The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Parked in front of Markov’s cabin was a heavy truck belonging to Markov’s good friend and beekeeping partner, Danila Zaitsev, a reserved and industrious man in his early forties. Zaitsev was a skilled mechanic and his truck, another cast-off from the military, was one of the few vehicles still functioning in Sobolonye. With Zaitsev were Sasha Dvornik and Andrei Onofreychuk, both family men in their early thirties who often hunted and fished with Markov. It was evident from their haggard appearance that they had barely slept the night before.

  Judging from the density of tracks, there had clearly been a lot of activity around the cabin. Several different species were represented and their trails overlaid each other so that, at first, it was hard to sort them out. Trush approached this tangled skein of information like a detective: somewhere in here was a beginning and an end, and somewhere, too, was a motive—perhaps several. Downhill from the cabin, closer to the entrance road, two tracks in particular caught his attention. One set traveled northward up the entrance road at a walking pace; the other traveled south from the cabin. They approached each other directly, as if the meeting had been intentional—like an appointment of some kind. The southbound tracks were noteworthy, not just because they were made by a tiger, but because there were large gaps—ten feet or more—between each set of impressions. At the point where they met, the northbound tracks disappeared, as if the person who made them had simply ceased to exist. Here the large paw prints veered off to the west, crossing the entrance road at right angles. Their regular spacing indicated a walking pace; they led into the forest, directly toward the crows.

  Trush had a video camera with him and its unblinking eye recorded the scene in excruciating detail. Only in retrospect does it strike one how steady Trush’s hand and voice are as he films the site, narrating as he goes: the rough cabin and the scrubby clearing in which it stands; the path of the attack and the point of impact, and then the long trail of horrific evidence. The camera doesn’t waver as it pans across the pink and trampled snow, taking in the hind foot of a dog, a single glove, and then a bloodstained jacket cuff before halting at a patch of bare ground about a hundred yards into the forest. At this point the audio picks up a sudden, retching gasp. It is as if he has entered Grendel’s den.

  The temperature is thirty below zero and yet, here, the snow has been completely melted away. In the middle of this dark circle, presented like some kind of sacrificial offering, is a hand without an arm and a head without a face. Nearby is a long bone, a femur probably, that has been gnawed to a bloodless white. Beyond this, the trail continues deeper into the woods. Trush follows it, squinting through his camera while his squad and Markov’s friends trail closely behind. The only sounds are the icy creak of Trush’s boots and the distant barking of his dog. Seven men have been stunned to silence. Not a sob; not a curse.

  Trush’s hunting dog, a little Laika, is further down the trail, growing increasingly shrill and agitated. Her nose is tingling with blood scent and tiger musk, and she alone feels free to express her deepest fear: the tiger is there, somewhere up ahead. Trush’s men have their rifles off their shoulders, and they cover him as he films. They arrive at another melted spot; this time, a large oval. Here, amid the twigs and leaf litter, is all that remains of Vladimir Ilyich Markov. It looks at first like a heap of laundry until one sees the boots, luminous stubs of broken bone protruding from the tops, the tattered shirt with an arm still fitted to one of the sleeves.

  Trush had never seen a fellow human so thoroughly and gruesomely annihilated and, even as he filmed, his mind fled to the edges of the scene, taking refuge in peripheral details. He was struck by the poverty of this man—that he would be wearing thin rubber boots in such bitter weather. He reflected on the cartridge belt—loaded but for three shells—and wondered where the gun had gone. Meanwhile, Trush’s dog, Gitta, is racing back and forth, hackles raised and barking in alarm. The tiger is somewhere close by—invisible to the men, but to the dog it is palpably, almost unbearably, present. The men, too, can sense a potency around them—something larger than their own fear, and they glance about, unsure where to look. They are so overwhelmed by the wreckage before them that it is hard to distinguish imminent danger from the present horror.

