The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Neither Denis nor Andrei saw the village as part of their future, but for now, this was their lot and they focused on those things over which they had some measure of control—namely, their traplines. In spite of recent events, both boys kept their faith in the tayozhnik’s dictum “If I don’t touch her, she won’t touch me.” Shortly after Markov’s funeral, they went back up the Takhalo with the horses, figuring that if the tiger was around the animals would scent it and warn them, and that together they could handle whatever came next. They weren’t the only ones venturing into the forest that week, and there may have been an element of bravado to their casual demeanor. They were young soldiers after all, skilled with guns and brimming with testosterone; they knew these woods like the backs of their hands, and hadn’t Denis survived Chechnya? Traveling through the forest, as tall as giants on their shaggy, steaming mounts, emboldened by all that heat and power between their legs, these two close friends may have said to each other the same thing Markov said to his fretting wife: “Why should I be afraid of her? She should be afraid of me!” Either of them would have relished the opportunity to avenge themselves against the tiger that killed their friend and neighbor.

  But their parents felt differently. After the boys made it safely back that evening, Denis’s mother and father flatly forbade him going into the taiga again. “He wanted to go,” said the huntress Baba Liuda, “but we talked him out of it. We said, ‘Denis, you did not die in Chechnya. Your mother cried day and night waiting for you.’ ”

  Their neighbor Leonid Lopatin felt the same way about his son. Lopatin is a rare Jew among the Slavs and natives along the Bikin. A thoughtful man and a skilled hunter, he had worked as a truck driver for the logging company before it closed down. Despite his rugged circumstances, Lopatin’s ability to articulate psychological and interpersonal nuance stands out among his blunt and forthright neighbors. In the West, a certain level of psychological awareness—and the language to go with it—is taken for granted now, but in Russia, with the exception of some in urban, educated circles, this is virtually nonexistent. Stoicism isn’t so much a virtue as it is a survival skill. Of the people in rural Primorye, a longtime expatriate said, “Those folks are tougher than nails and hardened from horrors.”3 A Russian-American author once quipped that what Russians needed after perestroika wasn’t economic aid but a planeload of social workers, and this seems painfully true. One reason people find it so difficult to describe how they feel is that they have never been asked. It is understood that life is hard and men, especially, are expected to suck it up and gut it out. If you need a counselor, confessor, or escape hatch—that’s what vodka is for. Lopatin makes his own and keeps it handy in a ten-liter milk can by his kitchen table. “You’ve never had vodka like this,” he assures his visitors. “It gives you better memories.”

  Lopatin’s son, Vasily, was the same age as Andrei and Denis, and he, too, had just returned from the army. Like them, he was an avid hunter and trapper, but his father laid down the law: “As soon as I heard about Markov,” Lopatin explained in his kitchen in Yasenovie, where he works now as a scrap metal dealer, “I said to my son, ‘Vasya! We have no business in the taiga any longer. It doesn’t matter how careful you are; this animal can sneak up on you in the blink of an eye. Do not take one step toward the taiga.’ My son was saying, ‘But we already put the traps out; this is the best part of the season.’ I said, ‘Let it be. Life is more important.’ ”

  The situation at Andrei Pochepnya’s house was more complicated. The Lopatins lived next door and they knew the family well. “I know what Andrei’s father told him when he came back from the army,” Lopatin said. “He said, ‘I fed you. I raised you. Now, you look after me; feed me.’ He liked to drink, you know. It was a tough time, and Andrei was just a young boy out of the army who didn’t know how to live his life. He had talked to the supervisor of a logging crew who sort of promised him a job, but it wasn’t a sure thing and both his parents were on his back, ‘sawing on him.’ ”

  Andrei was in a bind: his parents didn’t want him to risk his life in the forest, but he was the oldest son and was expected to contribute. At that point, no one was hunting the tiger and no one knew where it was, what its intentions were, or how long this paralysis would last. For Andrei, this uncertainty combined with the situation at home was intolerable. At least the taiga was quiet and he could be his own boss, and if he got lucky and caught some mink or weasel, he would have something to show for himself.

