invited; they didn’t have the right kind of guns; the guns they had were
illegal and would have been confiscated; that they couldn’t hunt the tiger
themselves because it was a protected species. There were grains of truth
in all of these claims, but underlying them was a lack of collective
morale, distrust of authority, and an ingrained passivity that is one of the
enduring legacies of State-enforced disempowerment. But one cannot
discount the villagers’ well-founded fear and common sense. This tiger
was not some geriatric livestock killer; he was a highly motivated man-
eater that weighed as much as three men and seemed to specialize in
killing hunters just like themselves.
In the end, the only villager to step forward and offer his services was
Andrei Pochepnya’s best friend, Denis Burukhin. Burukhin’s gun was
illegal, like just about everyone else’s, but this didn’t stop him, and Trush
wisely let it go, not least because he sympathized deeply with Burukhin’s
wish to avenge his friends. From a team-building point of view,
Burukhin, young as he was, was a fortuitous addition: not only was he a
war veteran with more high-stakes shooting experience than most of the
older men on the team, but he knew this stretch of river inside and out.
Furthermore, as a friend of both victims, he was highly motivated to track
this tiger down.
With the checkpoints in place, Inspection Tiger took a head count,
trying to determine who from the village might still be in the taiga. There
was a real urgency to this task because the tiger was doing the same
thing. The tiger clearly understood—had probably always understood—
the relationship between humans and their cabins, but they had a new
significance now, a new place in the tiger’s umwelt. Until two weeks ago,
human settlements, which advertised themselves from far away with their
outhouses, woodstoves, vehicles, and barking dogs, would have been
places to avoid. Now, despite a lifetime of training and a virtual eternity
of instinct, the tiger was actively seeking them out.
On two out of three occasions the tiger had experienced success by
waiting near a cabin—like a cat at a mousehole only on a grand and
sinister scale. His terrible patience had paid off: two kills out of three
attempts is a phenomenal success rate for a tiger. This tiger, disabled in
ron
(Ron)
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