we’re at the graveyard,” explained Markov’s neighbor Irina Peshkova,
“we always visit his grave. We’ll bring flowers, candy, and a shot of
vodka. Who knows who would drink it, but we leave it there anyway.”
To this day, Tamara Borisova maintains her husband’s innocence, as
do his closest friends. Andrei Onofreychuk and Sasha Dvornik were
adamant to the last that he had done nothing to the tiger. As evidence they
cited Markov’s choice of ammunition: “He never shot cartridges,”*
Onofreychuk insisted, “because he was hunting with dogs. He only used
bullets.”
“I hunted with Markov for several years,” said Dvornik in an interview
with the filmmaker Sasha Snow, “and he never used buckshot. Everyone
will tell you: he shot birdshot or bullets.”
Danila Zaitsev felt sure the tiger had been wounded before it
encountered Markov. Denis Burukhin, who did not know Markov as well,
said, “God knows where those bullets came from.”
When the tiger was skinned, six balls were recovered from its foreleg
and sent to a forensics lab in Ussurisk, near Primorye’s principal border
crossing with China. There, they were analyzed and compared with the
homemade buckshot found in Markov’s cartridge belt. According to
Trush, the lead composition was identical, and the formal determination
made by the ballistics analyst was that the buckshot was Markov’s.
“Clearly, he thought that he was strong enough to kill the tiger,” said
Trush, “and he accepted the tiger’s challenge.”
Vasily Solkin, the leopard specialist, understood it the same way.
“Markov couldn’t go back to the village. He had to stay and resolve the
situation. Try to understand this,” he said. “Markov was a tayozhnik—a
man of the taiga—and if he were to run away, he would not be able to
come back here—ever. For a tayozhnik, there was no other choice: he had
to finish this battle. Otherwise, for the rest of his life, he would be afraid
of every tree. The taiga would never let him in again.”
Drawing on seventy-five years of experience on the Bikin, Ivan Dunkai
made sense of the tragedy this way: “It has never happened that a tiger
attacked to kill and eat a man here. In the past, when a tiger attacked a