The Tiger (29 page)

Immediately after the attack, Inspection Tiger examined the site and determined that it was an unfortunate accident and chalked it up to human error; no attempt was made to pursue the tiger. When Sokolov’s boss came to the hospital to explain what had actually happened—that he had stumbled on mating tigers—he ribbed him, saying, “You’re lucky that tiger didn’t try to fuck you instead of the tigress.”

“Well, he should have proposed it to me,” Sokolov replied. “I’d have let him have his way with me if it would have kept him from biting.”

Infected by the tiger in mysterious ways, Sokolov found himself stirred by powerful impulses he had no wish to control. As soon as he was able to hobble around, he was overcome by sexual desire. “For a year and a half I had to use crutches,” he said. “After that I had to use a cane. Maybe some strength came from the tiger, or maybe I understood that I was really alive, but I started fucking around.”

It is the wish to acquire this same form of potency, but at less personal cost, that drives much of the illegal trade in tiger-based supplements. The brandname Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.

“I consider this event to be fate,” said Sokolov in conclusion. “If you go to the taiga, you should be prepared to encounter a tiger—that is where they live. In terms of my feelings toward this tiger, I have only feelings of gratitude, and I will explain why: if a person goes through a tough ordeal in his life, he either breaks down or becomes stronger than he used to be. In my case, it was the latter. After this incident, I became stronger—not physically, of course, but spiritually. Maybe it will sound funny, but, possibly, some strength from this tiger was transferred to me.”

All told, Sergei Sokolov’s rehabilitation took three years. During that time, he met his wife, Svetlana, and they have started a family. Their apartment in Vladivostok feels like a cozy, happy home, and it is clear that this has been a key ingredient in his remarkable recovery. “I vowed to a friend of mine: ‘I will walk, and I will return to the taiga,’ ” said Sokolov. “ ‘Even if I have to use crutches, even with a wooden leg, I will return.’ This is what I decided for myself.”

Today, Sokolov’s leg bends only slightly, and it is a horror to look at, but he can walk, and he can work. It is not a miracle so much as it is a testament to bloody-minded determination and, probably, love. It takes him twice as long now, and he pays for it in pain, but Sokolov has managed to return to his Taiga Matushka (Mother Taiga).

* A bolt-action infantry rifle whose design had changed little since it was introduced in 1891.

Amba, the tiger, said to the father, “Old man, leave me your son here; don’t take him with you. If you take him with you I will come and kill you both.”“The Boy and the Tiger,”

NINA VASILIEVNA MUNINA1

BY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, LEONID LOPATIN COULD STAND IT NO LONGER.

“One, two, three days passed. Andrei is not back, but nobody is doing anything. So I said to my son, ‘Let’s go to the apiary.’ I had a car so we went. Vasily went to look in the cabin, came back to the car and said, ‘Something is wrong. Come take a look.’ I saw a pot filled with frozen water in the kitchen; the rest of the bread was on the shelf, mostly eaten by a mouse, and I saw pieces of spaghetti eaten by the mouse as well. So everything was telling me: there’s trouble. We drove back and I went to Andrei’s mother. I asked her, ‘How much food did Andrei have? How long was he planning to stay in the forest?’ She said, ‘He only had a loaf of bread and a package of macaroni—he only left for a day.’ I asked her, ‘Why aren’t you worrying? It’s been four days, and the tiger is in the taiga. Where’s his father?’ She said, ‘He is working at the school; he’s on the night shift.’ I said, ‘Tell him to come and see me as soon as he gets off, I need to talk to him.’

“So in the morning, after his shift, Alexander Pochepnya came to see me. And when he came, I told him man-to-man: ‘It is your own son, what the hell are you doing? He is not a dog. He’s out there somewhere for four days and you’re not worried about him? If it was me, I would fly over there.’ He said, ‘I am worried. Something inside tells me that something is wrong. But I can’t go there by myself. Let’s go together.’ He was confused and upset; he didn’t know what to do, and I said, ‘You’re his father—gather some hunters and go with them.’ He asked Danila Zaitsev, Denis Burukhin, my son, and me.”

Lopatin stopped speaking and rubbed his eyes. “I am sorry,” he said, “my vision is bad and my eyes are in pain. That is why they are watering.”

