The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Shibnev worked with Yevgeny Smirnov in Field Group Taiga, a small team of dedicated hunting inspectors who, in addition to being skilled hunters and trackers, were based right on the Bikin. They knew the area intimately and took a proprietary interest in it, both personally and professionally. Shibnev was Russian, but he had been raised on the river in close proximity to the Udeghe and Nanai. Shibnev’s father and uncle had both done military service in the Far East, and they had been so inspired by the country—and by Arseniev’s descriptions of it—that in 1939 they persuaded their entire family to move out to this lush frontier on the far side of Siberia. Shibnev’s father worked on the Bikin as a fur and forest product buyer, and his uncle became a respected naturalist and author who specialized in the Bikin ecosystem. Shibnev’s mother taught school on a Nanai collective farm. As a result, Shibnev, a wise and handsome man who exudes a calm vitality, has an exceptionally good feel for the area and its inhabitants. At fifty, he was the oldest member of the hunting team, and he could remember the valley before the loggers came, when it was virtually roadless and thick with game. “Children who are born here are like wolf cubs,” Shibnev explained. “Our parents would go to work, and we would roam the river. Back then, everyone used to get around in boats.”

  Tigers were seldom seen in those days, but Shibnev became familiar with Nanai beliefs about them almost by osmosis: “The tiger was considered a protector, a just animal,” he said. “If you were to hurt or kill one, it would take revenge against you and your family. There was a story about a man who killed a tiger and then his entire family died. It was perceived that the tiger’s spirit avenged itself on that family.” It wasn’t until the late 1960s, when the first major logging road was pushed through the Bikin valley, that Shibnev saw a tiger for himself. “It was a feeling of joy and exaltation at the same time,” he recalled. “It was a sense, not so much of fear, but of respect or awe. I thought it was the czar of all animals.”

  From childhood, Shibnev had wanted to become a forest ranger, but his parents talked him out of it, and it wasn’t until 1992 that he was finally able to fulfill his dream. It was in this capacity that he ran into Markov for the first time: “He was a poacher, but I kind of liked him,” Shibnev recalled. “He was reasonable. Later, when he decided to move to the taiga on a more or less permanent basis, that’s when I heard he wanted to poach tigers.”

  For reasons that remain unexplained, Field Group Taiga had been notified of the Markov investigation on December 6, the same day Inspection Tiger arrived, but never formally included in it. “We were alerted,” explained Field Group Taiga’s leader, Yevgeny Smirnov, “and we sat on our rucksacks for the entire day [waiting to be picked up], but in the end they took a police officer with them. People who’d never seen a tiger in their lives ended up working on that case. They were walking around in the forest with pistols like they were hunting a criminal. Had they come to me right away, it would have become obvious immediately that it was not a tigress [as Trush had originally thought] but a tiger.”

  To a man, everyone in Field Group Taiga saw Inspection Tiger as outsiders—poachers, as it were, on their territory. One of Inspection Tiger’s greatest disadvantages was the size of its teams’ jurisdictions. Trush’s Bikin unit was responsible for the entire northwest corner of Primorye, which included nearly a hundred miles of the Chinese border along the Ussuri River. This meant they had a general understanding of their region, but sometimes lacked deep knowledge of specific areas. On the middle Bikin, the Tigers’ responsibilities overlapped with those of Field Group Taiga. The tensions this created were analogous to those occurring between local police and federal investigators: whereas Field Group Taiga was a small agency with limited power, Inspection Tiger operated on a larger scale with more resources and a higher profile. These imbalances, along with assorted interpersonal dynamics, made for some hard feelings, but after Pochepnya’s death there was no more room for turf wars or jealousy; Vladimir Schetinin simply needed the best men he could get, and Field Group Taiga had them. He called Yevgeny Smirnov.

