because he had been spared seeing Markov’s remains or the scene at his
cabin. As a result, the threat this tiger posed was still abstract for him—
more of a parental fear than something that could actually happen. “She
hides well,” Burukhin said. “I have seen all the other animals, but I have
never seen a tiger—not once.” Nonetheless, with each passing day, he
grew more uneasy. “That was the only time he went by himself,”
Burukhin said of his friend’s unannounced departure. “Always we would
go together. Always.”
The tiger had eaten Markov over a three-day period, but that had been
more than a week ago and, once again, the animal was ravenous. His
routine had also been disrupted; he was no longer making his usual
rounds. Instead, he was moving in a linear fashion, steadily downstream.
In doing so, he may well have been poaching on other tigers’ territories.
Though this tiger was in his prime, and large, he was now seriously
wounded and vulnerable to attack by another dominant male.
The tiger was hunting constantly as he moved down the valley toward
Sobolonye, and every step was painful. In the tiger’s left forepaw was a
deep, fresh laceration through the pad—possibly sustained when the tiger
destroyed the outhouse. Far worse, though, was the wound to his other
leg. A small handful of pea-sized buckshot had raked his right paw and
foreleg, separating it at the cubital joint (the equivalent of our elbow).
The only way buckshot could be so tightly concentrated is for it to have
been shot from point-blank range. A factory load shot from that distance
would have shattered the tiger’s leg and crippled him fatally, but
Markov’s homemade shell, possibly compromised by condensation,
didn’t have the same punch. It had only succeeded in making the tiger
extraordinarily dangerous.
The tiger’s wounds were also becoming infected, but this was a mere
inconvenience compared to a much more serious mechanical problem:
the damage to the joint was impacting the tiger’s ability to hunt. Over and