This time, it fired perfectly. Pochepnya’s father was standing next to
Burukhin, and there is no way to know now what went through his mind,
or his heart, as that deafening report echoed through the forest. But he
took the gun from Burukhin and, after walking a short distance, heaved it
into an open stretch of the Takhalo where the water ran deep and fast.
Then he went to look for his eldest son.
What Alexander Pochepnya found is something no parent is equipped
to see. Fifty yards into the snowy forest lay a heap of blood-blackened
clothing in a circle of exposed earth. It looked more like a case of
spontaneous combustion than an animal attack. There was nothing left
but shredded cloth and empty boots. Nearby, a watch and crucifix lay
undamaged on the ground. The remains of Pochepnya himself were so
small and so few they could have fit in a shirt pocket. It is normal for a
tiger to leave extremities as the tiger did with Markov, but Pochepnya
was gone, and this was—like the ransacking of the outhouse—
unprecedented. One need only imagine Udeghe hunters discovering a
scene like this two hundred years ago—their astonishment and terror at
the bloody tracks and empty clothes—to understand how the possibility
of a man-eating amba like the egule might implant itself in the collective
mind.
The men searched cautiously in the surrounding forest and found the
tiger’s exit trail; it was fresh, perhaps only hours old. Based on the two
sets of tracks, the men deduced that Andrei had been killed within hours
of his arrival on the 12th, and that the tiger had stayed with him for the
next three days; when he wasn’t feeding, the tiger reclined on his padded
throne, sheltered by spruce boughs. Now, with nothing left to hold him
there, the tiger had moved on, sated for the time being.
Andrei Pochepnya had been carrying an army-issue ditty bag with him
in case his traps produced anything, and this is what they collected him
in. Then the four men walked back upstream to meet Lopatin. Other than
Denis Burukhin, who had witnessed comparable scenes in Chechnya,
Danila Zaitsev was the only one present who had faced anything like this
before. He bore it as stoically as he had ten days earlier, and made a point
of staying close by Alexander Pochepnya. The father did not cry and
ron
(Ron)
#1