The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  In addition to a couple of small windows and the door, Markov’s caravan also had openings cut specifically for shooting in case deer or boar should wander into range. In this way, his trailer doubled as a kind of live-in hunting blind. From one of these openings, Markov finds his angle, thrusts the barrel through, and takes his shot from point-blank range, aiming for the tiger’s chest or head. There is a furious roar and a thrashing of brush, and the tiger is gone. For now. Markov reloads immediately. His heart is pounding. No one who has been challenged by a tiger comes away unmoved, and it is hard to tell who is more frightened now, Markov or his dogs. Once he has determined that the tiger is gone for the moment, Markov finds himself overcome with the need for a cigarette. If his dogs are outside, maybe he calls them in—if they haven’t already fled. He smokes, strokes his dogs if they are around, and gathers himself, assessing the damage, and trying to figure out what to do. He has just committed a federal offense, but it may not be his first and, if the tiger lives, federal laws will be the least of his problems; it is the tiger’s law he will need to worry about. He is going to have to come up with a strategy for dealing with this conflict, and he will have no peace until he does.

  As confident as Trush is in his interpretation of these events, there are other credible versions and one of them comes from Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily, who discussed the incident with his father at the time. “Markiz had killed a boar not far from my father’s cabin,” he recalled. “The tiger found it and was eating it. When Markiz saw the tiger eating it, he shot at him. Naturally, the tiger ran away. The tiger was injured, and he could not kill anything for a week.”

  For a hunter on foot, dismantling a dead boar can take days, which means that, even after Markov packed his first load home, there would have been hundreds of pounds of meat left in the forest. Just as a human may help himself to an unfinished tiger kill, a tiger may do the same to a half-butchered human kill. It wasn’t clear if Markov’s dogs had been mixed up in this, but one of the downsides of hunting dogs is that, when confronted by large, dangerous animals, they have a tendency to run back to their master, thus putting him directly in harm’s way. Had this happened, or had his dogs been attacked, Markov might have felt it necessary to shoot at the tiger. In any case, he would have had mere seconds to make a decision.

  This version squares with that of the local hunting inspector Evgeny Smirnov, who headed a small agency called Field Group Taiga. Even though Smirnov was an ethnic Russian, the fact that he lived in Krasny Yar and was married to a respected native gave him access to information that could easily elude an outsider like Trush. Between his daily presence on the river and his direct pipeline to local gossip, Smirnov had his finger on the pulse of the local hunting and poaching scene. Smirnov counted the Dunkai clan among his neighbors and, shortly after Markov’s death, he got on his Buran and rode out to Ivan Dunkai’s cabin at the confluence of the Amba and the Bikin.

  “The first thing I wanted to know,” Smirnov began, “was where the tiger came from. Uncle Vanya [Dunkai] showed me boar tracks going down along the Bikin, and the tiger had followed these boar tracks. He said, ‘Zhenya [a diminutive form of Evgeny], that’s not my tiger. He must have come from up the river.’ Then I knew the tiger had ventured out of its home territory. Uncle Vanya got scared when I told him that Markov was involved in trapping tigers and selling their skins. He understood very well that, if Markov had injured the tiger or harmed him in any way and then visited his [Dunkai’s] cabin, the tiger could come for Markov and might not spare him either.”

  It seems now that Evgeny Smirnov was the only person with a forensic interest in this case who actually spoke with Ivan Dunkai at the time of the incident. What must be taken into account here is that Russian citizens, particularly older ones, have learned through painful experience that information is a weapon that can and will be used against them. Therefore, people protect their friends and neighbors, and information about them is shared carefully, being limited or altered according to who is asking. Shooting a tiger is a serious offense; if it came down to a choice between Inspection Tiger, foreign journalists, and a known and trusted local like Smirnov who had married into the tribe, the latter stood the best chance of getting good information. This is why Smirnov’s account must be considered, even though it differs substantially from Trush’s piecemeal one, which depended heavily on his (often excellent) powers of deduction.