  Smirnov is a former Muscovite who exiled himself to Krasny Yar, and he is a force to be reckoned with. After doing hard time in the army under vague circumstances, he took a job as a night policeman in Moscow. This is a seriously dangerous occupation in which violent confrontations are commonplace, and Smirnov—lean, muscular, with a pale, rawboned face enlivened by piercing blue eyes—faced them head-on. However, the combination of this and his experiences in the army took its toll. “My life kind of cornered me,” he said in the living room of his airy and immaculate log home overlooking the Bikin. “The military training came back to haunt me, and my nerves gave out: there were occasions when people would come up behind me and, before I knew it, they would be lying on the ground. I realized that the further away I was from people, the better it would be for everyone. That’s why I got into hunting management. I found out about Krasny Yar in the Lenin Library in Moscow.”

  Smirnov married a Udeghe woman and has been living and working on the Bikin since 1979. He has had many encounters with tigers, but his approach to these meetings is radically different from that of his neighbors. When a questionnaire was sent around to local hunters seeking advice on what people should do if they ran into a tiger, Smirnov ignored the list of carefully crafted questions and scrawled SHOW NO FEAR across the blank side. Smirnov approaches tigers the same way he approached hooligans in the back alleys of Moscow. “An animal is an animal,” he said simply. “A predator can smell fear very well. If you show fear, you’re finished.

  “I have four tigers in my hunting area right now,” he added, by way of example. “I know them by their faces, and they certainly know me. Well, last year [2006], the younger female thought I was in her way, so she wanted to mess with my psyche a little bit. She started following me all the time, growling at me; she tried to grab my dog. Well, I went fishing in the early autumn; the bushes still had leaves, and my dog went ahead of me. Just as I was approaching a bend in the trail, the dog came running back; I looked up and saw the tigress flying through the air about fifteen feet away. She was after my dog, and I threw myself at her, swearing and trying to smack her with my fishing rod. She changed direction in midair and landed. I tried again to smack her on the nose and just missed her. She ran away and, since then, not only has she stopped showing up at the cabin, she keeps her distance from me. She was trying to get me to leave the area, but when we got face-to-face and she saw that I was not afraid of her, she started avoiding me.

  “Over time, I realized that if you have accumulated more anger inside yourself than a tiger has in him, the tiger will be afraid of you. Really, quite literally so. When a tiger is coming at you, you can gauge very well by his facial expression what he wants from you. You can judge by his eyes and ears. One cannot read bears like that. So, a tiger is coming toward you: if you see that his ears are down, that’s not a good sign. Then you have to look him in the eye with all the rage you can muster and the tiger will stop and back off. You don’t shout or scream—just look him in the eye, but with such hate that he would turn around and go away. After one, two, three times, they leave you alone.”

  Smirnov may as well have been quoting Henry V:

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,2

  Then imitate the action of the tiger;

  Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

  Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.

  Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.

  This strategy, as combative as it seems, is motivated by pragmatism, not bravado. Like any of us, Smirnov is using the tools at his disposal, and his include the same bestial ferocity that kept him alive in the army and on the back streets of Moscow. Smirnov is a protector of the forest and an admirer of tigers, but he has had to find a way to live within the confines of their domain. He summed up this dilemma with a poignant rhetorical question: “So, that tigress—she wanted to kick me out of the taiga. But where would I go?”

&nbs
p; Markov, Ivan Dunkai, and their hermit neighbor all shared the same predicament—along with just about everyone in Sobolonye—and each had to make his own accommodation with the tigers. Smirnov had no doubt that Markov’s accommodation had involved killing them. “I knew that he was catching tiger cubs,” said Smirnov. “He ate the meat and sold the skins. I was trying to hunt him down myself. If it weren’t for the tiger, I’d have gotten him sooner or later. The tiger beat me to it.”

  This tiger, with his appetite, confrontational attack style, and growing comfort in the world of men, now combined elements of both human and animal predators. And so did Smirnov. Each, in his way, was a traumatized refugee caught in a limbo between the human and animal worlds. That limbo had now become a death zone, and Smirnov, perhaps more than anyone else on the team, was ideally suited to function within it.

  Along with Vladimir Shibnev, Smirnov also worked with Yuri Pionka. Pionka is an Udeghe from Krasny Yar, an expert hunter, boat builder, and ski maker who knew the Bikin as well as anyone around. He was the only native on either team, and his role was complicated by something his father had impressed upon him since he was a boy: “The tiger is your god.”

