11

The story   of  cats    is  a   story   of  meat.^1

ELIZABETH   MARSHALL    THOMAS,

The Tribe   of  Tiger

MARKOV’S BURIAL SUIT ARRIVED FROM LUCHEGORSK ON

SATURDAY, December 6. That afternoon, Zaitsev, Dvornik, and
Onofreychuk gathered a load of firewood and drove down the road to the
graveyard. The tiger, never far from their minds, was moving, too, but
they had no idea where. Far away, they hoped. Until now, tigers had been
more of an abstraction than a fact in these men’s minds. There had
always been stories and tracks and missing dogs, but now the tiger’s
presence was personal, visceral—as if the animal had reached some kind
of critical mass whereby it shifted into a new and more immediate
dimension. None of them had felt a tiger the way they did at Markov’s
cabin, and it was crowding their consciousness now—waking and
sleeping—in a way it never had before. The woods still looked the same,
but they did not feel the same. It made a man think about his children
differently, and wonder where they were.
After clearing the snow from Markov’s gravesite, the men built a fire
there to thaw the ground. The temperature in the Bikin valley had not
risen above minus ten in a month or more and, lately, it had been much
colder, dropping to minus forty. The ground was as hard as cement,
frozen to a depth of about three feet. The fire would need to burn all
night. The next morning, they would return with picks and shovels to dig
the grave. That evening, in an alcoholic fog, the three men, along with a
couple of neighbors, took what little remained of the joker Markiz and
laid him in his coffin, arranging him the best they could in relation to the