The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  The tiger closed the gap in a matter of seconds and, in that moment of arrested consciousness, Sokolov didn’t even see the final leap. “I stepped back,” he said, “and closed my eyes for an instant—because of my nerves. They say that when a person is in this type of critical situation his whole life rushes through his mind. Well, that didn’t happen to me. I remembered Sergei Denisov [a hunter he had known who was killed and eaten by a tiger], and I had just one thought: let this tiger kill me right away so I won’t suffer too long.

  “The tiger knocked me down; my left leg was bent and he bit into my knee. For an instant, he and I were looking in each other’s eyes—his eyes were blazing, his ears were pressed back; I could see his teeth, and I thought I saw surprise in his eyes—like he was seeing something he hadn’t expected to see. He bit me once, twice. My bones were cracking, crushing; everything was crackling. He was holding my leg sort of like a dog, shaking his head from side to side, and there was a sound like heavy cloth ripping. I was in excruciating pain. He was eating me, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.”

  In that moment, Sokolov shifted into a different mode; it was as if the clouds of fear parted to make way for another emotion, much as they had for Jim West when he heard the bear attacking his dog. “I just got mad,” said Sokolov. “Instinctively, I punched the tiger in the forehead, between the eyes. He roared and jumped away. Then my partner came to help me.”

  In the act of coming to his senses, and tapping that deep and ancient vein of self-preservation that flows through all of us, Sokolov had brought the tiger to its senses, too. The tiger had no particular issue with Sokolov; he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But for Sokolov, this was just the beginning. “As soon as the tiger left, I understood that my bones were crushed and shattered, and my ligaments and tendons were torn apart.”

  And yet, in spite of this, the pain Sokolov felt then was as keen in his heart as it was in his leg: “I have spent so much time in the taiga,” he said. “I love the taiga and I treat it like my home—like it is some living creature. I have never violated her law, never killed anything which I shouldn’t have, never cut a tree unless I had to do it. So, when I saw that tiger charging me, I felt like I was being betrayed by my own mother.”

  Andrei Pochepnya may have felt the same way.

  Sokolov was now in a grave situation: lethally injured, lying in deep, wet snow, miles from the nearest road, with an inexperienced partner. There was no radio, and walking was out of the question. His knee was so badly damaged he looked, in his words, “like a grasshopper”; it was bleeding profusely. Sokolov’s partner managed to bind his upper leg with a tourniquet and ease him into his sleeping bag. “I told him, ‘Vladimir, please, cut some pine branches, prepare some firewood, make a fire and run for help.’ He gave me what he had, including his knapsack, his sweater, some chocolate, and then he left. There were cigarettes, too—a whole pack. I smoked them all in the first half hour.”

  By then, it was about three in the afternoon. It was windy and the temperature was dropping, the sodden snow turning to ice. The sun went down, and darkness settled in. Sokolov lay there as the hours passed, and the pile of firewood shrank, but nobody came. The nearest road was three miles away, and the research base was ten more beyond that. In spite of the tourniquet, Sokolov’s blood was draining steadily out of him, taking his body temperature down with it. Somehow he stayed alert; it may have been the pain that kept him conscious. Sokolov spent the entire night like that, alone in a traumatized limbo of blood loss, creeping hypothermia, and unimaginable pain. On top of this, there was no guarantee that the tigers wouldn’t come back. “I just wanted to lose consciousness and stop feeling that pain,” he said. “By three a.m., I understood that nobody was coming.”

  This was only the second circle of Sokolov’s hell; there were still at least seven more to go. Despite his best efforts, he never lost consciousness for more than a few minutes, and there in the dark, in shock, his mind wandered to some frightening places. He could not fathom where his partner was and he imagined he must have had an accident, too; he pictured Vladimir injured at the bottom of a cliff, and his despair deepened. “I don’t consider myself a religious man,” said Sokolov, “but at that time I was thinking: ‘God, please take me, and stop this torture.’ Over the course of the night, I passed through different stages of desire to live and to die. I decided I would hang on until noon the next day; if nobody had come by then I would take a knife and slit my wrist—these were the kinds of thoughts going through my mind.”

