The Tiger (23 page)

Yuri Trush appreciated and respected these qualities in the tiger. While investigating the site of the Markov attack, and while writing his report that weekend, he had made a sincere effort to understand this animal—to place himself inside the tiger’s umwelt and imagine his world as it pertained to Markov and those around him. He did the same with Markov, working hard to reconstruct both his umwelt and his last days. Trush is generally cautious and disciplined in his thinking and, when he is not sure, or just guessing, he is not afraid to say so. However, on one particular point, he was unequivocal: “I am one hundred percent sure,” he said, “that Markov shot at the tiger from the caravan at close range.”

It would have looked something like this: on December 1 or 2, a day or two before his death, Markov went out hunting with his dogs. He could have been alone or with Andrei Onofreychuk; the possibility of other people being present as well is not out of the question. The dogs would have been running up ahead, searching for a scent trail, and may well have been following one when they came upon a freshly killed boar. Markov is in hunting mode, so he is traveling with a gun, a rucksack, and perhaps a hatchet. When he catches up to the dogs, he sees the boar, and it is obvious that it has been killed by a tiger. He looks around, takes note of the dogs’ behavior, and decides the coast is clear. He can’t take the whole carcass, and he knows better than to do so, but he takes a haunch—maybe two, if he can carry that much. Then he hurries back to his cabin, feeling lucky: in the Panchelaza, this windfall was more fungible than mid-1990s rubles. Upon his return, Markov stores a portion of the meat in the beehive wellhead, which doubles as a food cache and is a safe distance from his cabin. Then he packs the rest of it down to the road workers’ camp to trade, returning home at dusk.

Meanwhile, the tiger returns to his kill. It is clear that it has been tampered with, and the tiger takes umbrage. Perhaps the tiger has a feed and a rest, or he may set off immediately on the trail of these interloping competitors. There is no ambiguity about who the tiger seeks: the scent trail of several dogs and a man is easy to follow. The tiger arrives at Markov’s sometime after nightfall, which, in early December, means anytime after 4:30 in the afternoon. He approaches from the east, from the Amba River, and the first thing he comes across is the meat cache.

When Trush investigated the meat cache wellhead in the stream, east of Markov’s cabin, he saw that it had been knocked over and that something had been dragged away from it, something that could have been a frozen boar leg. Trush didn’t spend a lot of time there, just long enough for him and Lazurenko to ascertain that the tiger had come from that direction and that the wellhead had been the first thing he investigated. However, they did note that this was the site of a resting place where the tiger spent a particularly long time—perhaps while he ate the recovered meat.

Following this, the tiger continues on toward the cabin, stopping briefly by Markov’s log latrine. By now, the dogs, wherever they are, are sounding the alarm. The tiger makes his way down to the cabin where he scours the area, knocking over Markov’s belongings and chewing them up in his angry search for Markov, his dogs, the rest of the meat, or all of the above (this damage could also have been done when the tiger returned later for the final stakeout). Meanwhile, Markov is inside, probably cooking up some of the boar meat (which the tiger may have scented already), and he may understand perfectly why the tiger is there. He realizes now that he has a serious problem on his hands. The tiger circles the caravan, searching for a way to get in, or at the dogs, which may be inside if they’re not hiding underneath. Markov is growing increasingly nervous; the caravan is a flimsy structure, sheathed only in boards, the cracks between them stuffed with rags to keep the wind out. By now, he may have realized that he has taken meat from the wrong tiger, and he is going to have to do something besides chain-smoke. Markov gets his gun.

