breath, and drivers had to stop periodically to clear them in order to keep
the animals from suffocating. Even so, horses died and axles broke on a
regular basis. “It is heavy going,” wrote Chekhov during his own cross-
country journey in the spring of 1890, “very heavy, but it grows heavier
still when you consider that this hideous, pock-marked strip of land, this
foul smallpox of a road, is almost the sole artery linking Europe and
Siberia!”^9
Mikhail Yankovsky won an early release when Czar Alexander II
declared an amnesty, but only on the condition that he never return to
western Russia. Yankovsky honored this restriction and went on to lead
an extraordinary life in the czar’s most recent acquisition, first managing
a gold mine on an island in the Sea of Japan, and then traveling down to
Korea by junk and returning up the coast on horseback where he
discovered a windswept (and mosquito-free) peninsula south of
Vladivostok. Not long after staking his claim there, he became involved
in a turf war with Manchurian bandits known as the hong huzi (“Red
Beards”) who had burned down the home of another recent settler, hung
his wife’s corpse on a lamp hook, and kidnapped his son. Yankovsky and
his grieving neighbor banded together with local Korean hunters and
pursued the gang to the Chinese border where a gunfight took place in
which Yankovsky killed the bandit chief. He then went on to build a
virtual fortress with bulletproof adobe walls, and began breeding horses
and deer.*
In addition to the meat, young, soft deer antlers (pantui) are highly
prized by Koreans for their rejuvenating properties; some took it to such
an extreme that they would stand in line by the Yankovskys’ paddock
while the antlers were sawed off live deer in order to suck the blood
directly from the pulsing stumps. A tiger’s appetites are not so different,
and the Yankovsky family hadn’t lived in their new home a year before
they registered their first losses. Between 1880 and 1920, tigers killed
scores of the Yankovskys’ animals—everything from dogs to cattle.
Once, a tiger dragged one of their hired men from his horse.
In the eyes of Russian settlers, tigers were simply four-legged bandits,