  Meanwhile, Sokolov’s partner was having some serious problems of his own. He made it to the road all right, but when he stopped at the first village, no one was willing to help him so he had to go all the way back to the base. Once there, it took him until around five in the morning before he managed to gather some men with a Caterpillar tractor and a hay wagon. In this, they made the slow trip back. Not even the Cat could get up to the ridge so they made the last mile or so on foot, carrying a stretcher. They didn’t reach Sokolov until nine. By then, he had been on his own for eighteen hours, and he was on the threshold, wavering between the living and the dead. “While I was in that suspended, uncertain state,” he recalled, “my body understood that it should fight for life and I should be alert. I knew that there was nobody to rely on, except myself. But as soon as I saw familiar faces, all my strength left me. I felt very weak; I was very thirsty. I started to cry.

  “I told them that they wouldn’t be able to take me to the hospital by tractor. I told them to call a helicopter immediately because I was going to die otherwise. As it was, I almost died on the way to the tractor. It took them six hours to carry me because the slope was so steep. The snow was melting and it was slippery; there were fallen trees along the creek and waterfalls covered with ice. There were only four people on the rescue team and they got exhausted.”

  The rescue team had a radiophone and they called for a helicopter, but because bills for previous rescue flights were in arrears, the aviation authority refused to fly. They were referred to the governor of the territory. They called the governor’s office, and they were told he would have to think about it. Hours passed, and Sokolov was slipping. They made more calls: to a well-connected Russian tiger researcher and then to his ex-wife, who eventually got in touch with Dale Miquelle, the American tiger biologist in Terney. Miquelle agreed to vouch for the flight and, finally, the helicopter took off. By then, it was late afternoon and, still, the stretcher-bearers had not been able to reach the tractor. Sokolov was drifting in and out of consciousness. When the helicopter arrived, there was nowhere to land so they had to winch him up through the trees in a basket.

  By the time Sokolov finally arrived in the hospital, the doctor gave him hours to live. His leg became a secondary concern then; simply saving his life was now the priority. When he was eventually stabilized and conscious again, Sokolov was greeted with the news that his leg would have to be amputated. By then, more than twenty-four hours had passed since the attack, and the wound had gone septic. Even the bone itself became afflicted with an infection of the marrow (osteomyelitis). The mouth of a tiger, even a healthy one, is a filthy place, and Sokolov required massive doses of antibiotics. He had to have a cannula (a semipermanent intravenous device) inserted under his collarbone and, like this, he was parked in the hospital, attached to an IV drip, for months. During this time, close friends managed to find doctors willing to try to save his leg, which they managed to do with multiple surgeries, plates, and screws. Whether he would ever be able to walk on it again was another matter. For months afterward, Sokolov was held together with a stainless steel armature called an Ilizarov apparatus, which gave him the macabre appearance of a human being under construction.

  Immediately after the attack, Inspection Tiger examined the site and determined that it was an unfortunate accident and chalked it up to human error; no attempt was made to pursue the tiger. When Sokolov’s boss came to the hospital to explain what had actu
ally happened—that he had stumbled on mating tigers—he ribbed him, saying, “You’re lucky that tiger didn’t try to fuck you instead of the tigress.”

  “Well, he should have proposed it to me,” Sokolov replied. “I’d have let him have his way with me if it would have kept him from biting.”

  Infected by the tiger in mysterious ways, Sokolov found himself stirred by powerful impulses he had no wish to control. As soon as he was able to hobble around, he was overcome by sexual desire. “For a year and a half I had to use crutches,” he said. “After that I had to use a cane. Maybe some strength came from the tiger, or maybe I understood that I was really alive, but I started fucking around.”

  It is the wish to acquire this same form of potency, but at less personal cost, that drives much of the illegal trade in tiger-based supplements. The brandname Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.

  “I consider this event to be fate,” said Sokolov in conclusion. “If you go to the taiga, you should be prepared to encounter a tiger—that is where they live. In terms of my feelings toward this tiger, I have only feelings of gratitude, and I will explain why: if a person goes through a tough ordeal in his life, he either breaks down or becomes stronger than he used to be. In my case, it was the latter. After this incident, I became stronger—not physically, of course, but spiritually. Maybe it will sound funny, but, possibly, some strength from this tiger was transferred to me.”

