The Tiger (37 page)

Trush and his men had been at this for a week now; they were tired, unwashed, and wanting to be done. Nonetheless, there was a charge that day; this empty road in the back of beyond was full of possibility. The tiger, hungrier than ever, made the most of the easy traveling it offered, and so did Oximenko. Each was making good time toward his respective destiny. But the Kung added a new wrinkle: as it labored up a steep rise, man and tiger alike heard the engine grinding through that perfect silence, and both of those seasoned tayozhniks had the same reaction: they got off the road and hid. As fate would have it, each turned to his right, so they ended up on opposite sides of the road, listening and watching for the Kung. Only three hundred yards stood between them. Had the Kung not disturbed them, they would have met in less than two minutes. Oximenko was oblivious. What the tiger knew had been answered best by Denis Burukhin: “He could not tell us what he knew and what he didn’t.” Who would live and who would not was equally unclear.

Trush, still scanning the unbroken snow on the roadsides, spotted Oximenko’s exit tracks immediately. They stopped again. The tracks were clearly fresh, and their presence there was beyond Trush’s comprehension: “We had warned absolutely everyone,” he said, still aggrieved. “These people knew we had two corpses on our hands, and yet they went into the forest anyway.” Trush couldn’t be sure who it was, but he had to decide immediately whether to chase this moron down, or continue on after the tiger. Schetinin wasn’t around so it was Trush’s call. He was fed up with poachers and disobedient locals, and he had a feeling the tiger was close, so he signaled his wheelman to drive on. Less than a minute later, Trush spotted tiger tracks off to his left. Again, they stopped. It was shortly after noon. By now, Trush had been in and out of the Kung many times and he was tired of taking the rifle with him, so he left it in the cab. Shibnev and Pionka climbed out of the back, and Shibnev remembers thinking, “What is it this time?” They left their weapons behind as well.

Together, the three of them made their way over to the road’s edge. It was clear, even from a distance, that this was their tiger. The tracks led into a clearing that was about fifty yards deep and half again as long. The visibility was unobstructed, and the tiger, wherever he was, was nowhere nearby. It was starting to seem like he was never going to be nearby. Pionka proceeded a short way into the clearing and bent down to test the edge of one of the tracks: it crumbled like powder. Pionka is a fairly quiet man so it surprised everyone when he said, “Motherfucker, it’s hot!”

As one, the men hustled back to the Kung for their rifles. Gitta was racing around now, barking, hackles up. This was it, and everyone knew it. Before them lay the clearing, which angled slightly up and to the west. It was a former loading deck for logs so it had been stripped of vegetation and graded. It was empty now save for the pristine snow that covered it. Poking through here and there were a few holdovers from the summer: bare stalks of wormwood and crowfoot, stray canes of raspberry, and blades of tall, golden grass. The tiger’s tracks appeared to be angling southwest across this virtually empty canvas and into the forest, which was a chaotic mixture of cedar, pine, aspen, and elm with a tangled understory that would make for hard going.

Gitta started down the track and raced back, yipping wildly, and the men flipped off the safetys on their rifles. Trush unfastened his knife sheath as well, but for some reason he carried his rifle on his shoulder, marching style. Shibnev had his slung off his left shoulder, trigger up, and Pionka held his like he was about to charge a bunker. Meanwhile, Gorborukov, the team’s designated driver, was locking up the Kung as he always did when they might be gone for a while. Under other circumstances it might have been comical, but in this case it evoked a different sensation when he said, “You guys go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

They didn’t wait for him but headed down the tiger’s limping track; the right forepaw wasn’t even clearing the snow now. Though the ground was wide open, they were so used to walking single file that they fell into this formation out of habit. Trush led the way, breaking trail, followed closely by Shibnev and Pionka. They were affected—and irritated—by Gitta’s manic barking and their eyes darted across the clearing and then to the forest edge, which stood like a dark wall before them.

The sun shone brilliantly on the undisturbed snow; the only shadows there were those cast by the men themselves—long, even at midday. Gitta continued darting up the trail and then back to Trush, barking incessantly, but she gave no clear indication of the tiger’s whereabouts. She didn’t know. As they walked, the men scanned the clearing, an expanse in which it would have been difficult to conceal a rabbit, and then they focused their attention on the forest ahead, which was beginning to look like one enormous ambush. With the exception of the dog, everything was calm and nearly still. Behind them, smoke rose lazily from the Kung’s chimney, drifting off to the north. Gorborukov was still standing there by the back door, holding his rifle like a broom. In the clearing, the slender stalks and blades nodded reassuringly, as if everything was unfolding according to plan. The men had gone about twenty yards when Shibnev, picking up some kind of ineffable, intuitive cue, calmly said, “Guys, we should spread out.”

