The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Along with more easily identifiable equipment, a typical tayozhnik’s (forest dweller’s) cabin will have a couple of steel trays, roughly the size of large baking pans, hanging under the eaves. Dotted with crude perforations like a giant cheese grater, these trays are used for stripping pinecones. In addition to being prime building material, the Korean pine produces nuts, usually in cycles of three or four years. These nuts, which grow inside the cones, look like oversized corn kernels in a durable brown shell. Once on the ground, they can remain viable—and edible—for years. They are a cruder, earthier cousin to European and North American pine nuts: not as sweet and with a bit more turpentine. Nonetheless, a taste for them is easy to acquire, and they can be as addictive as sunflower seeds. More than a century ago, Far Eastern settlers called them “Siberian conversation” due to the central role they played in frontier social gatherings where few other delicacies (or pastimes) existed.4 They have also been called “the bread of the forest” because they can be ground into flour; oil can be extracted from them as well. Pine nuts are a staple for bear, deer, elk, and boar, not to mention humans and countless smaller creatures. They have even been found in the scat of tigers.

  If there were such a thing as decadal time-lapse photography, one would be able to observe a series of incongruous processions trailing across the high country of Primorye: Korean pine forests following the lay of the land; deer, boar, and bear following the pinecones (which tend to roll downhill); the rootings of these creatures, in turn, advancing the cause of germinating pine seeds. Leopards, tigers, and wolves follow the deer and boar while crows and vultures follow them. Humans and rodents bring up the rear. All of these creatures play a role in disseminating the seeds still further, thus helping to define and push the boundaries—not just of the Korean pine’s range, but that of each participating species. It is not overstating the case to say that Korean pine nuts, as small and innocuous as they are, represent the hub around which the wheel of life here revolves. Whoever isn’t eating the nuts themselves is eating the creatures who do. And yet, so well disguised are they that a visitor could walk the length and breadth of Primorye and never notice them. After all, who eats pinecones? This is both wonderful and frightening to consider: that, in the absence of something so small and so humble, an entire ecosystem—from tigers to mice—could collapse.

  Markov had become part of this age-old cycle of consumption and dispersal; he was both its agent and dependent, accomplice and beneficiary. But on that humid August afternoon, he had other things on his mind. Trush and Gorborukov were watching for him and he returned nineteen minutes later, bearing a sawed-off shotgun. The gun was in poor condition and Markov had cut it down, not to make it more lethal, but simply to keep it functioning as the muzzle had been damaged. Whether this was his only firearm, Trush couldn’t be certain, but Markov had fulfilled his obligation and Trush was satisfied. He held up his end of the deal and kept his citation book in his pocket. After telling Markov to stay out of trouble, he and Gorborukov continued on their way, but no one present that day had any illusions that this would be their last encounter. This was an age-old game they were engaged in, this hunting of hunters. Robin Hood started out as a poacher, too, and the current situation in Primorye bears striking similarities to that found in the forests of Western Europe five hundred years ago.

  The combination of Russia’s current hunting regulations and gun licensing policy has effectively re-created the medieval laws that forbade peasants to own weapons or to hunt. Then, as now, the complementary forces of logging and hunting had seriously impacted European forests and the game they supported. As a result, most intact woodlands doubled as game reserves and were off limits to everyone with the exception of noble hunting parties. An analogous situation has developed in parts of post-perestroika Russia where legal hunting has become a luxury accessible only to the rich. In a sincere effort to protect existing game populations, the number of hunting licenses has been drastically reduced in Primorye with one result being that the few remaining permits go, inevitably, to the wealthy and well connected. Unfortunately, the wealthy and well connected often approach the forest and its creatures with the same sense of entitlement their medieval counterparts did, only without the discipline, skill, or ceremony. There is a sense among many of Russia’s nouveau riche that they are above the law, and many of them are: what has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union is a kind of ersatz aristocracy, one that enjoys its noblesse sans oblige. “For such men,” says Trush, “it is a matter of pride to shoot at a tiger or a bear, regardless of whether the shot hits its mark. It is no difference to them whether they injure a tiger or kill it. There are many such hunters, and they shoot without thinking.”

