think carefully before they do any harm to a tiger.”
But when Field Group Taiga got the call from Schetinin, Pionka’s
father was far upriver trapping sable and could not advise his son on what
to do. As an inspector, Pionka had a responsibility to his team and to his
community, and he had to reconcile this with his responsibilities to his
father and to his people’s beliefs. Fortunately, there was an escape clause
when it came to tigers: god or no god, there were limits to what his
subjects had to endure. It was clear that this tiger was an amba in its most
destructive manifestation and, when such a creature began killing people,
blood vengeance was an appropriate response. The same went for human
murderers, and this form of justice was practiced by the Udeghe at least
into the 1930s.
Depending on the situation, a hero, a shaman, or other clan members
might have intervened in a case like this, but such events were extremely
rare and any precedents had receded into the realm of folklore. In 1997,
there was one surviving shamanka living in Krasny Yar and, though she
had the all-important drum, the serpent belt hung with cone-shaped bells,
and even a tiger effigy, she was extremely elderly and this situation was
beyond her spiritual writ. But there was also the feeling in Krasny Yar
that this wasn’t an Udeghe problem. “If tigers liked eating people, they
would eat us all,” said Pionka’s neighbor Vasily Dunkai, who is himself
an aspiring shaman. “This tiger knew who injured him. The tiger is a very
clever predator with a very big brain; he can tell apart who is darker and
who is lighter, plus every man has his own distinct smell. That’s why he
didn’t eat my dad [Ivan] or my brother [Mikhail]. He ate the people who
harmed him: he ate Russians.”
Vasily Dunkai had a point: even though there were plenty of Udeghe
and Nanai in the Bikin valley, the tiger’s targets had, thus far, all been
Russian. And this posed another problem for Yuri Pionka: by entering
into this conflict, he risked drawing that dangerous energy onto himself
and his family. The story of Uza and the egule offered a possible solution,
but no one alive had what it took to master such a creature the way Uza
had. However, since the days of Uza, a new and powerful magic had
become available, and it had done more to change the relationship
ron
(Ron)
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