the tiger’s trail and found the tracks of another. “The tracking took an
awful lot of time,” said Trush. “The snow was deep. His wound was
restraining him, and the dragging of his right paw on the snow got bigger
and worse. The tiger got tired and so did we—that was the whole idea.”
“He always walked,” recalled Burukhin, who rejoined the hunt on the
19th. “He walked and walked, but he did not walk normally. He was
making small jumps all the time. He never lay down.” Burukhin wasn’t
sure if the tiger knew he was being hunted: “I don’t know,” he said. “He
could not tell us what he knew and what he didn’t.”
Pionka believed the tiger was always too far ahead of them to know he
was being tracked, but Trush wasn’t so sure. “We would be checking the
tracks fifteen to twenty times a day,” he said, “and, over the course of a
day, the distance between us and the tiger would decrease. I don’t doubt
that at times the tiger would have heard us, but I don’t think he was afraid
of us.”
Ever since leaving the Pochepnya site on the 15th, the tiger remained
in the high country, hunting behind the village. Perhaps he was trying to
return to his old hunting methods and prey, or he may have been staying
close to Sobolonye in the hope of discovering a stray hunter. As
circuitous as his route was, he got closer to Sobolonye every day. On the
evening of the 20th, Lazurenko’s team reported that the tiger had crossed
First Creek, which ran just north of the village. There was sign of a small
boar herd there and the tiger had been hunting them—again, without
success. However, a second, smaller tiger was in the area, too, and it had
managed to catch a young one. Lazurenko and his men found the young
boar’s remains with the wounded tiger’s prints overlaying those of the
other tiger. Perhaps he had run the smaller tiger off. In any case, he had
eaten what was left of the boar, but it wasn’t nearly enough to sustain
him. Meanwhile, there was Sobolonye, barely a quarter of a mile away.
They continued following the tracks, and they led directly to the village.
This was the moment Trush had been fearing all along. The teams
immediately relocated the Kungs and notified the residents, but there was
no need to: the dogs had already sounded the alarm.
“We could see Sobolonye,” said Trush. “We could hear the dogs
ron
(Ron)
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