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It  is  quite   in  the order   of  things  in  folk-tales  ... that    a   parent  should

purchase    his own safety  by  sacrificing his son to  a   ferocious   animal  or

to  a   supernatural    enemy.

C.  F.  COXWELL,

Siberian    and Other   Folk    Tales^1

SOBOLONYE WAS A PLACE FAMILIAR WITH MORTAL

TRAGEDY, BUT IT tended to be accidental or self-inflicted, and
alcohol was often a factor. One side effect of these repeated blows was a
caustic graveyard humor, and not even Markov was spared. Some in the
village felt sure he had invited his own death by robbing the tiger of its
kill. “It became a bit of a joke,” said one local resident, “that he brought

that meat to his own funeral.”^2
True or not, this assumption was also a way of deflecting such a fate
away from oneself, a corollary to the widely held belief that tigers never
attacked unprovoked. Without this psychic armor, how could one dare to
make one’s living in the taiga? Nonetheless, the possibility that there
might be exceptions to this rule had been preying on people’s minds
during the week following Markov’s death. By then, news of the tiger’s
behavior at the road workers’ camp had also spread through the valley,
and there was little doubt that this was the same tiger that had killed
Markov. Regardless of their other feelings about tigers, the residents of
Sobolonye had great respect for their intelligence and hunting prowess,
and the idea that these powers might be directed against them—at
random—was terrifying. This tiger’s presence had cast a pall over the
village, not just for its own sake, but for what it implied: the forest was
Sobolonye’s sole reason for being, and Mother Taiga was the closest