  All told, Sergei Sokolov’s rehabilitation took three years. During that time, he met his wife, Svetlana, and they have started a family. Their apartment in Vladivostok feels like a cozy, happy home, and it is clear that this has been a key ingredient in his remarkable recovery. “I vowed to a friend of mine: ‘I will walk, and I will return to the taiga,’ ” said Sokolov. “ ‘Even if I have to use crutches, even with a wooden leg, I will return.’ This is what I decided for myself.”

  Today, Sokolov’s leg bends only slightly, and it is a horror to look at, but he can walk, and he can work. It is not a miracle so much as it is a testament to bloody-minded determination and, probably, love. It takes him twice as long now, and he pays for it in pain, but Sokolov has managed to return to his Taiga Matushka (Mother Taiga).

  * A bolt-action infantry rifle whose design had changed little since it was introduced in 1891.

  16

  Amba, the tiger, said to the father, “Old man, leave me your son here; don’t take him with you. If you take him with you I will come and kill you both.”

  “The Boy and the Tiger,”

  NINA VASILIEVNA MUNINA1

  BY SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, LEONID LOPATIN COULD STAND IT NO LONGER.

  “One, two, three days passed. Andrei is not back, but nobody is doing anything. So I said to my son, ‘Let’s go to the apiary.’ I had a car so we went. Vasily went to look in the cabin, came back to the car and said, ‘Something is wrong. Come take a look.’ I saw a pot filled with frozen water in the kitchen; the rest of the bread was on the shelf, mostly eaten by a mouse, and I saw pieces of spaghetti eaten by the mouse as well. So everything was telling me: there’s trouble. We drove back and I went to Andrei’s mother. I asked her, ‘How much food did Andrei have? How long was he planning to stay in the forest?’ She said, ‘He only had a loaf of bread and a package of macaroni—he only left for a day.’ I asked her, ‘Why aren’t you worrying? It’s been four days, and the tiger is in the taiga. Where’s his father?’ She said, ‘He is working at the school; he’s on the night shift.’ I said, ‘Tell him to come and see me as soon as he gets off, I need to talk to him.’

  “So in the morning, after his shift, Alexander Pochepnya came to see me. And when he came, I told him man-to-man: ‘It is your own son, what the hell are you doing? He is not a dog. He’s out there somewhere for four days and you’re not worried about him? If it was me, I would fly over there.’ He said, ‘I am worried. Something inside tells me that something is wrong. But I can’t go there by myself. Let’s go together.’ He was confused and upset; he didn’t know what to do, and I said, ‘You’re his father—gather some hunters and go with them.’ He asked Danila Zaitsev, Denis Burukhin, my son, and me.”

  Lopatin stopped speaking and rubbed his eyes. “I am sorry,” he said, “my vision is bad and my eyes are in pain. That is why they are watering.”

  On Monday the 15th, Danila Zaitsev; Denis Burukhin; Andrei Pochepnya’s father, Alexander; Leonid Lopatin; and Lopatin’s son, Vasily, squeezed themselves and their guns into Lopatin’s Toyota sedan. Andrei’s younger brother had wanted to go, too, but they wouldn’t allow it because, said Burukhin, “We knew where we were going. We knew what we were going to find.” Leonid Lopatin was nearly sixty at the time—old for that country—so, after driving them to the apiary, he left on some other business, letting the younger men go ahead on their own. The men were all armed except for Alexander Pochepnya, who had only the one rifle, which Andrei had taken with him. This made Zaitsev the de facto leader of the party. He was carrying a powerful double-barreled shotgun, which, formidable as it was, would have been scoffed at by anyone with experience in shooting big cats. However, this is what he had, and it was legal.

  According to Markov’s friend Andrei Onofreychuk, Zaitsev was dismayed by the younger men’s casual attitude. “They were going down the trail with their weapons on their shoulders as if they didn’t need them,” he recalled. “So, Zaitsev said, ‘Are you guys nuts? You have to have your guns ready, right?’ But they just said, ‘Whatever happens, happens.’

  “Youth is youth,” said Onofreychuk. “They don’t realize the danger yet.”

