have tracked him right away. He killed a man, plus he was injured. They
could have done it right away.”
“Somebody told me that in India they won’t shoot a tiger until it has
eaten four people,” Sasha Dvornik told the filmmaker Sasha Snow in
- “Before then it’s not considered a man-eater. Well, I recommend
them to bring their own children to feed the tiger. The authorities are
responsible for the death of Andrei Pochepnya. It was obvious the tiger
was a cannibal; they should have killed it immediately. After Andrei was
killed, I thought we should catch those inspectors and beat the crap out of
them.”
When news of Pochepnya’s death reached Yuri Trush in Luchegorsk, on
the afternoon of the 15th, it upset him deeply. Even now, when he recalls
it, he must work fiercely to master his emotions. In Trush’s eyes, Andrei
Pochepnya was an “innocent,” the same age as his own son. As Andrei
had said himself, he had no quarrel with this tiger. Khomenko’s death, of
course, had been impossible to anticipate, and so, even, had Markov’s.
But Andrei’s was preventable, and this fact was like acid in the collective
wound. Trush couldn’t help revisiting that pivotal moment when he and
Lazurenko had that hot track back at Markov’s cabin: “The situation was
very difficult and tense,” Trush recalled. “What we saw there made quite
an impression on us: it was like a horror film; we were all in shock. But
had I seen the tiger at that moment, I am sure my hand would not have
trembled. I was certain that animal had to be killed.”
In the end, though, Trush had decided not to pursue it. That had been a
tough call and now he had the thankless task of being the go-between for
Inspection Tiger and the traumatized citizenry of Sobolonye. Even after
reinforcements arrived, Trush was still the point man—the name and face
everyone knew. Complicating matters was the fact that Trush and his men
had cited so many locals for poaching and possession of illegal firearms.
It put him in the impossible position of being both an adversary and a