  This flagrant disregard for nature and the law can take surprising forms: once, Trush intercepted a tank. It was a “civilian” model (no gun turret), lined inside with oriental carpets, and filled with corporate executives hunting like rajahs on a latter-day elephant. Needless to say, the vehicle was illegal. Its occupants weren’t pleased to see Trush, or his video camera, and they tried to intimidate him. “I filmed all this,” explained Trush, “and it was aired on a national program. When these men saw themselves on TV, they called me in for a dressing-down, and I agreed to go. They said, ‘You are not afraid to meet with us?’ And I said that I wasn’t. They threatened me. They said, ‘What are you doing? Don’t you understand? This is not America or Germany; this is Russia: you might get “lost” in the forest.’ Then they asked me for the videotape. I said to them, ‘Guys, I’m only doing my job. The tape is in Vladivostok. Go and talk to my supervisors.’ After that, they told me that I was incorrigible and that it would be easier to kill me than to convince me.”

  It was high praise—of a dangerous kind. Hiking through the forest one day, not far from Markov’s cabin, Trush nodded toward a dead poplar that had blown down, roots and all, leaving a large cavity behind. “This is how you hide a body in the forest,” he explained. “Put it in a hole like that and then cut the trunk off low, just above the roots. That way, you can lift the stump back up.” Trush elevates his hound-dog brows, wags his head, and shrugs. “No one will ever know.”

  Trush has been threatened many times, and his attitude is: “A barking dog doesn’t bite.” He knows how things are done in Russia, and that if someone powerful wanted him killed there would be little he could do to prevent it (in the taiga, the same is said to be true of a tiger when it has set its sights on a victim). On his rounds in the Bikin valley, all of Trush’s skills and weapons have served him well: he has been shot at and attacked with hatchets and knives. When illegal loggers have tried to run him off the road with their trucks, he has not hesitated to fire on the vehicle. He confesses rather sheepishly that, during raids, he tends to use up more ammunition than anyone else. However, his bullets are directed toward tires and radiators, or simply fired for effect. Trush is clearly proud of the fact that he has never shot a person, “although,” he is quick to add, “I have many times been within my rights to.” But this is what makes Trush such an unusual presence in this brutal milieu: he is a man who relishes the role of the authoritarian heavy, and he has carefully honed himself into a dangerous weapon that he is more than ready to unleash. And yet this capability is tempered by deep veins of mercy and compassion; life is hard in the taiga for man and beast alike, and Trush understands this. When he finds bear cubs orphaned by poachers (eight at last count), he nurses them in his apartment. Somehow, he is able—even in the heat of the moment—to keep both sides of the story in mind, and both sides of himself under control.

  “I could have started criminal proceedings and he would have gone to jail,” said Trush of a poacher who shot at him and whom he subdued and handcuffed while he was trying to reload. “But I took pity on this young guy and decided not to ruin his life. We wrote a report on him citing hunting violations and we confiscated his gun, but I felt sorry for his parents; I saw the conditions they lived in. That boy went into the forest in order to
put some food on the table, and that fact played a significant role in my decision.”

  Trush is well aware that, for many of Russia’s disenfranchised citizens, the acts of owning a gun and using it to procure food represent a last vestige of independence and self-respect. However, even if they were able to get their hands on a hunting license, most tayozhniks’ firearms would fail a modern inspection, and new rifles are prohibitively expensive by Russian standards. To make matters worse, the process of getting licensed to own a gun is onerous and time-consuming: not only are medical and psychological tests required, but the applicant must pay for them. This doesn’t include the cost of transportation to the appropriate offices, which might be a day’s travel from the applicant’s village, and which may not be open anyway. The total bill for tests, licenses, gun, and ammunition can easily approach $1,000, a sum many inhabitants of the Bikin valley may not see in a year. In parts of Primorye, the current system has created a “poach or starve” situation, and it’s not hard to see why many would rather risk a fine or the confiscation of a cheap gun.

