The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Gitta started down the track and raced back, yipping wildly, and the men flipped off the safetys on their rifles. Trush unfastened his knife sheath as well, but for some reason he carried his rifle on his shoulder, marching style. Shibnev had his slung off his left shoulder, trigger up, and Pionka held his like he was about to charge a bunker. Meanwhile, Gorborukov, the team’s designated driver, was locking up the Kung as he always did when they might be gone for a while. Under other circumstances it might have been comical, but in this case it evoked a different sensation when he said, “You guys go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

  They didn’t wait for him but headed down the tiger’s limping track; the right forepaw wasn’t even clearing the snow now. Though the ground was wide open, they were so used to walking single file that they fell into this formation out of habit. Trush led the way, breaking trail, followed closely by Shibnev and Pionka. They were affected—and irritated—by Gitta’s manic barking and their eyes darted across the clearing and then to the forest edge, which stood like a dark wall before them.

  The sun shone brilliantly on the undisturbed snow; the only shadows there were those cast by the men themselves—long, even at midday. Gitta continued darting up the trail and then back to Trush, barking incessantly, but she gave no clear indication of the tiger’s whereabouts. She didn’t know. As they walked, the men scanned the clearing, an expanse in which it would have been difficult to conceal a rabbit, and then they focused their attention on the forest ahead, which was beginning to look like one enormous ambush. With the exception of the dog, everything was calm and nearly still. Behind them, smoke rose lazily from the Kung’s chimney, drifting off to the north. Gorborukov was still standing there by the back door, holding his rifle like a broom. In the clearing, the slender stalks and blades nodded reassuringly, as if everything was unfolding according to plan. The men had gone about twenty yards when Shibnev, picking up some kind of ineffable, intuitive cue, calmly said, “Guys, we should spread out.”

  A moment later, the clearing exploded.

  The first impact of a tiger attack does not come from the tiger itself, but from the roar, which, in addition to being loud like a jet, has an eerie capacity to fill the space around it, leaving one unsure where to look. From close range, the experience is overwhelming, and has the effect of separating you from yourself, of scrambling the very neurology that is supposed to save you at times like this. Those who have done serious tiger time—scientists and hunters—describe the tiger’s roar not as a sound so much as a full-body experience. Sober, disciplined biologists have sworn they felt the earth shake. One Russian hunter, taken by surprise, recalled thinking a dam had burst somewhere. In short, the tiger’s roar exists in the same sonic realm as a natural catastrophe; it is one of those sounds that give meaning and substance to “the fear of God.” The Udeghe, Yuri Pionka, described the roar of that tiger in the clearing as soul-rending. The literal translation from Russian is “soul-tearing-apart.” “I have heard tigers in the forest,” he said, “but I never heard anything like that. It was vicious; terrifying.”

  What happened next transpired in less than three seconds. First, the tiger was nowhere to be seen, and then he was in the air and flying. What the tiger’s fangs do to the flesh its eyes do to the psyche, and this tiger’s eyes were fixed on Trush: he was the target and, as far as the tiger was concerned, he was as good as dead. Having launched from ten yards away, the tiger was closing at the speed of flight, his roar rumbling through Trush’s chest and skull like an avalanche. In spite of this, Trush managed to put his rifle to his shoulder, and the clearing disappeared, along with the forest behind it. All that remained in his consciousness was the black wand of his gun barrel, at the end of which was a ravening blur of yellow eyes and gleaming teeth that were growing in size by the nanosecond. Trush was squeezing the trigger, which seemed a futile gesture in the face of such ferocious intent—that barbed sledge of a paw, raised now for the death blow.

  The scenario was identical: the open field; the alert, armed man; the tiger who is seen only when he chooses to be seen, erupting, apparently, from the earth itself—from nowhere at all—leaving no time and no possibility of escape. Trush was going to die exactly as Markov and Pochepnya had. This was no folktale; nonetheless, only something heroic, shamanic, magical could alter the outcome. Trush’s semiautomatic loaded with proven tiger killers was not enough. Trush was a praying man, and only God could save him now.

  But in that clearing, there was only Yuri Pionka and Vladimir Shibnev. If divine intervention occurred, Shibnev was the vehicle: it was he who had been visited with the sudden impulse to reposition the men, which had placed him and Pionka broadside to the tiger and out of each other’s line of fire. Because there was no time for thought, or even fear, Shibnev’s and Pionka’s collective response was mainly one of instinct and muscle memory. And yet, somehow, both of these men found the wherewithal to think; they stole it out of time and space the same way gifted athletes wrest opportunities from inches and fractions of seconds. Even in the face of a flying tiger and a man about to die—a scene that would leave most people staring in dull surprise, as Gorborukov was from beside the Kung—both Shibnev and Pionka understood they could not shoot when the tiger was on top of Trush because their hyper-lethal bullets would kill him, too. They had to kill the tiger in the air. In that moment, those ungodly di ex machina became Trush’s gifts from God.

  Shibnev and Pionka brought their rifles to their shoulders in the same reflexive way Trush had, and Pochepnya and Markov had before him. “I fired and fired and fired and fired,” said Shibnev. “I remember seeing him fly through the air, the right paw was out like this.”

