me alone. I had made arrangements to get a horse, but then had a change
of heart: I can’t get a horse because it will get eaten. I can’t raise a pig
because it will get killed. My neighbor brought a horse to his apiary, and
a tiger killed it.”
Never a fan of tigers to begin with, Sasha Dvornik was seriously
traumatized by the Markov incident. “I’m probably too sensitive,” he told
Sasha Snow, “but I still have nightmares in which I’m collecting pieces
of Markov’s body. If I’d known what I would see there, I’d never have
gone to his cabin. Now, I won’t let a tiger get away alive. I will
exterminate that vermin everywhere.”
The huntress Baba Liuda’s feelings are more philosophical: “If they
want to walk around, let ’em walk around. If they want to roar, the hell
with ’em—let ’em do it.”
Long after the paperwork was completed, this incident continued to haunt
Yuri Trush, and it does so to this day. Although he managed to survive,
Trush has been scarred in a variety of ways: “The native people tell me
that I’m now marked by the tiger,” he said. “Some of them won’t allow
me to sleep with them under the same roof.”
The notion that Trush now bears some ineffable taint, discernible only
to tigers, was put to the test at the tiger catcher Vladimir Kruglov’s
wildlife rehabilitation center in 2004. Trush had gone there with Sasha
Snow in order to get some live footage of a tiger in a forest environment.
One of Kruglov’s rescued tigers, a particularly impressive male, is named
Liuty, which is an efficient word combining vicious, ferocious, cold-
blooded, and bold. It is a good descriptor for Ivan the Terrible, but it
seemed an odd name for this tiger, which was leaning against the
compound fence, getting his neck scratched by Kruglov, who had raised
him from a cub. Kruglov then stepped away to attend to something else,
leaving Trush, Snow, and a few other visitors spread out along the fence,
watching and taking pictures. Liuty, who was used to this kind of