A moment later, the clearing exploded.

The first impact of a tiger attack does not come from the tiger itself, but from the roar, which, in addition to being loud like a jet, has an eerie capacity to fill the space around it, leaving one unsure where to look. From close range, the experience is overwhelming, and has the effect of separating you from yourself, of scrambling the very neurology that is supposed to save you at times like this. Those who have done serious tiger time—scientists and hunters—describe the tiger’s roar not as a sound so much as a full-body experience. Sober, disciplined biologists have sworn they felt the earth shake. One Russian hunter, taken by surprise, recalled thinking a dam had burst somewhere. In short, the tiger’s roar exists in the same sonic realm as a natural catastrophe; it is one of those sounds that give meaning and substance to “the fear of God.” The Udeghe, Yuri Pionka, described the roar of that tiger in the clearing as soul-rending. The literal translation from Russian is “soul-tearing-apart.” “I have heard tigers in the forest,” he said, “but I never heard anything like that. It was vicious; terrifying.”

What happened next transpired in less than three seconds. First, the tiger was nowhere to be seen, and then he was in the air and flying. What the tiger’s fangs do to the flesh its eyes do to the psyche, and this tiger’s eyes were fixed on Trush: he was the target and, as far as the tiger was concerned, he was as good as dead. Having launched from ten yards away, the tiger was closing at the speed of flight, his roar rumbling through Trush’s chest and skull like an avalanche. In spite of this, Trush managed to put his rifle to his shoulder, and the clearing disappeared, along with the forest behind it. All that remained in his consciousness was the black wand of his gun barrel, at the end of which was a ravening blur of yellow eyes and gleaming teeth that were growing in size by the nanosecond. Trush was squeezing the trigger, which seemed a futile gesture in the face of such ferocious intent—that barbed sledge of a paw, raised now for the death blow.

The scenario was identical: the open field; the alert, armed man; the tiger who is seen only when he chooses to be seen, erupting, apparently, from the earth itself—from nowhere at all—leaving no time and no possibility of escape. Trush was going to die exactly as Markov and Pochepnya had. This was no folktale; nonetheless, only something heroic, shamanic, magical could alter the outcome. Trush’s semiautomatic loaded with proven tiger killers was not enough. Trush was a praying man, and only God could save him now.

But in that clearing, there was only Yuri Pionka and Vladimir Shibnev. If divine intervention occurred, Shibnev was the vehicle: it was he who had been visited with the sudden impulse to reposition the men, which had placed him and Pionka broadside to the tiger and out of each other’s line of fire. Because there was no time for thought, or even fear, Shibnev’s and Pionka’s collective response was mainly one of instinct and muscle memory. And yet, somehow, both of these men found the wherewithal to think; they stole it out of time and space the same way gifted athletes wrest opportunities from inches and fractions of seconds. Even in the face of a flying tiger and a man about to die—a scene that would leave most people staring in dull surprise, as Gorborukov was from beside the Kung—both Shibnev and Pionka understood they could not shoot when the tiger was on top of Trush because their hyper-lethal bullets would kill him, too. They had to kill the tiger in the air. In that moment, those ungodly di ex machina became Trush’s gifts from God.

Shibnev and Pionka brought their rifles to their shoulders in the same reflexive way Trush had, and Pochepnya and Markov had before him. “I fired and fired and fired and fired,” said Shibnev. “I remember seeing him fly through the air, the right paw was out like this.”

In that sliver of time between registering the tiger’s presence and his airborne collision with Trush less than three seconds later, Shibnev and Pionka fired eleven times between them; Trush fired twice. In spite of this barrage, the tiger hit Trush at full speed—claws extended, jaws agape. The impact was concentrated on Trush’s right shoulder, and his rifle was torn from his hands. Trush, now disarmed with the tiger upon him, threw his arms around his attacker, grasping fistfuls of his fur and burying his face in the animal’s chest. He was overcome in every sense: by the inexorable force of the tiger; by the point-blank blast of Pionka’s and Shibnev’s rifles; by the impossible softness of the tiger’s fur, the muscles taut as cables underneath. Like this, man and beast went down together, bound in a wrestler’s embrace.

