19

Mountains   are the more    beautiful

After   the sun has gone    down

And it  is

Twilight.   Boy,

Watch   out for tigers, now.

Let’s   not

Wander  about   in  the field.

YUN SǒN-DO  (1587–1671),

“Sunset”^1

HERDED TOGETHER IN THE DARK LIKE BISON,

WOODSTOVES BLAZING, the Kungs seemed like conveyances from
another age. Just down the road was the village, still but for the chimney
smoke and the anxious pacing of the dogs. Behind locked doors, their
owners’ lives were suspended, minds awash in unsettling thoughts.
Meanwhile, in the river below, fish hung motionless in the dark,
countering the current beneath two feet of ice, and finding in that dense
and steady resistance a perfect equilibrium. But there was more down
there besides—subtle disturbances passing through on their serpentine
journey out of the mountains: Takhalo to Bikin, Ussuri to Amur, and on
to the ice-choked bottleneck of Tartar Strait, past Sakhalin to the open
sea. Along with Andrei Pochepnya’s rifle was the rippled memory of a
tiger Sasha Dvornik once sought to disorient and drown with his
motorboat. A standard maneuver in the river poacher’s repertoire, it
works like a charm with deer. But deer can’t leap like dolphins from deep
water, and it seems that tigers can.
Up above, the world was frozen hard and waiting. And through it came