  There is a deep irony in Trush’s work, and it lies in the fact that he lives in Russia, a country where many people will tell you that it’s impossible to live without breaking the law. In the taiga, the combination of poverty, unemployment, and highly dangerous people and animals exacerbates a situation that is, at best, untenable. Trush represents a lonely act of faith in a largely faithless system. His mission—to impose order on a world in which desperate beings compete and collide to their mutual destruction—is as difficult as it is necessary, and the situation has improved little in the past decade. Despite their integrity and dedication, Trush and his comrades are modestly paid and rarely thanked for their work, and yet, courageously, quixotically, they persevere.

  While Trush’s sympathy and understanding are admirable, there are times when he seems almost too forgiving. As if he didn’t have enough trouble, there have been two occasions on which Trush has nearly been killed by inexperienced police officers who were supposed to be assisting him. While on a raid in 2005, Trush and three other men were traveling over a rough road in Trush’s Toyota pickup, and sitting in the front passenger seat was a young policeman with an AK-47 resting on the seat between his legs. In spite of his recent military and police training, the young man had his finger on the trigger while idly thumbing the switch that shifted the gun from single shot to automatic. With the gun on automatic, he squeezed the sensitive trigger and the rifle began firing, filling the cramped cab with smoke, fire, and a deafening roar. The soldier panicked for a moment, tightening his grip instead of releasing it, and his gun blew hole after hole in the cab roof, just inches above their heads. AK-47s have a tendency to pull upward when firing, and they eject spent shells to the right; the combination of these forces caused the barrel to swing toward Trush, whose shouts were drowned out by the blazing gun. While driving with one hand, he had to fend off the weapon with the other until the policeman finally came to his senses.

  Trush, understandably, was furious; he was also deafened in his right ear, a condition from which he has never fully recovered. But his response to this nearly disastrous screwup is telling. Trush was within his rights to beat this idiot within an inch of his life, and to end his career then and there. Instead, Trush, who has two grown children of his own, covered for the young man. In most police departments, officers are required to account for their bullets, and this officer had a lot of accounting to do—nearly half a clip’s worth. But through some army contacts, Trush made arrangements for the procurement of replacement bullets and, after a memorable tongue-lashing, the young man’s penance was limited to repairing Trush’s roof. In a similar accident at a stakeout in the forest, another junior officer inadvertently shot up the dirt around Trush’s feet. Trush gave that boy another chance, too.

  “In situations like this, my rule is from the Bible,” Trush explains: “ ‘First, there was the word and then a deed.’ It is always better to warn a person first; if he does not understand that warning, take action. That’s the principle that I follow. Not for everyone, though.”

  Trush is a practicing Christian in a largely secular society and, in this sense, patience, compassion, and forgiveness could be seen as revolutionary acts against a system that has, for generations, demonstrated a minimum of these qualities. While Trush will make allowances for youth, inexperience, and desperation, there are some things he will not forgive. Along with young, careless policemen, Trush must also deal with the old and cynical ones. In Primorye, as in many parts of Russia, policemen have poor reputations and are generally perceived as corrupt and dangerous bullies. Well armed, with the freedom and the means to go where they please, police are implicated in many poaching incidents. They can be extremely dangerous when caught in compromising positions, especially in remote areas. Nonetheless, one winter day, when a group of four police officers refused to get out of their car after he’d stopped them on a back road, Trush pulled out a canister of Mace and sprayed it into the car’s air intake. The heater was on so the Mace quickly filled the passenger compartment. Recalling the incident, Trush smiles broadly and spreads his arms like wings, exclaiming, “And the doors flew open!” It is because of situations like this that the Tigers never work alone.

