barking; we could smell the smoke from the chimneys. We were very
close—two or three hundred yards away. The tiger stopped, listened,
sniffed, and looked directly at the town.” And then, inexplicably, the tiger
turned away. “Maybe it was us,” Trush said. “Maybe he heard us coming
into the village and retreated because of that.”
The tracks bore off to the west, skirting the village, but it had grown
too dark to follow them. There was every reason to suppose the tiger was
doing reconnaissance, trying to determine the most advantageous point of
entry. “We couldn’t be sure he wasn’t coming back,” said Trush. “We
figured he was probably going to hunt dogs because he’d been hungry for
a long time.”
The tiger had arrived at midwinter, and the coming nights would be the
longest of the year. The moon was waning, in its last quarter, and its
paltry light cast shadows that were ragged and confused. They had the
same fragmenting effect on the gardens and barnyards of the village as
stripes have on a tiger: nothing held together but the blocky forms of the
houses themselves. Under such conditions a tiger could pass as formless
as a ghost, leaving only tracks to betray it. In the village, there was no
sign of human activity whatsoever. “As soon as it got dark, I got everyone
inside,” Dvornik said later. “Water, firewood—we left that for the
daytime. Nobody moved.”
Fear had hardened into certainty: the tiger was among them, hunting
beneath their very windows. In response, the people of Sobolonye
battened themselves down like the Danes at Heorot braced for Grendel’s
final assault. At midnight, the generator was shut down, and then there
was no sound but the dogs: a series of shrill and urgent calls and
responses that ricocheted between the houses, each one trailing a faint
echo behind it like a sonic shadow. Together, these sentinels formed a
kind of predator positioning system: when one of them reached a certain
pitch, or stopped transmitting altogether, dogs and humans alike would
know, if only for a moment, where the tiger was. But this ancient and
time-tested network of alarms was only that; it was no defense against the
tiger. The night belonged to him. The dogs could bark and growl all they
liked, but in the end they were helpless in the face of this creature they
ron
(Ron)
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