The Tiger (38 page)

It took him longer to notice that Trush was bleeding. Between his long underwear and the heavy sukno, much of the blood had wicked away, but eventually Gorborukov realized that the obvious rips in Trush’s clothes had been caused by the tiger and were deeper than they appeared. Trush had claw wounds on his back, arm, and thigh; the latter was deep, and needed to be stitched, but they had no thread in their first-aid kit. When they got to Sobolonye, the men applied a field dressing that was in common use during the Afghan War, and it offers an insight into the appalling conditions under which Russian soldiers served there. Trush was put back together with a “herring,” a name derived from the cans from which these improvised staples were often made. The method is simple, if unsanitary: with a knife, slice a short strip of steel out of a handy can; after pinching the wound together, bend the strip in half, place it over the wound, and clamp it down. Repeat as necessary. Trush was never seen by a doctor. They sterilized the wound with vodka. He kept his herrings in for a week and pried them off himself.

After Trush conferred with Schetinin, who had since called in Lazurenko’s team, Gorborukov drove the Kung to a snowy crossroad by the village well and parked. When they opened the back door, the news traveled fast and, soon, a semicircle of villagers had gathered around. Baba Liuda was there along with Denis Burukhin’s mother, Lida; so were Zaitsev and Dvornik. With the bare trees and the dilapidated houses in the background, the scene had a strangely timeless quality: it was as if these people had come to view a dead outlaw, or a witch. As Schetinin smoked his pipe and went over the details with the villagers, Trush stood by the door with his mangled rifle, ushering people in and out of the back of the Kung. Some thanked him or congratulated him; others glared.

Pionka and Shibnev sat inside on the bunks while the tiger lay at their feet, bleeding on the floor. It was still warm, and its paws made the men’s boots look small. Tigers, at the best of times, have a potent smell, and this one exuded a rank and musky, postcoital funk. Combined with its old and improperly healed wounds, the fresh blood, and the unwashed men, it made for an almost palpable atmosphere in the tight confines of the Kung. It would have been striking, and possibly informative, to juxtapose the Russians looking at that tiger with the Russians who regularly file through Lenin’s tomb. Viewers are not allowed to touch Lenin, but there were no such restrictions on the tiger. By turns, people patted it, kicked it, swore at it, and spat on it. Some simply stared impassively through the door. Most of them had never been so close to a tiger before, and so were struck by its size. “He was so big and beautiful,” said Irina Peshkova, the gas man’s wife. “Looking at him there, I didn’t feel sorry for those two guys [who were killed]; I felt sorry for the tiger: I think that people did something to him to make him kill.”

Lida Burukhina had a different reaction. Recalling her feelings that day, she said, “I wanted to have it killed again.”

Meanwhile, Trush, who had just come as close to death as one possibly could and still walk away, and who had been holding himself and his team together for more than two weeks under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, reached a kind of breaking point. With the tiger finally dead, and his boss and the villagers there to witness it, the stress and horror of the past two weeks came rushing home to him: “Andrei Pochepnya’s mother and sister came,” he said, “and that meeting touched my heart—touched my soul very deeply. When the two of them saw the tiger, they cried, and I could not restrain myself in that situation. I felt so sorry for that guy, Andrei.”

When the villagers had seen enough, and Trush and Schetinin had been able to tell their side of the story to those willing to listen, Schetinin ordered his men to close up the Kung. “What are you going to do with it?” a woman asked.

“We’re going to make dumplings out of him,” came the deadpan reply from a local man standing next to her.

Schetinin took Trush aside and instructed him to take the tiger out of the village and skin it. After driving a couple of miles up the road in the direction of the Pochepnyas’ apiary, Trush told Gorborukov to pull over. They were followed by Lazurenko’s team and Schetinin, and here, by the side of a logging road, the tiger was hauled out. There was a slender rope around its neck, like a leash, and by this, two legs, and its tail Trush’s team ran the tiger across the snow about twenty yards away from the vehicles. According to Sasha Lazurenko, they were preparing to cut into it when Denis Burukhin approached Schetinin: “Vladimir Ivanovich,” he said, respectfully, “may I kick the tiger for my friend?”

Schetinin granted him permission, and Burukhin wound up and kicked the tiger for Andrei Pochepnya.

