“He was about forty yards away and I saw him running toward me. The
word ‘fear’ doesn’t really describe the feeling in that situation. It’s more
like an animal horror—a terror that’s genetically inherent in you.
Something happened to me then: I went into a stupor; I was paralyzed,
and I had only one thought: I am going to die right now. Very clearly, I
realized that I was going to die.”
The tiger closed the gap in a matter of seconds and, in that moment of
arrested consciousness, Sokolov didn’t even see the final leap. “I stepped
back,” he said, “and closed my eyes for an instant—because of my
nerves. They say that when a person is in this type of critical situation his
whole life rushes through his mind. Well, that didn’t happen to me. I
remembered Sergei Denisov [a hunter he had known who was killed and
eaten by a tiger], and I had just one thought: let this tiger kill me right
away so I won’t suffer too long.
“The tiger knocked me down; my left leg was bent and he bit into my
knee. For an instant, he and I were looking in each other’s eyes—his eyes
were blazing, his ears were pressed back; I could see his teeth, and I
thought I saw surprise in his eyes—like he was seeing something he
hadn’t expected to see. He bit me once, twice. My bones were cracking,
crushing; everything was crackling. He was holding my leg sort of like a
dog, shaking his head from side to side, and there was a sound like heavy
cloth ripping. I was in excruciating pain. He was eating me, and there was
nothing I could do to stop him.”
In that moment, Sokolov shifted into a different mode; it was as if the
clouds of fear parted to make way for another emotion, much as they had
for Jim West when he heard the bear attacking his dog. “I just got mad,”
said Sokolov. “Instinctively, I punched the tiger in the forehead, between
the eyes. He roared and jumped away. Then my partner came to help me.”
In the act of coming to his senses, and tapping that deep and ancient
vein of self-preservation that flows through all of us, Sokolov had
brought the tiger to its senses, too. The tiger had no particular issue with
Sokolov; he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But for
Sokolov, this was just the beginning. “As soon as the tiger left, I
understood that my bones were crushed and shattered, and my ligaments
ron
(Ron)
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