aggrieved. “These people knew we had two corpses on our hands, and yet
they went into the forest anyway.” Trush couldn’t be sure who it was, but
he had to decide immediately whether to chase this moron down, or
continue on after the tiger. Schetinin wasn’t around so it was Trush’s call.
He was fed up with poachers and disobedient locals, and he had a feeling
the tiger was close, so he signaled his wheelman to drive on. Less than a
minute later, Trush spotted tiger tracks off to his left. Again, they
stopped. It was shortly after noon. By now, Trush had been in and out of
the Kung many times and he was tired of taking the rifle with him, so he
left it in the cab. Shibnev and Pionka climbed out of the back, and
Shibnev remembers thinking, “What is it this time?” They left their
weapons behind as well.
Together, the three of them made their way over to the road’s edge. It
was clear, even from a distance, that this was their tiger. The tracks led
into a clearing that was about fifty yards deep and half again as long. The
visibility was unobstructed, and the tiger, wherever he was, was nowhere
nearby. It was starting to seem like he was never going to be nearby.
Pionka proceeded a short way into the clearing and bent down to test the
edge of one of the tracks: it crumbled like powder. Pionka is a fairly quiet
man so it surprised everyone when he said, “Motherfucker, it’s hot!”
As one, the men hustled back to the Kung for their rifles. Gitta was
racing around now, barking, hackles up. This was it, and everyone knew
it. Before them lay the clearing, which angled slightly up and to the west.
It was a former loading deck for logs so it had been stripped of vegetation
and graded. It was empty now save for the pristine snow that covered it.
Poking through here and there were a few holdovers from the summer:
bare stalks of wormwood and crowfoot, stray canes of raspberry, and
blades of tall, golden grass. The tiger’s tracks appeared to be angling
southwest across this virtually empty canvas and into the forest, which
was a chaotic mixture of cedar, pine, aspen, and elm with a tangled
understory that would make for hard going.
Gitta started down the track and raced back, yipping wildly, and the
men flipped off the safetys on their rifles. Trush unfastened his knife
sheath as well, but for some reason he carried his rifle on his shoulder,
ron
(Ron)
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