over again, he caught fresh scent, stalked viable game, and set up
ambushes that, a week earlier, would have produced life-sustaining
results. Now, the boar and deer were getting away. The tiger’s speed,
agility, and jumping distance were off—not by much, but margins in the
taiga are tight to begin with; when measuring a missed kill, an inch might
as well be a mile.
The tiger was not a man-eater by nature—Markov had been a special
case—but even as the tiger hunted, he was being hunted, too, by his own
hunger, and by the unrelenting cold. The tiger understood this
instinctively and, with every passing day, his desperation mounted. It is
hard to say if it was injury, hunger, or some kind of primordial rage that
changed his behavior, but ever since being shot by Markov, the tiger had
been acting with a kind of calculated audacity that is not typical of these
creatures. In any case, shortly after he arrived at the Takhalo River, some
peculiar events took place.
Andrei Pochepnya arrived at the apiary cabin about midday and, before
heading out to check his traps, he made a fire and had some tea and bread.
Pochepnya believed himself to be alone there, but he wasn’t. The tiger,
though he was more than a mile away, sensed the young man’s presence.
It is impossible to know whether it was the slam of the cabin door, the
smoke from the fire, or some other cue that caused the tiger to pause in
his tracks there near the foot of the Takhalo, but something did. Whatever
it was made the tiger change direction, and he stalked this new
information with a single-minded intensity that would have been chilling
to behold. A mile downstream from Andrei’s cabin, on the right bank,
was a crude Udeghe-style shelter made of branches; the only indicator of
the century in which it was made was the tarpaper that covered it instead
of tree bark. The tiger crossed the river on the ice and broke into this
structure, inside of which was a mattress and other camping equipment
belonging to a man named Tsepalev. After scavenging some rancid bait