The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

much out the narrow side windows.
Trush sat in the passenger seat of the high two-man cab with Gitta,
scanning the roadside for tiger tracks. It wasn’t long before he spotted
some. Trush hopped out with his rifle to examine them, and Shibnev and
Pionka got out, too. They could tell immediately that the tracks belonged
to a different tiger. By now, these men knew this animal’s prints almost
as well as they knew their own hands. The men climbed back in and they
continued northward. The weather was holding: brilliant sun, minus
thirty, the snow as fine as confectioners’ sugar. Here and there, along the
road, were birch trees bent double by heavy snow, their forked branches
plunging earthward like lightning bolts frozen in mid-strike. There were
more tracks and Trush jumped out to check, as did Shibnev and Pionka.
These ones were old and, again, it was the wrong tiger—probably the
same one whose tracks they’d crossed earlier. By now, they had covered
about a mile and a half at this careful, stop-and-go pace.
Trush and his men had been at this for a week now; they were tired,
unwashed, and wanting to be done. Nonetheless, there was a charge that
day; this empty road in the back of beyond was full of possibility. The
tiger, hungrier than ever, made the most of the easy traveling it offered,
and so did Oximenko. Each was making good time toward his respective
destiny. But the Kung added a new wrinkle: as it labored up a steep rise,
man and tiger alike heard the engine grinding through that perfect
silence, and both of those seasoned tayozhniks had the same reaction:
they got off the road and hid. As fate would have it, each turned to his
right, so they ended up on opposite sides of the road, listening and
watching for the Kung. Only three hundred yards stood between them.
Had the Kung not disturbed them, they would have met in less than two
minutes. Oximenko was oblivious. What the tiger knew had been
answered best by Denis Burukhin: “He could not tell us what he knew and
what he didn’t.” Who would live and who would not was equally unclear.
Trush, still scanning the unbroken snow on the roadsides, spotted
Oximenko’s exit tracks immediately. They stopped again. The tracks
were clearly fresh, and their presence there was beyond Trush’s
comprehension: “We had warned absolutely everyone,” he said, still