difficult for Trush, though, would be walking up to that crooked house
filled with all those anxious faces, and knocking on the door. “I was
overwhelmed,” said Trush. “My eyes filled with tears. At that moment,
when I saw their circumstances, I felt sorry for the man, not for the
tiger.”
It was the timing that had been especially cruel: on January 26, Trush
had stopped Khomenko and seriously considered disarming him. On the
29th, Khomenko met the tiger.
Now, nearly two years later, Markov was dead and, once again, lives
would be saved or lost depending on how Trush read his hunches. While
he, Lazurenko, and Gorborukov studied the melted, trampled snow, trying
to take the measure of both man and tiger, it was left to Deputy Bush and
Markov’s grieving friends to gather Markov’s remains onto the blanket
that Zaitsev had been carrying for that purpose. All of these men were
hunters; they had seen animal kills and had butchered animals
themselves. But Markov was a man—a close friend—and now it was as if
he had exploded, shattered into pieces by this brutal, frigid life. The task
of gathering, of re-membering, was almost too much to bear so the men
worked slowly, numb and mechanical. “Try to get all the bones,”
mumbled Onofrecuk, more to himself than anyone else. “Let’s try to get
as many as we can for the grave.”
There is a costly wisdom in this, the stoic execution of deeds that must
be done. It is a survival skill that is closely linked to Fate, and Fate has
always been a potent force in Russia, where, for generations, citizens
have had little control over their own destinies. Fate can be a bitch, but,
as Zaitsev, Dvornik, and Onofrecuk had discovered, it can also be a tiger.
By then, it was clear to everyone present that this wasn’t forest business
as usual; there was more going on here than bad luck or carelessness.
What had Markov done to bring this upon himself? Markov’s friends, the
same ones who hid his shotgun before Inspection Tiger arrived, had a