The Tiger (36 page)

This confused matters somewhat. No one had assumed the tiger would be the only one in the area, but they hadn’t counted on there being that many others. None, however, had paws the size of the tiger they were seeking. Although no one could be positive, Trush believed that this area, large as it was, could be the tiger’s home territory, and that the neighboring cubs and females were there by his grace.

During the 19th and the 20th, the pattern of stalking and driving repeated itself, and during that time the tracking teams occasionally lost the tiger’s trail and found the tracks of another. “The tracking took an awful lot of time,” said Trush. “The snow was deep. His wound was restraining him, and the dragging of his right paw on the snow got bigger and worse. The tiger got tired and so did we—that was the whole idea.”

“He always walked,” recalled Burukhin, who rejoined the hunt on the 19th. “He walked and walked, but he did not walk normally. He was making small jumps all the time. He never lay down.” Burukhin wasn’t sure if the tiger knew he was being hunted: “I don’t know,” he said. “He could not tell us what he knew and what he didn’t.”

Pionka believed the tiger was always too far ahead of them to know he was being tracked, but Trush wasn’t so sure. “We would be checking the tracks fifteen to twenty times a day,” he said, “and, over the course of a day, the distance between us and the tiger would decrease. I don’t doubt that at times the tiger would have heard us, but I don’t think he was afraid of us.”

Ever since leaving the Pochepnya site on the 15th, the tiger remained in the high country, hunting behind the village. Perhaps he was trying to return to his old hunting methods and prey, or he may have been staying close to Sobolonye in the hope of discovering a stray hunter. As circuitous as his route was, he got closer to Sobolonye every day. On the evening of the 20th, Lazurenko’s team reported that the tiger had crossed First Creek, which ran just north of the village. There was sign of a small boar herd there and the tiger had been hunting them—again, without success. However, a second, smaller tiger was in the area, too, and it had managed to catch a young one. Lazurenko and his men found the young boar’s remains with the wounded tiger’s prints overlaying those of the other tiger. Perhaps he had run the smaller tiger off. In any case, he had eaten what was left of the boar, but it wasn’t nearly enough to sustain him. Meanwhile, there was Sobolonye, barely a quarter of a mile away. They continued following the tracks, and they led directly to the village. This was the moment Trush had been fearing all along. The teams immediately relocated the Kungs and notified the residents, but there was no need to: the dogs had already sounded the alarm.

“We could see Sobolonye,” said Trush. “We could hear the dogs barking; we could smell the smoke from the chimneys. We were very close—two or three hundred yards away. The tiger stopped, listened, sniffed, and looked directly at the town.” And then, inexplicably, the tiger turned away. “Maybe it was us,” Trush said. “Maybe he heard us coming into the village and retreated because of that.”

The tracks bore off to the west, skirting the village, but it had grown too dark to follow them. There was every reason to suppose the tiger was doing reconnaissance, trying to determine the most advantageous point of entry. “We couldn’t be sure he wasn’t coming back,” said Trush. “We figured he was probably going to hunt dogs because he’d been hungry for a long time.”

The tiger had arrived at midwinter, and the coming nights would be the longest of the year. The moon was waning, in its last quarter, and its paltry light cast shadows that were ragged and confused. They had the same fragmenting effect on the gardens and barnyards of the village as stripes have on a tiger: nothing held together but the blocky forms of the houses themselves. Under such conditions a tiger could pass as formless as a ghost, leaving only tracks to betray it. In the village, there was no sign of human activity whatsoever. “As soon as it got dark, I got everyone inside,” Dvornik said later. “Water, firewood—we left that for the daytime. Nobody moved.”

Fear had hardened into certainty: the tiger was among them, hunting beneath their very windows. In response, the people of Sobolonye battened themselves down like the Danes at Heorot braced for Grendel’s final assault. At midnight, the generator was shut down, and then there was no sound but the dogs: a series of shrill and urgent calls and responses that ricocheted between the houses, each one trailing a faint echo behind it like a sonic shadow. Together, these sentinels formed a kind of predator positioning system: when one of them reached a certain pitch, or stopped transmitting altogether, dogs and humans alike would know, if only for a moment, where the tiger was. But this ancient and time-tested network of alarms was only that; it was no defense against the tiger. The night belonged to him. The dogs could bark and growl all they liked, but in the end they were helpless in the face of this creature they could sense but could not see. And this made the long night seem longer still. Around the village, tree-lined ridges rose up against the deeper dark beyond and, along that wavering verge, stars moved imperceptibly in the treetops, encircling man and animal alike. Altogether, those cross-hatched branches wove a spangled basket against the sky and somewhere inside it was the tiger, hunting.

