The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

If divine intervention occurred, Shibnev was the vehicle: it was he who
had been visited with the sudden impulse to reposition the men, which
had placed him and Pionka broadside to the tiger and out of each other’s
line of fire. Because there was no time for thought, or even fear,
Shibnev’s and Pionka’s collective response was mainly one of instinct
and muscle memory. And yet, somehow, both of these men found the
wherewithal to think; they stole it out of time and space the same way
gifted athletes wrest opportunities from inches and fractions of seconds.
Even in the face of a flying tiger and a man about to die—a scene that
would leave most people staring in dull surprise, as Gorborukov was from
beside the Kung—both Shibnev and Pionka understood they could not
shoot when the tiger was on top of Trush because their hyper-lethal
bullets would kill him, too. They had to kill the tiger in the air. In that
moment, those ungodly di ex machina became Trush’s gifts from God.
Shibnev and Pionka brought their rifles to their shoulders in the same
reflexive way Trush had, and Pochepnya and Markov had before him. “I
fired and fired and fired and fired,” said Shibnev. “I remember seeing
him fly through the air, the right paw was out like this.”
In that sliver of time between registering the tiger’s presence and his
airborne collision with Trush less than three seconds later, Shibnev and
Pionka fired eleven times between them; Trush fired twice. In spite of
this barrage, the tiger hit Trush at full speed—claws extended, jaws
agape. The impact was concentrated on Trush’s right shoulder, and his
rifle was torn from his hands. Trush, now disarmed with the tiger upon
him, threw his arms around his attacker, grasping fistfuls of his fur and
burying his face in the animal’s chest. He was overcome in every sense:
by the inexorable force of the tiger; by the point-blank blast of Pionka’s
and Shibnev’s rifles; by the impossible softness of the tiger’s fur, the
muscles taut as cables underneath. Like this, man and beast went down
together, bound in a wrestler’s embrace.