Here, a problem arises in this scenario: where does he get the gun from? Because of condensation issues, poachers’ guns are usually stored outside, in order to maintain a stable temperature. However, since it was late, and a patrol was unlikely, Markov may have simply leaned it up outside the door along with his cartridge belt. If that is the case, then he has a chance of retrieving it—so long as the tiger is on the far side of the caravan. Another possibility is that he has the gun inside on the floor. When it is this cold—minus thirty or so—poorly insulated cabins may stay ice-cold below knee height because the heat from the stove rises and dissipates so quickly. In any case, Markov now has his gun. His dogs are whining and barking, and he is going to have to do something decisive. However, as soon as he brings the gun up to window height, there is a significant change in temperature and the steel components start sweating, as do the brass shells. At this rate, it won’t take long for the gunpowder to be compromised, if it isn’t already. There is a new moon so visibility is poor, but Markov can hear the tiger, which at this point is making no effort to disguise its presence. Perhaps it has already killed one of his dogs, an offense many tayozhniks would consider just cause for shooting a tiger. At least one of his dogs is a trained hunter, a “breadwinner,” and his livelihood depends on it. Markov is frightened, angry, and maybe a little drunk. Humble as it is, this is his castle, and there is a tiger at the gate.

In addition to a couple of small windows and the door, Markov’s caravan also had openings cut specifically for shooting in case deer or boar should wander into range. In this way, his trailer doubled as a kind of live-in hunting blind. From one of these openings, Markov finds his angle, thrusts the barrel through, and takes his shot from point-blank range, aiming for the tiger’s chest or head. There is a furious roar and a thrashing of brush, and the tiger is gone. For now. Markov reloads immediately. His heart is pounding. No one who has been challenged by a tiger comes away unmoved, and it is hard to tell who is more frightened now, Markov or his dogs. Once he has determined that the tiger is gone for the moment, Markov finds himself overcome with the need for a cigarette. If his dogs are outside, maybe he calls them in—if they haven’t already fled. He smokes, strokes his dogs if they are around, and gathers himself, assessing the damage, and trying to figure out what to do. He has just committed a federal offense, but it may not be his first and, if the tiger lives, federal laws will be the least of his problems; it is the tiger’s law he will need to worry about. He is going to have to come up with a strategy for dealing with this conflict, and he will have no peace until he does.

As confident as Trush is in his interpretation of these events, there are other credible versions and one of them comes from Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily, who discussed the incident with his father at the time. “Markiz had killed a boar not far from my father’s cabin,” he recalled. “The tiger found it and was eating it. When Markiz saw the tiger eating it, he shot at him. Naturally, the tiger ran away. The tiger was injured, and he could not kill anything for a week.”

For a hunter on foot, dismantling a dead boar can take days, which means that, even after Markov packed his first load home, there would have been hundreds of pounds of meat left in the forest. Just as a human may help himself to an unfinished tiger kill, a tiger may do the same to a half-butchered human kill. It wasn’t clear if Markov’s dogs had been mixed up in this, but one of the downsides of hunting dogs is that, when confronted by large, dangerous animals, they have a tendency to run back to their master, thus putting him directly in harm’s way. Had this happened, or had his dogs been attacked, Markov might have felt it necessary to shoot at the tiger. In any case, he would have had mere seconds to make a decision.

This version squares with that of the local hunting inspector Evgeny Smirnov, who headed a small agency called Field Group Taiga. Even though Smirnov was an ethnic Russian, the fact that he lived in Krasny Yar and was married to a respected native gave him access to information that could easily elude an outsider like Trush. Between his daily presence on the river and his direct pipeline to local gossip, Smirnov had his finger on the pulse of the local hunting and poaching scene. Smirnov counted the Dunkai clan among his neighbors and, shortly after Markov’s death, he got on his Buran and rode out to Ivan Dunkai’s cabin at the confluence of the Amba and the Bikin.

“The first thing I wanted to know,” Smirnov began, “was where the tiger came from. Uncle Vanya [Dunkai] showed me boar tracks going down along the Bikin, and the tiger had followed these boar tracks. He said, ‘Zhenya [a diminutive form of Evgeny], that’s not my tiger. He must have come from up the river.’ Then I knew the tiger had ventured out of its home territory. Uncle Vanya got scared when I told him that Markov was involved in trapping tigers and selling their skins. He understood very well that, if Markov had injured the tiger or harmed him in any way and then visited his [Dunkai’s] cabin, the tiger could come for Markov and might not spare him either.”

