something. His parents told me he had gone out to look for a job.”
“I will tell you how it happened,” said Denis’s mother, Lida. “Andrei
dropped by the night before. He said, ‘The tiger hasn’t smelled my
bullets, so she won’t touch me.’ Denis wanted to go, too, but we wouldn’t
let him. Then, Andrei argued with his parents and left in the morning.”
Leonid Lopatin saw Andrei as he was heading out on the morning of
the 12th. “I was with my son sitting and talking at my kitchen table,” he
explained, “and through the window we saw Andrei coming out of his
house.” This image remains vivid in Lopatin’s mind: “He was a tall
fellow,” Lopatin continued. “He would make a good man.... Anyway, he
had a small knapsack on and was headed toward the taiga. My son and he
were schoolmates, so my son asked him, ‘Where are you going?’ Andrei
said, ‘I have a few traps; I have to go and check them.’ My son and I both
told him, ‘The cannibal tiger is out there. Don’t go!’ Andrei said, ‘Don’t
worry, I stink so bad that she wouldn’t want to touch me anyway.’
“I knew that he had only a crappy rifle,” said Lopatin, “an old Mosin
carbine*—some rusty, prewar nonsense. I had used it before: it was not a
rifle—it was a stick. I wanted to give him my own rifle, and if he would
have stopped for a moment, I would have. But he was unstoppable—like
a torpedo. He left about ten or eleven a.m. and as soon as he stepped out
onto the road, Sergei Boyko drove by, so Boyko gave him a lift out to the
apiary.”
Denis Burukhin was puzzled by his friend’s sudden departure, but at
first he wasn’t overly concerned; after all, the tiger was far away. “His
parents said he had gone up to First Creek, which is in a completely
different direction,” he recalled, “and that he would be home in the
evening. I thought, why should I go looking for him? He would come
back soon anyway. So, I went to the ninth-day vigil, and then here and
there. The next day, I went to see him, and they said he was still not back.
What to do? I figured he had stayed in the cabin overnight and that he
would be home that evening. I went to see him the day after: again he was
not there.”
Burukhin still had faith in the law of his jungle, and this may have been