and tendons were torn apart.”
And yet, in spite of this, the pain Sokolov felt then was as keen in his
heart as it was in his leg: “I have spent so much time in the taiga,” he
said. “I love the taiga and I treat it like my home—like it is some living
creature. I have never violated her law, never killed anything which I
shouldn’t have, never cut a tree unless I had to do it. So, when I saw that
tiger charging me, I felt like I was being betrayed by my own mother.”
Andrei Pochepnya may have felt the same way.
Sokolov was now in a grave situation: lethally injured, lying in deep,
wet snow, miles from the nearest road, with an inexperienced partner.
There was no radio, and walking was out of the question. His knee was so
badly damaged he looked, in his words, “like a grasshopper”; it was
bleeding profusely. Sokolov’s partner managed to bind his upper leg with
a tourniquet and ease him into his sleeping bag. “I told him, ‘Vladimir,
please, cut some pine branches, prepare some firewood, make a fire and
run for help.’ He gave me what he had, including his knapsack, his
sweater, some chocolate, and then he left. There were cigarettes, too—a
whole pack. I smoked them all in the first half hour.”
By then, it was about three in the afternoon. It was windy and the
temperature was dropping, the sodden snow turning to ice. The sun went
down, and darkness settled in. Sokolov lay there as the hours passed, and
the pile of firewood shrank, but nobody came. The nearest road was three
miles away, and the research base was ten more beyond that. In spite of
the tourniquet, Sokolov’s blood was draining steadily out of him, taking
his body temperature down with it. Somehow he stayed alert; it may have
been the pain that kept him conscious. Sokolov spent the entire night like
that, alone in a traumatized limbo of blood loss, creeping hypothermia,
and unimaginable pain. On top of this, there was no guarantee that the
tigers wouldn’t come back. “I just wanted to lose consciousness and stop
feeling that pain,” he said. “By three a.m., I understood that nobody was
coming.”
This was only the second circle of Sokolov’s hell; there were still at
least seven more to go. Despite his best efforts, he never lost
consciousness for more than a few minutes, and there in the dark, in
ron
(Ron)
#1