habits; follow it in order to get a feel for where it is going; and then, in
effect, read ahead and wait for the prey to arrive. End of story.
As far as the tiger was concerned, Andrei Pochepnya was simply one
more episode—like a character in a murder mystery who is introduced
and dispatched solely for the purpose of driving the plot forward. Who
would be next was a question of some interest to the tiger, but of even
greater interest to Trush and Schetinin, who could not allow it to be
answered. Ultimately, there was only one way to prevent it. “For a week I
had been thinking about it,” said Schetinin, recalling the first stage of the
hunt. “I was trying to think like an injured tiger, trying to imagine where
an injured tiger was most likely to go.”
A homicide detective would have been doing the same thing, but the
detective operates in a world of coherent social codes where all but the
most deranged understand there will be consequences. The tiger’s world,
by contrast, is not only amoral but peculiarly consequence-free, and this
—the atavistic certainty that there is nothing out there more lethal than
itself—is the apex predator’s greatest weakness. The coyote is a gifted
hunter, but it knows that if it fails to take proper precautions it can easily
become prey. Even leopards, arguably the deadliest cats on earth,
understand that they hunt on a continuum. A tiger, on the other hand, will,
with sufficient provocation, charge a moving car. This doesn’t mean that
a tiger will not learn to be cautious in the face of certain threats, but these
hazards typically have more to do with competition than with predation.
Trush and his men needed to capitalize on this inborn confidence, even
though doing so ensured that conflict was inevitable: once the tiger
understood that he was being hunted, his response would not be to flee
deeper into the taiga, it would be to confront his pursuers and liquidate
them. The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and
you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.
In February 2002, a former member of Inspection Tiger named Anatoli