It seems now that Evgeny Smirnov was the only person with a forensic interest in this case who actually spoke with Ivan Dunkai at the time of the incident. What must be taken into account here is that Russian citizens, particularly older ones, have learned through painful experience that information is a weapon that can and will be used against them. Therefore, people protect their friends and neighbors, and information about them is shared carefully, being limited or altered according to who is asking. Shooting a tiger is a serious offense; if it came down to a choice between Inspection Tiger, foreign journalists, and a known and trusted local like Smirnov who had married into the tribe, the latter stood the best chance of getting good information. This is why Smirnov’s account must be considered, even though it differs substantially from Trush’s piecemeal one, which depended heavily on his (often excellent) powers of deduction.

“The thing is,” Smirnov explained, “that particular year was a bad year for tigers in terms of prey. Boars are very susceptible to disease and the boar population was in decline. That was the main reason this tiger came down the river: he was forced to expand his turf because there was not enough food and, while chasing boars, he ended up in someone else’s territory. As it happened, the tiger killed this boar very close to a road. At the same time, Markov was passing by with his dogs. The dogs ran toward the tiger, the tiger killed a dog, and, either because he was scared or because he didn’t know what else to do, Markov shot at the tiger. The misfortune was that the tiger memorized the smell of that man and started hunting him. There were many people in the area—soldiers, loggers, beekeepers—but the tiger moved around them and did not touch anyone. He was looking for a particular person. When Markov realized that the tiger was pursuing him, he fled.

“He was afraid to go home then because he knew that he had not killed the tiger. He ran four miles to Uncle Vanya’s, and stayed there, hoping the tiger would go away. Uncle Vanya saw that Markov was not himself: he was constantly deep in thought, and he seemed scared, but Uncle Vanya did not ask him any questions. Only after several days did Markov tell him that he had shot at a tiger and injured him. That’s when Uncle Vanya said, ‘Listen, you have to go to the village or somewhere else; you have to leave the taiga. The tiger will not let you live.’ And that’s when he left.

“In the meantime, the tiger had finished off what was left of the boar. Then, he found Markov’s tracks, found his apiary, and waited there for him. Tigers are very well insulated so, if a tiger lies down somewhere overnight, his body heat does not melt the snow completely. It was obvious that the tiger waited for a long time because the snow had melted to the ground where he was resting. He waited for a long time; he waited long enough.”

As Smirnov understood it, Markov had stopped in at Zhorkin’s logging camp in the hope of getting a ride back to his cabin. However, by the time he arrived that evening, all the heavy vehicles had been put away for the night and their radiators drained.* Zhorkin had already driven home, and there were no other vehicles available. For some reason—very likely his dogs, who may have run ahead—Markov was unwilling to wait.

As much as these accounts may differ from one another, there is, running through them all, the common theme of dogs and meat—the two things humans and tigers are most likely to have conflict over in the forest. In this sense, the incident was a textbook case, and is completely consistent with the behavior of all the creatures involved. Markov for his part was certainly familiar with tigers and with the local lore, both native and Russian, but the only tiger attacks he is likely to have known much about were two local incidents, both of which were spontaneous retaliations to human attacks. In the mid-1980s, a woman from Yasenovie had her arm mauled after she tried to chase a tiger out of her barnyard with an axe; the man who came to help her was also injured before the tiger was shot. On the Bikin River, in 1996, there had been another incident in which a native man named Evgeny Nekrasov shot at a family of tigers from his boat, whereupon the tigress jumped into his boat and attacked him. He survived only because his partner, who was also in the boat, shot the tigress and killed her. That same year, about a hundred miles to the east, on the Pacific slope of the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, two poachers were killed and eaten within days of each other by a tiger whose right foreleg had been crippled by a snare.

According to Evgeny Suvorov, a journalist and author from Primorye who has studied the subject exhaustively, the mid-1990s were bad years for tiger attacks. In 1996, at least five people were killed, and several more were seriously injured. Some of these attacks were provoked, but others clearly weren’t. In his book Zapovednoye Primorye, Suvorov quotes the following verse by a game warden who had to face this uncertainty on a daily basis:

I’ve read a tiger’s not dangerous,10

They say the tiger won’t attack

But one thing’s not clear to me.