A small fire was built, and the men set to work skinning the tiger, starting at the paws and working their way toward the center. Although Schetinin had burned dozens of tiger pelts over the years in order to keep them off the black market, he wanted this one to be removed “carpet style” and preserved. The sun was now in the trees, and it was bitterly cold, but most of the men worked barehanded while Schetinin stood by, puffing on his pipe, observing their progress. All of these men were seasoned animal skinners; nonetheless, as they worked, they commented often on the smell and on how amazingly tough the tiger’s hide was. When they opened the chest cavity, the heart was steaming.

Trush, Pionka, and Shibnev did most of the work and, as they went along, they had the opportunity to study the tiger’s wounds in detail. In addition to the deep flesh wound in its left forepaw, it now appeared that the tiger had been shot twice in the right leg at point-blank range with weak loads of buckshot. One cluster had only gone skin deep into the foreleg while the other had penetrated the joint above, and many of the balls were still in place. Only one of Trush’s bullets had actually gone into the tiger, and most of Pionka’s and Shibnev’s had passed right through. But as the men went over the tiger’s body, carefully flensing the skin away with their hunting knives, they came to understand that it had been shot an extraordinary number of times—not just by them and Markov; this tiger had absorbed bullets the way Moby-Dick absorbed harpoons. In addition to their and Markov’s wounds, they found a steel bullet from another rifle and many pieces of birdshot. The end of the tiger’s tail was also missing, and had been for a while—either shot off or frozen. There were no plans for a formal autopsy, but it was clear already that during its short life in the traumatic aftermath of perestroika, this tiger had been shot with literally dozens of bullets, balls, and birdshot. Markov may not have been the beginning but rather the last straw. Denis Burukhin said, “Maybe after someone fired that birdshot into him, he got angry with the whole world.”

“It was men who were responsible for the aggression of this animal,” said Trush, “and the incident with Markov was a sort of quintessence of all those cases.”

The tiger dismantled was a disturbing sight. The skinned head—all white muscle and fangs—was terrifying: an egule in the flesh. The legs, extended, were as long as a man’s. The stomach was empty. The skin lay as it had come off the body, inside up. How strange it would have been to see it there—so recently alive with unimaginable fury—now as flat and lifeless as a shroud, being folded first in half along the spine, then in quarters, eighths, and sixteenths, like the carpet it had now become. All these disparate parts, laid out neatly at sunset on the bloodstained road, were as hard to relate to a tiger as a crashed plane is to flight.

Pursuant to the permission for the period December 16th-31st, 1997, an Amur tiger has been killed under the supervision of Y. A. Trush. The killing has been carried out in accordance with Permission No. 731 issued on December 8, 1997, by the State Ecology Committee of Russia.YURI TRUSH, Final Report

CHRISTMAS AND THE NEW YEAR CAME AND WENT QUICKLY AND QUIETLY. It was a somber time made more so by the introduction of the New Ruble, a devastating, if effective, reset of the nation’s currency. Already broke, the residents of Sobolonye were minimally affected and limped on much as they had before. If nothing else, it had been a good year for pine nuts and now, at least, it was safe to search for them again. But it wasn’t safe for everyone; in Alexander Pochepnya’s heart and mind, the tiger was alive and hunting still. One night in January, it caught up to him. Shortly after returning to work as the night watchman at the village school, he was found there, dead by his own hand. The father was buried beside the son in an anonymous grave.

Today, Sobolonye has the feel of a time capsule in which the most damaging effects of perestroika have been preserved. What is so haunting is the fact that this time capsule contains people, and it is clear from the faces and the material poverty that many of them remain trapped in 1995, which could have been Appalachia in 1935, a time when life in the resource-dependent hill country was particularly desperate and bleak. In the intervening years, Pyotr Zhorkin has died, along with Boris Ivanovich, the boss of the Middle Bikin National Forest Enterprise. Ivan Dunkai was next. Sasha Dvornik moved away after his wife died, and Leonid Lopatin has done the same. With no prospects in Sobolonye, Denis Burukhin moved to Luchegorsk where a friend helped him get a job at the power plant. The trapper-poet Tsepalev left, too, saying that if he stayed, he would drink himself to death. Andrei Onofreychuk stayed in Sobolonye; unemployed and debilitated by alcoholism, he hanged himself in the fall of 2007. That winter, the village administrative offices burned down. Baba Liuda, Irina Peshkova, Lida Burukhina, and the Pochepnya and Onofreychuk families have all stayed on, captives of inertia and the comfort of the known. Danila Zaitsev, alone, seems to have remained of his own volition. A model of stoicism under duress, he continues to keep the village generator running, and also works as a heavy equipment mechanic for a private logging company where he is held in high regard by his co-workers.

