The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Like our own texts, these “early works” are linear and continuous with their own punctuation and grammar. Plot, tense, gender, age, health, relationships, and emotional states can all be determined from these durable records. In this sense, The Jungle Book is our story, too: just as Mowgli was schooled by wild animals, so in many ways were we. The notion that it was animals who taught us to read may seem counterintuitive, but listening to skilled hunters analyze tiger sign is not that different from listening to literature majors deconstruct a short story. Both are sorting through minutiae, down to the specific placement and inflection of individual elements, in order to determine motive, subtext, and narrative arc. An individual track may have its own accent or diacritical marks that distinguish the intent of a foot, or even a single step, from the others. On an active game trail, as in one of Tolstoy’s novels, multiple plots and characters can overlap with daunting subtlety, pathos, or hair-raising drama. Deciphering these palimpsests can be more difficult than reading crossed letters* from the Victorian era, and harder to follow than the most obscure experimental fiction. However, with practice, as Henno Martin wrote in The Sheltering Desert, “you learn to read the writing of hoof, claw and pad.3 In fact before long you are reading their message almost subconsciously.”

  Trush and his men had opened the White Book at mid-chapter, and now they had to place themselves in the story. This isn’t something one does lightly in the taiga: the reader must commit to becoming a character, too, with no assurance of how the story will end. There, on that blinding winter afternoon at the foot of the Takhalo, began a struggle for control of the narrative. This had happened at least once already, two weeks earlier, when Markov had been drawn into the story; though he had managed to shift its direction, he had failed to control it—the tiger had seen to that. Once again, the tiger was in charge, as he was accustomed to being. There are conventions in the tracking narrative just as there are in any literary form, and tigers employ different ones than deer or boar or humans. While one can usually make predictions, based on these, about how a particular plotline will unfold, this tiger defied the formula to the point that it occupied a genre of its own. To begin with, there is usually no ambiguity in the taiga about who is hunting whom, but in this story, that wasn’t the case.

  Even as the men read his tracks, the tiger could have been nearby, reading them, deciding how or when to work them into the plot. Tigers, of course, are experts at this game, and they use the same methods humans do: pick up the trail of potential prey by scent, sight, or knowledge of its habits; follow it in order to get a feel for where it is going; and then, in effect, read ahead and wait for the prey to arrive. End of story.

  As far as the tiger was concerned, Andrei Pochepnya was simply one more episode—like a character in a murder mystery who is introduced and dispatched solely for the purpose of driving the plot forward. Who would be next was a question of some interest to the tiger, but of even greater interest to Trush and Schetinin, who could not allow it to be answered. Ultimately, there was only one way to prevent it. “For a week I had been thinking about it,” said Schetinin, recalling the first stage of the hunt. “I was trying to think like an injured tiger, trying to imagine where an injured tiger was most likely to go.”

  A homicide detective would have been doing the same thing, but the detective operates in a world of coherent social codes where all but the most deranged understand there will be consequences. The tiger’s world, by contrast, is not only amoral but peculiarly consequence-free, and this—the atavistic certainty that there is nothing out there more lethal than itself—is the apex predator’s greatest weakness. The coyote is a gifted hunter, but it knows that if it fails to take proper precautions it can easily become prey. Even leopards, arguably the deadliest cats on earth, understand that they hunt on a continuum. A tiger, on the other hand, will, with sufficient provocation, charge a moving car. This doesn’t mean that a tiger will not learn to be cautious in the face of certain threats, but these hazards typically have more to do with competition than with predation. Trush and his men needed to capitalize on this inborn confidence, even though doing so ensured that conflict was inevitable: once the tiger understood that he was being hunted, his response would not be to flee deeper into the taiga, it would be to confront his pursuers and liquidate them. The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.

  In February 2002, a former member of Inspection Tiger named Anatoli Khobitnov found the end of a tiger trail not far from Luchegorsk. The subsequent encounter gave him the distinction of being one of the few people on earth who has been literally nose-to-nose with a wild tiger and managed to walk away. The road to Khobitnov’s hometown in Terney, a picturesque fishing village on the outer edge of the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik, is narrow and serpentine, and there are moments among those green ridges covered in birch, oak, and pine when you could swear you were in New England, somewhere between the Berkshires and the White Mountains. But this illusion dissolves as soon as you cross the bridge over Tigrine Creek or pass through villages with names like Transformation and Little Stone by the Sea. Traveling these quiet back roads—the only roads—it is hard to tell what era one is in. Nestled in the valleys are squat villages that, with the exception of cars and the occasional satellite dish, have changed little since Arseniev passed through. The houses are still trimmed in gingerbread and painted in wavering shades of slate blue, mustard yellow, and verdigris. In summer, the picketed yards are still planted to the doorsills with potatoes and, in winter, buried to the windowsills in snow. Their inhabitants may smoke cigarettes rolled with newspaper, and most of the young and disenchanted have left.