  Given the remoteness of his beat, and the ease with which the taiga can absorb a body, Trush has reason to be much more cautious than he is. But Trush has a contagious confidence, and some of this is due to his beagle-sized Laika, Gitta. The two are inseparable. Gitta has saved Trush’s life at least twice, and he has returned the favor an equal number of times. She is his eyes, ears, and sixth sense in the forest. It seems both comical and poignant that such a small dog could mean so much to such a large man, and yet the intensity and clairvoyance of their bond is profound—one best understood by K-9 corps officers, waterfowlers, and the blind. Gitta keeps Trush’s heart strong in the forest, but it is Lubov Trush who simply keeps his heart. They have been married for forty years. Fully a foot shorter than Trush, she is his emotional backbone, and it is a steely one. Herself a former kayak champion, Lubov is tightly bundled, kind and industrious. Goodwill and good food seem to emanate from her. Yuri may run you hard in the bush, but a visitor can still grow fat at Lubov’s table.

  At home in their fifth-floor apartment, Trush seems too large for the space, and the simple furniture appears insufficient to hold him, as if it had been designed for a smaller scale of human. In this calm and cozy sanctuary, where Lubov holds sway, there are few signs of her husband’s working life. But there are some hints: the kettlebells in the corner, shiny with use; the tiger-striped blanket on the guest bed; the improvised punching bag filled with wheat germ hanging in the hallway. Stashed in closets and drawers are more obvious clues: a pair of Udeghe-style hunting skis; a tiger’s claw; a Dragunov “Tiger” sniper’s rifle; a mangled bullet, its crevices still packed with matter from a tiger Trush shot in the icy spring of 1996.

  4

  What the hammer? What the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  WILLIAM BLAKE, “The Tyger”

  THE BADGER AND SHOTGUN INCIDENT WAS THE ONLY TIME TRUSH SAW Markov alive, and he had underestimated him. Then, he had figured Markov for one more unemployed subsistence hunter who wasn’t above taking a lynx or a badger if the opportunity presented itself. When Trush finds himself, as he often does, in that murky place between the letter of the law and the fact of a man’s circumstances, he is reminded that the line between right and wrong can be a crooked one. But how, in the forest there, with that sorry badger in a pot, could Trush have imagined what would happen to Markov, a known poacher with illegal weapons who was fed up with being poor? And how, for that matter, could he have known what would happen to Lev Khomenko?

  Lev (“Lion”) Khomenko was a thirty-six-year-old hunter and herbalist from the village of Lesopil’noye, near the confluence of the Ussuri and Bikin rivers. He had a degree in hunting management and was a staff hunter for Alufchanski,
the State Forest Management Company, which oversaw the region’s commercial meat and fur industry. But the 1990s were the toughest years many Russians could remember, and the winter of ’96 found Khomenko unemployed with four children to feed. He and his family lived a marginal existence on the edge of the taiga; their house was old and made of logs, and it leaned precariously to one side. There were cracks in the walls big enough to put a hand through. Trush had been making his rounds one day when he came upon Khomenko hunting in the forest; while doing a routine document check, he discovered that Khomenko’s gun was registered not in his own name but in his father’s. Trush was within his rights to confiscate the weapon, but he had sympathy for the man’s obvious poverty and was impressed that all his other papers were in order, so he let him go.

  Not long afterward, Khomenko hitched a ride up the Bikin in a logging truck. He wore fleece-lined boots that were much better suited to town use and, over these, he wore a green forester’s uniform. He was hunting, as many in the taiga do, with a double-barreled shotgun. In the backwoods of Primorye, these relatively light firearms tend to be old—sometimes very old—and of dubious quality; their killing range is usually under a hundred yards, and they are accurate only to around seventy yards, which is almost laughable by the standards of modern hunting weapons. Khomenko’s gun was loaded with a single large ball in the right barrel, and with lead shot in the left; this way he would be prepared for any kind of game, be it big or small. Khomenko was traveling alone; there was about ten inches of snow on the ground, and it was forty degrees below zero.