  Until now, this fact had never posed a problem. “I never got involved in any conflict situations with tigers,” Pionka explained. “Udeghe people think carefully before they do any harm to a tiger.”

  But when Field Group Taiga got the call from Schetinin, Pionka’s father was far upriver trapping sable and could not advise his son on what to do. As an inspector, Pionka had a responsibility to his team and to his community, and he had to reconcile this with his responsibilities to his father and to his people’s beliefs. Fortunately, there was an escape clause when it came to tigers: god or no god, there were limits to what his subjects had to endure. It was clear that this tiger was an amba in its most destructive manifestation and, when such a creature began killing people, blood vengeance was an appropriate response. The same went for human murderers, and this form of justice was practiced by the Udeghe at least into the 1930s.

  Depending on the situation, a hero, a shaman, or other clan members might have intervened in a case like this, but such events were extremely rare and any precedents had receded into the realm of folklore. In 1997, there was one surviving shamanka living in Krasny Yar and, though she had the all-important drum, the serpent belt hung with cone-shaped bells, and even a tiger effigy, she was extremely elderly and this situation was beyond her spiritual writ. But there was also the feeling in Krasny Yar that this wasn’t an Udeghe problem. “If tigers liked eating people, they would eat us all,” said Pionka’s neighbor Vasily Dunkai, who is himself an aspiring shaman. “This tiger knew who injured him. The tiger is a very clever predator with a very big brain; he can tell apart who is darker and who is lighter, plus every man has his own distinct smell. That’s why he didn’t eat my dad [Ivan] or my brother [Mikhail]. He ate the people who harmed him: he ate Russians.”

  Vasily Dunkai had a point: even though there were plenty of Udeghe and Nanai in the Bikin valley, the tiger’s targets had, thus far, all been Russian. And this posed another problem for Yuri Pionka: by entering into this conflict, he risked drawing that dangerous energy onto himself and his family. The story of Uza and the egule offered a possible solution, but no one alive had what it took to master such a creature the way Uza had. However, since the days of Uza, a new and powerful magic had become available, and it had done more to change the relationship between humans and tigers in the Russian Far East than anything except the attitude of the people who introduced it. Pionka had some of this magic in the form of an SKS semiautomatic rifle, a gun that was invented to kill humans, but which worked on tigers, and which gave those who wielded it an unprecedented—one could say heroic—confidence.

  In most places, including Russia, there is an inverted correlation between the rise of firearms and the fall of traditional beliefs. Firearms, especially those like the SKS, made certain kinds of shamanic intervention obsolete, and they did so by functioning much as shamans do—that is, by harnessing powerful natural forces and concentrating them into a supernatural form, which can then be channeled through the hands of a human being. It is no coincidence that the rifle combines the elemental mastery of the shaman with the superhuman might of the hero. Hunters and warriors have always dreamed of this and, in this sense, the SKS was a dream come true. After making its debut in the Russian army at the end of World War II, it was replaced by the simpler and more versatile AK-47. However, the SKS remained available as military surplus and, over time, it became the weapon of choice for serious Russian hunters and game wardens; everyone in Field Group Taiga had one, and the same went for Inspection Tiger. Armed with such a weapon, any man could be an Uza.

  On the night of December 16, there were eight armed men packed into the back of Trush’s Kung. In addition to Schetinin, Trush, Lazurenko, and Gorborukov were Vitaly Timchenko, an inspector from Vladivostok, Andrei Kopayev, leader of the neighboring Kirovsky Inspection Tiger unit, as well as Shibnev and Pionka from Field Group Taiga. Smirnov and Gorunov had gone home for the night, as had Denis Burukhin. Lazurenko cooked dinner on the Kung’s wood stove. With images from the Pochepnya site roaming through their minds and conversation, they made their plan of attack. “Everyone was quite agitated,” recalled Trush. “Everyone was emotional. We all agreed that the tiger had to be destroyed and the discussion boiled down to what would be the fastest and most efficient way of doing it.”