  Khobitnov is fortunate in that he has, despite multiple puncture wounds and broken bones, managed to live a relatively normal life, though his path to the present has been anything but normal. A former Muscovite who turned sixty in 2008, Khobitnov has been on the Far East coast for more than half his life, working in fishing and hunting management, and also with Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich on the Siberian Tiger Project. During this time, he has had dozens of tiger encounters, his first occurring shortly after he arrived in the spring of 1974. “About three days after I got here,” he recalled, “a lot of snow fell and a neighbor invited me to go down to the ocean. We went to the ocean and saw a tiger!” Seeing this storied creature on the edge of his known world evoked “such joy,” recalled Khobitnov. “The tiger is the symbol of Primorye.”

  The courtyard in front of Khobitnov’s low-slung house near the beach is the first indication that one is in the presence of a remarkable person. It is strewn with polished beach stones among which stands the bleached carcass of a driftwood tree. In its branches is an assemblage of bear skulls. Hanging from an upended beach log nearby are scores of carefully chosen stones, each meticulously wrapped with string in a variety of crisscross patterns. It is hard to say if these are shamanic devices or exercises in bricolage, but Khobitnov is a complex and gifted man and he has a grasp of both.

  Khobitnov is almost exactly the same age as Yuri Trush; they are friends and, for a time, they overlapped in Inspection Tiger under Vladimir Schetinin, a man for whom Khobitnov maintains the utmost respect. Like Trush, Khobitnov developed an affinity for the forest while hunting with his father and, like him, he participated briefly in the commercial slaughter of saiga antelope on the steppes of Kazakhstan. As a young man, Khobitnov found a wolf cub in Moscow’s famous Zavidovsky hunting reserve (now a park) and raised it in his apartment, not far from the city center. After getting his degree from the Moscow Institute for Decorative and Applied Arts (now called the Moscow State University of Arts and Industry), he was hired by the Moscow mint, where he worked as an engraver rendering designs for coins, paper money, and government documents. His face looks as if it could have been made there, too: above his salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, the crow’s-feet and brow furrows are so deeply incised that they seem more the result o
f tools than time. It is hard to reconcile the detail and precision required of an engraver with the size of Khobitnov’s hands, which look as if they could palm a basketball, and yet evidence of his skill can be found throughout his home. In his free time, he builds hunting knives from scratch, shaping and engraving the steel, bone, and antler into works of art that look as if they should be in a gallery rather than hanging from someone’s belt. The number of Russians who have painted the Sea of Japan for its beauty alone can be counted on one hand, but Khobitnov does that, too. His works—mostly landscapes and marines—are distinctive for their detail and a tendency toward the miniature. “There is a high demand for artistry here,” wrote Chekhov on his journey to the Far East in 1890, “but God has not supplied the artists.”4 One has the sense that Anatoli Khobitnov could meet that demand single-handedly—in any medium.

  Hunting poachers and tigers requires an entirely different skill set than making art; nonetheless, Khobitnov once shot a leaping tiger between the eyes at twenty-five yards, a feat more troubling than impressive until you realize that the tiger was seriously wounded and had been terrorizing a village for weeks, and that Khobitnov was wounded, too: he made the shot having taped his rifle onto the cast covering his broken left arm, which had been mauled three weeks earlier by a tigress.

  The tigress that attacked Khobitnov had been asleep in the snow when he and his companion stumbled on her on that snowy afternoon. Based on the fluids they had seen staining her previous rest spots, they thought they had been following a nursing tigress, and they were hoping to locate her den. It wasn’t until later that they realized the fluid they were seeing was suppuration from the tigress’s mange-ridden skin. It is always a bad idea to surprise a napping tiger, even when that tiger is napping at death’s door, but by the time the men realized their mistake, there was only fifteen feet between them. The tigress awoke with a start, let loose a spine-rattling roar, and leaped at Khobitnov’s partner. Khobitnov was as surprised as the tigress and he performed one of those instinctive animal acts that make one proud to be human: he sacrificed himself by jumping in front of his unarmed companion. Khobitnov was armed, but with no time to take proper aim all he could do was thrust his rifle butt into the tigress’s face. The blow broke one of her fangs and the tigress responded by knocking Khobitnov off his feet with a stroke of her paw, sending his rifle flying. What happened next gave new life to the cliché “staring death in the face.” The tigress jumped on Khobitnov’s chest, giving him the extraordinary experience of looking up a tiger’s throat: nothing on the horizon but fangs and tongue and a cavernous black hole—the same picture early Christians painted of hell. What Khobitnov remembers most vividly is not the fear, or the pain, but the temperature—her “hot, hot breathing.”

  Disarmed and desperate, Khobitnov swung his right fist, but the tigress simply caught it like a dog snapping at a fly and crushed it. Still trying to stave off the inevitable, he jammed his left arm into her mouth and attempted to reach his pistol with his now punctured hand. The tigress crushed his arm as well, impaling it with her remaining fangs and shattering the bones. At that point, Khobitnov’s partner hit the tigress with a dose of pepper spray and she leaped off him, fleeing into the forest. The entire encounter lasted less than five seconds.

