughs. Many days would pass between feedings, and water simply did not exist as such; liquids would be taken in via the blood and meat of prey, when available, or by eating snow. At these temperatures, an animal’s fur and fat take on the properties and importance of a space suit; like a polar bear, this tiger was a solitary and self-sufficient vessel designed to withstand the harshest elements in a remote pocket of a frozen world. In such a context, it is easy to see how the combination of extraordinary beauty, total self-containment, and apparent imperviousness to just about everything sets this animal at a godlike remove.

Because of the latitude and the approaching winter solstice, dawn held off until eight or so in the morning, which left only about eight hours of daylight for tracking. In this situation, daylight, too, became a crucial ingredient—if not for life, exactly, then for safety. As brave and eager for a resolution as these men were, no one considered hunting the tiger after dark; the odds were too badly skewed in the tiger’s favor. But this is the way it has always been, and so Trush and his men sheltered in the Kungs until the sun made it safe to come out again.

When at last it did, on the morning of December 17, Andrei Pochepnya’s best friend and hunting partner showed up on horseback, armed with a double-barreled shotgun and accompanied by a small pack of mongrel dogs. Pictured from a distance, in a grainy black and white photograph, it could have been 1910 with Yuri Yankovsky just outside the frame. “Denis was in an aggressive mood,” recalled Sasha Lazurenko. “He wanted revenge.”

Andrei’s funeral was going to be held the following day. Denis Burukhin’s world had changed and he had changed with it. “Somehow, I felt no fear of that tiger anymore,” he said later. “I followed his tracks but felt no fear.”

Burukhin’s role in the hunt came to resemble that of a local fixer, and he was valuable, not just for his determination, his knowledge of local roads, and his access to hunting dogs. “He was the only one from the local population who went with us,” explained Lazurenko, “because nobody wanted to show the location of their cabins.”

It was around these clandestine hunting bases that multiple agendas collided. Trush knew that there could still be hunters, trappers, and cone pickers out in the forest, but it seemed many locals would rather risk an attack than betray their neighbors. Trush needed to know where these cabins were because the tiger certainly did and he wanted desperately to avoid another tragedy. But only Burukhin was willing to break this unspoken pact with his neighbors, and his motivation was clear. “He was angry,” recalled Yuri Pionka, “and his intention was to ‘have a meeting’ with that tiger.”

The road out to the Pochepnyas’ apiary lay between the river and Sobolonye, and Trush knew that, at some point, the tiger would have to cross it. “As we drove, I was asking the guys to look carefully to the right and to the left,” Trush explained, “and yes, we found the tiger’s tracks crossing the road. He had crossed over and did not come back.”

The tiger’s tracks ran almost due west of Tsepalev’s tarpaper shelter, and when they studied them that afternoon, their edges were already hard and slightly rounded, a natural progression of aging snow tracks. Yuri Pionka judged them to be nearly two days old, which meant the tiger had crossed over almost immediately after leaving Pochepnya on the 15th. From here, it was roughly three miles to Sobolonye as the crow flew, and about twice that overland. The tiger could have been there and gone by now, but so far there had been no sign of him around the village. Team members were posted there just in case, and among them was Yegeny Smirnov from Field Group Taiga.

The terrain between this point and Sobolonye was steep and convoluted, laced with creeks and interrupted repeatedly by steep rocky bluffs. It was perfect habitat for Amur tigers, but very hard on humans. This was where the two tracking teams would be spending their days until the situation resolved itself, one way or another. Should the driving team find a fresher track, they could contact the other team by radio and let them know. Although their radios were Japanese and of decent quality, they only worked line-of-sight. If either party was in a valley or over a hill, there was no way they could communicate with each other.

Denis Burukhin, his short, sturdy horse antsy and blowing in the cold, took the first tracking shift with Trush, Shibnev, Pionka, and Gorborukov. He led the way, breaking trail, while the dogs, including Trush’s Gitta, ran ahead. The scent trail was cold, so for them this was just a jaunt through the woods; nonetheless, they knew hunters, and they knew something was up. Winter is killing season in the taiga and the dogs were primed. The snow was about knee deep and between that, the fallen trees, and the steep ground, it was hard going for man and horse alike. “You can’t really walk in the taiga like they do in the movies: fanned out like Germans hunting resistance fighters,” Shibnev explained. “If we’d done that it would have taken two hours to go half a mile.”

