The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

out of her mind with grief, and his father was spiraling into a suicidal
depression.
“We were neighbors,” explained Leonid Lopatin, “but as we say,
‘Somebody else’s family is like a dark forest.’ ” Now the darkness in the
Pochepnyas’ private forest was revealing itself in some disturbing ways.
Their anguish was compounded by the fact that all their neighbors had
managed to keep their own children home and safe, and this knowledge
became a gulf between them. Alone on the far side, the Pochepnyas
replayed the previous week in a vicious feedback loop that left them
beseeching the cosmos for some way to reclaim those lost days. Their
sorrow and discord touched everyone around them, not least because it
resonated so closely with their own. Neighbors shook their heads and
clucked their tongues, but they also feared for their lives.
“People stopped going into the taiga,” said Lopatin, recalling the week
of December 15. “Hunters who had been upriver came back to the village;
loggers were afraid to work. It had a big impact on the people. Something
like this might have happened a very long time ago, but nobody can
remember. The relationship between the people and the tiger changed.”
“Many people have seen tigers, or bumped into them, but there were
never any conflicts,” insisted Andrei Onofreychuk. “It might happen that
a tiger would snatch a dog right in front of a person, but they never
hunted people. They had their standards, so to say.”
Once again, Kuzmich was commissioned to build a coffin though there
was little to put in it, and once again, a fire was laid in the graveyard to
thaw the frozen ground. This time, it was Leonid Lopatin who would
bring the wood on his Buran, glancing behind him as he went, a rifle
slung from his shoulder. The survivors were clinging to symbol and
gesture now because there was little else except for anger and blame.
There seemed to be no shortage of these, and both landed squarely on the
shoulders of Yuri Trush and Inspection Tiger. “They should have shot the
tiger right away!” said Onofreychuk, still bitter after nearly a decade.
“They could have caught her that day, but because they let her go another
person died—only then they moved a peg!”
“People were not happy about it,” said Danila Zaitsev. “They should