starting at the paws and working their way toward the center. Although
Schetinin had burned dozens of tiger pelts over the years in order to keep
them off the black market, he wanted this one to be removed “carpet
style” and preserved. The sun was now in the trees, and it was bitterly
cold, but most of the men worked barehanded while Schetinin stood by,
puffing on his pipe, observing their progress. All of these men were
seasoned animal skinners; nonetheless, as they worked, they commented
often on the smell and on how amazingly tough the tiger’s hide was.
When they opened the chest cavity, the heart was steaming.
Trush, Pionka, and Shibnev did most of the work and, as they went
along, they had the opportunity to study the tiger’s wounds in detail. In
addition to the deep flesh wound in its left forepaw, it now appeared that
the tiger had been shot twice in the right leg at point-blank range with
weak loads of buckshot. One cluster had only gone skin deep into the
foreleg while the other had penetrated the joint above, and many of the
balls were still in place. Only one of Trush’s bullets had actually gone
into the tiger, and most of Pionka’s and Shibnev’s had passed right
through. But as the men went over the tiger’s body, carefully flensing the
skin away with their hunting knives, they came to understand that it had
been shot an extraordinary number of times—not just by them and
Markov; this tiger had absorbed bullets the way Moby-Dick absorbed
harpoons. In addition to their and Markov’s wounds, they found a steel
bullet from another rifle and many pieces of birdshot. The end of the
tiger’s tail was also missing, and had been for a while—either shot off or
frozen. There were no plans for a formal autopsy, but it was clear already
that during its short life in the traumatic aftermath of perestroika, this
tiger had been shot with literally dozens of bullets, balls, and birdshot.
Markov may not have been the beginning but rather the last straw. Denis
Burukhin said, “Maybe after someone fired that birdshot into him, he got
angry with the whole world.”
“It was men who were responsible for the aggression of this animal,”
said Trush, “and the incident with Markov was a sort of quintessence of
all those cases.”
The tiger dismantled was a disturbing sight. The skinned head—all
ron
(Ron)
#1