The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  “It was men who were responsible for the aggression of this animal,” said Trush, “and the incident with Markov was a sort of quintessence of all those cases.”

  The tiger dismantled was a disturbing sight. The skinned head—all white muscle and fangs—was terrifying: an egule in the flesh. The legs, extended, were as long as a man’s. The stomach was empty. The skin lay as it had come off the body, inside up. How strange it would have been to see it there—so recently alive with unimaginable fury—now as flat and lifeless as a shroud, being folded first in half along the spine, then in quarters, eighths, and sixteenths, like the carpet it had now become. All these disparate parts, laid out neatly at sunset on the bloodstained road, were as hard to relate to a tiger as a crashed plane is to flight.

  23

  Pursuant to the permission for the period December 16th-31st, 1997, an Amur tiger has been killed under the supervision of Y. A. Trush. The killing has been carried out in accordance with Permission No. 731 issued on December 8, 1997, by the State Ecology Committee of Russia.

  YURI TRUSH, Final Report

  CHRISTMAS AND THE NEW YEAR CAME AND WENT QUICKLY AND QUIETLY. It was a somber time made more so by the introduction of the New Ruble, a devastating, if effective, reset of the nation’s currency. Already broke, the residents of Sobolonye were minimally affected and limped on much as they had before. If nothing else, it had been a good year for pine nuts and now, at least, it was safe to search for them again. But it wasn’t safe for everyone; in Alexander Pochepnya’s heart and mind, the tiger was alive and hunting still. One night in January, it caught up to him. Shortly after returning to work as the night watchman at the village school, he was found there, dead by his own hand. The father was buried beside the son in an anonymous grave.

  Today, Sobolonye has the feel of a time capsule in which the most damaging effects of perestroika have been preserved. What is so haunting is the fact that this time capsule contains people, and it is clear from the faces and the material poverty that many of them remain trapped in 1995, which could have been Appalachia in 1935, a time when life in the resource-dependent hill country was particularly desperate and bleak. In the intervening years, Pyotr Zhorkin has died, along with Boris Ivanovich, the boss of the Middle Bikin National Forest Enterprise. Ivan Dunkai was next. Sasha Dvornik moved away after his wife died, and Leonid Lopatin has done the same. With no prospects in Sobolonye, Denis Burukhin moved to Luchegorsk where a friend helped him get a job at the power plant. The trapper-poet Tsepalev left, too, saying that if he stayed, he would drink himself to death. Andrei Onofreychuk stayed in Sobolonye; unemployed and debilitated by alcoholism, he hanged himself in the fall of 2007. That winter, the village administrative offices burned down. Baba Liuda, Irina Peshkova, Lida Burukhina, and the Pochepnya and Onofreychuk families have all stayed on, captives of inertia and the comfort of the known. Danila Zaitsev, alone, seems to have remained of his own volition. A model of stoicism under duress, he continues to keep the village generator running, and also works as a heavy equipment mechanic for a private logging company where he is held in high regard by his co-workers.

  Vladimir Markov’s wife, Tamara Borisova, has remained as well, but she has never fully recovered from Zaitsev’s terrible news that evening, so many years ago. Her sons have stayed by her, and they see to her needs, but her face is a mask of grief, and her loss seems to replay itself daily in her mind. She spends her days fishing on the Bikin in all weather, often alone. Her husband’s caravan is gone now, and so are his beehives, but her boys have built a cabin of their own a hundred yards to the west. In the eyes of the law, they are poachers, but there is nothing else and, in the Panchelaza, poaching isn’t what it used to be. “They’ve logged a lot of the forest,” said Markov’s son, Alexei. “The ecology has deteriorated. The Bikin used to be a deep river, but now, you can walk across it. They’ve built roads all over the taiga, and a lot of people are coming here now [for hunting and fishing].”