  On Friday, December 12, Tamara Borisova held a ninth-day vigil for her husband. Vigils were a holdover from the days of the church: nine days after a person’s death, the soul is believed to still be wandering, searching for its place; at that time, friends and family gather to drink, eat, and remember the deceased. On the fortieth day, there would be another vigil and by then the soul is expected to have settled. “Markov’s son came and woke me up,” Denis recalled. “He said, ‘Let’s go; people are gathering.’ I told him, ‘I’ll go get Andrei and we’ll come right over.’ I went to Andrei’s, but they said he had gone to the forest. We hadn’t planned on going anywhere that day because it was Markov’s ninth-day vigil. I don’t know what happened; I think Andrei had an argument at home or something. His parents told me he had gone out to look for a job.”

  “I will tell you how it happened,” said Denis’s mother, Lida. “Andrei dropped by the night before. He said, ‘The tiger hasn’t smelled my bullets, so she won’t touch me.’ Denis wanted to go, too, but we wouldn’t let him. Then, Andrei argued with his parents and left in the morning.”

  Leonid Lopatin saw Andrei as he was heading out on the morning of the 12th. “I was with my son sitting and talking at my kitchen table,” he explained, “and through the window we saw Andrei coming out of his house.” This image remains vivid in Lopatin’s mind: “He was a tall fellow,” Lopatin continued. “He would make a good man.… Anyway, he had a small knapsack on and was headed toward the taiga. My son and he were schoolmates, so my son asked him, ‘Where are you going?’ Andrei said, ‘I have a few traps; I have to go and check them.’ My son and I both told him, ‘The cannibal tiger is out there. Don’t go!’ Andrei said, ‘Don’t worry, I stink so bad that she wouldn’t want to touch me anyway.’

  “I knew that he had only a crappy rifle,” said Lopatin, “an old Mosin carbine*—some rusty, prewar nonsense. I had used it before: it was not a rifle—it was a stick. I wanted to give him my own rifle, and if he would have stopped for a moment, I would have. But he was unstoppable—like a torpedo. He left about ten or eleven a.m. and as soon as he stepped out onto the road, Sergei Boyko drove by, so Boyko gave him a lift out to the apiary.”

  Denis Burukhin was puzzled by his friend’s sudden departure, but at first he wasn’t overly concerned; after all, the tiger was far away. “His parents said he had gone up to First Creek, which is in a completely different direction,” he recalled, “and that he would be home in the evening. I thought, why should I go looking for him? He would come back soon anyway. So, I went to the ninth-day vigil, and then here and there. The next day, I went to see him, and they said he was still not back. What to do? I figured he had stayed in the cabin overnight and that he would be home that evening. I went to see him the day after: again he was not there.”

  Burukhin still had faith in the law of his jungle, and this may have been because he had been spared seeing Markov’s remains or the scene at his cabin. As a result, the threat this tiger posed was still abstract for him—more of a parental fear than something that could actually happen. “She hides well,” Burukhin said. “I have seen all the other animals, but I have never seen a tiger—not once.” Nonetheless, with each passing day, he grew more uneasy. “That was the only time he went by himself,” Burukhin said of his friend’s unannounced departure. “Always we would go together. Always.”

  The tiger had eaten Markov over a three-day period, but that had been more than a week ago and, once again, the animal was ravenous. His routine had also been disrup
ted; he was no longer making his usual rounds. Instead, he was moving in a linear fashion, steadily downstream. In doing so, he may well have been poaching on other tigers’ territories. Though this tiger was in his prime, and large, he was now seriously wounded and vulnerable to attack by another dominant male.