  Save for the movements of the dog and the men, the forest has gone absolutely still; even the crows have withdrawn, waiting for this latest disturbance to pass. And so, it seems, has the tiger. Then, there is a sound: a brief, rushing exhale—the kind one would use to extinguish a candle. But there is something different about the volume of air being moved, and the force behind it—something bigger and deeper: this is not a human sound. At the same moment, perhaps ten yards ahead, the tip of a low fir branch spontaneously sheds its load of snow. The flakes powder down to the forest floor; the men freeze in mid-breath and, once again, all is still.

  Since well before the Kung’s engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not in a language like Russian or Chinese, but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men—some more fluently than others. That single blast of breath contained a message lethal in its eloquence. But what does one do with such information so far from one’s home ground? Gitta tightens the psychic leash connecting her to her master. Markov’s friends, already shaken to the core, pull in closer, too. The tiger’s latest communication serves not only to undo these men still further, but to deepen the invisible chasm between them—poachers to a man—and the armed officials on whom their liberty and safety now depend. Markov’s friends are known to Trush because he has busted them before—for possessing illegal firearms and hunting without a license. Of the three of them, only Zaitsev’s gun is legal, but it is too light to stop a tiger. As for the others, their weapons are now hidden in the forest, leaving them more helpless than Trush’s dog.

  Trush is unarmed, too. There had been some back-and-forth at the entrance road about who was going to follow that grisly trail, and comments were made implying that Trush and his men didn’t have what it took. Fear is not a sin in the taiga, but cowardice is, and Trush returned the challenge with a crisp invitation: “Poshli”—“Let’s go.” One of Markov’s friends—Sasha Dvornik, as Trush recalled—then suggested that Trush’s team could handle it themselves. Besides, he said, they had no weapons. Trush called his bluff by urging him to fetch his unregistered gun from hiding. “This is no time to be confiscating guns,” he said. “What’s important now is to protect ourselves.” Still, Dvornik hesitated, and this is when Trush offered him his rifle. It was a bold gesture on several levels: not only did it imply an expectation of trust and cooperation, but Trush’s semiautomatic was a far better weapon than Dvornik’s battered smoothbore. It also short-circuited the argument: now, there was no excuse, and no way that Dvornik—with six men watching—could honorably refuse. It was this same mix of shame, fear, and loyalty that compelled Zaitsev and Onofrecuk to go along, too. Besides, there was safety in numbers.

  But it had been a long time since Dvornik was in the army, and Trush’s weapon felt strangely heavy in his hands; Trush, meanwhile, was feeling the absence of its reassuring weight, and that was strange, too. He still had his pistol, but it was holstered and, in any case, it would have been virtually useless against a tiger. His faith rested with his squad mates because he had put himself in an extremely vulnerable position: even though he was leading the way, he did so at an electronic remove—in this drama but not of it, exploring this dreadful surreality through the camera’s narrow, cyclopean lens. Because Zaitsev and Dvornik couldn’t be counted on, and Deputy Bush had only a pistol, the Tigers were Trush’s only reliable proxies. Those with guns had them at the ready, but the forest was dense and visibility was poor. Were the tiger to attack, they could end up shooting one another. So they held their fire, eyes darting back and forth to that single, bare branch, wondering where the next sign would come from.

&nb
sp; Behind the camera, Trush remained strangely calm. “We clearly see the tiger’s tracks going away from the remains,” he continued in his understated official drone, while Gitta barked incessantly, stiff-legged and staring. “… the dog clearly indicates that the tiger went this way.”

  Up ahead, the tiger’s tracks showed plainly in the snow, brought into sharp relief by the shadows now pooling within them. The animal was maneuvering northward to higher ground, the place every cat prefers to be. “It looks like the tiger’s not too far,” Trush intoned to future viewers, “around forty yards.” The snow wasn’t deep and, under those conditions, a tiger could cover forty yards in about four seconds. This may have been why Trush chose that moment to shut off his camera, reclaim his gun, and step back into real time. But once there, he was going to have to make a difficult decision.

