“I’d say to them that they were wrong,” said Trush. “ ‘The tiger doesn’t
care if you’re only out there picking cones.’ Some kept quiet, others said,
‘God will be merciful.’ And they carried on.”
In this way, armed with talismanic prayers, the villagers’ survival
strategy had much in common with those of Korean peasants a century
before. When Schetinin encountered an armed man named Andrei
Oximenko from the neighboring village of Yasenovie, he confiscated his
weapon on the spot, promising to return it only after the tiger had been
killed. He then urged Oximenko to go home and stay there, which he
didn’t. These were headaches Trush and Schetinin didn’t need. Each
additional body in the forest was like another wild card, making the
aggregate situation that much more dangerous. It also raised the question
of how Inspection Tiger should be allocating its resources—trying to
protect people who refused to cooperate with them, or staying focused on
the tiger.
That night, Trush, Schetinin, and the others went over all this in the
Kung. The next tracking shift would be Lazurenko’s; Burukhin would be
off that day because of Andrei’s funeral. On the morning of the 18th,
Lazurenko’s team headed up into the hills behind Sobolonye to pick up
the trail. Meanwhile, the second funeral procession in less than two
weeks made its way down the road to the cemetery. When it is extremely
cold there is an almost frangible quality to the air; even the trees seem
frozen hard as crystal, so sounds move differently, becoming sharper and
more percussive. There, at the gravesite, surrounded by a hatchwork of
forest, the people of Sobolonye gathered close around that hard dark hole.
Friends and family threw in ceremonial handfuls of dirt and, when they
landed on the lid of that all but empty box, those clods of frozen earth
rang like drumbeats through the woods.
Sobolonye was on its knees. To make matters worse, another man was
missing. A villager named Kostya Novikov had gone out a day earlier in
the direction of Siptsy Creek, and hadn’t returned. Siptsy was the next
watershed over from Third Creek, where Trush’s team had tracked the
tiger on the first day. Given how close he was, the tiger could easily have
circled back if he had picked up sound or scent of someone. Perhaps this
ron
(Ron)
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