The Tiger (18 page)

After clearing the snow from Markov’s gravesite, the men built a fire there to thaw the ground. The temperature in the Bikin valley had not risen above minus ten in a month or more and, lately, it had been much colder, dropping to minus forty. The ground was as hard as cement, frozen to a depth of about three feet. The fire would need to burn all night. The next morning, they would return with picks and shovels to dig the grave. That evening, in an alcoholic fog, the three men, along with a couple of neighbors, took what little remained of the joker Markiz and laid him in his coffin, arranging him the best they could in relation to the clothing provided. Then they slipped a pack of cigarettes into his breast pocket, covered him with a white sheet, and nailed the lid down hard.

The following morning—Sunday—most of Sobolonye’s dwindling population joined in the procession to the cemetery. Markov’s coffin rode in a truck while the villagers followed on foot. It was thirty below zero. There were no songs, horns, or banners as there might have been before Soviet times. “No one said anything,” recalled the huntress Baba Liuda. “After what that tiger did, everyone was speechless. We came; we cried; we buried him.”

Tamara Borisova could barely stand. There is no church in Sobolonye and, while there was a practicing shamanka (a female shaman) down the river in Krasny Yar, there wasn’t a priest for sixty miles in any direction—three generations of communism had seen to that—so the townspeople took it upon themselves to lay Markov to rest. With no overarching cosmology to guide them, only vestigial formalities, each would have to decide for himself what their friend and neighbor’s eternal fate might be.

In fact, Markov had already transubstantiated: he had become energy in one of its rawest, most terrifying forms. Even as his friends and neighbors lowered that disturbingly light coffin into the ground, Markov’s flesh and blood were driving a hungry, wounded tiger through the forest, directly toward Sobolonye.

Tigers on the prowl may look like the embodiment of lethal competence, but looks are deceiving: in order to survive, they need to kill roughly one large animal each week, and they miss their mark between 30 and 90 percent of the time. This relative inefficiency is extremely costly in terms of energy expenditure. As a result, injured or not, there is no rest for a tiger—no hibernation as there is for bears, no division of labor as with lions, and no migration to lush pastures as there is for many ungulates. Time, for the tiger, especially the male, is more like time is for the shark: a largely solitary experience of hunting and digesting followed by more hunting, until he dies.

The tiger’s life is enlivened by breeding, but only briefly. These moments of courtship and intimacy, which typically take place in the dead of winter, can produce behaviors recognizable to any human. Arthur Strachan, a British tiger hunter, author, and artist, described the following encounter between a pair of Bengal tigers at a kill:

… The male strode slowly as if in studied indifference to her presence, while the body of his spouse seemed to sink gradually into the ground as she flattened herself as a cat does on the near approach of its prey.2With blazing eyes, ears laid back, and twitching tail, her attitude for the moment was anything but that of the loving wife. Waiting till the tiger was within a few paces, she sprang towards him as if bent on his annihilation, lifted a fore-paw, and gently patted him on the side of his face. Then she raised her head and obviously kissed him.To these symptoms of affection the male at first seemed rather indifferent, but when she rubbed herself against his legs and playfully bit them, he condescendingly lay down, and a mock battle ensued between the two beautiful animals. This was conducted in absolute silence, save for the occasional soft “click” of teeth meeting when the widely opened jaws came in contact with each other.Sometimes locked in a close embrace, playfully kicking each other with their hind-feet, sometimes daintily sparring with their fore-paws, they rolled about thus for nearly a quarter of an hour …

Such tender moments are, however, few and far between. Once the cubs are born the tigress must keep hunting on her own, only twice as hard now because she has cubs to feed—and to protect from infanticidal males. A tiger’s taste for meat may be innate, but its ability to acquire it is not, so the tigress must also teach her cubs how to hunt. Tigresses typically bear from one to four cubs in a litter, and they will spend one to two years with the mother, during which time she must keep them warm, safe, and fed. In addition to all her other tasks, she must engineer predation scenarios that demonstrate stalking and killing techniques and then allow the cubs to safely practice them without getting injured or starving due to their own incompetence, and while taking care of her own prodigious appetite. The learning curve is long and steep and, in the taiga, the combination of hard winters, hunting accidents, and hostile males takes a heavy toll on cubs, especially young males.