  In his professional capacity as senior inspector for Inspection Tiger, Trush acted as a medium between the Law of the Jungle and the Law of the State; one is instinctive and often spontaneous while the other is contrived and always cumbersome. The two are, by their very natures, incompatible. When he was in the field, Trush usually had no means of contacting his superiors, or anyone else for that matter; his walkie-talkies had limited range (when they worked at all) so he and his squad mates were profoundly on their own. Because of this, Trush’s job required a lot of judgment calls, and he was going to have to make one now: the tiger is a “Red Book” species—protected in Russia—so permission to kill had to come from Moscow. Trush did not yet have this permission, but it was Saturday, Moscow might as well have been the moon, and they had an opportunity to end this now.

  Trush decided to track it. This had not been part of the plan; he had been sent to investigate an attack, not to hunt a tiger. Furthermore, his team was short a man, dusk was coming on, and Markov’s friends were a liability; they were still in shock and so, for that matter, was Trush. But at that moment, he was poised—equidistant between the tiger and the harrowing evidence of what it had done. The two would never be so close again. Signaling Lazurenko to follow, Trush set off up the trail, knowing that every step would take him deeper into the tiger’s comfort zone.

  2

  “You’re from Russia?”

  “Yes, from Russia.”

  “I’ve never been there at all.”

  ANTON CHEKHOV, From Siberia1

  IF RUSSIA IS WHAT WE THINK IT IS, THEN TIGERS SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE there. After all, how could a creature so closely associated with stealth and grace and heat survive in a country so heavy-handed, damaged, and cold? The nearest jungle is two thousand miles away. For these and other reasons, neither Russia the Idea nor Russia the Place are useful ways of describing the home of the Siberian tiger, which is, itself, a misnomer. This subspecies is known locally—and formally—as the Amur tiger, and it lives, in fact, beyond Siberia. Sparsely inhabited, seldom visited, and poorly understood, the “far side” of Russia is not so much a frontier as a margin for error. The humans who share space with the Amur tiger—who fear it, revere it, tolerate it, and sometimes hunt it—will tell you their tiger lives in the Far East, in the taiga,* and this is true enough, but still, no coherent picture emerges. A biologist might say that this animal occupies a geographical range bounded by China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan. This may be so, but a foreigner will be hard-pressed to understand what that means, even after consulting a map.

  The Russians have had trouble making sense of it, too. When the railroad and telegraph engineer Dmitry Romanov arrived on Primorye’s south coast aboard the steamship Amerika in the summer of 1859, he was astonished by what he saw: “The area around these harbors is covered with lush sub-tropical forests, woven by lianes,” he enthused in a St. Petersburg newspaper,2

  where oaks have a diameter of one sagene [over six feet]. Some other examples of gigantic vegetation are marvelous. We have seen them before in tropical America. What a wonderful future this place can have with prehistoric forests and the most splendid harbors in the world! … It is appropriate that the best port here is called Vladivostok [“Power in the East”], because it will be home to our navy in the Pacific, and the beginning of Russian influence over a vast ocean territory.

  The Chinese knew this country as the shuhai, or “forest sea.” It may have been marvelous to contemplate from the deck of a ship, but on the ground, it took a savage toll on humans and animals alike. When you weren’t battling arctic cold, or worrying about tigers, there were insects on a scale that is hard to imagine. Sir Henry Evan Murchison James, a member of the Royal Geographical Society and no stranger to jungles or arthropods, was astounded: “There are several kinds,” he wrote in 1887,3

  one striped yellow and black, like a giant wasp; and the rapidity with which they can pierce a mule’s tough hide is inconceivable. In a few moments, before one could go to its assistance, I have seen a wretched beast streaming with blood.… When we went to bed or when marching in the early morning, and at meals we enveloped ourselves with smoke.… If there be a time when life is not worth living, I should say it was summer in the forests of Manchuria.

  More than one poor soul has been bound to a tree here and consigned to a hideous death from insect bites, and even Yuri Trush has used this method to make stubborn poachers more compliant.

