that had been sealed inside a plastic jar, the tiger hauled Tsepalev’s
mattress out of the shelter and dragged it fifty yards across the frozen
Takhalo. There, on the opposite bank, he spread the mattress out under a
commanding spruce tree, lay down on it in plain view, and waited. The
ground was open along this section of the river and visibility was
excellent in both directions.
When Pochepnya arrived, as the tiger somehow knew he would, it
would have been around two in the afternoon. Hunters are vigilant of
necessity, and a four-hundred-pound tiger sitting sphinxlike on a mattress
is hard to miss. But Pochepnya was not aware of the tiger until he
launched himself off his bed from ten yards away.
Pochepnya’s rifle would have been slung over his left shoulder with the
trigger facing upward. This arrangement enables a hunter (or a soldier) to
grasp the barrel with his left hand and bring the gun up to his right
shoulder in one fluid motion. Pochepnya, fresh out of the army and a
hunter all his life, was trained to do this in a fraction of a second—and he
did. But when he pulled the trigger nothing happened.
There are, scattered around the hinterlands of Asia and—increasingly—
elsewhere, a small fraternity of people who have been attacked by tigers
and lived. Its members find their way in through various means: greed,
desperation, curiosity, bad timing, and, in a handful of cases, dazzling
stupidity or madness. There is no association that advocates for them as
there is for so many other niche populations of afflicted people, and there
is no journal that reviews their cases or disseminates information on their
behalf. Mostly, they stay at home, often in shacks and cabins a long way
from paved roads. If they leave, it is usually with difficulty and
sometimes in great pain. Very rarely is there anyone in their immediate
vicinity who fully appreciates what happened to them out there and, in
this way, the lives of tiger attack survivors resemble those of retired
astronauts or opera divas: each in their own way has stared alone into the