  In that sliver of time between registering the tiger’s presence and his airborne collision with Trush less than three seconds later, Shibnev and Pionka fired eleven times between them; Trush fired twice. In spite of this barrage, the tiger hit Trush at full speed—claws extended, jaws agape. The impact was concentrated on Trush’s right shoulder, and his rifle was torn from his hands. Trush, now disarmed with the tiger upon him, threw his arms around his attacker, grasping fistfuls of his fur and burying his face in the animal’s chest. He was overcome in every sense: by the inexorable force of the tiger; by the point-blank blast of Pionka’s and Shibnev’s rifles; by the impossible softness of the tiger’s fur, the muscles taut as cables underneath. Like this, man and beast went down together, bound in a wrestler’s embrace.

  22

  No bird flies near, no tiger creeps; alone the whirlwind, wild and black, assails the tree of death and sweeps away with death upon its back.

  ALEXANDER PUSHKIN,

  “The Upas Tree”1

  THE TIGER’S ROAR ECHOED AWAY, AND SO, TOO, DID THAT FUSILLADE of rifle shots. The steady south wind carried off the gun smoke, and the crowfoot and wormwood nodded to themselves as if all was well. Svetly Creek flowed on, silent and invisible beneath its carapace of ice, and Alexander Gorborukov took a step forward. Later, he would say that it had been like watching a movie in slow motion, one in which he was powerless to intervene. Shibnev and Pionka would agree that the events in that decisive moment were as vivid as a film, but that there was nothing slow about them. Less than a minute had passed from when they first set foot in the clearing to when they stopped shooting.

  The first thing Trush remembers is someone saying, “Yurka! Are you alive?”

  With his friends’ help, the dead man stood. He said, “Oh!” several times in succession. His eyes were big and round and, for a moment, he did not know if they were gazing on this world or the next. After colliding with Trush, the tiger’s momentum had caused it to somersault over him and now the tiger lay in the snow, pawing blindly in its death throes. Pionka fired a final control shot. The tiger was dead, perhaps many times over, and Trush was alive, feeling himself for injuries and proof of existence. It is still not clear whether it was a symptom of shock or an example of extraordinary sangfroid, but Trush’s first impulse after standing and taking in
ventory of himself was to get it on film: “I said, ‘Guys, stay where you are!’ and I ran to the Kung and got my video camera. I filmed footage of where the tiger was and where Yuri Pionka was standing; I filmed his hiding place from where he had pounced at me. I filmed it all.”

  It is a frantic and scattershot piece of work and the soundtrack plays like a crash course in mat (short for “Fuck your mother”), a form of Russian profanity that is the bastard child of gulag and criminal slang. It is visceral, violent, and anatomically explicit, and for five or ten minutes after the tiger’s death and Trush’s resurrection, it poured forth undiluted as the men stormed around the clearing, replaying those death-dealing, life-saving seconds.

  Conspicuously absent in all this was Trush’s rifle. “I kept wondering,” said Trush, “why the tiger hadn’t grabbed me by the neck. It was a riddle to me. When I came up to the dead tiger, this was what I saw”:

  Trush’s rifle had gone down the tiger’s throat, all the way to the stock. The stock itself was cracked, and pocked with teeth marks, and the gas tube, which runs along the top of the barrel, had been crushed. This explained why Trush took the impact of the tiger on his right shoulder, and it may explain why he is alive today. In the end, the margin between Trush’s life and death came down, literally, to millimeters and fractions of seconds; down to Shibnev’s uncanny—one could say “animal”—intuition, and to his and Pionka’s equally instinctive and precise responses. It is safe to say that nothing but the superhuman powers of those weapons, in conjunction with Shibnev’s and Pionka’s heroic skill and presence of mind, could have effected such an outcome under those circumstances. Odysseus and Ahab would have been impressed. But these are the tolerances the predator must routinely operate within; the line is always deadly fine.

  Trush radioed the other team, but they were still on the far side of the ridge so he could not get through. He then thanked his men and shot triumphal footage of them with the dead tiger, including close-ups of the tiger’s face and teeth. Gorborukov noted the time: 12:35 p.m. Though seriously underweight, the tiger was an otherwise impressive specimen with huge paws and magnificent fangs. The head was enormous—in Sasha Dvornik’s words: “as big as a basin.” Its fur was a russet brown laid over with broad black bands; around its chest, the shaggy white of the underbelly carried on up across its ribs. Its eyes appeared exceptionally slanted, even for a tiger; they were set in the face at an angle approaching forty-five degrees, and further accentuated by the mascara-like striping that ran up from their outside corners.

  Trush managed to get Schetinin on the radio, and he was told to bring the tiger directly to the village. Schetinin wanted the people to see it in the flesh—to know that it was dead so they would no longer be afraid. As emaciated as the tiger was, it took all four of them to wrestle it into the back of the Kung. Shibnev and Pionka rode in back with the body, and it covered the floor. Trush rode in front with Gorborukov and, although he does not smoke, he asked Gorborukov for a cigarette. “When he was handing me the cigarette,” Trush recalled, “he said, ‘Has it finally sunk in?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And then he noticed my trembling hands.”

  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 on
e 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.”