On Monday the 15th, Danila Zaitsev; Denis Burukhin; Andrei Pochepnya’s father, Alexander; Leonid Lopatin; and Lopatin’s son, Vasily, squeezed themselves and their guns into Lopatin’s Toyota sedan. Andrei’s younger brother had wanted to go, too, but they wouldn’t allow it because, said Burukhin, “We knew where we were going. We knew what we were going to find.” Leonid Lopatin was nearly sixty at the time—old for that country—so, after driving them to the apiary, he left on some other business, letting the younger men go ahead on their own. The men were all armed except for Alexander Pochepnya, who had only the one rifle, which Andrei had taken with him. This made Zaitsev the de facto leader of the party. He was carrying a powerful double-barreled shotgun, which, formidable as it was, would have been scoffed at by anyone with experience in shooting big cats. However, this is what he had, and it was legal.

According to Markov’s friend Andrei Onofreychuk, Zaitsev was dismayed by the younger men’s casual attitude. “They were going down the trail with their weapons on their shoulders as if they didn’t need them,” he recalled. “So, Zaitsev said, ‘Are you guys nuts? You have to have your guns ready, right?’ But they just said, ‘Whatever happens, happens.’

“Youth is youth,” said Onofreychuk. “They don’t realize the danger yet.”

Although they were neighbors, Zaitsev did not know Alexander Pochepnya particularly well. A father himself, he accompanied Pochepnya on this dreadful errand, not out of love or loyalty, but because he had been asked, and perhaps because he could sense how close to the edge this man already was. Zaitsev had been born in western China where many Old Believers sought refuge following the Russian Revolution. Shortly after Stalin’s death, Zaitsev’s family had moved to Kazakhstan, and later he had moved on to the Far East—first to Chukotka and then south to Primorye, a path similar to Yuri Trush’s. Zaitsev was a rarity in Sobolonye, having stayed sober and kept the same job maintaining the village’s diesel generator for twenty years. Whatever his other failings, Zaitsev was a calm and sturdy soul whose presence alone was a bulwark against the crushing circumstances of both the era and the moment. And this was what Alexander Pochepnya needed now, more than anything.

The day they were given was crystalline, brittle, and bitterly cold. The taiga was at its winter finest and seemed made for the eyes alone: the sunshine was so brilliant, the snow so pristine, the sky so depthless, the stillness of the forest so profound that speech or motion of any kind felt like an intrusion. Here, even the softest sounds carried an echo, and the search party’s presence, announced by the irksome, eightfold squeaking of their boots, seemed out of place—an affront to the exalted silence all around them. Burdened as they were by their dark concerns, these men were strangers here.

They did not travel in any kind of formation, or with any particular plan, but they all knew how to decipher winter sign—how, as Russian hunters say, to “read the White Book.” The frozen river was a wind-stripped tabula rasa bearing just enough snow to record a track. A steep escarpment rose up from the right bank, guiding the river and pushing the men, first onto the ice and then over to the other side—Burukhin’s side, where only his traps were set. The lower ground there carried more snow but was confused by a tangle of grass, shrubs, and fallen trees that soon gave way to full-blown forest. Even with the leaves down, it would be nearly impossible to find anything that didn’t want to be found. But the snow missed nothing: a meticulous record keeper, it captured the story and held it fast. Andrei Pochepnya’s was a meandering narrative of one line only: a single set of boot tracks leading away, and never coming back. His traps, which were set at the bases of small trees and among overhanging roots along the right bank, lay empty and undisturbed. A mile downstream from the apiary, hunkered down among bare stalks and saplings on the same side of the river, was Tsepalev’s tarpaper hovel. As the men drew abreast of it, they noticed a second set of tracks emerging from the low doorway. Under normal circumstances these would have been made by the owner, a trapper and poet who was known to these men. But these tracks weren’t made by a man.

It was shortly after noon, a week from the solstice, and the sun hung low over the river, blazing heatlessly. It was so cold and dry that it felt as if every molecule of moisture had been sucked from the air. There was no wind, and the snow sparkled with such fierce precision that each flake appeared distinct from those around it. In the midst of this exultant dazzle, dread turned to certainty. They readied their weapons and followed the tracks—across the river and up the left bank, over to a massive spruce tree, well over one hundred feet tall. There at the base, they found, along with the poet’s tattered bed, a story very like the one at Markov’s cabin: that of a tiger who made no attempt to hide and who attacked an alert, armed man head-on from ten paces away—as if he was an adversary, as opposed to prey. It was becoming a kind of signature. How, they wondered, could Pochepnya have been so close to something the size and color of a tiger, lying in the snow—on a mattress, no less—and failed to see it?

