As the men pored over the White Book, Andrei Pochepnya’s last
moments became as clear as if man and tiger alike had been taking notes:
the tiger had approached from the east—the direction of the road
workers’ camp—until he paused, catching wind or sound of Pochepnya.
Anticipating Pochepnya’s plans to walk downriver—perhaps by scenting
the bait in his traps—the tiger turned south, traveling parallel to
Pochepnya’s future path, just far enough from the river so that Pochepnya
failed to notice his tracks. Then the tiger made a loop into the forest,
effectively removing any trace of himself from the area, and came up
from behind (downstream), a standard stalking maneuver. From here, the
tiger spotted Tsepalev’s hovel; after exploring it and having his way with
it, much as he had done with Markov’s cabin and the road workers’
outhouse, the tiger found a comfortable, if oddly exposed, spot and
settled down to wait for the inevitable.
Standing by the tiger’s bed under that big spruce tree, it would have
been easy to see why Mikhail Dunkai believes that tigers can read
people’s minds and influence their thoughts. One had only to observe
Pochepnya’s tracks: they looked as if the tiger had him on a line and
simply reeled him in. Theory of mind is almost always discussed in the
context of human interaction and relationships, but tigers use a version of
it, too. The tiger’s theory of mind is not as sophisticated as ours, but it is
as sophisticated as it needs to be, and it is what enabled this tiger to
engineer a situation in which Andrei Pochepnya, a far more intelligent
animal, all but delivered himself into his jaws.
Sheriff Gorunov traced the impressions of the attack leaps. They seemed
awfully close together for such a large tiger: a sure sign, in his view, of
weakness or injury. A healthy tiger could have covered that distance in a
single bound. There was no doubt this tiger was impaired, but he may
have also understood from previous experience that there was no rush. It
is hard to articulate how overmatched Pochepnya was, how little effort a