absence of Pochepnya. The sight of those empty clothes was something
none of these men was fully prepared for. The horror in a thing is usually
derived from its presence, however distorted or fragmentary, but here in
the scrub and snow by the Takhalo was a broken frame with no picture in
it. Had there been no tracks and no story, one could have thought these
things had simply been abandoned—as if, a year or two earlier, some
hunter had come down to the river for a swim, left his belongings in a
heap, and simply never returned. Over the intervening seasons, animals,
weather, and rot would have shredded and stained them, leaving the ruins
that lay there now. But these clothes were only a few days old, and their
owner had ceased to exist.
To end a person’s life is one thing; to eradicate him from the face of
the earth is another. The latter is far more difficult to do, and yet the tiger
had done it, had transported this young man beyond death to a kind of
carnal oblivion. It was clear on this day that, in the taiga, the sacred
vessel of a human being has no more intrinsic value or meaning than a
wild boar or a roe deer, and no greater purpose beyond its potential as
prey. In the jaws of a tiger, one’s body is, for all practical purposes,
weightless and, in the case of Andrei Pochepnya, it appeared to have no
substance at all. This begs an obscure metaphysical question: if the body
journeys through the viscera of an animal—if its substance and essence
become that animal—what happens to the soul? Hurricanes, avalanches,
and volcanoes consume people, but such random acts of insensate
violence are considered acts of God; they don’t pick their targets, nor do
they metabolize them. It is rare that one is confronted, as these men were,
with such overwhelming evidence of one’s own mutability in the face of
a sentient natural force. In this way, tigers and their quasi-conscious kin
occupy an uncharted middle ground somewhere between humans and
natural catastrophes. Under certain circumstances, the tiger can have the
same nullifying effect as a long look into the night sky.
As the men studied the cuffs and collars of Andrei’s many layers, it
was clear that after his gun misfired Andrei had tried to fend the tiger off
with his left arm. But the athleticism of these animals is stunning and, in
a series of blinding and fluid motions, the tiger caught Andrei’s wrist,
ron
(Ron)
#1