The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  “When I was about six, I clued in that we were in exile,” Schetinin explained in his cramped apartment near the harbor in Vladivostok. “There was a concentration camp nearby and most of the prisoners there were teachers. Our homeroom teacher had been in jail there for fifteen years, and he was released because there was a shortage of teachers. When I was finishing grade ten, he called us in one by one. He said, ‘Tell me your sins.’ I respected him so I told him that I was a Cossack and a son of an enemy of the State. He said, ‘You can only study agriculture. Forget about everything else.’ ”

  As advised, Schetinin went up the Amur to study agriculture in the nearby river town of Blagoveshchensk (“Glad Tidings”) and in this there was a savage irony: Blagoveshchensk is the site of one of the Cossacks’ most notorious massacres of Chinese civilians. While Schetinin was studying there, his father was “rehabilitated,” a process by which a blackballed Soviet citizen could be exonerated of his crimes and restored to good standing—dead or alive. By way of compensation for the murder of his father, Schetinin now receives 92 rubles (about $3) a month, plus a housing subsidy. Not surprisingly, he never joined the Communist Party. Nor was he cut out for farming (few Cossacks were). Today, the notion of captivity still appalls him. “I can’t stand the sight of animals in cages,” Schetinin said. “I have never been to see the circus or the zoo.”

  Instead, he maneuvered himself toward the study of wild animal herds, and in 1964 became the first field ecologist in a recently created national park near Blagoveshchensk. From there, he moved to Vladivostok and into animal protection, discovering tigers in the late 1970s. Schetinin’s overarching goal was to protect these animals, but after Pochepnya’s death there was no doubt in his mind about what needed to be done with this tiger.

  PART THREE

  TRUSH

  18

  “He is. But he will still be hunted for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long since thou saw’st him? Which way heading?”

  CAPTAIN AHAB,

  Moby-Dick1

  THE HUNT FOR THE TIGER BEGAN ON THE TAKHALO—THE FIRE RIVER. IT was Tuesday, December 16, another brilliant, bitter day, and the hunting party that took charge of it was formidable. Six men descended the riverbank at the apiary and headed downstream on the ice, every one of them armed. In addition to Trush and Lazurenko were three local hunting inspectors who had been brought in to assist, along with Nikolai Gorunov, the Belarusian sheriff of Krasny Yar. There were no dubious locals or green cops this time; these men were all seasoned professionals. Like Trush, Sheriff Gorunov is a born Alpha, a handsome, fire-breathing dragon of a man who smokes with an alarming vigor: cigarette clamped between his canines at the point where filter and tobacco meet, the act of inhaling fully integrated into breath and speech such that there is no discernible pause, only billowing smoke that seems to be a natural by-product of a voice that booms even in the confines of his quiet kitchen. He bears a striking resemblance to the hawk-eyed and mustachioed tiger hunter Yuri Yankovsky, and seems to share the same temperament: he will haul a total stranger bodily (and effortlessly) through a doorway because it is considered bad luck to shake hands across a threshold; a map, when he is done with it, will be scored and pocked with holes from his emphatic pen.

  While there was no question in anyone’s mind that the tigers that killed Markov and Pochepnya were one and the same, it still had to be confirmed, and this was one of the purposes of this trip down the Takhalo. It was also an opportunity for the new arrivals to take this tiger’s measure and see where he was headed. Everyone on the team was a lifelong hunter and this was a good day for hunting; spirits were high. Walking together in loose formation down the river, one had the sense that these men, whom fate had gathered from end to end of Russia, were doing what they were made to do. They were all workers with a deep affinity for the taiga, and there was a certain bracing joy—like that of sled dogs being put into harness—in being presented with a task that was not just worthy of their mettle but bound to test it. They were in Arseniev and Yankovsky territory now, and it was in part the promise of such challenges that had lured most of them or their parents to the Far East in the first place.

  Seeing that Trush was filming, they razzed one another: “Aw fuck,” said one. “It’s too bad I didn’t put my gold epaulettes on.”

