Instead of snowshoes, winter travelers here use short, broad traditional
skis called okhotniki (“hunters”). Many tayozhniks (including Markov)
make these themselves.
In the winter of 1974, Dunkai and Pikunov were in the Bikin valley,
tracking bears, when a blizzard came up. There had been little snow on
the ground when they had set off that morning so they had left their skis
back in camp. By the time the blizzard hit, they were a long way from
home and ill-equipped for severe weather. Visibility is already limited in
the forest and when driving snow and wind are added, it is easy to
become disoriented. With the snow deepening by the minute, both men
understood that they needed to get out of there fast. While Pikunov was
preparing to simply race back along their rapidly filling tracks, Dunkai
stopped and pulled a hatchet from his rucksack. Finding a tree about as
thick as his leg, he chopped it down, cut the trunk to ski length and then
split it into slender boards. “The snow was up to our waists,” recalled
Pikunov. “There was no way out of there without skis, and Vanya made
them without any proper tools; all he had was a knife and an axe. He was
a master of all trades.”
In addition to having what Russians call “golden hands,” Dunkai had
an extraordinary rapport with his surroundings. In many ways, his daily
routine bore a strong resemblance to the tiger’s: both are built around a
routinized practice of observing, deciphering, and mental cataloguing,
often over well-trodden routes. Just as we might be familiar with certain
cats and dogs in our neighborhood, Dunkai knew his neighbors, too,
including the tigers. And they knew him. Despite spending more than
seventy years in the taiga, much of it on foot or in a tent, Dunkai never
had serious difficulties with a tiger. But “difficulties” is a relative term:
over the years, he did lose a number of dogs. Dogs seem to trigger the
tiger’s wolf-killing instincts, and they also seem to relish the taste. Many
is the Far Eastern hunter, farmer, or dacha owner who has risen in the
morning to find nothing but a broken chain where his dog had been.
When one former dog owner was asked what these attacks sounded like,
he answered acidly, “It’s more of a silence.”^1 But this is the price of