By the time tigress and cubs go their separate ways, the cubs will be nearly adult-sized though still a couple of years away from sexual maturity. Some cubs will stay close by, but these are usually the females who control smaller territories and are more likely to be tolerated by their mother, and by the area’s dominant male. A two- or three-year-old male, however, is on his own; for both genetic and competitive reasons, the mother doesn’t want him around. A male cub’s exile is comparable to sending a barely pubescent boy out onto the street to fend for himself: he might make it, but there’s a good chance he won’t for any number of reasons. He could be gored by a boar or have his jaw broken by an elk; he could be attacked by a large bear. The dominant male tiger may kill him outright or run him off and, with no territory of his own, he will have to make his living on the margins.

Living as an amateur in this sylvan purgatory is catch-as-catch-can, and one accident with a car, an animal trap, or a hunter—not to mention one bad stretch of deep snow and minus forty weather—could finish him off. Unfortunately, this combination of landlessness and semi-competence can often lead to dog and livestock killing: if the taiga doesn’t get him, a farmer may well. In any case, it can require several years of this dangerous, liminal existence before a male tiger acquires the skill—and the will—to stake out and defend his own territory. But as strong and able as he may be, the battle for that territory—even if he wins it—can leave him grievously injured. So lethally designed are these animals that a battle between them can be compared to a hand grenade contest: there is virtually no way to come away from that combination of points, blades, and combustive energy without incurring serious damage. In short, the gauntlet of trials and initiations a male tiger must endure is long, arduous, and deadly, and the survivors are truly formidable specimens.

By Tuesday morning, December 9, the Markov attack was frontpage news. LAW OF THE JUNGLE, crowed the headline in the Primorye edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda (“Young Communist Truth”), a venerable but now ironically titled propaganda-organ-turned-tabloid. Next to a stock photo of a tiger’s face ran the subhead: “Tigress Avenges Dead Offspring.”

The Markov investigation was barely three days old, but already fact, rumor, and human error had been woven into a tangled braid, the individual strands of which would be hard to tease apart. Inspection Tiger was trying to do the right things, but with conflicting information. Trush and his team had been patrolling the area, making inquiries, and mining established local informants, and the rumors they were hearing about Markov’s activities had the ring of truth. They also had a common theme—that, prior to the attack, Markov had been having trouble with a tiger: something had happened and it wouldn’t leave him alone. Confounding matters was the fact that there wasn’t just one tiger; nor was there just one story. Over the previous year, Markov had been spending progressively more time at his cabin in the Panchelaza, during which time he had had encounters with several tigers. Maybe they were attracted by his dogs, maybe it was something else, but it seemed that the Panchelaza was becoming a vortex of tiger activity.

It was believed by some who knew him well, including a longtime resident of Yasenovie named Sergei Boyko, that Markov had killed a tiger cub recently. Boyko is a huge and bearded former logger, now in his mid-forties; though a teetotaler, he still manages to project the mass and manner of a Slavic Bacchus. “You cannot hide things in the taiga,” he explained in his driveway-barnyard. “The police might not find out about it, but we always do.” Boyko had worked with both Markov and Onofreychuk, and he knew the tayozhnik’s life firsthand. “I have lived in the taiga all my life,” he said. “I have been in many situations, including poaching. I won’t lie to you about that.”

Boyko was luckier than most in that he had managed to find steady work on a maintenance crew at one of the new highway bridges about six miles west of Markov’s cabin. Tigers prowl around their flimsy barracks on a regular basis, and watchdogs don’t last long there. One of Boyko’s co-workers, a gaunt older man who could have stepped out of a daguerreotype, keeps an aluminum canteen pocked with finger-sized holes made by the fangs of an inquisitive tiger. Boyko believed there was a connection between the attack on Markov and an attempt by him and some other locals, including Onofreychuk, to wipe out an entire family of tigers earlier in the winter. “They were together there,” said Boyko. “One had a sixteen-gauge; another had a twelve [a more powerful shotgun]. They seriously injured the tigress and she ran away upriver, but it snowed and they couldn’t find her. The cub was left behind, and they killed it. They traded the skin for a Buran” (a brand of Soviet-era snowmobile).

