Inspection Tiger, but in May 2008 he described the last time he saw
Markov.
Mikhail Dunkai is in his early fifties, and he is a hunter and trapper
like his father and brother. He is short and thickly set with a shock of
black hair that falls across his forehead in bangs, the only straight line on
an otherwise round face. Dark eyes glimmer through folded lids. Like his
father, he had a good relationship with Markov and, over the years, they
had shared meals, vodka, and each other’s cabins. Markov arrived at
Mikhail’s cabin on the Amba shortly before noon on the 3rd, and he was
clearly upset. “He was angry with the tiger,” Mikhail recalled as he stood
in a recently thawed dirt track dotted with puddles and cow pats that
serves as one of Krasny Yar’s main streets. “He was swearing at him; he
was saying that we should kill, destroy, and wipe out the tigers. ‘There
are too many of them,’ he said. I could see that he was really worried: he
didn’t want to drink or eat anything; he didn’t even have tea. He was just
smoking cigarettes—one after another, one after another, and
complaining that they were too weak. ‘Let’s roll them with makhorka,’*
he said. He was smoking constantly for a half an hour.”
Many Udeghe and Nanai, including Mikhail Dunkai, feel about tigers
the same way Pyotr Zhorkin did: that if one has set its sights on you,
there is little you can do to alter the outcome. “He was doomed,” Mikhail
said simply. “You could tell by looking in his eyes. They were strange
and empty when I was talking with him: dead-looking. This tiger was
probably angry and vindictive, and Markiz probably struck a wrong chord
with him. Personally, I think he was trying to shoot the tiger, and this
tiger didn’t forgive him. If the tiger had felt that it was his fault—if he
had killed a dog or done something else wrong—then he would have gone
away.”
Anthropologists who write about indigenous peoples often note their
tendency to anthropomorphize the animals around them. Even though