The Tiger (28 page)

When Pochepnya arrived, as the tiger somehow knew he would, it would have been around two in the afternoon. Hunters are vigilant of necessity, and a four-hundred-pound tiger sitting sphinxlike on a mattress is hard to miss. But Pochepnya was not aware of the tiger until he launched himself off his bed from ten yards away.

Pochepnya’s rifle would have been slung over his left shoulder with the trigger facing upward. This arrangement enables a hunter (or a soldier) to grasp the barrel with his left hand and bring the gun up to his right shoulder in one fluid motion. Pochepnya, fresh out of the army and a hunter all his life, was trained to do this in a fraction of a second—and he did. But when he pulled the trigger nothing happened.

There are, scattered around the hinterlands of Asia and—increasingly—elsewhere, a small fraternity of people who have been attacked by tigers and lived. Its members find their way in through various means: greed, desperation, curiosity, bad timing, and, in a handful of cases, dazzling stupidity or madness. There is no association that advocates for them as there is for so many other niche populations of afflicted people, and there is no journal that reviews their cases or disseminates information on their behalf. Mostly, they stay at home, often in shacks and cabins a long way from paved roads. If they leave, it is usually with difficulty and sometimes in great pain. Very rarely is there anyone in their immediate vicinity who fully appreciates what happened to them out there and, in this way, the lives of tiger attack survivors resemble those of retired astronauts or opera divas: each in their own way has stared alone into the abyss.

In the case of the hunting-manager-turned-big-cat-researcher Sergei Sokolov, it took years to pull himself back out. Sokolov was in his early forties when he was attacked by a tiger in March of 2002. Powerfully built, with a bull neck and a closely shorn head, he exudes the kind of pent-up intensity that one might expect of a highly trained soldier—the kind that gets dropped alone behind enemy lines and must, somehow, get himself back alive. Sokolov is a rigorously principled and very focused man, made more so, it seems, by his experiences with tigers and leopards. To date, he has spent more than twenty years working and hunting in the taiga. During his thirteen years as a ranger and hunting inspector, two hunters he knew were killed by tigers, and he was personally involved in a hunt for a man-eater (a decrepit male whose fangs had been worn down to nubs). Like so many in this work, Sokolov was drawn to the Far East by the stories he had read, and by their promise of the wild and exotic. Today, there is an urgency about Sokolov, a sense that time is limited and precious, and it may have something to do with coming so close to death. Even so, it took him several hours to recount the ordeal that began, as these incidents so often do, with a roar.

“I will tell you my personal outlook on things,” said Sokolov late one evening at the kitchen table in his modest apartment in Vladivostok. “Everybody has his fate and his destiny. It is difficult to escape it: if it is your destiny to die this year, it won’t matter if you go into the taiga or not. I never thought that something could happen to me in the taiga, because in the taiga I felt like I was at home.”

Sokolov’s purpose on that cold spring day in the mountains of southern Primorye had been to collect samples of Amur leopard scat for DNA analysis, which is one way scientists determine population numbers for this critically endangered cat. He was working with a partner—a novice—who was some distance away, and both men were unarmed as per the regulations for this type of research. It was early afternoon, just below freezing, when Sokolov ran across a set of tiger tracks and stopped to measure them; they were fresh, and it was clear they belonged to a female. He decided to follow them, but did so backward as a precaution. He lost the trail and, as he circled around to find it again, he crested a ridge where he paused to catch his breath. And this was when he heard it. “This sound,” said Sokolov, “you cannot confuse it with anything else—God willing you should never hear it. My partner was a hundred yards away, and he said that when he heard that roar he was stunned; it was all he could do not to start running.”

Sokolov paused, trying to find words to describe a sensation that is essentially indescribable. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas could have helped him here: on the African savanna, she explains in The Tribe of Tiger, when thunder rolls, lions will roar back. What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

“I will use an analogy,” said Sokolov, trying his best to articulate what he heard and felt on that ridge. “Every melody is based on the same seven notes, but some melodies make you happy, some make you sad, and some can terrify you. Well, this was a roar which makes your blood go cold in your veins and your hair stand up on your head. You could call it a ‘premonition of death.’ When I heard it, I thought, ‘That tiger is going to kill somebody,’ but the wind was blowing and my back was turned, so at first I didn’t realize it was going to be me.”