  “The thing is,” Smirnov explained, “that particular year was a bad year for tigers in terms of prey. Boars are very susceptible to disease and the boar population was in decline. That was the main reason this tiger came down the river: he was forced to expand his turf because there was not enough food and, while chasing boars, he ended up in someone else’s territory. As it happened, the tiger killed this boar very close to a road. At the same time, Markov was passing by with his dogs. The dogs ran toward the tiger, the tiger killed a dog, and, either because he was scared or because he didn’t know what else to do, Markov shot at the tiger. The misfortune was that the tiger memorized the smell of that man and started hunting him. There were many people in the area—soldiers, loggers, beekeepers—but the tiger moved around them and did not touch anyone. He was looking for a particular person. When Markov realized that the tiger was pursuing him, he fled.

  “He was afraid to go home then because he knew that he had not killed the tiger. He ran four miles to Uncle Vanya’s, and stayed there, hoping the tiger would go away. Uncle Vanya saw that Markov was not himself: he was constantly deep in thought, and he seemed scared, but Uncle Vanya did not ask him any questions. Only after several days did Markov tell him that he had shot at a tiger and injured him. That’s when Uncle Vanya said, ‘Listen, you have to go to the village or somewhere else; you have to leave the taiga. The tiger will not let you live.’ And that’s when he left.

  “In the meantime, the tiger had finished off what was left of the boar. Then, he found Markov’s tracks, found his apiary, and waited there for him. Tigers are very well insulated so, if a tiger lies down somewhere overnight, his body heat does not melt the snow completely. It was obvious that the tiger waited for a long time because the snow had melted to the ground where he was resting. He waited for a long time; he waited long enough.”

  As Smirnov understood it, Markov had stopped in at Zhorkin’s logging camp in the hope of getting a ride back to his cabin. However, by the time he arrived that evening, all the heavy vehicles had been put away for the night and their radiators drained.* Zhorkin had already driven home, and there were no other vehicles available. For some reason—very likely his dogs, who may have run ahead—Markov was unwilling to wait.

  As much as these accounts may differ from one another, there is, running through them all, the common theme of dogs and meat—the two things humans and tigers are most likely to have conflict over in the forest. In this sense, the incident was a textbook case, and is completely consistent with the behavior of all the creatures involved. Markov for his part was certainly familiar with tigers and with the local lore, both native and Russian, but the only tiger attacks he is likely to have known much about were two local incidents, both of which were spontaneous retaliations to human attacks. In the mid-1980s, a woman from Yasenovie had her arm mauled after she tried to chase a tiger out of her barnyard with an axe; the man who came to help her was also injured before the tiger was shot. On the Bikin River, in 1996, there had been another incident in which a native man named Evgeny Nekrasov shot at a family of tigers from his boat, whereupon the tigress jumped into his boat and attacked him. He survived only because his partner, who was also in the boat, shot the tigress and killed her. That same year, about a hundred miles to the east, on the Pacific slope of the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, two poachers were killed and eaten within days of each other by a tiger whose right foreleg had been crippled by a snare.

  According to Evgeny Suvorov, a journalist and author from Primorye who has studied the subject exhaustively, the mid-1990s were bad years for tiger attack
s. In 1996, at least five people were killed, and several more were seriously injured. Some of these attacks were provoked, but others clearly weren’t. In his book Zapovednoye Primorye, Suvorov quotes the following verse by a game warden who had to face this uncertainty on a daily basis:

  I’ve read a tiger’s not dangerous,10

  They say the tiger won’t attack

  But one thing’s not clear to me.

  Has he read this, too? Does he know?

