The Tiger (39 page)

Sasha Dvornik had a vivid memory of the scene as well: “Markov’s gun was lying open in the snow by the print of his body,” he recalled in 2004. “There were two cartridges in the snow: one was empty; the other was full. He had managed to take the fresh cartridge from his belt, but had no time to reload the gun.”

Markov’s cartridge belt held twenty shells and, when Trush recovered it, three of them were missing. None were found in his caravan. It is conceivable then that the first shell was fired sometime around December 1 or 2, the second shell was fired on the night of December 3, and the third was dropped in the snow moments later. As was the case with Pochepnya and Trush, Markov would have had two or three seconds between hearing the tiger’s roar and being attacked. His shotgun would have been loaded, and there is every reason to suppose he would have tried to defend himself. It has never been clear where that shot went, but, based on Inspection Tiger’s field autopsy, it now looks as if Markov managed to shoot the tiger twice in the right foreleg—once from his caravan (or in the woods) and, again, just before he was killed. The fact that he was attempting to reload in the midst of the attack implies desperation, but also extraordinary presence of mind: Markov died while trying to fit a small, slippery shotgun shell into a narrow gun barrel, in the dark, at thirty below zero—with a tiger bearing down on him from ten yards away.

Today, only the tiger remains. When Vladimir Schetinin returned to Vladivostok after the hunt, he delivered the tiger’s skin to the Arseniev Museum, which occupies a historic building downtown, on Aleutskaya. There, the tiger has been stuffed and put on display for all to see. Safely contained in a glass case, it has been caught forever, out of its element and visible to all.

Yuri Trush hoped, at the very least, that these events could serve as a kind of cautionary tale to deter careless hunters and would-be poachers; if laws and warnings failed, he reasoned, maybe graphic images would get the point across. “During the investigation, I sent video footage of Khomenko, Markov, and Pochepnya to the local TV station,” he said. “They aired it, and there was a lot of negative feedback. People called saying, ‘Why are you broadcasting such horrors?’ They thought it was some kind of video montage; they didn’t understand that the footage was real. In my opinion, people who hunt—who have guns—really needed to see those images. They have to think about things like that.”

There seems to be no question that, in Primorye, human-tiger relations have entered a new era in which the potential for scenarios like Markov’s is increasing. Vasily Solkin attributes this to four factors: a simultaneous increase in the availability of powerful hunting rifles, Japanese four-wheel-drive vehicles, and access via logging roads, combined with a breakdown in traditional hunting values. “The biggest problem for a tiger these days,” Solkin explained, “is the New Russians who buy good foreign guns with good optical devices, who trample on hunting rules, written or traditional, and who hunt without leaving their jeeps, firing at any animal without even bothering to check whether they killed it or not. Those people bring the most harm to tigers. The situation today is very different from the situation ten years ago because, if I encounter a tiger in the taiga these days, I am encountering an injured tiger more often than not.”

According to Galina Salkina, a tiger researcher at the Lazovski Zapovednik and one of only two women working full-time in the testosterone-heavy world of Amur tiger research, about 80 percent of the tigers she autopsies have been shot at some point in their lives, many of them more than once. Sometimes, these situations end like this one did: In May of 2004, three poachers negotiated access to a restricted border zone in a tanklike GTS. Because they were hunting at night with lights, the hunters were aiming at eye-shine alone without being sure what they were shooting at. One of the men managed to hit a tiger, which then charged the massive vehicle, jumped aboard, and fatally mauled one of the hunters before his partners killed it. The crime was discovered, but the commanding officer in charge of the border area refused access to investigators. In cases where the tiger survives, it may hold the memory in mind, and retaliate against the next vehicle or person who fits that sensory profile.

There have been no attacks on humans reported in the Bikin valley since 1997, but there is conclusive evidence that tigers are being poached there—by Russians and natives alike. In spite of this, tigers remain a relatively common sight, and the age-old tensions between them and the pastoralist Russians with whom they share the taiga persist, exacerbated by diminishing game populations and loss of habitat to logging. The range of attitudes seems directly related to personal experience: Sergei Boyko, who clearly respects his local tigers, has almost lost his patience with them. At the bridge maintenance camp where he works, five of the six dogs they kept there were killed by tigers during the winter of 2007–2008. “I am sick and tired of them,” he said bitterly. “They don’t leave me alone. I had made arrangements to get a horse, but then had a change of heart: I can’t get a horse because it will get eaten. I can’t raise a pig because it will get killed. My neighbor brought a horse to his apiary, and a tiger killed it.”