The site of the attack was clearly marked by the trampled snow, but there was strangely little blood, and Pochepnya’s body was nowhere to be found. Only his rifle remained where it had fallen. Denis Burukhin picked it up and the first thing he did was draw back the bolt and look in the breech; it was still loaded. He withdrew the bullet to study it more closely and there in the primer, at the center of the bullet’s brass head, was a dimple where the firing pin had struck it. The gun had misfired. Andrei Pochepnya’s last fully realized thought may well have been the sickening realization that his father’s gun had betrayed him. Burukhin cleared the snow from the barrel, reloaded the same bullet, and pulled the trigger. This time, it fired perfectly. Pochepnya’s father was standing next to Burukhin, and there is no way to know now what went through his mind, or his heart, as that deafening report echoed through the forest. But he took the gun from Burukhin and, after walking a short distance, heaved it into an open stretch of the Takhalo where the water ran deep and fast. Then he went to look for his eldest son.

What Alexander Pochepnya found is something no parent is equipped to see. Fifty yards into the snowy forest lay a heap of blood-blackened clothing in a circle of exposed earth. It looked more like a case of spontaneous combustion than an animal attack. There was nothing left but shredded cloth and empty boots. Nearby, a watch and crucifix lay undamaged on the ground. The remains of Pochepnya himself were so small and so few they could have fit in a shirt pocket. It is normal for a tiger to leave extremities as the tiger did with Markov, but Pochepnya was gone, and this was—like the ransacking of the outhouse—unprecedented. One need only imagine Udeghe hunters discovering a scene like this two hundred years ago—their astonishment and terror at the bloody tracks and empty clothes—to understand how the possibility of a man-eating amba like the egule might implant itself in the collective mind.

The men searched cautiously in the surrounding forest and found the tiger’s exit trail; it was fresh, perhaps only hours old. Based on the two sets of tracks, the men deduced that Andrei had been killed within hours of his arrival on the 12th, and that the tiger had stayed with him for the next three days; when he wasn’t feeding, the tiger reclined on his padded throne, sheltered by spruce boughs. Now, with nothing left to hold him there, the tiger had moved on, sated for the time being.

Andrei Pochepnya had been carrying an army-issue ditty bag with him in case his traps produced anything, and this is what they collected him in. Then the four men walked back upstream to meet Lopatin. Other than Denis Burukhin, who had witnessed comparable scenes in Chechnya, Danila Zaitsev was the only one present who had faced anything like this before. He bore it as stoically as he had ten days earlier, and made a point of staying close by Alexander Pochepnya. The father did not cry and barely spoke, but in that silence, hooped and bound, he weathered a torrent of subjunctive recrimination that would only intensify with time.

“I came back to the apiary,” said Lopatin, “and they were sitting on the porch, waiting. ‘Where is Andrei?’ I asked. His father picked up a bag from the ground and said, ‘He is here.’ ”

Every fact seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his operations; he made two [separate] attacks … both of which, according to their direction, were calculated to do us the most injury.… His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury.OWEN CHASE,

Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing

Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, of Nantucket1

THERE ARE NO STREETLIGHTS IN SOBOLONYE, AND THE SUN WAS keeping winter hours, so darkness of a profound kind set in around five in the afternoon. People stayed indoors. If they had to go out, they only did so armed, even to the outhouse. Inside, by their massive Russian stoves, people paid close attention to the barking of their dogs and any augury a change in timbre—or a sudden silence—might contain. Daylight, fire, weapons, and wild animals were now determining the shape and schedule of the villagers’ lives. It was as if the clock had just been turned back a hundred years—or a million.

Andrei Pochepnya’s death had a profound effect on the people around him, and it moved their understanding of this tiger into unfamiliar territory. Never, in the living memory of the Bikin, had there been such a sense of menace emanating from the forest itself. Markov’s death had been tragic, but one could still find in it an elemental logic, even justice: Markov, it could be said, had been forgiven his trespasses as he forgave those who trespassed against him. He had judged the tiger and, in turn, been judged by him. But what had young Andrei done? He had been devoured while checking his traps for weasels. His mother was shattered, out of her mind with grief, and his father was spiraling into a suicidal depression.