  Alexei wears boots identical to those his father died in, and he labors over a motorcycle of the same make and color his father once had. Many of Alexei’s happiest memories are of working with his father at his apiary and, even as he approaches thirty, one can see in his eyes the sad vacancy left by the man from whom he learned to love the taiga. Alexei has since planted a Korean pine at the site where his father’s remains were found, and surrounded it with stones. There is a cup there, as there is by his grave, so that visitors can remember him with a vodka toast. “Whenever we’re at the graveyard,” explained Markov’s neighbor Irina Peshkova, “we always visit his grave. We’ll bring flowers, candy, and a shot of vodka. Who knows who would drink it, but we leave it there anyway.”

  To this day, Tamara Borisova maintains her husband’s innocence, as do his closest friends. Andrei Onofreychuk and Sasha Dvornik were adamant to the last that he had done nothing to the tiger. As evidence they cited Markov’s choice of ammunition: “He never shot cartridges,”* Onofreychuk insisted, “because he was hunting with dogs. He only used bullets.”

  “I hunted with Markov for several years,” said Dvornik in an interview with the filmmaker Sasha Snow, “and he never used buckshot. Everyone will tell you: he shot birdshot or bullets.”

  Danila Zaitsev felt sure the tiger had been wounded before it encountered Markov. Denis Burukhin, who did not know Markov as well, said, “God knows where those bullets came from.”

  When the tiger was skinned, six balls were recovered from its foreleg and sent to a forensics lab in Ussurisk, near Primorye’s principal border crossing with China. There, they were analyzed and compared with the homemade buckshot found in Markov’s cartridge belt. According to Trush, the lead composition was identical, and the formal determination made by the ballistics analyst was that the buckshot was Markov’s. “Clearly, he thought that he was strong enough to kill the tiger,” said Trush, “and he accepted the tiger’s challenge.”

  Vasily Solkin, the leopard specialist, understood it the same way. “Markov couldn’t go back to the village. He had to stay and resolve the situation. Try to understand this,” he said. “Markov was a tayozhnik—a man of the taiga—and if he were to run away, he would not be able to come back here—ever. For a tayozhnik, there was no other choice: he had to finish this battle. Otherwise, for the rest of his life, he would be afraid of every tree. The taiga would never let him in again.”

  Drawing on seventy-five years of experience on the Bikin, Ivan Dunkai made sense of the tragedy this way: “It has never happened that a tiger attacked to kill and eat a man here. In the past, when a tiger attacked a man, it was only because the man was aggressive to the tiger: who would like to be wounded—to get a bullet? These were the only cases. So, it was Markov’s destiny to be eaten by a tiger. If he had stayed overnight at my place, it would have been a different story.”

  Lingering on in Trush’s mind was the question of what exactly happened on the night Markov was killed—had Markov shot at the tiger then as well? Trush knew little beyond the fact that the gun had been taken from the scene, most likely by Onofreychuk. In March of 2007, Onofreychuk stated that, when he arrived, Markov’s gun was lying open in the snow. “There was an empty shell in the barrel,” he explained. “Apparently, he shot once, opened the gun to reload it, but he didn’t make it and the tiger got him.”

  Sasha Dvornik had a vivid memory of the scene as well: “Markov’s gun was lying open in the snow by the print of his body,” he recalled in 2004. “There were two cartridges in the snow: one was empty; the other was full. He had managed to take the fresh cartridge from his belt, but had no time to reload the gun.”

  Markov’s cartridge belt held twenty shells and, when Trush recovered it, three of them were missing. None were found in his caravan. It is conceivable then that the first shell was fired sometime around December 1 or 2, the second shell was fired on the night of December 3, and the third was dropped in the snow moments later. As was the case with Pochepnya and Trush, Markov would have had two or t
hree seconds between hearing the tiger’s roar and being attacked. His shotgun would have been loaded, and there is every reason to suppose he would have tried to defend himself. It has never been clear where that shot went, but, based on Inspection Tiger’s field autopsy, it now looks as if Markov managed to shoot the tiger twice in the right foreleg—once from his caravan (or in the woods) and, again, just before he was killed. The fact that he was attempting to reload in the midst of the attack implies desperation, but also extraordinary presence of mind: Markov died while trying to fit a small, slippery shotgun shell into a narrow gun barrel, in the dark, at thirty below zero—with a tiger bearing down on him from ten yards away.