He who has suffered you to impose on him, knows you.…

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.WILLIAM BLAKE,

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

WAITING FOR A TIGER TO ATTACK IS LIKE WAITING FOR A BOMB TO GO off. Nobody slept much. Trush was on tenterhooks, but there was nothing he or his men could do until the sun rose on the shortest day of the year. When it finally did, it was so cold out that it took them nearly an hour just to get the trucks running. Once they were mobile, Trush’s team drove into the village proper where they discovered that no dogs or livestock were missing. Besides the barking of their dogs, the cautiously emerging villagers had neither heard nor seen anything out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, Lazurenko’s team picked up the tiger’s trail where they had left off at dusk the previous afternoon. It was evident from the tracks that the tiger had bypassed the village altogether. “I can’t explain why,” said Trush, “but he did not go in.”

For some reason, despite the presence of a variety of easy prey, the tiger had left the village alone, a decision that, under the circumstances, would have taken extraordinary restraint, or caution. Perhaps he sensed the Kungs and the men who were hunting him. Perhaps the village was too crowded with evidence of man and guns. Perhaps the tiger was looking for an easy, isolated kill.

The tiger headed west, back into the hills, following the bed of First Creek. Burukhin was with Lazurenko and, when they saw where the tracks were going, and how direct the tiger’s line of travel was, Burukhin had a chilling realization: about four miles to the west, just over a low ridge at the head of another stream called Svetly (Bright) Creek, there was a cabin belonging to a neighbor named Grisha Tsibenko. In the Bikin valley, people rarely lock their cabins; hospitality is one resource there is still plenty of, and friends and travelers drop in all the time. Burukhin believed that people could be staying up there. Furthermore, Andrei Oximenko, the same man Schetinin had disarmed three days earlier, was known to hunt in that area, and he was nowhere to be found.

By now, the tiger had not rested or eaten well in a week. This would not have been quite so serious had it been a different season, but the temperature was ranging from twenty-five to forty-five below zero. The amount of meat required to keep something the size of a tiger as much as 150 degrees hotter than the world around it is prodigious—on the order of forty pounds per day. Between his injuries, the brutal cold, the hunger gnawing in his gut, and the hunters’ steady pursuit, the tiger was being pressured from all sides. In his compromised state, he also ran the risk of being challenged by another tiger and either killed or driven from the area. But at that moment, as Lazurenko conferred with Burukhin and radioed the tiger’s probable destination back to Trush, meat would have been foremost in his thoughts. Winter was only just getting started in the taiga and, without a significant kill, the tiger’s thermal clock was in grave danger of running down. He could freeze to death before he starved.

In a sense, Markov had succeeded in bringing the tiger down to his level: now, the tiger was a poacher, too. In order to feed himself, he was once again going to have to violate his own laws. Burukhin had been right: the tiger was headed straight for Tsibenko’s cabin. When the tiger arrived there, sometime in the early dark of December 21, it scouted the place for dogs, a meat cache, the owner. Failing to find any of these, he started knocking things off the cabin’s outer walls. When he got to a set of large bowls, he chewed them to scrap metal. From his experiences at Markov’s cabin, the road workers’ camp, and Tsepalev’s shelter on the Takhalo, the tiger had learned many things about the world of men and, here, he brought them all to bear. When the possibilities of the cabin’s exterior had been exhausted, the tiger located a window and forced his way in.

