The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

to those who smelled like him, whatever form they might take.
Markov had been a regular at the road workers’ camp just as he had
been at Zhorkin’s. Both bases had resident crews and were stocked with
supplies that Markov needed: cooking oil, rice, potatoes, and cigarettes;
perhaps a little vodka. What these remote camps lacked was a steady
supply of fresh meat, so when Markov bagged something big he would
pack a haunch down the trail to barter. Trush interviewed the watchmen,
and according to them, Markov had come by earlier in the month with
some boar meat. Trush had a strong suspicion that Markov had robbed it
from a tiger kill.
One of a tiger’s jobs as keeper of a territory is to take inventory; a tiger
needs to know who is around and “available.” When speaking of local
tigers, Andrei Onofreychuk described them coming by periodically “to
count us.” One of the most efficient ways to do this is at an outhouse. It
may reek to high heaven, but it is precisely because of this that it is a
gold mine of information. Tigers mark their territories in a variety of
ways: by clawing trees, scratching the ground, defecating, and also by
spraying a durable and redolent combination of urine and musk. When
doing the latter, they often select sheltered areas—the undersides of
bushes, leaning trees, and angled rocks—to ensure their sign lasts as long
as possible. A camp latrine is a kind of human equivalent: a communal
scent tree, and it is to a tiger what a compressed personnel file is to a
CEO. From its concentrated off-gassings a creature so attuned may glean
the latest information about who is present, how many, their gender,
disposition, health, and, of course, their diet. In the midst of that
olfactory cacophony at the road workers’ camp there may well have been
two scents in particular that leaped out from the others: those of Markov
and boar meat, specifically, meat from the tiger’s last wild kill. Whatever
was in there was rank and ruined, but the tiger considered it his, and he
tore that outhouse down to get at it, board by shrieking board.
Under normal circumstances, a tiger’s menu is based on a handful of
local prey species, but it can expand almost limitlessly to include lizards,
snakes, turtles, frogs, crocodiles, crabs, fish, seals, grass, berries, pine
nuts, livestock, eggs, monkeys, cow dung, bones, carrion, maggots,