  In Primorye, between 1970 and 1994, there were six recorded tiger attacks that were classified as “unprovoked”; in four of them, the tiger appeared to hunt the victims as if they were prey. However, it is difficult to ascertain from the data how the prior history, or momentary desperation, of these animals might have predisposed them to hunt people. According to Suvorov, attacks on patrolling border guards were “entirely ordinary occurrences” during this period.11

  Earlier data—from mid-century and back—is patchy at best, but for what it’s worth no incidents of man eating were recorded anywhere in the Russian Far East from the 1920s through the 1950s (probably because the Amur tiger population was at an all-time low). In any case, most early attack reports are anecdotal accounts collected by travelers and, with the exception of the German lepidopterist whose remains were identified only by his butterfly net and jacket buttons, they tended to involve solitary Russian hunters, or Korean and Chinese ginseng collectors and railway workers, some of whom were reportedly snatched from their own beds. Chinese gold miners would also have been among the victims of an atypical rash of attacks reported by the famed Russian explorer Nikolai “Give me a company of soldiers and I’ll conquer China” Przhevalski.12 According to Przhevalski, twenty-one men were killed and six more were wounded by tigers on the Shkotovka River in southern Primorye in 1867.

  Regardless of whether Trush’s, Smirnov’s, or Vasily Dunkai’s scenario is closer to the truth, Markov had reason to believe the tiger might pursue him. It is not known exactly how long he remained sequestered after shooting the tiger, but on the morning of December 3, something emboldened—or compelled—Markov to leave his cabin and make the risky journey over to the Amba River, three and a half miles away. Perhaps he was searching for his dogs, or he may have been looking for backup to finish off the tiger. Whether the profit motive entered into his calculations is not known. However, Markov did not go immediately to see his friend Ivan Dunkai, but instead went northeast, to visit Dunkai’s son (and Vasily’s brother) Mikhail. Mikhail was never interviewed by Inspection Tiger, but in May 2008 he described the last time he saw Markov.

  Mikhail Dunkai is in his early fifties, and he is a hunter and trapper like his father and brother. He is short and thickly set with a shock of black hair that falls across his forehead in bangs, the only straight line on an otherwise round face. Dark eyes glimmer through folded lids. Like his father, he had a good relationship with Markov and, over the years, they had shared meals, vodka, and each other’s cabins. Markov arrived at Mikhail’s cabin on the Amba shortly before noon on the 3rd, and he was clearly upset. “He was angry with the tiger,” Mikhail recalled as he stood in a recently thawed dirt track dotted with puddles and cow pats that serves as one of Krasny Yar’s main streets. “He was swearing at him; he was saying that we should kill, destroy, and wipe out the tigers. ‘There are too many of them,’ he said. I could see that he was really worried: he didn’t want to drink or eat anything; he didn’t even have tea. He was just smoking cigarettes—one after another, one after another, and complaining that they were too weak. ‘Let’s roll them with makhorka,’* he said. He was smoking constantly for a half an hour.”

  Many Udeghe and Nanai, including Mikhail Dunkai, feel about tigers the same way Pyotr Zhorkin did: that if one has set its sights on you, there is little you can do to alter the outcome. “He was doomed,” Mikhail said simply. “You could tell by looking in his eyes. They were strange and empty when I was talking with him: dead-looking. This tiger was probably angry and vindictive, and Markiz probably struck a wrong chord with him. Personally, I think he was trying to shoot the tiger, and this tiger didn’t forgive him. If the tiger had felt that it was his fault—if he had killed a dog or done something else wrong—then he would have gone away.”

  Anthropologists who write about indigenous peoples often note their tendency to anthropomorphize the animals around them. Even though !Kung and Nanai hunters (among countless others) have used this approach to great effect while hunting, the ascription of recognizable emotions and motives to animals causes problems for Western scholars, not least because they are awfully hard to prove in a lab or defend in a dissertation. Such claims are what lawyers and philosophers refer to as “arguments from inference”: anecdotal and unprovable. Under these circumstances, the potential for hair-splitting, semantic quibbling, and “definition objection” is endless, but it also misses the point: these feelings of trans-species understanding and communication have less to do with animals being humanized, or humans being “animalized,” than with all parties simply being sensitized to nuances of the other’s presence and behavior. If you spend most of your life in a natural environment, intimately connected with, and dependent upon, the animals around you, you will undoubtedly—necessarily—feel a certain kinship with those creatures, even if you have no conscious intention of doing so.