  The tiger was hunting constantly as he moved down the valley toward Sobolonye, and every step was painful. In the tiger’s left forepaw was a deep, fresh laceration through the pad—possibly sustained when the tiger destroyed the outhouse. Far worse, though, was the wound to his other leg. A small handful of pea-sized buckshot had raked his right paw and foreleg, separating it at the cubital joint (the equivalent of our elbow). The only way buckshot could be so tightly concentrated is for it to have been shot from point-blank range. A factory load shot from that distance would have shattered the tiger’s leg and crippled him fatally, but Markov’s homemade shell, possibly compromised by condensation, didn’t have the same punch. It had only succeeded in making the tiger extraordinarily dangerous.

  The tiger’s wounds were also becoming infected, but this was a mere inconvenience compared to a much more serious mechanical problem: the damage to the joint was impacting the tiger’s ability to hunt. Over and over again, he caught fresh scent, stalked viable game, and set up ambushes that, a week earlier, would have produced life-sustaining results. Now, the boar and deer were getting away. The tiger’s speed, agility, and jumping distance were off—not by much, but margins in the taiga are tight to begin with; when measuring a missed kill, an inch might as well be a mile.

  The tiger was not a man-eater by nature—Markov had been a special case—but even as the tiger hunted, he was being hunted, too, by his own hunger, and by the unrelenting cold. The tiger understood this instinctively and, with every passing day, his desperation mounted. It is hard to say if it was injury, hunger, or some kind of primordial rage that changed his behavior, but ever since being shot by Markov, the tiger had been acting with a kind of calculated audacity that is not typical of these creatures. In any case, shortly after he arrived at the Takhalo River, some peculiar events took place.

  Andrei Pochepnya arrived at the apiary cabin about midday and, before heading out to check his traps, he made a fire and had some tea and bread. Pochepnya believed himself to be alone there, but he wasn’t. The tiger, though he was more than a mile away, sensed the young man’s presence. It is impossible to know whether it was the slam of the cabin door, the smoke from the fire, or some other cue that caused the tiger to pause in his tracks there near the foot of the Takhalo, but something did. Whatever it was made the tiger change direction, and he stalked this new information with a single-minded intensity that would have been chilling to behold. A mile downstream from Andrei’s cabin, on the right bank, was a crude Udeghe-style shelter made of branches; the only indicator of the century in which it was made was the tarpaper that covered it instead of tree bark. The tiger crossed the river on the ice and broke into this structure, inside of which was a mattress and other camping equipment belonging to a man named Tsepalev. After scavenging some rancid bait that had been sealed inside a plastic jar, the tiger hauled Tsepalev’s mattress out of the shelter and dragged it fifty yards across the frozen Takhalo. There, on the opposite bank, he spread the mattress out under a commanding spruce tree, lay down on it in plain view, and waited. The ground was open along this section of the river and visibility was excellent in both directions.

  When Pochepnya arrived, as the tiger somehow knew he would, it would have been around two in the afternoon. Hunters are vigilant of necessity, and a four-hundred-pound tiger sitting sphinxlike on a mattress is hard to miss. But Pochepnya was not aware of the tiger until he launched himself off his bed from ten yards away.

  Pochepnya’s rifle would have been slung over his left shoulder with the trigger facing upward. This arrangement enables a hunter (or a soldier) to grasp the barrel with his left hand and bring the gun up to his right shoulder in one fluid motion. Pochepnya, fresh out of the army and a hunter all his life, was trained to do this in a fraction of a second—and he did. But when he pulled the trigger nothing happened.

  There are, scattered around the hinterlands of Asia and—increasingly—elsewhere, a small fraternity of people who have been attacked by tigers and lived. Its members find their way in through various means: greed, desperation, curiosity, bad timing, and, in a handful of cases, dazzling stupidity or madness. There is no association that advocates for them as there is for so many other niche populations of afflicted people, and there is no journal that reviews their cases or disseminates information on their behalf. Mostly, they stay at home, often in shacks and cabins a long way from paved roads. If they leave, it is usually with difficulty and sometimes in great pain. Very rarely is there anyone in their immediate vicinity who fully appreciates what happened to them out there and, in this way, the lives of tiger attack survivors resemble those of retired astronauts or opera divas: each in their own way has stared alone into the abyss.

