“Everyone was emotional. We all agreed that the tiger had to be
destroyed and the discussion boiled down to what would be the fastest
and most efficient way of doing it.”
Initially, Schetinin and his men had to decide whether to proceed with
an aerial hunt via helicopter, set cage traps, or stick with a more
traditional tracking operation. Within the intimate confines of the Kung
there existed a kind of democracy. Each participant had an opportunity to
voice his opinion, and pros and cons were weighed on their relative
merits. Even so, it wasn’t a long conversation. The helicopter hunt was
dismissed quickly, not just because of expense, but because of the dense
forest cover in the Bikin valley. The chances of spotting a tiger from the
air were slim, and even then it would have to be the right tiger, a difficult
determination to make from a hundred yards above the ground. Steel cage
traps didn’t make sense for this situation either; they were available, but
it would take days to truck them into the valley and put them in place.
Traps of this kind ran the added risk of catching the wrong tigers and
injuring them, and thus adding more dangerous tigers to the population.
Lazurenko recalled a trapping incident in which a tigress had fought so
hard to escape that she had broken her canines on the bars.
The options continued to narrow steadily: the terrain was too steep and
the ground cover too thick here for skis, or snowmobiles, both of which
were far better suited to river travel and the surrounding swamps.
Someone threw out the idea of a bulldozer, which went nowhere.
Weighing heavy on the men’s minds was the fact that, with every passing
day, the chances of another attack increased exponentially, and it was
soon agreed that the fastest and surest method for finding this tiger would
be to hunt him the same way the Yankovskys had more than a century
earlier—on foot with dogs. Such was the nature of this tiger and his
“operating environment” that, even though the people hunting him had
access to air and ground support, lethal weapons, radios, maps, and
centuries of accumulated hunting experience, they were forced to proceed
on the tiger’s terms. This wasn’t the fault of the hunters; it was because
effective predators excel at engineering situations that skew the odds in
their favor, and this is what the tiger had managed to do, even though he
ron
(Ron)
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