  “What were you thinking, you stupid ass?” called another. “You missed your chance.”

  Of all of them, it was Yuri Trush, alone behind the camera, who bore the day’s burden most heavily—not just because he was the mission’s now embattled leader, but because, with the exception of Sasha Lazurenko, he was the only one present who truly, viscerally grasped what a tiger could do to a human being. The rest would understand soon enough and, when they got to the site, the collective mood sobered quickly. There was no mistaking the implications of the pale and hairless scat that lay on the ice like a warning at midstream. Nor was there any confusion about the limping tracks: this was the same tiger. The inspectors projected a solemn intensity there as if it was a murder scene, and Trush urged everyone to take special care with the evidence. Together, these six men represented close to two hundred years of hunting experience—most of it in tiger country—and yet none of them had witnessed anything quite like this. Stepping carefully, speaking only in soft tones, they followed the tiger’s tracks to Tsepalev’s shredded mattress, which was spattered with blood and laced with tiger hair.

  As the men pored over the White Book, Andrei Pochepnya’s last moments became as clear as if man and tiger alike had been taking notes: the tiger had approached from the east—the direction of the road workers’ camp—until he paused, catching wind or sound of Pochepnya. Anticipating Pochepnya’s plans to walk downriver—perhaps by scenting the bait in his traps—the tiger turned south, traveling parallel to Pochepnya’s future path, just far enough from the river so that Pochepnya failed to notice his tracks. Then the tiger made a loop into the forest, effectively removing any trace of himself from the area, and came up from behind (downstream), a standard stalking maneuver. From here, the tiger spotted Tsepalev’s hovel; after exploring it and having his way with it, much as he had done with Markov’s cabin and the road workers’ outhouse, the tiger found a comfortable, if oddly exposed, spot and settled down to wait for the inevitable.

  Standing by the tiger’s bed under that big spruce tree, it would have been easy to see why Mikhail Dunkai believes that tigers can read people’s minds and influence their thoughts. One had only to observe Pochepnya’s tracks: they looked as if the tiger had him on a line and simply reeled him in. Theory of mind is almost always discussed in the context of human interaction and relationships, but tigers use a version of it, too. The tiger’s theory of mind is not as sophisticated as ours, but it is as sophisticated as it needs to be, and it is what enabled this tiger to engineer a situation in which Andrei Pochepnya, a far more intelligent animal, all but delivered himself into his jaws.

  Sheriff Gorunov traced the impressions of the attack leaps. They seemed awfully close together for such a large tiger: a sure sign, in his view, of weakness or injury. A healthy tiger could have covered that distance in a single bound. There was no doubt this tiger was impaired, but he may have also understood from previous experience that there was no rush. It is hard to articulate how overmatched Pochepnya was, how little effort a tiger needs to make in order to subdue a human being. A tiger’s jaws can exert roughly a thousand pounds of pressure per square inch, but it takes less than a hundred pounds to crush a windpipe, and only five pounds to block the carotid artery, which causes unconsciousness almost instantly. In other words, a tiger’s fangs don’t need to puncture the skin in order to immobilize prey; no blood need be let.

  Although a tiger’s canines may be nearly an inch thick at the base, they still break surprisingly often, and they don’t grow back; these losses can be crippling and are one reason wild tigers may turn to livestock killing and man-e
ating. As menacing as they appear, tiger fangs are actually delicate instruments—literally, bundles of nerves and blood vessels encased in layers of bonelike dentin, sheathed in enamel and somewhat rounded at the ends. With these four surgical sensors, the tiger has the ability to feel its way through prey, differentiating between bone and tissue types to find the gap between two vertebrae in order to sever the spinal cord, or locate the windpipe in order to stifle the air supply—all at attack speed. In this sense, the canines are sentient weapons, capable of grasping and puncturing but also of deciphering the Braille of an animal’s anatomy. As removed as we are from our own origins in the wild, our teeth possess the same sensitivity, and we rely on it daily whether we are gnawing a T-bone, love-biting a nipple, or detecting rot in an apple by resistance alone.

