that different from listening to literature majors deconstruct a short story.
Both are sorting through minutiae, down to the specific placement and
inflection of individual elements, in order to determine motive, subtext,
and narrative arc. An individual track may have its own accent or
diacritical marks that distinguish the intent of a foot, or even a single
step, from the others. On an active game trail, as in one of Tolstoy’s
novels, multiple plots and characters can overlap with daunting subtlety,
pathos, or hair-raising drama. Deciphering these palimpsests can be more
difficult than reading crossed letters* from the Victorian era, and harder
to follow than the most obscure experimental fiction. However, with
practice, as Henno Martin wrote in The Sheltering Desert, “you learn to
read the writing of hoof, claw and pad.^3 In fact before long you are
reading their message almost subconsciously.”
Trush and his men had opened the White Book at mid-chapter, and now
they had to place themselves in the story. This isn’t something one does
lightly in the taiga: the reader must commit to becoming a character, too,
with no assurance of how the story will end. There, on that blinding
winter afternoon at the foot of the Takhalo, began a struggle for control
of the narrative. This had happened at least once already, two weeks
earlier, when Markov had been drawn into the story; though he had
managed to shift its direction, he had failed to control it—the tiger had
seen to that. Once again, the tiger was in charge, as he was accustomed to
being. There are conventions in the tracking narrative just as there are in
any literary form, and tigers employ different ones than deer or boar or
humans. While one can usually make predictions, based on these, about
how a particular plotline will unfold, this tiger defied the formula to the
point that it occupied a genre of its own. To begin with, there is usually
no ambiguity in the taiga about who is hunting whom, but in this story,
that wasn’t the case.
Even as the men read his tracks, the tiger could have been nearby,
reading them, deciding how or when to work them into the plot. Tigers, of
course, are experts at this game, and they use the same methods humans
do: pick up the trail of potential prey by scent, sight, or knowledge of its