Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, The by Vaillant John

Author:Vaillant, John [Vaillant, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Animals, Fiction, Hunters, Novel
ISBN: 9780307397140
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Published: 2010-09-15T10:53:05+00:00

Yuri Trush appreciated and respected these qualities in the tiger. While investigating the site of the Markov attack, and while writing his report that weekend, he had made a sincere effort to understand this animal—to place himself inside the tiger’s umwelt and imagine his world as it pertained to Markov and those around him. He did the same with Markov, working hard to reconstruct both his umwelt and his last days. Trush is generally cautious and disciplined in his thinking and, when he is not sure, or just guessing, he is not afraid to say so. However, on one particular point, he was unequivocal: “I am one hundred percent sure,” he said, “that Markov shot at the tiger from the caravan at close range.”

It would have looked something like this: on December 1 or 2, a day or two before his death, Markov went out hunting with his dogs. He could have been alone or with Andrei Onofreychuk; the possibility of other people being present as well is not out of the question. The dogs would have been running up ahead, searching for a scent trail, and may well have been following one when they came upon a freshly killed boar. Markov is in hunting mode, so he is traveling with a gun, a rucksack, and perhaps a hatchet. When he catches up to the dogs, he sees the boar, and it is obvious that it has been killed by a tiger. He looks around, takes note of the dogs’ behavior, and decides the coast is clear. He can’t take the whole carcass, and he knows better than to do so, but he takes a haunch—maybe two, if he can carry that much. Then he hurries back to his cabin, feeling lucky: in the Panchelaza, this windfall was more fungible than mid-1990s rubles. Upon his return, Markov stores a portion of the meat in the beehive wellhead, which doubles as a food cache and is a safe distance from his cabin. Then he packs the rest of it down to the road workers’ camp to trade, returning home at dusk.

Meanwhile, the tiger returns to his kill. It is clear that it has been tampered with, and the tiger takes umbrage. Perhaps the tiger has a feed and a rest, or he may set off immediately on the trail of these interloping competitors. There is no ambiguity about who the tiger seeks: the scent trail of several dogs and a man is easy to follow. The tiger arrives at Markov’s sometime after nightfall, which, in early December, means anytime after 4:30 in the afternoon. He approaches from the east, from the Amba River, and the first thing he comes across is the meat cache.

When Trush investigated the meat cache wellhead in the stream, east of Markov’s cabin, he saw that it had been knocked over and that something had been dragged away from it, something that could have been a frozen boar leg. Trush didn’t spend a lot of time there,

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