something is wrong. But I can’t go there by myself. Let’s go together.’
He was confused and upset; he didn’t know what to do, and I said,
‘You’re his father—gather some hunters and go with them.’ He asked
Danila Zaitsev, Denis Burukhin, my son, and me.”
Lopatin stopped speaking and rubbed his eyes. “I am sorry,” he said,
“my vision is bad and my eyes are in pain. That is why they are
watering.”
On Monday the 15th, Danila Zaitsev; Denis Burukhin; Andrei
Pochepnya’s father, Alexander; Leonid Lopatin; and Lopatin’s son,
Vasily, squeezed themselves and their guns into Lopatin’s Toyota sedan.
Andrei’s younger brother had wanted to go, too, but they wouldn’t allow
it because, said Burukhin, “We knew where we were going. We knew
what we were going to find.” Leonid Lopatin was nearly sixty at the time
—old for that country—so, after driving them to the apiary, he left on
some other business, letting the younger men go ahead on their own. The
men were all armed except for Alexander Pochepnya, who had only the
one rifle, which Andrei had taken with him. This made Zaitsev the de
facto leader of the party. He was carrying a powerful double-barreled
shotgun, which, formidable as it was, would have been scoffed at by
anyone with experience in shooting big cats. However, this is what he
had, and it was legal.
According to Markov’s friend Andrei Onofreychuk, Zaitsev was
dismayed by the younger men’s casual attitude. “They were going down
the trail with their weapons on their shoulders as if they didn’t need
them,” he recalled. “So, Zaitsev said, ‘Are you guys nuts? You have to
have your guns ready, right?’ But they just said, ‘Whatever happens,
happens.’
“Youth is youth,” said Onofreychuk. “They don’t realize the danger
yet.”
Although they were neighbors, Zaitsev did not know Alexander
Pochepnya particularly well. A father himself, he accompanied
Pochepnya on this dreadful errand, not out of love or loyalty, but because
he had been asked, and perhaps because he could sense how close to the
edge this man already was. Zaitsev had been born in western China where
ron
(Ron)
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