To say that a tiger is an “outside” animal is an understatement that is best appreciated when a tiger is inside. Cabins are small, of necessity, and the tiger filled this one the way a cat would a fish tank. Much to the tiger’s irritation, Grisha Tsibenko was not at home. In the course of searching for something—anything—made of meat, the tiger destroyed the place. When he got around to the mattress, which smelled richly of Tsibenko, his habits and afflictions, the tiger tore it apart and then lay down on its harrowed remains. Perhaps by chance, or perhaps by synthesizing his recent experiences hunting for humans, the tiger had arrived at a more efficient method: building on his success with cabin stakeouts and with mattresses, he combined the two here in a way that also warmed him in the process. Waiting for prey inside was the tigrine equivalent to a better mousetrap. Now it was only a matter of time.

It is not known how long the tiger waited for Tsibenko to show up, but it is a small mercy—in a place notably short on mercy—that he didn’t. The image—arriving home to find a tiger in your bed—is one worthy of a folktale, and there are Udeghe and Nanai stories in which exactly this occurs. In any case, at some point that morning, the tiger got up and left. It may have been because he got impatient, or it may have been because he sensed Andrei Oximenko coming up the Svetly Creek road.

Vladimir Shibnev knew this road intimately because he had helped build it back when he worked for the logging company. It was a dead-end spur that followed Svetly Creek for about three miles before petering out in a steep tree-clad bowl. Unless one hiked over the ridge behind Sobolonye, the only way to get there was by driving south out of Sobolonye for five miles to Yasenovie, and then turning west onto the main road back to civilization. From there, it was another couple of miles to the Svetly Creek turnoff. The spur followed the creek northward, almost all the way to Tsibenko’s cabin, which was set back discreetly in the forest beyond. While Lazurenko, Burukhin, Smirnov, and Kopayev followed the tiger’s tracks on foot, Trush, along with Shibnev, Gorborukov, and Pionka, drove the Kung over to Svetly Creek, where they hoped to intercept the tiger. The net was closing: “We had a feeling,” said Burukhin, “that we would come over that ridge and he would be there.”

It was only a ten-mile trip, but between one thing and another Trush and his men didn’t get over to Svetly until shortly before noon. In the back of the Kung, there was a gun rack where the rifles were usually stored, but the rack was empty now. That morning, everyone kept their rifles by their sides. Because it was 1997, and chaos had become the norm in Russia, these men had access to all manner of military surplus at discount prices. As a result, Shibnev’s and Pionka’s rifles were loaded with bullets that had been designed to kill soldiers inside armored personnel carriers. These rounds, called BZs, can penetrate a slab of steel three quarters of an inch thick, at which point they explode. Trush, because he actually had a budget for ammunition, was using more traditional hunting bullets called dum-dums. Made of lead, as opposed to steel, these will mushroom inside the body as they carom around, tearing up everything in their path. While there are some bullets made to stop a charging man in his tracks, neither BZs nor dum-dums can stop a charging tiger. The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second-story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning.

Lazurenko’s team was still hiking up First Creek when Gorborukov turned the Kung onto the Svetly Creek road. By then, the tiger had emerged from the forest at the far end and was walking south, directly toward them. Between the tiger and the Kung was Andrei Oximenko. Oximenko was on foot, heading north, on a collision course with the tiger. If he had a gun, it was because he had found a replacement for the one Schetinin had confiscated—not that guns had been much of a deterrent to this tiger. Trush and his men were not aware of Oximenko’s presence there, so they proceeded slowly, the Kung’s huge tires churning through the knee-deep snow, smoke billowing from the woodstove in the back. Shibnev and Pionka were riding in back, too, and they couldn’t see much out the narrow side windows.

Trush sat in the passenger seat of the high two-man cab with Gitta, scanning the roadside for tiger tracks. It wasn’t long before he spotted some. Trush hopped out with his rifle to examine them, and Shibnev and Pionka got out, too. They could tell immediately that the tracks belonged to a different tiger. By now, these men knew this animal’s prints almost as well as they knew their own hands. The men climbed back in and they continued northward. The weather was holding: brilliant sun, minus thirty, the snow as fine as confectioners’ sugar. Here and there, along the road, were birch trees bent double by heavy snow, their forked branches plunging earthward like lightning bolts frozen in mid-strike. There were more tracks and Trush jumped out to check, as did Shibnev and Pionka. These ones were old and, again, it was the wrong tiger—probably the same one whose tracks they’d crossed earlier. By now, they had covered about a mile and a half at this careful, stop-and-go pace.