Nor had Sokolov realized that there was more than one tiger. The tigress he was tracking was in heat and a large male had been tailing her; while backtracking on the trail of the female, Sokolov had run into the male. When a tigress comes into estrus, a kind of pheromone-induced insanity follows wherever she goes, and this tiger was out of its mind with lust. He had probably fought for his position and he had a lot to look forward to: once the tigress has reviewed and accepted a suitor, the two may copulate twenty times a day for a week or more. Individual encounters are brief and loud and, once consummated, the tigress may wheel around and club her mate savagely in the face. It is hard to tell from the human vantage whether this is a sign of irritation or tigerish affection.

When the tiger spotted Sokolov, it may have perceived him as a competitor, a threat, or simply as an obstacle, but by the time Sokolov realized his mistake, it was too late. “The tiger roared again,” he said. “He was about forty yards away and I saw him running toward me. The word ‘fear’ doesn’t really describe the feeling in that situation. It’s more like an animal horror—a terror that’s genetically inherent in you. Something happened to me then: I went into a stupor; I was paralyzed, and I had only one thought: I am going to die right now. Very clearly, I realized that I was going to die.”

The tiger closed the gap in a matter of seconds and, in that moment of arrested consciousness, Sokolov didn’t even see the final leap. “I stepped back,” he said, “and closed my eyes for an instant—because of my nerves. They say that when a person is in this type of critical situation his whole life rushes through his mind. Well, that didn’t happen to me. I remembered Sergei Denisov [a hunter he had known who was killed and eaten by a tiger], and I had just one thought: let this tiger kill me right away so I won’t suffer too long.

“The tiger knocked me down; my left leg was bent and he bit into my knee. For an instant, he and I were looking in each other’s eyes—his eyes were blazing, his ears were pressed back; I could see his teeth, and I thought I saw surprise in his eyes—like he was seeing something he hadn’t expected to see. He bit me once, twice. My bones were cracking, crushing; everything was crackling. He was holding my leg sort of like a dog, shaking his head from side to side, and there was a sound like heavy cloth ripping. I was in excruciating pain. He was eating me, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.”

In that moment, Sokolov shifted into a different mode; it was as if the clouds of fear parted to make way for another emotion, much as they had for Jim West when he heard the bear attacking his dog. “I just got mad,” said Sokolov. “Instinctively, I punched the tiger in the forehead, between the eyes. He roared and jumped away. Then my partner came to help me.”

In the act of coming to his senses, and tapping that deep and ancient vein of self-preservation that flows through all of us, Sokolov had brought the tiger to its senses, too. The tiger had no particular issue with Sokolov; he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But for Sokolov, this was just the beginning. “As soon as the tiger left, I understood that my bones were crushed and shattered, and my ligaments and tendons were torn apart.”

And yet, in spite of this, the pain Sokolov felt then was as keen in his heart as it was in his leg: “I have spent so much time in the taiga,” he said. “I love the taiga and I treat it like my home—like it is some living creature. I have never violated her law, never killed anything which I shouldn’t have, never cut a tree unless I had to do it. So, when I saw that tiger charging me, I felt like I was being betrayed by my own mother.”

Andrei Pochepnya may have felt the same way.

Sokolov was now in a grave situation: lethally injured, lying in deep, wet snow, miles from the nearest road, with an inexperienced partner. There was no radio, and walking was out of the question. His knee was so badly damaged he looked, in his words, “like a grasshopper”; it was bleeding profusely. Sokolov’s partner managed to bind his upper leg with a tourniquet and ease him into his sleeping bag. “I told him, ‘Vladimir, please, cut some pine branches, prepare some firewood, make a fire and run for help.’ He gave me what he had, including his knapsack, his sweater, some chocolate, and then he left. There were cigarettes, too—a whole pack. I smoked them all in the first half hour.”

