when it was virtually roadless and thick with game. “Children who are
born here are like wolf cubs,” Shibnev explained. “Our parents would go
to work, and we would roam the river. Back then, everyone used to get
around in boats.”
Tigers were seldom seen in those days, but Shibnev became familiar
with Nanai beliefs about them almost by osmosis: “The tiger was
considered a protector, a just animal,” he said. “If you were to hurt or kill
one, it would take revenge against you and your family. There was a story
about a man who killed a tiger and then his entire family died. It was
perceived that the tiger’s spirit avenged itself on that family.” It wasn’t
until the late 1960s, when the first major logging road was pushed
through the Bikin valley, that Shibnev saw a tiger for himself. “It was a
feeling of joy and exaltation at the same time,” he recalled. “It was a
sense, not so much of fear, but of respect or awe. I thought it was the czar
of all animals.”
From childhood, Shibnev had wanted to become a forest ranger, but his
parents talked him out of it, and it wasn’t until 1992 that he was finally
able to fulfill his dream. It was in this capacity that he ran into Markov
for the first time: “He was a poacher, but I kind of liked him,” Shibnev
recalled. “He was reasonable. Later, when he decided to move to the taiga
on a more or less permanent basis, that’s when I heard he wanted to
poach tigers.”
For reasons that remain unexplained, Field Group Taiga had been
notified of the Markov investigation on December 6, the same day
Inspection Tiger arrived, but never formally included in it. “We were
alerted,” explained Field Group Taiga’s leader, Yevgeny Smirnov, “and
we sat on our rucksacks for the entire day [waiting to be picked up], but
in the end they took a police officer with them. People who’d never seen
a tiger in their lives ended up working on that case. They were walking
around in the forest with pistols like they were hunting a criminal. Had
they come to me right away, it would have become obvious immediately
that it was not a tigress [as Trush had originally thought] but a tiger.”
To a man, everyone in Field Group Taiga saw Inspection Tiger as
outsiders—poachers, as it were, on their territory. One of Inspection
ron
(Ron)
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