already fled. He smokes, strokes his dogs if they are around, and gathers
himself, assessing the damage, and trying to figure out what to do. He has
just committed a federal offense, but it may not be his first and, if the
tiger lives, federal laws will be the least of his problems; it is the tiger’s
law he will need to worry about. He is going to have to come up with a
strategy for dealing with this conflict, and he will have no peace until he
does.
As confident as Trush is in his interpretation of these events, there are
other credible versions and one of them comes from Ivan Dunkai’s son
Vasily, who discussed the incident with his father at the time. “Markiz
had killed a boar not far from my father’s cabin,” he recalled. “The tiger
found it and was eating it. When Markiz saw the tiger eating it, he shot at
him. Naturally, the tiger ran away. The tiger was injured, and he could not
kill anything for a week.”
For a hunter on foot, dismantling a dead boar can take days, which
means that, even after Markov packed his first load home, there would
have been hundreds of pounds of meat left in the forest. Just as a human
may help himself to an unfinished tiger kill, a tiger may do the same to a
half-butchered human kill. It wasn’t clear if Markov’s dogs had been
mixed up in this, but one of the downsides of hunting dogs is that, when
confronted by large, dangerous animals, they have a tendency to run back
to their master, thus putting him directly in harm’s way. Had this
happened, or had his dogs been attacked, Markov might have felt it
necessary to shoot at the tiger. In any case, he would have had mere
seconds to make a decision.
This version squares with that of the local hunting inspector Evgeny
Smirnov, who headed a small agency called Field Group Taiga. Even
though Smirnov was an ethnic Russian, the fact that he lived in Krasny
Yar and was married to a respected native gave him access to information
that could easily elude an outsider like Trush. Between his daily presence