Never a fan of tigers to begin with, Sasha Dvornik was seriously traumatized by the Markov incident. “I’m probably too sensitive,” he told Sasha Snow, “but I still have nightmares in which I’m collecting pieces of Markov’s body. If I’d known what I would see there, I’d never have gone to his cabin. Now, I won’t let a tiger get away alive. I will exterminate that vermin everywhere.”

The huntress Baba Liuda’s feelings are more philosophical: “If they want to walk around, let ’em walk around. If they want to roar, the hell with ’em—let ’em do it.”

Long after the paperwork was completed, this incident continued to haunt Yuri Trush, and it does so to this day. Although he managed to survive, Trush has been scarred in a variety of ways: “The native people tell me that I’m now marked by the tiger,” he said. “Some of them won’t allow me to sleep with them under the same roof.”

The notion that Trush now bears some ineffable taint, discernible only to tigers, was put to the test at the tiger catcher Vladimir Kruglov’s wildlife rehabilitation center in 2004. Trush had gone there with Sasha Snow in order to get some live footage of a tiger in a forest environment. One of Kruglov’s rescued tigers, a particularly impressive male, is named Liuty, which is an efficient word combining vicious, ferocious, cold-blooded, and bold. It is a good descriptor for Ivan the Terrible, but it seemed an odd name for this tiger, which was leaning against the compound fence, getting his neck scratched by Kruglov, who had raised him from a cub. Kruglov then stepped away to attend to something else, leaving Trush, Snow, and a few other visitors spread out along the fence, watching and taking pictures. Liuty, who was used to this kind of attention, appeared content and relaxed until he spotted Trush, at which point his demeanor changed suddenly. Liuty fixed his eyes on him and then, with no warning or apparent motive, he growled, accelerated to a run, and leaped at the fence as if trying to clear it. It was too high, and five hundred pounds of tiger piled into the wire, striking it with so much force that the fence bowed outward ominously, directly in front of Trush. Trush recoiled and fell over backward as if he had been knocked down solely by the projected energy of the tiger. Snow was nearby and went to help him up. “His face was ashen,” he recalled.

Remembering the incident, Trush touched his chest and said, “I felt cold in here.”

There was no obvious explanation for why this well-fed, well-socialized tiger would do this, or why it would have picked Trush out of a group. “Maybe some sort of a bio field exists,” Trush suggested afterward. “Maybe tigers can feel some connection through the cosmos, or have some common language. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

Such an interpretation would not have surprised anyone in the Dunkai or Pionka clans, and it is one of the principal reasons those who maintain traditional beliefs avoid tigers. Lubovna Passar, a fifty-year-old Nanai psychologist who uses a combination of shamanic practice and Western psychology to treat patients addicted to drugs and alcohol, describes it as “a centuries-old taboo that’s held in the genes.”

Yuri Pionka was concerned about this kind of postmortem fallout as well. While skinning the tiger in Sobolonye, he had hit a blood vessel that caused some of the tiger’s blood to spatter on him. He reacted, at the time, as if he had been burned with hot embers, and he used his knife blade to scrape the blood off as quickly as possible. “I can say one thing about the tiger,” said Pionka, “he is definitely a very smart animal. He has an intellect, and he will go after a specific person who offended him. My father came back [from upriver] for the New Year and, when he learned that I’d been involved in hunting a tiger, he said to me, ‘Throw away the clothes you were wearing, and throw away the knife you used to skin him.’ ”

That the tiger was physically dead didn’t seem to matter. In the elder Pionka’s view, this tiger was an Amba, and so may have existed beyond mortal containment. Whether there was additional cleansing required, Pionka declined to say. In any case, he suffered a serious illness afterward that lasted a number of years, but he appears to have recovered.

Trush is a man for whom law and order represent not just a job description but a personal code of conduct. As a backcountry lawman, facts and logic—the observable and the provable—form the bedrock of his thought processes. However, his personal experience, along with his exposure to native beliefs, has opened his mind to the supernatural capabilities of the tiger. “I’ve often heard from hunters and villagers that strange things happen in the presence of a tiger,” he said. “It can be compared to a snake looking at a rabbit and hypnotizing him: it has some inexplicable influence on objects and humans and, in his presence, magical phenomena can occur.”