  It was not clear if the tiger simply took Pochepnya in his jaws and carried him off or clubbed him first. The force of a tiger paw strike has never been measured, but given that a tiger weighs two or three times as much as a prizefighter, and is many times stronger with even faster reflexes, one can begin to calculate how devastating a single blow from a tiger’s paw might be. Bengal tigers have been observed breaking the necks and skulls of buffalo with paw strikes. Reginald Burton, a British hunter, author, and longtime India hand, observed a tiger clubbing a beater (hunting assistant) so hard that its claws penetrated the heavy brass dish suspended from the man’s back.

  In the winter of 1960, coincidentally on the Amba River, a ranger and naturalist named Vladimir Troinin witnessed an epic battle between a juvenile Amur tiger and a full-grown Ussurian boar. The tiger, though half the size of the boar, managed to knock it down repeatedly by jumping on the animal’s back and clubbing it in the head with his macelike paws. In addition to their bladed tusks, wild boars are built like tanks: covered with wiry bristles and thick hide beneath which is a mantle of cartilaginous armor that further protects their muscular neck and shoulders. The fight on the Amba was to the death and, in spite of the odds, the young tiger prevailed, motivated, apparently, by spite alone. When Troinin inspected the site afterward he found an appalling scene: the abandoned boar had been eviscerated, its throat torn out, and its snout sliced off “as with a razor.”2 Troinin was particularly struck by the scratches in the boar’s skull, which were half an inch deep.

  It was clear that day on the Takhalo that, wounded as he was, the Panchelaza tiger still possessed deep reserves of strength. Furthermore, he had made the most of Pochepnya; at the very least, the young man had bought him some time. When Sheriff Gorunov examined Tsepalev’s ransacked hovel, he discovered a collection of topographical maps, but the tiger had gotten to them first. Gorunov noted evidence of the tiger’s fangs rending the landscape—perhaps a sign of things to come. There was a notebook in there, too, with Tsepalev’s poems inside, lost now, their author long gone. Gorunov then worked his way back across the river, joining the others at the terminus of the drag trail where they were sorting through Pochepnya’s clothes. Danila Zaitsev and Andrei’s father had gathered up Andrei’s meager remains the previous day, but when Gorunov went through his pockets, he found an undamaged pack of cheap unfiltered cigarettes. He would have been craving a cigarette then, but he wouldn’t smoke those.

  Police are required to attend anytime there is a body in order to determine whether a criminal investigation is necessary, but in this case there was no body. Gorunov’s role ended up being to formally witness the absence of Pochepnya. The sight of those empty clothes was something none of these men was fully prepared for. The horror in a thing is usually derived from its presence, however distorted or fragmentary, but here in the scrub and snow by the Takhalo was a broken frame with no picture in it. Had there been no tracks and no story, one could have thought these things had simply been abandoned—as if, a year or two earlier, some hunter had come down to the river for a swim, left his belongings in a heap, and simply never returned. Over the intervening seasons, animals, weather, and rot would have shredded and stained them, leaving the ruins that lay there now. But these clothes were only a few days old, and their owner had ceased to exist.

  To end a person’s life is one thing; to eradicate him from the face of the earth is another. The latter is far more difficult to do, and yet the tiger had done it, had transported this young man beyond death to a kind of carnal oblivion. It was clear on this day that, in the taiga, the sacred vessel of a human being has no more intrinsic value or meaning than a wild boar or a roe deer, and no greater purpose beyond its potential as prey. In the jaws of a tiger, one’s body is, for all practical purposes, weightless and, in the case of Andrei Pochepnya, it appeared to have no substance at all. This begs an obscure metaphysical question: if the body journeys through the viscera of an animal—if its substance and essence become that animal—what happens to the soul? Hurricanes, avalanches, and volcanoes consume people, but such random acts of insensate violence are considered acts of God; they don’t pick their targets, nor do they metabolize them. It is rare that one is confronted, as these men were, with such overwhelming evidence of one’s own mutability in the face of a sentient natural force. In this way, tigers and their quasi-conscious kin occupy an uncharted middle ground somewhere between humans and natural catastrophes. Under certain circumstances, the tiger can have the same nullifying effect as a long look into the night sky.

