termites, locusts, birds, porcupines, pangolins, badgers, sables, squirrels,
cats, dogs, dholes, wolves, rats, mice, rabbits, bears, lynxes, leopards, and
other tigers. But even with such catholic tastes, it is hard to understand
what would compel a tiger to rip the walls off a locked outhouse and
devour the contents. This is a decidedly strange thing for a tiger to do. It
may even be unprecedented. But if one of the last people to use it was
Markov, and Markov and others had been eating meat that the tiger
recognized as his, then there was a motive. Trush, for one, felt sure the
tiger had scented Markov or its stolen meat. The tiger researcher Dmitri
Pikunov believed the tiger was driven to such an extreme by hunger, but
the tiger had been gorging on Markov and his dogs only a day earlier, and
the scats left by his cabin were ropey with boar hair. This tiger wasn’t
starving—not yet anyway. A sick or injured tiger can lay up for a week or
two without food if it has to, and there was other potential prey around.
With this in mind, the notion that the tiger smelled something in there
that belonged to him, that enraged him, becomes more plausible.
“Throughout the investigation,” said Trush, “we kept wondering why the
tiger was pressuring the man so intensely, why he had been stalking him.
It seemed that he wanted to settle accounts.” And, perhaps, to reclaim
that which he knew to be rightfully his.
Unarmed and without a vehicle, the camp watchmen could do nothing
but piss in a bucket, gape through the glass, and pray the tiger didn’t do to
their caravan what it was doing to the stoutly built privy thirty yards
away. In the end, the tiger held them hostage for about twenty-four hours
after abandoning Markov on Saturday the 6th and making the six-mile
trek east. The watchmen had neighbors at the nearby Takhalo bridge
maintenance camp, but no way to communicate with them. However,
Sergei Boyko was on duty there that weekend and, having gotten wind of
the Markov attack, paid a social call on Sunday. When the tiger heard
Boyko’s vehicle approaching, he retreated into the trees to watch. The
watchmen heard it, too, and they cracked the door, signaling Boyko to
stay inside. “There is a tiger!” they shouted.
Boyko ignored them and strode across the lot, went inside, and had a
cup of tea. He knew what it was to have tiger trouble, but he had no issue
ron
(Ron)
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