The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Isayev had been in the cook wagon when Markov showed up around dinnertime on Wednesday, December 3. The sun had already been down for several hours, and it was pitch dark in the forest; only a thumbnail moon was visible through black-fingered trees. Markov had been on the trail all afternoon. Apparently, he was on a circuit, having just come over from Ivan Dunkai’s cabin, about four miles away on the lower Amba. Isayev recalled that Markov had left his gun somewhere outside, which was standard operating procedure for a poacher, particularly at that time of year, and noted that he was wearing a knife and cartridge belt. When the men offered him dinner, Markov refused despite having been on the trail for hours in minus thirty degree weather. “He looked a little scared,” Isayev recalled. “Usually he was very chatty, but not this time. He wasn’t in a good mood.”

  Zhorkin wasn’t present that evening, but Markov told Isayev, Luzgan, Sakirko, and two other loggers gathered there that he was searching for his dogs and that he couldn’t stay long. He had at least three hunting dogs, but only one of them, a shaggy, black-haired mutt named Jack, was with him now. At that point, Strelka and Belka (“Squirrel”) were still at large. Apparently, Dunkai hadn’t seen them either. There was a certain amount of confusion around the dogs—which ones and how many, and, ordinarily, one could ignore such details, but not in the case of a hunter. It is hard to overemphasize their importance, especially when the hunter is destitute. Dogs are the poacher’s assistants, colleagues, companions, and guards. No one keeps a secret better. Often, they will keep each other warm at night, and their perennial optimism offers a reason to get out of bed in the morning. But in the case of a tiger, dogs can also get a man killed.

  Sakirko, Luzgan, and Isayev, who were interviewed separately, each recalled Markov being anxious about his dogs, being unwilling to eat despite the fact that hot food was being served, and refusing their offers to put him up for the night though it was bitterly cold out. They all remember him being agitated and in a hurry—not himself. Sakirko alone remembered Markov mentioning his concerns about a tiger and saying, “I’d better get home because the dogs will get killed.” He also remembers being amused by Markov’s worries. After all, many in the Panchelaza saw tigers, and who hadn’t lost a dog or two over the years?

  In fact, on the same day Markov stopped by, Sakirko and Isayev had both seen fresh prints of a tigress and cub about half a mile from camp. All of Zhorkin’s men knew this tigress because she was a regular, tending, as tigers do, to orbit through her territory every week or two. For those so inclined it presented an ideal poaching scenario. There was opportunity, motive, minimal risk of discovery, and a nearly foolproof way to get the carcass out of the forest: hidden in a load of logs. And yet these men let her be. It wasn’t so much because they respected the law; rather, they respected her. They and most others in the Bikin valley lived by the motto “If I don’t touch her, she won’t touch me.” Such was the stability of human-tiger relations in the Panchelaza that the possibility of a person getting attacked—much less eaten—by a tiger was, literally, laughable—like getting hit by a meteorite. But an analogy to cars may be more useful: everyone knows they are deadly and that people can get killed by them, and yet most people have reconciled themselves to this danger in a way that allows them to live in daily harmony with motor vehicles.

  At some point, possibly on Sunday, December 7, Sasha Lazurenko was sent off on foot to interview the Nanai elder Ivan Dunkai at his cabin on the lower Amba. This was a crucial interview because Dunkai was someone Markov might well have confided in. But, unbeknownst to Trush, something went awry: it seems now that the interview never took place. Like Trush, Lazurenko is tall, lean, and industrious. His face is round and bisected by a trim mustache; pale blue eyes hide behind heavy, hooded lids. Born and raised on the Ussuri, in a village south of Luchegorsk, Lazurenko is a fully integrated tayozhnik and, like most of his kind, he dresses in camouflage or forest green. It was specifically because of his local knowledge that he was selected for Inspection Tiger’s Bikin squad. Sasha Lazurenko was Trush’s right-hand man, and Trush trusted him with his life. Despite the lack of a written statement, Trush was convinced that Lazurenko had met with Dunkai, and this may well be because Lazurenko told him he had. Nobody knows now. Lazurenko has had some serious health problems of late and his memories of this event have become a landscape partially obscured by clouds: some details are vivid while others are lost to view.

  Nonetheless, Ivan Dunkai’s account of his last meeting with Markov survives. “He came to me [on December 3],” Dunkai explained to the filmmaker Sasha Snow, “and it was getting dark when he arrived. He said, ‘There’s a tiger about.’ I asked him, ‘Where?’ Markov said that the animal was hiding. ‘When are you going to visit me?’ he asked. ‘Come now, and we’ll go hunting together.’ I asked him, ‘How can we go hunting at night? Look, I’ve made a soup. Let’s eat together.’ But he kept insisting, saying that he had to go now! I asked if he would come back the next day, but he said he had a lot to do.”

  Dunkai offered him a bed for the night, but Markov refused; though it was already dusk, he headed off through the forest to Zhorkin’s camp. Apparently, he made no mention of a search for lost dogs. Rather, it seemed to Dunkai that the dogs were searching for Markov: “What was curious,” Dunkai noted, “was that, after he left, his dog came by. It was strange because a dog usually stays with its master, and that one was a hunting dog.”

  Markov was not in the habit of chaining up his dogs (in part due to the risk of tigers), and there was no reason for him to become separated from them unless something extraordinary had happened. When one considers the keen senses of a good hunting dog, its familiarity with its home territory, and its loyalty to its master, it becomes clearer just how difficult it would be for one of them, much less all three, to “lose” not only their master but one another. In the Panchelaza, there was really only one thing that could cause this to happen.