  As the men studied the cuffs and collars of Andrei’s many layers, it was clear that after his gun misfired Andrei had tried to fend the tiger off with his left arm. But the athleticism of these animals is stunning and, in a series of blinding and fluid motions, the tiger caught Andrei’s wrist, jerked it aside, and hurtled onto its target. The shredded collar told the rest: there was no further resistance. What remained looked like the work of paramedics at an accident scene, and the video camera absorbed it all, discreet as a confessor: “The tiger took all the clothing off the individual,” murmurs Trush. “The tiger undressed him quite well.” The boots, now unseamed, were homemade: a timeless design of felt-soled arctic moccasin that mimics tiger pads with their texture and silence. But stealth is no defense against the hunter who perfected it.

  By the time Andrei had drawn even with Tsepalev’s shelter, the tiger would have tapered his awareness down to a single taut beam of consciousness, and the intensity of this attention, boring into its target like a laser, would have been an almost palpable thing, imperturbable: a reality unto itself. The hunt—like lovemaking—occurs in a timeless zone where all external measures temporarily cease to apply. It is a ritual of concentration that determines life and death for all concerned.

  Though death was close and breathing, Andrei had other things on his mind. As the gap between the tiger and himself closed to one of seconds, he may have had an inkling that something wasn’t quite right; perhaps a bird sounded an alarm; maybe he glanced around, but judging from the tracks nothing in his gait betrayed uncertainty. Meanwhile, the tiger gathered himself, manifesting anticipation in its purest form: his eyes riveted on their target as he flexed and set his paws, compensating for any irregularity in the ground beneath; the hips rising slightly as he loaded and aimed the missile of himself, while that hawser of a tail twitched like a broken power line. There was the moment when impulse and prey aligned in the tiger’s mind, and then a roar filled the forest with the force of an angry god.

  Caught off guard and off balance, Andrei, whose life was finished though his heart still beat, swiveled slightly to the left. He would have been amazed to hear and see this avatar of doom so unbelievably close and closing fast. More amazing is the young man’s composure and muscle memory: left shoulder dropping to shed the gun strap as the left hand twists the rifle forward and up; the right index finger hooking and hauling back the bolt as both hands, together now, guide the rifle butt to his right shoulder. The target is the hardest kind: head-on and airborne, an arcing blur of fire and ice, black and ocher haloed in glittering snow. Andrei’s finger on the trigger, squeezing—tighter now—Yopt! The bowel-loosening realization that
the magic has failed. Polny pizdets. Nothing exists now but the tiger, filling his field of vision like a bad accident, like the end of the world: a pair of blazing yellow lanterns over a temple door framed with ivory columns.

  For most of our history, we have been occupied with the cracking of codes—from deciphering patterns in the weather, the water, the land, and the stars, to parsing the nuanced behaviors of friend and foe, predator and prey. Furthermore, we are compelled to share our discoveries in the form of stories. Much is made of the fact that ours is the only species that does this, that the essence of who and what we understand ourselves to be was first borne orally and aurally: from mouth to ear to memory. This is so, but before we learned to tell stories, we learned to read them. In other words, we learned to track. The first letter of the first word of the first recorded story was written—“printed”—not by us, but by an animal. These signs and symbols left in mud, sand, leaves, and snow represent proto-alphabets. Often smeared, fragmented, and confused by weather, time, and other animals, these cryptograms were life-and-death exercises in abstract thinking. This skill, the reading of tracks in order to procure food, or identify the presence of a dangerous animal, may in fact be “the oldest profession.”