Vladimir Schetinin, whose history with the State is checkered, to say the
least, this erosion of status and order burns like an ulcer in his heart and
mind, not least because of the toll it is taking on the taiga. Now, more
than ever, his primary concern—with the possible exception of his
grandchildren—is the fate of the Amur tiger and its far rarer cousin, the
Amur leopard. The four-way tension between this, Moscow’s tiger killing
protocol, his deeply felt responsibility to protect his men, and a need to
reassure the public, would determine the fate of this tiger and the people
around it.
In his capacity as chief of Inspection Tiger, Schetinin had sought to give
his men all the tools at his disposal. This is why, moments after first
hearing about the Markov attack from Trush on Friday the 5th, he had
sent a fax to Moscow requesting a shooting permit for an Amur tiger.
Though he had little information about the case at that point, Schetinin
was familiar enough with federal bureaucracy to know that responses
from the capital often took weeks, and he wanted to be covered. Even
Schetinin’s critics were impressed when he received a telegram just four
days later, on Tuesday, December 9, from Valentin Ilyashenko, the
federal administrator of biological resources. It was brief and to the
point: “This is to approve the shooting of the man-eating tiger in the area
of the village, Sobolevka [a diminutive form of Sobolonye]. The official
permit will be issued upon receipt of the shooting report.”
Sometimes, the system worked. On the same day as the telegram, a
more formal document arrived by fax; this one bore all the appropriate
seals and signatures, but it was inexplicably postdated, clearly stating that
the hunt was to begin a week later, on December 16. Whether this delay
was a clerical error, or intended to build in a cooling-off period in which
nature could take its course, is not clear and, apparently, never was.
While there was real concern for the safety of the local populace, there
appeared to be no great urgency—at either end of the fax line—to hunt