4

What    the hammer? What    the chain?

In  what    furnace was thy brain?

WILLIAM BLAKE,  “The    Tyger”

THE BADGER AND SHOTGUN INCIDENT WAS THE ONLY

TIME TRUSH SAW Markov alive, and he had underestimated him.
Then, he had figured Markov for one more unemployed subsistence
hunter who wasn’t above taking a lynx or a badger if the opportunity
presented itself. When Trush finds himself, as he often does, in that
murky place between the letter of the law and the fact of a man’s
circumstances, he is reminded that the line between right and wrong can
be a crooked one. But how, in the forest there, with that sorry badger in a
pot, could Trush have imagined what would happen to Markov, a known
poacher with illegal weapons who was fed up with being poor? And how,
for that matter, could he have known what would happen to Lev
Khomenko?
Lev (“Lion”) Khomenko was a thirty-six-year-old hunter and herbalist
from the village of Lesopil’noye, near the confluence of the Ussuri and
Bikin rivers. He had a degree in hunting management and was a staff
hunter for Alufchanski, the State Forest Management Company, which
oversaw the region’s commercial meat and fur industry. But the 1990s
were the toughest years many Russians could remember, and the winter
of ’96 found Khomenko unemployed with four children to feed. He and
his family lived a marginal existence on the edge of the taiga; their house
was old and made of logs, and it leaned precariously to one side. There
were cracks in the walls big enough to put a hand through. Trush had been
making his rounds one day when he came upon Khomenko hunting in the