The way Mikhail Dunkai saw it, accepting meat from a tiger is like
accepting a favor from the Communist Party, or the mafia: once
obligated, it can be very hard to extract oneself. Markov may not have
fully grasped the nature of the contract he was entering into if, indeed, he
helped himself to that tiger kill. Ivan Dunkai, being from an earlier
generation, seemed to accept these rigorous terms, but his son clearly did
not. That the tiger researcher Dmitri Pikunov was able to scavenge so
successfully, and so safely, from tiger kills was most likely due to the
fact that he didn’t go near a kill until he was sure the tiger was
completely finished with it. The czar always eats first.
That Markov had become so entangled with this tiger seemed
genuinely to surprise Mikhail Dunkai. “Markiz was a strong, good man,”
he said in sum. “He was always optimistic, always kept his spirits up. He
was honest. It’s hard to understand how it happened, but this situation
with the tiger diverted him from the path of life. I tried to tell him that he
should stay overnight, that he should take it easy, stop worrying, and
think it over. I said, ‘If you didn’t do anything bad to him, he won’t do
anything to you. Just don’t do anything bad to him. Remember: you are
living in the taiga. He can crush you.’ ”
But by then, the die was cast, and a facet of Markov’s own character
may have sealed his fate. “If Markiz started something,” Mikhail said,
“he usually finished it.”
“Look at it from the tiger’s point of view,” Trush said later. “The tiger
challenged Markov. From his point of view, either you leave, or you sort
it out face-to-face and see what happens. Markov accepted that challenge.
Volodya Markov had a chance to leave the taiga; had he done so, he
would still be alive. He had that choice.”
The question remains: why did Markov go for a long walk in the forest,
alone, if he knew there was an angry tiger looking for him? Was it pride?
Was it concern for his dogs? Or was he intending to finish what he had
started? Mikhail Dunkai believed it was something else altogether. He
had the sense that Markov was already in the tiger’s thrall when he saw
him that morning. “The tiger had already taken his soul,” he said. “I had
this dog once,” he explained, “and one day the dog became nervous,
ron
(Ron)
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