  Markov’s dogs, it seemed, were on a circuit of their own and, like all good trackers, they searched in steadily widening rings around the place they had last seen what they were looking for. They also checked in with the neighbors. The only person located closer to Markov than Zhorkin’s loggers was a small, curious hermit of a man with a tobacco rasp and a nickname he had picked up in prison. Kopchony (“Smokey”) was about fifty years old and barely five feet tall, with a hairstyle and mustache identical to Joseph Stalin’s. He lived a mile southwest of Markov and worked part-time as a watchman for Zhorkin; the rest of the time he lived off the land in a state of solitude much like Ivan Dunkai’s, interrupted only by occasional trips to Sobolonye for supplies and a steam bath. Lacking the resources to build a proper cabin, Kopchony lived in what was, essentially, a hole in the ground. It was surrounded by low walls and a shed roof and, were a Muscovite or a Petersburger to encounter it, they would scarcely recognize it as a dwelling; it looked more like a root cellar. Surrounded as it was by undisturbed forest, and accessible only by a faint and winding footpath, Kopchony’s hovel looked like something from a fairy tale—the kind of place where a witch might live, or maybe a gnome. The only way to find it was to be led there by someone who knew the way. Markov took tea there on occasion, and at least one of his dogs went there to look for him.

  Not surprisingly, tigers were a fairly regular occurrence in Kopchony’s world. “Sometimes, I would see one on the way to the outhouse, sometimes when I went fishing,” he explained. He was well acquainted with the tigress that frequented the logging base: “I often saw her on the way to the village,” he said. “Once, I was walking on the road and noticed something up ahead. I came closer, and there she was—her paw big like that.” He put his hands up to frame his face. “She had stood there for a long while, and I said to her, ‘You have been waiting for me for quite some time, haven’t you? You noticed me from far away.’ ”

  Ivan Dunkai described these experiences, too. “There is something hypnotic in a tiger,” he explained. “She has that quality. She tread
s so softly that there is no sound, and you won’t know she’s there at all. But if she doesn’t like something, she’ll stop and hold your gaze. There’s a kind of psychological ballet: who will outstare who? In such cases, you should not suddenly turn tail because the scent of fear passes quickly. You must back off slowly, slowly—especially if the tiger has a kill, or if she’s a mother with cubs: she makes a step, you make a step—you must not run away. And only when you leave the territory she thinks is hers, only then can you run.”

  Tigers, incidentally, have been observed doing the same thing: sauntering casually away from a car and then, once they believe themselves to be out of sight, bolting for their lives. But for Kopchony, as small and solitary as he was, fear didn’t seem to be a factor; he had found a comfortable niche for himself within the ecosystem of the Panchelaza. “I never had any conflicts with them,” he said of the local tigers. Kopchony’s world was a peaceful one, governed in part by a pragmatic but circular logic reminiscent of a Laurel and Hardy sketch. When asked if he had ever discussed the Markov incident with Ivan Dunkai, he replied, “No, we never talked about it because he knew about it without me telling him about it, and I knew about it without him telling me, so what are we going to talk about?”

  Deadly attacks by tigers are rare events in Russia, and Trush had handled only one such incident before. Most of Inspection Tiger’s work involved poaching incidents and related infractions, and so weren’t usually this involved or this deadly. Typically, interviews were restricted to immediate suspects and possibly a middleman; local informants also played a role. The Khomenko incident had been Trush’s first case involving the death of a person. As upsetting as it was, it had fit the typical profile of an animal attack on a hunter: clearly provoked, quickly resolved, and with no third parties attempting to conceal evidence. In human terms, Khomenko’s death was a third-degree murder: a spur-of-the moment defensive reaction in which death was incidental rather than intended. By contrast, the attack on Markov was far more sinister. It resembled something closer to a first-degree murder: premeditated, with malice aforethought, and a clear intent to kill. However, at this early stage of the investigation, neither Trush nor anyone else had fully grasped the threat this tiger posed to the general public. Trush was hoping that Markov, like Khomenko, would be a one-off and, now that the score was settled, the tiger would return to its usual prey. But it was too late for that now; this tiger was beyond recall.

  Trush’s last interview that day was with Pyotr Zhorkin, and Trush certainly didn’t endear himself to the man when he confiscated the bullets for his unregistered gun. Zhorkin, in return, issued a warning that Trush transcribed word for word: “I can tell you one thing,” he said, “if a tiger decides to hunt somebody, you’re not going to stop her.” Zhorkin was a man who held his own opinions in high regard, regardless of their grounding, but in this case he was prophetic. By the time Trush got back to Luchegorsk and typed up his notes on Sunday afternoon, the tiger was hunting again.

  11

  The story of cats is a story of meat.1

  ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS,

  The Tribe of Tiger

  MARKOV’S BURIAL SUIT ARRIVED FROM LUCHEGORSK ON SATURDAY, December 6. That afternoon, Zaitsev, Dvornik, and Onofreychuk gathered a load of firewood and drove down the road to the graveyard. The tiger, never far from their minds, was moving, too, but they had no idea where. Far away, they hoped. Until now, tigers had been more of an abstraction than a fact in these men’s minds. There had always been stories and tracks and missing dogs, but now the tiger’s presence was personal, visceral—as if the animal had reached some kind of critical mass whereby it shifted into a new and more immediate dimension. None of them had felt a tiger the way they did at Markov’s cabin, and it was crowding their consciousness now—waking and sleeping—in a way it never had before. The woods still looked the same, but they did not feel the same. It made a man think about his children differently, and wonder where they were.

  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.2

  With 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 th
e 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.