the list of carefully crafted questions and scrawled SHOW NO FEAR across
the blank side. Smirnov approaches tigers the same way he approached
hooligans in the back alleys of Moscow. “An animal is an animal,” he
said simply. “A predator can smell fear very well. If you show fear,
you’re finished.
“I have four tigers in my hunting area right now,” he added, by way of
example. “I know them by their faces, and they certainly know me. Well,
last year [2006], the younger female thought I was in her way, so she
wanted to mess with my psyche a little bit. She started following me all
the time, growling at me; she tried to grab my dog. Well, I went fishing
in the early autumn; the bushes still had leaves, and my dog went ahead
of me. Just as I was approaching a bend in the trail, the dog came running
back; I looked up and saw the tigress flying through the air about fifteen
feet away. She was after my dog, and I threw myself at her, swearing and
trying to smack her with my fishing rod. She changed direction in midair
and landed. I tried again to smack her on the nose and just missed her.
She ran away and, since then, not only has she stopped showing up at the
cabin, she keeps her distance from me. She was trying to get me to leave
the area, but when we got face-to-face and she saw that I was not afraid of
her, she started avoiding me.
“Over time, I realized that if you have accumulated more anger inside
yourself than a tiger has in him, the tiger will be afraid of you. Really,
quite literally so. When a tiger is coming at you, you can gauge very well
by his facial expression what he wants from you. You can judge by his
eyes and ears. One cannot read bears like that. So, a tiger is coming
toward you: if you see that his ears are down, that’s not a good sign. Then
you have to look him in the eye with all the rage you can muster and the
tiger will stop and back off. You don’t shout or scream—just look him in
the eye, but with such hate that he would turn around and go away. After
one, two, three times, they leave you alone.”
Smirnov may as well have been quoting Henry V:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,^2
Then imitate the action of the tiger;