  In the case of the hunting-manager-turned-big-cat-researcher Sergei Sokolov, it took years to pull himself back out. Sokolov was in his early forties when he was attacked by a tiger in March of 2002. Powerfully built, with a bull neck and a closely shorn head, he exudes the kind of pent-up intensity that one might expect of a highly trained soldier—the kind that gets dropped alone behind enemy lines and must, somehow, get himself back alive. Sokolov is a rigorously principled and very focused man, made more so, it seems, by his experiences with tigers and leopards. To date, he has spent more than twenty years working and hunting in the taiga. During his thirteen years as a ranger and hunting inspector, two hunters he knew were killed by tigers, and he was personally involved in a hunt for a man-eater (a decrepit male whose fangs had been worn down to nubs). Like so many in this work, Sokolov was drawn to the Far East by the stories he had read, and by their promise of the wild and exotic. Today, there is an urgency about Sokolov, a sense that time is limited and precious, and it may have something to do with coming so close to death. Even so, it took him several hours to recount the ordeal that began, as these incidents so often do, with a roar.

  “I will tell you my personal outlook on things,” said Sokolov late one evening at the kitchen table in his modest apartment in Vladivostok. “Everybody has his fate and his destiny. It is difficult to escape it: if it is your destiny to die this year, it won’t matter if you go into the taiga or not. I never thought that something could happen to me in the taiga, because in the taiga I felt like I was at home.”

  Sokolov’s purpose on that cold spring day in the mountains of southern Primorye had been to collect samples of Amur leopard scat for DNA analysis, which is one way scientists determine population numbers for this critically endangered cat. He was working with a partner—a novice—who was some distance away, and both men were unarmed as per the regulations for this type of research. It was early afternoon, just below freezing, when Sokolov ran across a set of tiger tracks and stopped to measure them; they were fresh, and it was clear they belonged to a female. He decided to follow them, but did so backward as a precaution. He lost the trail and, as he circled around to find it again, he crested a ridge where he paused to catch his breath. And this was when he heard it. “This sound,” said Sokolov, “you cannot confuse it with anything else—God willing you should never hear it. My partner was a hundred yards away, and he said that when he heard that roar he was stunned; it was all he could do not to start running.”

  Sokolov paused, trying to find words to describe a sensation that is essentially indescribable. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas could have helped him here: on the African savanna, she explains in The Tribe of Tiger, when thunder rolls, lions will roar back. What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

  “I will use an analogy,” said Sokolov, trying his best to articulate what he heard and felt on that ridge. “Every melody is based on the same seven notes, but some melodies make you happy, some
make you sad, and some can terrify you. Well, this was a roar which makes your blood go cold in your veins and your hair stand up on your head. You could call it a ‘premonition of death.’ When I heard it, I thought, ‘That tiger is going to kill somebody,’ but the wind was blowing and my back was turned, so at first I didn’t realize it was going to be me.”

  Nor had Sokolov realized that there was more than one tiger. The tigress he was tracking was in heat and a large male had been tailing her; while backtracking on the trail of the female, Sokolov had run into the male. When a tigress comes into estrus, a kind of pheromone-induced insanity follows wherever she goes, and this tiger was out of its mind with lust. He had probably fought for his position and he had a lot to look forward to: once the tigress has reviewed and accepted a suitor, the two may copulate twenty times a day for a week or more. Individual encounters are brief and loud and, once consummated, the tigress may wheel around and club her mate savagely in the face. It is hard to tell from the human vantage whether this is a sign of irritation or tigerish affection.

  When the tiger spotted Sokolov, it may have perceived him as a competitor, a threat, or simply as an obstacle, but by the time Sokolov realized his mistake, it was too late. “The tiger roared again,” he said. “He was about forty yards away and I saw him running toward me. The word ‘fear’ doesn’t really describe the feeling in that situation. It’s more like an animal horror—a terror that’s genetically inherent in you. Something happened to me then: I went into a stupor; I was paralyzed, and I had only one thought: I am going to die right now. Very clearly, I realized that I was going to die.”