is what had kept him from heading directly to the village. Further
complicating matters was the fact that a group of hunters from Sobolonye
had gone out to search for the missing man themselves. Markov’s friend
Sasha Dvornik was among them: “We all went searching for him,” he
told the filmmaker Sasha Snow in 2004. “When he was still out there the
second day, we thought the tiger had eaten him.”
Trush was of the opinion that the tiger wouldn’t backtrack on himself
and felt strongly that the teams should stay focused on Sobolonye and the
tiger. But Schetinin wasn’t taking any chances and he ordered Trush’s
team to go back to Siptsy and make sure Novikov had been accounted for.
The following morning, December 19, while Lazurenko’s team picked up
the tiger’s trail, Trush’s team, along with Schetinin, drove over to Siptsy.
“There was an old logging road there,” Trush recalled, “and we saw a
truck with three men inside. It turned out that the man had been lost in
the forest and spent the night out there.”
“He was walking like he was wounded,” Dvornik recalled, “falling
every fifty yards. He just had no strength left.”
It wasn’t clear whether Novikov was truly lost, drunk, or both, but
there is no doubt he was lucky and, after his friends recovered him, he did
not leave the village again. Trush continued on with Schetinin, following
logging roads in a great circle around Sobolonye. They wanted to make
sure the tiger was still in the immediate area, and to see if any other
tigers might be in there with him. “We covered a large territory, about a
hundred miles,” said Trush, “and we determined that there were five
tigers within that circle. But the tiger we were looking for was in the
center.”
This confused matters somewhat. No one had assumed the tiger would
be the only one in the area, but they hadn’t counted on there being that
many others. None, however, had paws the size of the tiger they were
seeking. Although no one could be positive, Trush believed that this area,
large as it was, could be the tiger’s home territory, and that the
neighboring cubs and females were there by his grace.
During the 19th and the 20th, the pattern of stalking and driving
repeated itself, and during that time the tracking teams occasionally lost
ron
(Ron)
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