with this tiger, so in his mind there was no possibility of a conflict. Many
of his neighbors felt the same way. But his hosts, being city dwellers
from Khabarovsk, weren’t aware of this unspoken agreement; in this
case, their ignorance probably saved their lives.
During the previous four days, the tiger had crossed over into a realm
from which there was no returning. This was a one-way trip through
uncharted territory—for the tiger and for the humans around him. A new
model had been created; whatever bonds had held this tiger in
relationship to his human neighbors, indeed, to his own nature, were
broken. Now, anything was possible. When a domestic animal goes wild
—a sheep-killing dog, for example—it is referred to as feral, but there is
no name for what happens when a wild animal goes in the other direction
and becomes dangerously familiar with the world of domesticated
creatures. What should one call it when a tiger starts eating people and
shit, and injures itself demolishing man-made things? Is it rage? A loss of
bearing? Or simply adaptation to a new order? Perhaps some things are
best left unnamed.
In any case, this tiger was now linked to the world of men in a way no
animal should ever be. In the metabolic sense, at least—contaminated by
both the bullets and the blood of his enemy—he had become something
that doesn’t exist in the West, something, if one had to put a name to it,
akin to a weretiger. In the narrative canon of the southern Udeghe, whose
current population is centered on Krasny Yar, there exists a kind of
specialized amba called an egule. An elder named Martina Nedezhda
described it as an enormous fur-covered creature, “like a tiger,” that eats
people.^2 It is impossible to say now whether entities of this kind are
recognized in the environment and given a name, or conceived by the
collective imagination to serve a particular purpose, but suffice to say
that things are described and named for a reason. In the Udeghe tale,
“Uza and the Egule,” Uza and his older brother, both of whom were