Dmitri Pikunov, the tiger researcher, who had extensive contacts along the Bikin, had heard this version, too, and found it credible. True or not, it formed a tidy narrative, much as Khomenko’s story had: Markov, a known poacher, blatantly hunting tigers in violation of federal law, kills a cub and is himself killed by the wounded and vengeful mother. Case closed. It was this version of events, provided by people close to the source, but not eyewitnesses, that inspired the headlines and raised Trush’s hopes for a peaceful resolution in which the tigress would simply disappear into the forest.

There was an eerie reciprocity energizing this scenario, and it was that, prior to being eaten by the tiger, it seemed Markov had been eating them. “Tastes like chicken,” Markov had once quipped to Denis Burukhin.

“I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not,” Burukhin said. “It was always hard to tell with Markiz.”

But Evgeny Smirnov, a hunting inspector living in Krasny Yar, had also heard this rumor, and it didn’t strike him as odd at all. According to Smirnov, tiger is delicious—not quite as good as lynx, but a bona fide forest delicacy for those so inclined. Yuri Trush even has a recipe. When he and some local villagers were skinning out the Khomenko tiger, the understanding had been that they could keep the meat, but Trush would take the skin and bones. However, when he turned away to attend to something, someone made off with the tiger’s head. When Trush found out who it was, he confronted the man in his home and asked him what he was doing. “I was going to make an aspic,” the man said sheepishly.

Those were lean years in Primorye, and they still are. Many of the people who live on the Bikin are hungry—and resourceful—in ways that can be hard to imagine. For someone in Markov’s situation, it is totally reasonable—righteous, even—to eat what you kill, whatever it may be. “I’ve tried tiger,” said Trush. “My whole family tried it. It’s quite unusual—slightly sweet, but I don’t care for it anymore—not since I saw a tiger eat a rotten cow in 2000. He ate the meat with worms and everything.”

In addition to the story of the avenging tigress, there were other, equally plausible rumors involving Markov and tigers circulating through the valley, but at this early stage of the investigation, Trush ignored them. It was here that Trush’s combination of authority and lack of extensive tiger tracking experience betrayed him, if only briefly. The confusion centered on a crucial inconsistency between the emphatic but fallible accounts he was hearing from informants and the far steadier record kept by the snow. The truth lay in the paw prints: soon, it would become painfully clear that the tracks around Markov’s cabin were far too big to have been made by a female.

Nonetheless, the avenging tigress theory gained traction when a tiger trap was discovered a quarter mile east of Markov’s cabin. The device was all business and whoever built it had known exactly what he was doing. It consisted of a sturdy wooden corral six feet high, four feet wide, and twenty feet long. At the closed end was a stake with a chain, and this was for the bait: a live dog. Between the entrance and the bait was a series of buried wolf traps, rigged in conjunction with heavy cable snares. In the taiga, such a contraption has only one conceivable purpose, and its discovery confirmed for Trush and many others that Markov had made the jump from subsistence poaching to the big leagues of black market tiger hunting.

When Ivan Dunkai found out what had happened to Markov, he was flabbergasted: “After he hadn’t showed up for four days, I decided to go look for him,” Dunkai explained. “I arrived there [Zhorkin’s camp], and they told me: ‘Markov’s been eaten by a tiger.’ How could that happen? It seemed such nonsense to me! We’ve never heard of such a thing! What do you mean ‘eaten’? Literally, eaten?”

Sergei Boyko, however, wasn’t so surprised, and this may be because he knows what it is to run afoul of a tiger. “Another hunter and me, we once took some of a tiger’s kill,” he began. “We saw the tiger running away and cut some meat for ourselves. We didn’t take it all because you can’t take everything. It’s a law in the taiga: you have to share. But when we came to check the next day, the tiger hadn’t touched what we’d left for him. After that, we couldn’t kill anything: the tiger destroyed our traps, and he scared off the animals that came to our bait. If any animal got close, he would roar and everyone would run away. We learned the hard way. That tiger wouldn’t let us hunt for an entire year. I must tell you,” Boyko added, “the tiger is such an unusual animal: very powerful, very smart, and very vengeful.”