By then, it was about three in the afternoon. It was windy and the temperature was dropping, the sodden snow turning to ice. The sun went down, and darkness settled in. Sokolov lay there as the hours passed, and the pile of firewood shrank, but nobody came. The nearest road was three miles away, and the research base was ten more beyond that. In spite of the tourniquet, Sokolov’s blood was draining steadily out of him, taking his body temperature down with it. Somehow he stayed alert; it may have been the pain that kept him conscious. Sokolov spent the entire night like that, alone in a traumatized limbo of blood loss, creeping hypothermia, and unimaginable pain. On top of this, there was no guarantee that the tigers wouldn’t come back. “I just wanted to lose consciousness and stop feeling that pain,” he said. “By three a.m., I understood that nobody was coming.”

This was only the second circle of Sokolov’s hell; there were still at least seven more to go. Despite his best efforts, he never lost consciousness for more than a few minutes, and there in the dark, in shock, his mind wandered to some frightening places. He could not fathom where his partner was and he imagined he must have had an accident, too; he pictured Vladimir injured at the bottom of a cliff, and his despair deepened. “I don’t consider myself a religious man,” said Sokolov, “but at that time I was thinking: ‘God, please take me, and stop this torture.’ Over the course of the night, I passed through different stages of desire to live and to die. I decided I would hang on until noon the next day; if nobody had come by then I would take a knife and slit my wrist—these were the kinds of thoughts going through my mind.”

Meanwhile, Sokolov’s partner was having some serious problems of his own. He made it to the road all right, but when he stopped at the first village, no one was willing to help him so he had to go all the way back to the base. Once there, it took him until around five in the morning before he managed to gather some men with a Caterpillar tractor and a hay wagon. In this, they made the slow trip back. Not even the Cat could get up to the ridge so they made the last mile or so on foot, carrying a stretcher. They didn’t reach Sokolov until nine. By then, he had been on his own for eighteen hours, and he was on the threshold, wavering between the living and the dead. “While I was in that suspended, uncertain state,” he recalled, “my body understood that it should fight for life and I should be alert. I knew that there was nobody to rely on, except myself. But as soon as I saw familiar faces, all my strength left me. I felt very weak; I was very thirsty. I started to cry.

“I told them that they wouldn’t be able to take me to the hospital by tractor. I told them to call a helicopter immediately because I was going to die otherwise. As it was, I almost died on the way to the tractor. It took them six hours to carry me because the slope was so steep. The snow was melting and it was slippery; there were fallen trees along the creek and waterfalls covered with ice. There were only four people on the rescue team and they got exhausted.”

The rescue team had a radiophone and they called for a helicopter, but because bills for previous rescue flights were in arrears, the aviation authority refused to fly. They were referred to the governor of the territory. They called the governor’s office, and they were told he would have to think about it. Hours passed, and Sokolov was slipping. They made more calls: to a well-connected Russian tiger researcher and then to his ex-wife, who eventually got in touch with Dale Miquelle, the American tiger biologist in Terney. Miquelle agreed to vouch for the flight and, finally, the helicopter took off. By then, it was late afternoon and, still, the stretcher-bearers had not been able to reach the tractor. Sokolov was drifting in and out of consciousness. When the helicopter arrived, there was nowhere to land so they had to winch him up through the trees in a basket.

By the time Sokolov finally arrived in the hospital, the doctor gave him hours to live. His leg became a secondary concern then; simply saving his life was now the priority. When he was eventually stabilized and conscious again, Sokolov was greeted with the news that his leg would have to be amputated. By then, more than twenty-four hours had passed since the attack, and the wound had gone septic. Even the bone itself became afflicted with an infection of the marrow (osteomyelitis). The mouth of a tiger, even a healthy one, is a filthy place, and Sokolov required massive doses of antibiotics. He had to have a cannula (a semipermanent intravenous device) inserted under his collarbone and, like this, he was parked in the hospital, attached to an IV drip, for months. During this time, close friends managed to find doctors willing to try to save his leg, which they managed to do with multiple surgeries, plates, and screws. Whether he would ever be able to walk on it again was another matter. For months afterward, Sokolov was held together with a stainless steel armature called an Ilizarov apparatus, which gave him the macabre appearance of a human being under construction.