No bird flies near, no tiger creeps; alone the whirlwind, wild and black, assails the tree of death and sweeps away with death upon its back.ALEXANDER PUSHKIN,

“The Upas Tree”1

THE TIGER’S ROAR ECHOED AWAY, AND SO, TOO, DID THAT FUSILLADE of rifle shots. The steady south wind carried off the gun smoke, and the crowfoot and wormwood nodded to themselves as if all was well. Svetly Creek flowed on, silent and invisible beneath its carapace of ice, and Alexander Gorborukov took a step forward. Later, he would say that it had been like watching a movie in slow motion, one in which he was powerless to intervene. Shibnev and Pionka would agree that the events in that decisive moment were as vivid as a film, but that there was nothing slow about them. Less than a minute had passed from when they first set foot in the clearing to when they stopped shooting.

The first thing Trush remembers is someone saying, “Yurka! Are you alive?”

With his friends’ help, the dead man stood. He said, “Oh!” several times in succession. His eyes were big and round and, for a moment, he did not know if they were gazing on this world or the next. After colliding with Trush, the tiger’s momentum had caused it to somersault over him and now the tiger lay in the snow, pawing blindly in its death throes. Pionka fired a final control shot. The tiger was dead, perhaps many times over, and Trush was alive, feeling himself for injuries and proof of existence. It is still not clear whether it was a symptom of shock or an example of extraordinary sangfroid, but Trush’s first impulse after standing and taking inventory of himself was to get it on film: “I said, ‘Guys, stay where you are!’ and I ran to the Kung and got my video camera. I filmed footage of where the tiger was and where Yuri Pionka was standing; I filmed his hiding place from where he had pounced at me. I filmed it all.”

It is a frantic and scattershot piece of work and the soundtrack plays like a crash course in mat (short for “Fuck your mother”), a form of Russian profanity that is the bastard child of gulag and criminal slang. It is visceral, violent, and anatomically explicit, and for five or ten minutes after the tiger’s death and Trush’s resurrection, it poured forth undiluted as the men stormed around the clearing, replaying those death-dealing, life-saving seconds.

Conspicuously absent in all this was Trush’s rifle. “I kept wondering,” said Trush, “why the tiger hadn’t grabbed me by the neck. It was a riddle to me. When I came up to the dead tiger, this was what I saw”:

Trush’s rifle had gone down the tiger’s throat, all the way to the stock. The stock itself was cracked, and pocked with teeth marks, and the gas tube, which runs along the top of the barrel, had been crushed. This explained why Trush took the impact of the tiger on his right shoulder, and it may explain why he is alive today. In the end, the margin between Trush’s life and death came down, literally, to millimeters and fractions of seconds; down to Shibnev’s uncanny—one could say “animal”—intuition, and to his and Pionka’s equally instinctive and precise responses. It is safe to say that nothing but the superhuman powers of those weapons, in conjunction with Shibnev’s and Pionka’s heroic skill and presence of mind, could have effected such an outcome under those circumstances. Odysseus and Ahab would have been impressed. But these are the tolerances the predator must routinely operate within; the line is always deadly fine.

Trush radioed the other team, but they were still on the far side of the ridge so he could not get through. He then thanked his men and shot triumphal footage of them with the dead tiger, including close-ups of the tiger’s face and teeth. Gorborukov noted the time: 12:35 p.m. Though seriously underweight, the tiger was an otherwise impressive specimen with huge paws and magnificent fangs. The head was enormous—in Sasha Dvornik’s words: “as big as a basin.” Its fur was a russet brown laid over with broad black bands; around its chest, the shaggy white of the underbelly carried on up across its ribs. Its eyes appeared exceptionally slanted, even for a tiger; they were set in the face at an angle approaching forty-five degrees, and further accentuated by the mascara-like striping that ran up from their outside corners.

Trush managed to get Schetinin on the radio, and he was told to bring the tiger directly to the village. Schetinin wanted the people to see it in the flesh—to know that it was dead so they would no longer be afraid. As emaciated as the tiger was, it took all four of them to wrestle it into the back of the Kung. Shibnev and Pionka rode in back with the body, and it covered the floor. Trush rode in front with Gorborukov and, although he does not smoke, he asked Gorborukov for a cigarette. “When he was handing me the cigarette,” Trush recalled, “he said, ‘Has it finally sunk in?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And then he noticed my trembling hands.”