ridge at the head of another stream called Svetly (Bright) Creek, there
was a cabin belonging to a neighbor named Grisha Tsibenko. In the Bikin
valley, people rarely lock their cabins; hospitality is one resource there is
still plenty of, and friends and travelers drop in all the time. Burukhin
believed that people could be staying up there. Furthermore, Andrei
Oximenko, the same man Schetinin had disarmed three days earlier, was
known to hunt in that area, and he was nowhere to be found.
By now, the tiger had not rested or eaten well in a week. This would
not have been quite so serious had it been a different season, but the
temperature was ranging from twenty-five to forty-five below zero. The
amount of meat required to keep something the size of a tiger as much as
150 degrees hotter than the world around it is prodigious—on the order of
forty pounds per day. Between his injuries, the brutal cold, the hunger
gnawing in his gut, and the hunters’ steady pursuit, the tiger was being
pressured from all sides. In his compromised state, he also ran the risk of
being challenged by another tiger and either killed or driven from the
area. But at that moment, as Lazurenko conferred with Burukhin and
radioed the tiger’s probable destination back to Trush, meat would have
been foremost in his thoughts. Winter was only just getting started in the
taiga and, without a significant kill, the tiger’s thermal clock was in grave
danger of running down. He could freeze to death before he starved.
In a sense, Markov had succeeded in bringing the tiger down to his
level: now, the tiger was a poacher, too. In order to feed himself, he was
once again going to have to violate his own laws. Burukhin had been
right: the tiger was headed straight for Tsibenko’s cabin. When the tiger
arrived there, sometime in the early dark of December 21, it scouted the
place for dogs, a meat cache, the owner. Failing to find any of these, he
started knocking things off the cabin’s outer walls. When he got to a set
of large bowls, he chewed them to scrap metal. From his experiences at
Markov’s cabin, the road workers’ camp, and Tsepalev’s shelter on the
Takhalo, the tiger had learned many things about the world of men and,
here, he brought them all to bear. When the possibilities of the cabin’s
exterior had been exhausted, the tiger located a window and forced his
way in.
ron
(Ron)
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