  Today, only the tiger remains. When Vladimir Schetinin returned to Vladivostok after the hunt, he delivered the tiger’s skin to the Arseniev Museum, which occupies a historic building downtown, on Aleutskaya. There, the tiger has been stuffed and put on display for all to see. Safely contained in a glass case, it has been caught forever, out of its element and visible to all.

  Yuri Trush hoped, at the very least, that these events could serve as a kind of cautionary tale to deter careless hunters and would-be poachers; if laws and warnings failed, he reasoned, maybe graphic images would get the point across. “During the investigation, I sent video footage of Khomenko, Markov, and Pochepnya to the local TV station,” he said. “They aired it, and there was a lot of negative feedback. People called saying, ‘Why are you broadcasting such horrors?’ They thought it was some kind of video montage; they didn’t understand that the footage was real. In my opinion, people who hunt—who have guns—really needed to see those images. They have to think about things like that.”

  There seems to be no question that, in Primorye, human-tiger relations have entered a new era in which the potential for scenarios like Markov’s is increasing. Vasily Solkin attributes this to four factors: a simultaneous increase in the availability of powerful hunting rifles, Japanese four-wheel-drive vehicles, and access via logging roads, combined with a breakdown in traditional hunting values. “The biggest problem for a tiger these days,” Solkin explained, “is the New Russians who buy good foreign guns with good optical devices, who trample on hunting rules, written or traditional, and who hunt without leaving their jeeps, firing at any animal without even bothering to check whether they killed it or not. Those people bring the most harm to tigers. The situation today is very different from the situation ten years ago because, if I encounter a tiger in the taiga these days, I am encountering an injured tiger more often than not.”

  According to Galina Salkina, a tiger researcher at the Lazovski Zapovednik and one of only two women working full-time in the testosterone-heavy world of Amur tiger research, about 80 percent of the tigers she autopsies have been shot at some point in their lives, many of them more than once. Sometimes, these situations end like this one did: In May of 2004, three poachers negotiated access to a restricted border zone in a tanklike GTS. Because they were hunting at night with lights, the hunters were aiming at eye-shine alone without being sure what they were shooting at. One of the men managed to hit a tiger, which then charged the massive vehicle, jumped aboard, and fatally mauled one of the hunters before his partners killed it. The crime was discovered, but the commanding officer in charge of the border area refused access to investigators. In cases where the tiger survives, it may hold the memory in mind, and retaliate against the next vehicle or person who fits that sensory profile.

  There have been no attacks on humans reported in the Bikin valley since 1997, but there is conclusive evidence that tigers are being poached there—by Russians and natives alike. In spite of this, tigers remain a relatively common sight, and the age-old tensions between them and the pastoralist Russians with whom they share the taiga persist, exacerbated by diminishing game populations and loss of habitat to logging. The range of attitudes seems directly related to personal experience: Sergei Boyko, who clearly respects his local tigers, has almost lost his patience with them. At the bridge maintenance camp where he works, five of the six dogs they kept there were killed by tigers during the winter of 2007–2008. “I am sick and tired of them,” he said bitterly. “They don’t leave me alone. I had made arrangements to get a horse, but then had a change of heart: I can’t get a horse because it will get eaten. I can’t raise a pig because it will get killed. My neighbor brought a horse to his apiary, and a tiger killed it.”

  Never a fan of tigers to begin with, Sasha Dvornik was seriously traumatized by the Markov incident. “I’m probably too sensitive,” he told Sasha Snow, “but I still have nightmares in which I’m collecting pieces of Markov’s body. If I’d known what I would see there, I’d never have gone to his cabin. Now, I won’t let a tiger get away alive. I will exterminate that vermin everywhere.”

  The huntress Baba Liuda’s feelings are more philosophical: “If they want to walk around, let ’em walk around. If they want to roar, the hell with ’em—let ’em do it.”

  Long after the paperwork was completed, this incident continued to haunt Yuri Trush, and it does so to this day. Although he managed to survive, Trush has been scarred in a variety of ways: “The native people tell me that I’m now marked by the tiger,” he said. “Some of them won’t allow me to sleep with them under the same roof.”