  A striking example of this unintended intimacy occurred in present-day Namibia in 1940. In May of that year, two German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, having already fled Nazi Germany, chose to disappear themselves in the desert rather than risk being interned in their host country (South Africa) as enemy aliens. The two men were experienced desert travelers and, after making careful preparations, they loaded a truck with bare necessities, including a dog named Otto, and descended into the vast and labyrinthine Kuiseb River canyon, 120 miles southwest of Windhoek. Always fearful of discovery, and at the mercy of hunger and thirst, they crept about like persecuted anchorites, living in caves and stone shelters, hunting game with strictly rationed ammunition, and sleeping by their kills to keep the hyenas away. For two and a half years, they survived in this desiccated underworld, an environment in which neither the plants nor the animals had changed significantly in a million years.

  The Kuiseb canyon contained reservoirs of last resort and, when the waterholes on the plains above went dry, leopards, jackals, hyenas, ostriches, antelope, and zebra would descend to the canyon floor in order to search among the stones for springs and sumps. For Martin and Korn, a by-product of this self-imposed exile in a place devoid of other humans was total immersion into the animal world. As trained scientists, both men took a disciplined and energetic interest in their new circumstances, which Martin recounted in great detail in his memoir, The Sheltering Desert (1957). In it, he describes how they were forced to adapt to an elemental existence, which centered on a trinity of basic needs: safety, food, and water. But it had a surreal twist: a wind-powered generator enabled them to listen to the radio. There, in the desert fastness, where the Southern Cross gave shape to the night sky, herds of zebra clattered by in the dark, and thirst trumped all other concerns, news of the war in Europe intruded like distress calls from another planet. These men were, quite literally, caught between worlds. As wanted men, and refugees from twentieth-century fascism and war, they were forced to rediscover skills and instincts that had lain dormant since the Stone Age.

  The Namib Desert is barren for much of the year, save for a few scattered bushes and trees, so Korn’s and Martin’s diet was heavily dependent on meat. As a result, animals became a central focus; they were mobile hubs around which their own lives revolved. Because their bullets were old and weak—to the point that they would bounce off the skulls of their prey—Martin and Korn had to creep within bow and arrow range to be assured of a kill. But even as their lives took on an increasingly savage and desperate cast, they were able to step back and observe their own behavior—as if they were researcher and subject rolled into one. “Our clothes, alwa
ys stiff with blood and sweat, were torn and frayed from crawling over the sharp hot rubble,” wrote Martin.13 “After a while we gave up wearing trousers and stockings.… Using towels as loin-cloths we sat there and tore apart the ribs of an antelope … and gnawed away like carnivorous beasts.14 But our thoughts were freer and less oppressed than they had ever been, and later that evening Hermann’s violin sang triumphantly into the dark night around us.” At one point, Korn was moved to say, “My paleolithic soul feels at home here.”15

  As they settled into the Namib’s ancient rhythms of flood and drought, hunting and repose, Martin and Korn studied the animals around them, and their social bonds, hierarchies, and interspecies dynamics became a source of fascination. Inevitably perhaps, both men began to identify with them. “They were like people you meet constantly in the street without knowing their names,” wrote Martin, “and we soon began to look on them as neighbors.”16 In essence, this desolate but surprisingly lively maze of boulder and scrub was a kind of communal umwelt and, in it, Martin and Korn developed a sense of deep, empathic familiarity with their cohabitants: “We learnt to recognise their mood and intentions from the way they held their heads, or set their hooves.17 We got to understand them and their behaviour as you get to understand your friends without the need of speech.… The longer we lived with animals the clearer it became to us that human and animal behaviour were very closely related.”18