  Although they were neighbors, Zaitsev did not know Alexander Pochepnya particularly well. A father himself, he accompanied Pochepnya on this dreadful errand, not out of love or loyalty, but because he had been asked, and perhaps because he could sense how close to the edge this man already was. Zaitsev had been born in western China where many Old Believers sought refuge following the Russian Revolution. Shortly after Stalin’s death, Zaitsev’s family had moved to Kazakhstan, and later he had moved on to the Far East—first to Chukotka and then south to Primorye, a path similar to Yuri Trush’s. Zaitsev was a rarity in Sobolonye, having stayed sober and kept the same job maintaining the village’s diesel generator for twenty years. Whatever his other failings, Zaitsev was a calm and sturdy soul whose presence alone was a bulwark against the crushing circumstances of both the era and the moment. And this was what Alexander Pochepnya needed now, more than anything.

  The day they were given was crystalline, brittle, and bitterly cold. The taiga was at its winter finest and seemed made for the eyes alone: the sunshine was so brilliant, the snow so pristine, the sky so depthless, the stillness of the forest so profound that speech or motion of any kind felt like an intrusion. Here, even the softest sounds carried an echo, and the search party’s presence, announced by the irksome, eightfold squeaking of their boots, seemed out of place—an affront to the exalted silence all around them. Burdened as they were by their dark concerns, these men were strangers here.

  They did not travel in any kind of formation, or with any particular plan, but they all knew how to decipher winter sign—how, as Russian hunters say, to “read the White Book.” The frozen river was a wind-stripped tabula rasa bearing just enough snow to record a track. A steep escarpment rose up from the right bank, guiding the river and pushing the men, first onto the ice and then over to the other side—Burukhin’s side, where only his traps were set. The lower ground there carried more snow but was confused by a tangle of grass, shrubs, and fallen trees that soon gave way to full-blown forest. Even with the leaves down, it would be nearly impossible to find anything that didn’t want to be found. But the snow missed nothing: a meticulous record keeper, it captured the story and held it fast. Andrei Pochepnya’s was a meandering narrative of one line only: a single set of boot tracks leading away, and never coming back. His traps, which were set at the bases of small trees and among overhanging roots along the right bank, lay empty and
undisturbed. A mile downstream from the apiary, hunkered down among bare stalks and saplings on the same side of the river, was Tsepalev’s tarpaper hovel. As the men drew abreast of it, they noticed a second set of tracks emerging from the low doorway. Under normal circumstances these would have been made by the owner, a trapper and poet who was known to these men. But these tracks weren’t made by a man.

  It was shortly after noon, a week from the solstice, and the sun hung low over the river, blazing heatlessly. It was so cold and dry that it felt as if every molecule of moisture had been sucked from the air. There was no wind, and the snow sparkled with such fierce precision that each flake appeared distinct from those around it. In the midst of this exultant dazzle, dread turned to certainty. They readied their weapons and followed the tracks—across the river and up the left bank, over to a massive spruce tree, well over one hundred feet tall. There at the base, they found, along with the poet’s tattered bed, a story very like the one at Markov’s cabin: that of a tiger who made no attempt to hide and who attacked an alert, armed man head-on from ten paces away—as if he was an adversary, as opposed to prey. It was becoming a kind of signature. How, they wondered, could Pochepnya have been so close to something the size and color of a tiger, lying in the snow—on a mattress, no less—and failed to see it?

  The site of the attack was clearly marked by the trampled snow, but there was strangely little blood, and Pochepnya’s body was nowhere to be found. Only his rifle remained where it had fallen. Denis Burukhin picked it up and the first thing he did was draw back the bolt and look in the breech; it was still loaded. He withdrew the bullet to study it more closely and there in the primer, at the center of the bullet’s brass head, was a dimple where the firing pin had struck it. The gun had misfired. Andrei Pochepnya’s last fully realized thought may well have been the sickening realization that his father’s gun had betrayed him. Burukhin cleared the snow from the barrel, reloaded the same bullet, and pulled the trigger. This time, it fired perfectly. Pochepnya’s father was standing next to Burukhin, and there is no way to know now what went through his mind, or his heart, as that deafening report echoed through the forest. But he took the gun from Burukhin and, after walking a short distance, heaved it into an open stretch of the Takhalo where the water ran deep and fast. Then he went to look for his eldest son.