of the tracks and factor them into the grand schematic in his head. “You
can read the taiga as a book,” he explained. “The twig is bent—why?
What animal has passed here? The twig is broken—this means that a
person has passed. It is interesting! If an animal stops paying attention to
you, maybe it sees another animal. So, you should find out what causes
this attention. That is how we were taught, and that is how I teach my
sons.”
On a sunny winter afternoon at the Far Eastern Institute of Geography,
outside Vladivostok, a tiger biologist named Dmitri Pikunov told a story
about Ivan Dunkai that could have been taken from the pages of Dersu
the Trapper. Pikunov is a ruddy, robust man in his early seventies with
piercing blue eyes and a dwindling silver crew cut, and he has spent
decades studying and writing about tigers in the Bikin valley. It was he
who first chronicled the Markov incident in 1998, in a local nature
magazine called Zov Taigi (“Call of the Taiga”). Like Dunkai, Pikunov is
a throwback to the old school and, like most early tiger advocates, he
came to conservation through hunting. An expert marksman, he earned
the rank of Master of Sports in skeet shooting and was invited to join
Russia’s national shooting team, which he did. “I am incredibly good
with guns,” he says, seeing no need for false modesty.
However, Pikunov’s father, a highly regarded metallurgist in a tank
factory, had other plans and urged his son to follow him into the industry.
Had Pikunov done so it would have all but guaranteed him a secure and
privileged life, but he found shooting and the hunt so compelling that he
applied to the Irkutsk Institute’s hunting management program instead.
Tuition was free in those days, so the competition was fierce, but Pikunov
excelled. Once out of school, he was hired to manage the Pacific Fleet’s
five-thousand-member hunting association in Primorye. From there, he
was invited to join the Far East Division of the Environmental Protection
Department as a researcher. “I was spending six months a year in the
taiga then,” explained Pikunov in a battered office with a commanding
view of the ice-covered Amur Bay. “Even when I was on vacation, I
would get a rifle, sign a contract to hunt for boar or deer, and sell the
meat.”
ron
(Ron)
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