day, she said, “I wanted to have it killed again.”
Meanwhile, Trush, who had just come as close to death as one possibly
could and still walk away, and who had been holding himself and his
team together for more than two weeks under extraordinarily difficult
circumstances, reached a kind of breaking point. With the tiger finally
dead, and his boss and the villagers there to witness it, the stress and
horror of the past two weeks came rushing home to him: “Andrei
Pochepnya’s mother and sister came,” he said, “and that meeting touched
my heart—touched my soul very deeply. When the two of them saw the
tiger, they cried, and I could not restrain myself in that situation. I felt so
sorry for that guy, Andrei.”
When the villagers had seen enough, and Trush and Schetinin had been
able to tell their side of the story to those willing to listen, Schetinin
ordered his men to close up the Kung. “What are you going to do with
it?” a woman asked.
“We’re going to make dumplings out of him,” came the deadpan reply
from a local man standing next to her.
Schetinin took Trush aside and instructed him to take the tiger out of
the village and skin it. After driving a couple of miles up the road in the
direction of the Pochepnyas’ apiary, Trush told Gorborukov to pull over.
They were followed by Lazurenko’s team and Schetinin, and here, by the
side of a logging road, the tiger was hauled out. There was a slender rope
around its neck, like a leash, and by this, two legs, and its tail Trush’s
team ran the tiger across the snow about twenty yards away from the
vehicles. According to Sasha Lazurenko, they were preparing to cut into
it when Denis Burukhin approached Schetinin: “Vladimir Ivanovich,” he
said, respectfully, “may I kick the tiger for my friend?”
Schetinin granted him permission, and Burukhin wound up and kicked
the tiger for Andrei Pochepnya.
A small fire was built, and the men set to work skinning the tiger,