Driven off Markov’s corpse by Trush and his men on December 6, the
tiger limped eastward, halting periodically to nurse his wounded leg.
Each time, he would lick and gnaw at the wound, cleaning away the blood
and pus, but above all, trying to soothe that incessant, searing pain. A
tiger’s tongue appears pink and soft from a distance, but it is actually
covered in thornlike barbs, which are angled back toward the throat. They
are so abrasive that they can pull out an animal’s hair and excoriate its
hide like a rasp; it would have the same effect on the tiger’s own foreleg.
Over the coming days, this cycle of travel and recovery would ebb and
flow, but at this early stage, the tiger, crippled as he was, was otherwise
perfectly fit. He had been well fed on forest game and could draw on the
reserves he had built up during the fall and early winter before these
latest encounters changed not only his diet but his modus vivendi.
The tiger’s route led directly to the gravel highway and a road workers’
camp where the raucous stench of feces emanating from the outhouse
would have manifested an almost physical presence in the still and icy
air. To the tiger, it would have been as arresting as a siren. Because it was
the weekend, the soldiers drafted to work on the highway had been
trucked back to their base in Khabarovsk, and two watchmen had been
left behind to look after the cabins and equipment. The outhouse was
plainly visible from their caravan and they were terrified by what they
saw.
The tiger was following a human trail, but he was also, intentionally or
not, reconstructing a story—a crime of sorts. This animal was now
intimate with every nuance of Markov’s scent, an elemental mélange of
blood, sweat, intestines, and dogs combined with gunpowder,
woodsmoke, vodka, and cigarettes. In a very real sense, these two beings
were now fully integrated. It wasn’t only Markov who had been
irrevocably transformed; so, in his way, had the tiger: he had never had
this kind of contact with a human before, and as a result he was no longer
the same animal he once had been. His focus had shifted in a fundamental
way. Now he was highly sensitized to the smallest trace of Markov, and
ron
(Ron)
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