Trush sees his own survival as all the more extraordinary because of this, and he considers December 21, 1997, to be his “second birthday.” For years afterward, members of his squad, including Pionka, would phone him on the anniversary to acknowledge his survival and rebirth. “Sometime after all this happened,” said Trush, “I met Andrei Oximenko [the man who nearly walked into the tiger on the last day], and I said to him that he was born under a lucky star. He admitted it, and said, ‘Yes, I heard your truck and turned off the road. Thank you for showing up at the right time.’ I said, ‘You probably have a guardian angel, just as I do.’

“There was a period after these events when I had unpleasant sensations if I went to the forest alone, or saw a tiger track,” Trush explained. “And now, when I see tiger tracks, I still feel fearful and cautious. I don’t believe anyone who says, ‘I’m not afraid of tigers.’ A man must have a sense of fear; it’s only normal. Since then, I have encountered tigers in the forest, but I have never lost self-control. Maybe more encounters lie ahead, God forbid.”

In 2000, Vladimir Schetinin, Inspection Tiger’s founding chief, was forced into retirement, and with him went much of his hand-picked staff, including Trush. Shortly afterward, Trush’s squad mate, Alexander Gorborukov, committed suicide. Subsequent “reorganizations” at all levels of government have led to staff and funding cuts that have left the agency’s future in doubt. In 2008, Sasha Lazurenko was the only member of the team still affiliated with Inspection Tiger, but since the shake-up in 2000, its power to effectively enforce the law in the forest has been steadily whittled away, and undermined by allegations of corruption under the new chief (he was replaced in 2009). Salaries and morale have diminished accordingly. The current state of things becomes clear after a visit to their offices. When it was first created, Inspection Tiger was based in downtown Vladivostok with the State Committee of Ecology; after 2000, it was banished to the second floor of an obscure housing project, two bus connections and an hour’s travel away.

“That’s why I left,” said Trush. “That’s why I came to work in a federal national park. Here, we have the status of state inspectors: I have the authority to write a report and follow it through. If I catch someone, I have the authority [as he once had in Inspection Tiger] to push the matter to the very end.”

Talking to Inspection Tiger’s alumni now is kind of like reminiscing with a successful rock band or sports team that has broken up and fallen on hard times. Those years, 1994–2000, were glory days. They had good training, respectable salaries, high morale, a strong media presence, and real power. With the necessary equipment—uniforms, vehicles, guns, cameras, and fuel—to do their job properly, the public respected them, and so did poachers. They even had a community outreach program through which they visited schools to talk about their work and the importance of a healthy, intact environment (Trush continues to do this). At a time when cynicism and corruption seemed to be the order of the day in Primorye, Inspection Tiger offered an alternative and, for the most part, its members took pride in being part of something that was having a tangible, positive impact on the territory. For many of these men, their work with Inspection Tiger represents one of the best, most empowered moments in their lives. The thought of it, and the demise of it, are bittersweet for Trush, and they elicit strong feelings to this day. But it is clear that what he and his former colleagues are mourning is not simply the job, but their youth. “My only regret,” said Trush, “is that I didn’t get into conservation work ten or fifteen years earlier.”

Now Trush seems to be making up for lost time. In 2007, two new federal parks were created in Primorye, Zov Tigra (“Call of the Tiger”) and Udegheyskaya Legenda (“Udeghe Legend”). It is strangely appropriate that Trush would have been made the deputy director of Udeghe Legend, and that has been his title since 2008. However, there is currently no salary for this position and so Trush must rely on Phoenix Fund, a Vladivostok-based conservation group affiliated with the Wildlife Alliance in Washington, D.C., which also funds a number of inspection teams throughout Primorye. The park is medium-sized, totaling five hundred square miles*; currently, Trush’s duties are focused on protection and enforcement, the work he loves. In spite of its protected status, a powerful logging company gained access to the Zov Tigra park and ransacked it; they attempted this in Udeghe Legend as well, but Trush intervened. “They thought that if they got caught, they would just pay a bribe and be done with it,” Trush explained. “But the case received good coverage in the media. I must admit I was very pleased. Because they logged in a national park, the fines and damages were five times higher than usual.”