  When the tigress was later trapped, it was discovered that not only was she old and sick, but her teeth were rotten and she was missing several toes. She had been killing livestock because there was nothing else she was capable of subduing. Although she wouldn’t have lasted the winter, this sorry creature was still a match for two experienced hunters. She was put down by lethal injection. Meanwhile, in addition to the stitches, screws, and cast, Khobitnov ended up contracting gangrene.

  The lesson from this mishap is one the renowned tiger researcher John Seidensticker tries hard to impress upon his students working in the field: “Don’t ever assume anything with tigers.”5 Everyone who works closely with these animals emphasizes the importance of approaching them on an individual basis. Tiger behavior is influenced by age, health, history, stress levels, and place in the local pecking order, among numerous other factors, and like us they are capable of very perplexing behavior. Generally speaking, the more intelligent an animal, the more “character” it is likely to have.

  In December 2001, John Goodrich, the field coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Siberian Tiger Project, encountered what he described as an “extreme, crazy tigress” at a logging camp near the village of Pilana. “She chewed up chainsaws,” he recalled, “stole a gas can and chewed that up, covered herself in gas. Then she attacked a logger.” With life as difficult as it is in the forest, and with so many other things to focus on, the motive to do things like this is hard to ascribe to anything other than rage, desperation, or insanity—all of which lie well within the tiger’s emotive spectrum. Inspection Tiger was called to the site immediately and the tigress charged them as well. After wounding her, the inspectors tracked her, only to find she had doubled back and set up an ambush. This is where they found her, poised to attack, covered in a light dusting of snow. She had died waiting for them.

  Trush was concerned that the Panchelaza tiger might be waiting for him, too. The tiger knew Trush and some of his men “personally” now, and, collectively, the team smelled of weapons, cigarettes, and dogs just as Markov and Pochepnya had. It also seemed that his wounds were healing; Trush noted less blood in the tracks on the Takhalo than he had observed at Markov’s. At the same time, the right forepaw was still dragging in the snow: the bleeding may have stopped, but the damage was done. Sometime before noon on the previous day—the 15th—the tiger had crossed back over the Takhalo by Tsepalev’s shelter and ascended a steep, rocky bluff covered in ice and snow. There were easier routes available, but the tiger chose not to use them. For a person, this would have been a hand-over-hand scramble. The shortest day of the year was less than a week away so night fell early, and, after following the trail for several hundred yards, the men turned back. But they had the information they needed. There is no easier trail to follow than fresh tracks in fresh snow, and now, Trush had the permit, the manpower, and the motive. It was no longer a question of if, just a question of when.

  * In order to save on paper and postage, nineteenth-century correspondents would fill a page, turn it ninety degrees, and continue, thus crossing one line of text with another.

  19

  Mountains are the more beautiful

  After the sun has gone down

  And it is

  Twilight. Boy,

  Watch out for tigers, now.

  Let’s not

  Wander about in the field.

  YUN SǒN-DO (1587–1671),

  “Sunset”1

  HERDED TOGETHER IN THE DARK LIKE BISON, WOODSTOVES BLAZING, the Kungs seemed like conveyances from another age. Just down the road was the village, still but for the chimney smoke and the anxious pacing of the dogs. Behind locked doors, their owners’ lives were suspended, minds awash in unsettling thoughts. Meanwhile, in the river below, fish hung motionless in the dark, countering the current beneath two feet of ice, and finding in that dense and steady resistance a perfect equilibrium. But there was more down there besides—subtle disturbances passing through on their serpentine journey out of the mountains: Takhalo to Bikin, Ussuri to Amur, and on to the ice-choked bottleneck of Tartar Strait, past Sakhalin to the open sea. Along with Andrei Pochepnya’s rifle was the rippled memory of a tiger Sasha Dvornik once sought to disorient and drown with his motorboat. A standard maneuver in the river poacher’s repertoire, it works like a charm with deer. But deer can’t leap like dolphins from deep water, and it seems that tigers can.

  Up above, the world was frozen hard and waiting. And through it came the tiger, hunting, eyes alight. Stepping gingerly over the ice and plowing through the drifts, there was in its progress something relentless and mechanical: the clouds of steam chugging, enginelike, from its nostrils, translucent whiskers laced with hoarfrost
from its own hot breath. Inside Trush’s Kung, men sat jammed hip to hip on the makeshift bunks, rifles cleaned and ready in the rack on the wall, a kettle steaming on the woodstove by the door.

  Kungs are essentially self-propelled versions of the caravans Markov and the loggers used, and Inspection Tiger’s had been modified to serve as patrol vehicles, personnel carriers, dormitories, dining halls, arms caches, and war rooms rolled into one. On the night of the 16th, Trush’s vehicle was dedicated to the latter purpose. “Schetinin got us all together and told us to find the tiger and destroy him,” recalled Vladimir Shibnev, one of the local hunting inspectors who had been called in to assist. “I argued with him: I said, ‘Do you have any idea what it means to follow tiger tracks in December? A tiger is not a sable who walks a few miles and is done. This tiger could be fifty miles away by now; it could be a hundred and fifty miles away.’ ”