  The notion that Trush now bears some ineffable taint, discernible only to tigers, was put to the test at the tiger catcher Vladimir Kruglov’s wildlife rehabilitation center in 2004. Trush had gone there with Sasha Snow in order to get some live footage of a tiger in a forest environment. One of Kruglov’s rescued tigers, a particularly impressive male, is named Liuty, which is an efficient word combining vicious, ferocious, cold-blooded, and bold. It is a good descriptor for Ivan the Terrible, but it seemed an odd name for this tiger, which was leaning against the compound fence, getting his neck scratched by Kruglov, who had raised him from a cub. Kruglov then stepped away to attend to something else, leaving Trush, Snow, and a few other visitors spread out along the fence, watching and taking pictures. Liuty, who was used to this kind of attention, appeared content and relaxed until he spotted Trush, at which point his demeanor changed suddenly. Liuty fixed his eyes on him and then, with no warning or apparent motive, he growled, accelerated to a run, and leaped at the fence as if trying to clear it. It was too high, and five hundred pounds of tiger piled into the wire, striking it with so much force that the fence bowed outward ominously, directly in front of Trush. Trush recoiled and fell over backward as if he had been knocked down solely by the projected energy of the tiger. Snow was nearby and went to help him up. “His face was ashen,” he recalled.

  Remembering the incident, Trush touched his chest and said, “I felt cold in here.”

  There was no obvious explanation for why this well-fed, well-socialized tiger would do this, or why it would have picked Trush out of a group. “Maybe some sort of a bio field exists,” Trush suggested afterward. “Maybe tigers can feel some connection through the cosmos, or have some common language. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

  Such an interpretation would not have surprised anyone in the Dunkai or Pionka clans, and it is one of the principal reasons those who maintain traditional beliefs avoid tigers. Lubovna Passar, a fifty-year-old Nanai psychologist who uses a combination of shamanic practice and Western psychology to treat patients addicted to drugs and alcohol, describes it as “a centuries-old taboo that’s held in the genes.”

  Yuri Pionka was concerned about this kind of postmortem fallout as well. While skinning the tiger in Sobolonye, he had hit a blood vessel that caused some of the tiger’s blood to spatter on him. He reacted, at the time, as if he had been burned with hot embers, and he used his knife blade to scrape the blood off as quickly as possible. “I can say one thing about the tiger,” said Pionka, “he is definitely a very smart animal. He has an intellect, and he will go after a specific person who offended him. My father came back [from upriver] for the New Year and, when he learned that I’d been involved in hunting a tig
er, he said to me, ‘Throw away the clothes you were wearing, and throw away the knife you used to skin him.’ ”

  That the tiger was physically dead didn’t seem to matter. In the elder Pionka’s view, this tiger was an Amba, and so may have existed beyond mortal containment. Whether there was additional cleansing required, Pionka declined to say. In any case, he suffered a serious illness afterward that lasted a number of years, but he appears to have recovered.

  Trush is a man for whom law and order represent not just a job description but a personal code of conduct. As a backcountry lawman, facts and logic—the observable and the provable—form the bedrock of his thought processes. However, his personal experience, along with his exposure to native beliefs, has opened his mind to the supernatural capabilities of the tiger. “I’ve often heard from hunters and villagers that strange things happen in the presence of a tiger,” he said. “It can be compared to a snake looking at a rabbit and hypnotizing him: it has some inexplicable influence on objects and humans and, in his presence, magical phenomena can occur.”

  Trush sees his own survival as all the more extraordinary because of this, and he considers December 21, 1997, to be his “second birthday.” For years afterward, members of his squad, including Pionka, would phone him on the anniversary to acknowledge his survival and rebirth. “Sometime after all this happened,” said Trush, “I met Andrei Oximenko [the man who nearly walked into the tiger on the last day], and I said to him that he was born under a lucky star. He admitted it, and said, ‘Yes, I heard your truck and turned off the road. Thank you for showing up at the right time.’ I said, ‘You probably have a guardian angel, just as I do.’