23

Pursuant    to  the permission  for the period  December    16th-31st,  1997,

an  Amur    tiger   has been    killed  under   the supervision of  Y.  A.  Trush.

The killing has been    carried out in  accordance  with    Permission  No.

731 issued  on  December    8,  1997,   by  the State   Ecology Committee   of

Russia.

YURI    TRUSH,  Final   Report

CHRISTMAS AND THE NEW YEAR CAME AND WENT

QUICKLY AND QUIETLY. It was a somber time made more so by the
introduction of the New Ruble, a devastating, if effective, reset of the
nation’s currency. Already broke, the residents of Sobolonye were
minimally affected and limped on much as they had before. If nothing
else, it had been a good year for pine nuts and now, at least, it was safe to
search for them again. But it wasn’t safe for everyone; in Alexander
Pochepnya’s heart and mind, the tiger was alive and hunting still. One
night in January, it caught up to him. Shortly after returning to work as
the night watchman at the village school, he was found there, dead by his
own hand. The father was buried beside the son in an anonymous grave.
Today, Sobolonye has the feel of a time capsule in which the most
damaging effects of perestroika have been preserved. What is so haunting
is the fact that this time capsule contains people, and it is clear from the
faces and the material poverty that many of them remain trapped in 1995,
which could have been Appalachia in 1935, a time when life in the
resource-dependent hill country was particularly desperate and bleak. In
the intervening years, Pyotr Zhorkin has died, along with Boris
Ivanovich, the boss of the Middle Bikin National Forest Enterprise. Ivan
Dunkai was next. Sasha Dvornik moved away after his wife died, and