Pionka fired a final control shot. The tiger was dead, perhaps many times
over, and Trush was alive, feeling himself for injuries and proof of
existence. It is still not clear whether it was a symptom of shock or an
example of extraordinary sangfroid, but Trush’s first impulse after
standing and taking inventory of himself was to get it on film: “I said,
‘Guys, stay where you are!’ and I ran to the Kung and got my video
camera. I filmed footage of where the tiger was and where Yuri Pionka
was standing; I filmed his hiding place from where he had pounced at me.
I filmed it all.”
It is a frantic and scattershot piece of work and the soundtrack plays
like a crash course in mat (short for “Fuck your mother”), a form of
Russian profanity that is the bastard child of gulag and criminal slang. It
is visceral, violent, and anatomically explicit, and for five or ten minutes
after the tiger’s death and Trush’s resurrection, it poured forth undiluted
as the men stormed around the clearing, replaying those death-dealing,
life-saving seconds.
Conspicuously absent in all this was Trush’s rifle. “I kept wondering,”
said Trush, “why the tiger hadn’t grabbed me by the neck. It was a riddle
to me. When I came up to the dead tiger, this was what I saw”:
Trush’s rifle had gone down the tiger’s throat, all the way to the stock.
The stock itself was cracked, and pocked with teeth marks, and the gas
tube, which runs along the top of the barrel, had been crushed. This
explained why Trush took the impact of the tiger on his right shoulder,
and it may explain why he is alive today. In the end, the margin between
Trush’s life and death came down, literally, to millimeters and fractions
of seconds; down to Shibnev’s uncanny—one could say “animal”—
intuition, and to his and Pionka’s equally instinctive and precise
responses. It is safe to say that nothing but the superhuman powers of
those weapons, in conjunction with Shibnev’s and Pionka’s heroic skill
and presence of mind, could have effected such an outcome under those
circumstances. Odysseus and Ahab would have been impressed. But these
are the tolerances the predator must routinely operate within; the line is
always deadly fine.
Trush radioed the other team, but they were still on the far side of the
ron
(Ron)
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