Instead, they walked single file. It was a more efficient way to cover ground, but it could cause serious problems if the tiger were to attack. There had been the same problem at Markov’s: lined up like that along the trail, they ran the risk of shooting each other instead of the tiger. But there was no alternative in this terrain, so they walked in line, each man about two body lengths behind the other, the dogs barking, bolting ahead and then orbiting back to check in. Unless the tiger was laid up somewhere—or waiting for them—they probably wouldn’t be catching up to him that day anyway.

Given the temperature, the men wore surprisingly light clothes, and it was so cold and dry that there was no need for rubber or nylon. Some wore camouflage, but Trush chose more traditional clothing—homemade pants and jacket fashioned from gray blanket wool called sukno. Hunters like this material because it is quiet in the bush and, when it is this cold, it sheds snow easily. On his feet, Trush wore ordinary boots, but Pionka wore fleece moccasins like Andrei Pochepnya’s. Besides their rifles, a belt knife, and a handful of extra shells, the men carried little on the trail. Between them, they shared a rucksack containing a few snacks, a Thermos or two of tea, a radio, and a compass. They brought no maps. Burukhin was their map, and the tiger was their guide.

Like this, the men walked all day, stopping to rest only briefly. Every half hour or so, one of them would pause and study the tiger’s tracks, just to make sure they were as old as they had originally thought. Trush and his men had suspected the tiger would head to high ground after crossing the road and then angle southward toward Sobolonye, but the tiger had other plans. He appeared to be heading northwest, following a steep, tight ravine up into the thickly wooded hill country. There was a lot of Korean pine up there, which meant a strong likelihood of wild boar, but there were hunters’ cabins up there, too. In any case, the tiger did not travel in a linear fashion and nor did he choose paths that a man or horse would, so his pursuers found themselves weaving through the forest, plowing through underbrush and scrambling over deadfall and rock. Often, Burukhin’s horse would be forced back and have to find another route. By the end of that exhausting first day, it would be clear that there was no place for a horse on this hunt.

The sun was well on its way down by the time the five men approached the head of a little stream the locals called Third Creek, and it was up there, about three miles northwest of Sobolonye, that the tiger’s tracks began to trend southward toward the village. With the light failing, the men noted their position, checked the tracks one last time, and headed back the way they had come. All around them were low tree-covered mountains about 2,500 feet high. From the right angle, backlit by the sun, one could see through the forest to the stark outlines of the mountains themselves, the trees standing out on the ridges like stubble on a scalp. As the sun fell beyond the treetops, the upper branches seemed to gather mass, coming into high relief like the leading in a stained glass window. Briefly, the slivered voids between were lit in church glass shades of vermilion and purple, soon deepening to indigo and black.

The tracking team arrived back at the Kung after dark having covered, all told, only around ten miles. Still, they were beat. “After following his tracks for a day, we were getting a picture,” said Trush. “It was easy to see what the tiger was doing. He was hungry, and he was hunting Manchurian deer and roe deer. The tracks showed where he had pounced at them, but failed to catch them.”

“I wouldn’t say that he was weak,” said Pionka. “His wound was not serious. It was difficult for him to lift that leg, but he wasn’t going to die because of the injury. He didn’t seek out the easiest routes, and he didn’t lie down that often.”

Nonetheless, more than two weeks after being shot, the tiger still wasn’t able to hunt normally. He was going to need alternative food sources, and this meant livestock, dogs, or humans. There was no livestock in the back country so that left only two options, unless he was able to poach another tiger’s kill.

That evening, Burukhin rode home alone on the snowy road with his dogs trailing behind, now much subdued. Up above, the stars seemed to wink and pulse as they often do on particularly cold winter nights. In the village, smoke rose above the sheet metal chimneys as straight as a pencil. Further down the road in the graveyard, a few plots over from Markov’s, a coffin-shaped pile of embers glowed among the snow-covered graves, as startling as a wound. In the Pochepnyas’ little house, there was a coffin far too big for what it held, but no container big enough for the grief that went with it. It filled the place, and Andrei’s father was being slowly crushed beneath its invisible mass.