Vladimir Markov’s wife, Tamara Borisova, has remained as well, but she has never fully recovered from Zaitsev’s terrible news that evening, so many years ago. Her sons have stayed by her, and they see to her needs, but her face is a mask of grief, and her loss seems to replay itself daily in her mind. She spends her days fishing on the Bikin in all weather, often alone. Her husband’s caravan is gone now, and so are his beehives, but her boys have built a cabin of their own a hundred yards to the west. In the eyes of the law, they are poachers, but there is nothing else and, in the Panchelaza, poaching isn’t what it used to be. “They’ve logged a lot of the forest,” said Markov’s son, Alexei. “The ecology has deteriorated. The Bikin used to be a deep river, but now, you can walk across it. They’ve built roads all over the taiga, and a lot of people are coming here now [for hunting and fishing].”

Alexei wears boots identical to those his father died in, and he labors over a motorcycle of the same make and color his father once had. Many of Alexei’s happiest memories are of working with his father at his apiary and, even as he approaches thirty, one can see in his eyes the sad vacancy left by the man from whom he learned to love the taiga. Alexei has since planted a Korean pine at the site where his father’s remains were found, and surrounded it with stones. There is a cup there, as there is by his grave, so that visitors can remember him with a vodka toast. “Whenever we’re at the graveyard,” explained Markov’s neighbor Irina Peshkova, “we always visit his grave. We’ll bring flowers, candy, and a shot of vodka. Who knows who would drink it, but we leave it there anyway.”

To this day, Tamara Borisova maintains her husband’s innocence, as do his closest friends. Andrei Onofreychuk and Sasha Dvornik were adamant to the last that he had done nothing to the tiger. As evidence they cited Markov’s choice of ammunition: “He never shot cartridges,”* Onofreychuk insisted, “because he was hunting with dogs. He only used bullets.”

“I hunted with Markov for several years,” said Dvornik in an interview with the filmmaker Sasha Snow, “and he never used buckshot. Everyone will tell you: he shot birdshot or bullets.”

Danila Zaitsev felt sure the tiger had been wounded before it encountered Markov. Denis Burukhin, who did not know Markov as well, said, “God knows where those bullets came from.”

When the tiger was skinned, six balls were recovered from its foreleg and sent to a forensics lab in Ussurisk, near Primorye’s principal border crossing with China. There, they were analyzed and compared with the homemade buckshot found in Markov’s cartridge belt. According to Trush, the lead composition was identical, and the formal determination made by the ballistics analyst was that the buckshot was Markov’s. “Clearly, he thought that he was strong enough to kill the tiger,” said Trush, “and he accepted the tiger’s challenge.”

Vasily Solkin, the leopard specialist, understood it the same way. “Markov couldn’t go back to the village. He had to stay and resolve the situation. Try to understand this,” he said. “Markov was a tayozhnik—a man of the taiga—and if he were to run away, he would not be able to come back here—ever. For a tayozhnik, there was no other choice: he had to finish this battle. Otherwise, for the rest of his life, he would be afraid of every tree. The taiga would never let him in again.”

Drawing on seventy-five years of experience on the Bikin, Ivan Dunkai made sense of the tragedy this way: “It has never happened that a tiger attacked to kill and eat a man here. In the past, when a tiger attacked a man, it was only because the man was aggressive to the tiger: who would like to be wounded—to get a bullet? These were the only cases. So, it was Markov’s destiny to be eaten by a tiger. If he had stayed overnight at my place, it would have been a different story.”

Lingering on in Trush’s mind was the question of what exactly happened on the night Markov was killed—had Markov shot at the tiger then as well? Trush knew little beyond the fact that the gun had been taken from the scene, most likely by Onofreychuk. In March of 2007, Onofreychuk stated that, when he arrived, Markov’s gun was lying open in the snow. “There was an empty shell in the barrel,” he explained. “Apparently, he shot once, opened the gun to reload it, but he didn’t make it and the tiger got him.”