  Once considered part of Outer Manchuria, Primorye, or Primorskii Krai, is Russia’s southeasternmost territory; it is the man-made container for most of the Amur tiger’s current range, and about two million people live there. Protruding conspicuously from Russia’s vast bulk, Primorye is embedded in China’s eastern flank like a claw or a fang, and it remains a sore spot to this day. The territory is an embodiment of the tension between proximity and possession: the capital, Vladivostok, which is home to more than half a million people, is just a two-day train journey from Beijing. The trip to Moscow, on the other hand, is a week-long, 5,800-mile epic on the Trans-Siberian. No other major city lies so far from its national capital; even Australia is closer.

  It is hard to express how far over the horizon this region lies in relation to Russia’s political, cultural, and economic centers, but a nickname can offer insight to a place just as it can to a person. Many Siberians refer to western Russia as the materik—the Mainland, which is similar to the way Alaskans think of the Lower 48. But most of Siberia is thousands of miles closer to the capital than Russia’s Far East. In terms of sheer remoteness—both geographic and cultural—the Maritime Territory is more like Hawai’i. As a result, visitors will find themselves standing out conspicuously in a geographic vortex where the gravitational pulls of Europe and North America are weak, and familiar landmarks are virtually nonexistent. Primorye doesn’t get many visitors and, out here on Eurasia’s ragged eastern rim, you are more likely to find kinship in your foreignness with a North Korean “guest” worker than with a wayward German tourist.

  Vladivostok, which is the home base of Inspection Tiger, lies further south than the French Riviera, but this is hard to reconcile with the fact that the bays here stay frozen until April. Tigers used to roam the wedge-shaped hills above the harbor, and one of these is still called Tiger Hill; down below is a Tigrine Street. In hard winters, their namesakes still prowl the outskirts of the city, hunting for dogs; in 1997, one had to be shot after repeatedly charging cars by the airport. In this and other ways, Primorye represents a threshold between civilization and the frontier. This territory—and the Far East in general—occupies its own strange sphere, somewhere between the First World and the Third. That the trains are clean and run on time is a point of honor and pride, but when they get to the station there may be no platform and the retractable steps might be frozen shut, forcing you to simply heave your luggage into the darkness and jump out after it.

  Because so much of life here is governed by a kind of whimsical rigidity—a combination of leftover Soviet bureaucracy and free market chaos—even simple interactions with officialdom can leave you feeling as if you have wandered into an insane asylum. To this day, the Russ
ian Far East is a place where neither political correctness nor eco-speak have penetrated, and patriotism is vigorous and impassioned. Vladivostok is about as far as one can be from the Eastern Front and still be in Russia, but huge monuments to the heroic fallen command the squares, along with an intermittently eternal flame. To get an idea how large the Second World War’s legacy of sacrifice and heroism still looms in the popular mind, one need only stand on Svetlanskaya, one of the two principal shopping streets framing the harbor where the Pacific Fleet is berthed. Here, on an early-twenty-first-century Sunday, more than sixty years after the Red Army took Berlin, two grandsons of that generation—pink-cheeked family men out for lunch with their wives and young children—will invoke the legacy of that time with a ferocity few Westerners could muster. After reasserting Russia’s indispensable role in the defeat of the Nazis, and brushing aside the contributions of the Allies, one of these young men will go on to say, “If you stand with us, we will protect you with all our Russian soul.4 But if you are against us [a finger is jabbing now], we will fight you with all our Russian soul. We will fight you to the end!”

  The speaker looks at his mate, and their eyes lock in solidarity; then they laugh, embrace, and knock their heads together so hard you can hear the crack of bone on bone.

  In Primorye, the seasons collide with equal intensity: winter can bring blizzards and paralyzing cold, and summer will retaliate with typhoons and monsoon rains; three quarters of the region’s rainfall occurs during the summer. This tendency toward extremes allows for unlikely juxtapositions and may explain why there is no satisfactory name for the region’s peculiar ecosystem—one that happens to coincide with the northern limit of the tiger’s pan-hemispheric range. It could be argued that this region is not a region at all but a crossroads: many of the aboriginal technologies that are now considered quintessentially North American—tipis, totem poles, bows and arrows, birch bark canoes, dog sleds, and kayak-style paddles—all passed through here first.