The village was in mourning and the danger was real, but even so, some continued to ignore the warnings from Inspection Tiger and their own families. Trush had seen the tracks of those who dodged the roadblocks, tempting fate. On one hand, he was sympathetic: “You have to remember that these were difficult times,” he said. “People were desperate. Wages weren’t being paid and, there, money was lying on the road: all you had to do was bend down and pick it up and sell the cones to China. You’d be paid right away.”

But at the same time, he was frustrated and deeply hurt. “In a situation like this, how can you blame Inspection Tiger? How can they accuse us of not taking any measures? How can we restrain the local population? And then there were all these negative sensational articles claiming that we were not doing anything. Where is the logic?”

When confronted, these diehards would inevitably repeat the tayozhnik’s mantra: “If I don’t touch her …”

“I’d say to them that they were wrong,” said Trush. “ ‘The tiger doesn’t care if you’re only out there picking cones.’ Some kept quiet, others said, ‘God will be merciful.’ And they carried on.”

In this way, armed with talismanic prayers, the villagers’ survival strategy had much in common with those of Korean peasants a century before. When Schetinin encountered an armed man named Andrei Oximenko from the neighboring village of Yasenovie, he confiscated his weapon on the spot, promising to return it only after the tiger had been killed. He then urged Oximenko to go home and stay there, which he didn’t. These were headaches Trush and Schetinin didn’t need. Each additional body in the forest was like another wild card, making the aggregate situation that much more dangerous. It also raised the question of how Inspection Tiger should be allocating its resources—trying to protect people who refused to cooperate with them, or staying focused on the tiger.

That night, Trush, Schetinin, and the others went over all this in the Kung. The next tracking shift would be Lazurenko’s; Burukhin would be off that day because of Andrei’s funeral. On the morning of the 18th, Lazurenko’s team headed up into the hills behind Sobolonye to pick up the trail. Meanwhile, the second funeral procession in less than two weeks made its way down the road to the cemetery. When it is extremely cold there is an almost frangible quality to the air; even the trees seem frozen hard as crystal, so sounds move differently, becoming sharper and more percussive. There, at the gravesite, surrounded by a hatchwork of forest, the people of Sobolonye gathered close around that hard dark hole. Friends and family threw in ceremonial handfuls of dirt and, when they landed on the lid of that all but empty box, those clods of frozen earth rang like drumbeats through the woods.

Sobolonye was on its knees. To make matters worse, another man was missing. A villager named Kostya Novikov had gone out a day earlier in the direction of Siptsy Creek, and hadn’t returned. Siptsy was the next watershed over from Third Creek, where Trush’s team had tracked the tiger on the first day. Given how close he was, the tiger could easily have circled back if he had picked up sound or scent of someone. Perhaps this is what had kept him from heading directly to the village. Further complicating matters was the fact that a group of hunters from Sobolonye had gone out to search for the missing man themselves. Markov’s friend Sasha Dvornik was among them: “We all went searching for him,” he told the filmmaker Sasha Snow in 2004. “When he was still out there the second day, we thought the tiger had eaten him.”

Trush was of the opinion that the tiger wouldn’t backtrack on himself and felt strongly that the teams should stay focused on Sobolonye and the tiger. But Schetinin wasn’t taking any chances and he ordered Trush’s team to go back to Siptsy and make sure Novikov had been accounted for. The following morning, December 19, while Lazurenko’s team picked up the tiger’s trail, Trush’s team, along with Schetinin, drove over to Siptsy. “There was an old logging road there,” Trush recalled, “and we saw a truck with three men inside. It turned out that the man had been lost in the forest and spent the night out there.”

“He was walking like he was wounded,” Dvornik recalled, “falling every fifty yards. He just had no strength left.”

It wasn’t clear whether Novikov was truly lost, drunk, or both, but there is no doubt he was lucky and, after his friends recovered him, he did not leave the village again. Trush continued on with Schetinin, following logging roads in a great circle around Sobolonye. They wanted to make sure the tiger was still in the immediate area, and to see if any other tigers might be in there with him. “We covered a large territory, about a hundred miles,” said Trush, “and we determined that there were five tigers within that circle. But the tiger we were looking for was in the center.”