  Initially, Schetinin and his men had to decide whether to proceed with an aerial hunt via helicopter, set cage traps, or stick with a more traditional tracking operation. Within the intimate confines of the Kung there existed a kind of democracy. Each participant had an opportunity to voice his opinion, and pros and cons were weighed on their relative merits. Even so, it wasn’t a long conversation. The helicopter hunt was dismissed quickly, not just because of expense, but because of the dense forest cover in the Bikin valley. The chances of spotting a tiger from the air were slim, and even then it would have to be the right tiger, a difficult determination to make from a hundred yards above the ground. Steel cage traps didn’t make sense for this situation either; they were available, but it would take days to truck them into the valley and put them in place. Traps of this kind ran the added risk of catching the wrong tigers and injuring them, and thus adding more dangerous tigers to the population. Lazurenko recalled a trapping incident in which a tigress had fought so hard to escape that she had broken her canines on the bars.

  The options continued to narrow steadily: the terrain was too steep and the ground cover too thick here for skis, or snowmobiles, both of which were far better suited to river travel and the surrounding swamps. Someone threw out the idea of a bulldozer, which went nowhere. Weighing heavy on the men’s minds was the fact that, with every passing day, the chances of another attack increased exponentially, and it was soon agreed that the fastest and surest method for finding this tiger would be to hunt him the same way the Yankovskys had more than a century earlier—on foot with dogs. Such was the nature of this tiger and his “operating environment” that, even though the people hunting him had access to air and ground support, lethal weapons, radios, maps, and centuries of accumulated hunting experience, they were forced to proceed on the tiger’s terms. This wasn’t the fault of the hunters; it was because effective predators excel at engineering situations that skew the odds in their favor, and this is what the tiger had managed to do, even though he was injured and, most likely, in unfamiliar territory.

  That evening, it was determined that they would hunt the tiger using two four-man teams. The strategy was simple, involving a kind of roving pincer movement: while one team tracked the tiger step for step, exerting steady pressure from behind, the other team would drive the surrounding logging roads, searching the edges for signs of the tiger as well as humans who could be at risk. Shibnev was correct in that tigers can cover huge distances in a short period when they need to, but this is rare; major rel
ocations are usually caused by natural catastrophes like fires and plagues. War can cause this, too, and so can a concerted hunt, but on December 16, the tiger was close by, and he was the one who was hunting.

  A strange feature of the ordeal in Sobolonye was that although the village was well populated with hunters, many of them professionals, only one of them volunteered to assist Inspection Tiger in the hunt. This was striking for a couple of reasons, the first being that it was they and their neighbors who had already lost the most to this tiger, and who had the most yet to lose. But another, more ironic, is that among these reluctant hunters were men who may have had more tiger hunting experience than anyone in Inspection Tiger. Sasha Dvornik had actually admitted to shooting a tiger once “long ago,” but, if Trush’s information was correct, there were others as well; Zaitsev, for one, was a prime suspect. Unlike Andrei Onofreychuk, Zaitsev had the skill, drive, and discipline for such a task, and also the means to get a dead tiger out of the forest. One reason he may not have stepped forward is because of his history with Yuri Trush, who had busted him once under rather comical circumstances: after luring Zaitsev out of hiding by imitating the call of a rutting elk, he added insult to injury by confiscating his gun and ammunition.

  When asked why they didn’t participate in the hunt, or initiate one themselves, Zaitsev, Lopatin, and others said, variously, that they weren’t invited; they didn’t have the right kind of guns; the guns they had were illegal and would have been confiscated; that they couldn’t hunt the tiger themselves because it was a protected species. There were grains of truth in all of these claims, but underlying them was a lack of collective morale, distrust of authority, and an ingrained passivity that is one of the enduring legacies of State-enforced disempowerment. But one cannot discount the villagers’ well-founded fear and common sense. This tiger was not some geriatric livestock killer; he was a highly motivated man-eater that weighed as much as three men and seemed to specialize in killing hunters just like themselves.