desperation, but also extraordinary presence of mind: Markov died while
trying to fit a small, slippery shotgun shell into a narrow gun barrel, in
the dark, at thirty below zero—with a tiger bearing down on him from ten
yards away.
Today, only the tiger remains. When Vladimir Schetinin returned to
Vladivostok after the hunt, he delivered the tiger’s skin to the Arseniev
Museum, which occupies a historic building downtown, on Aleutskaya.
There, the tiger has been stuffed and put on display for all to see. Safely
contained in a glass case, it has been caught forever, out of its element
and visible to all.
Yuri Trush hoped, at the very least, that these events could serve as a kind
of cautionary tale to deter careless hunters and would-be poachers; if
laws and warnings failed, he reasoned, maybe graphic images would get
the point across. “During the investigation, I sent video footage of
Khomenko, Markov, and Pochepnya to the local TV station,” he said.
“They aired it, and there was a lot of negative feedback. People called
saying, ‘Why are you broadcasting such horrors?’ They thought it was
some kind of video montage; they didn’t understand that the footage was
real. In my opinion, people who hunt—who have guns—really needed to
see those images. They have to think about things like that.”
There seems to be no question that, in Primorye, human-tiger relations
have entered a new era in which the potential for scenarios like Markov’s
is increasing. Vasily Solkin attributes this to four factors: a simultaneous
increase in the availability of powerful hunting rifles, Japanese four-
wheel-drive vehicles, and access via logging roads, combined with a
breakdown in traditional hunting values. “The biggest problem for a tiger
these days,” Solkin explained, “is the New Russians who buy good
foreign guns with good optical devices, who trample on hunting rules,
written or traditional, and who hunt without leaving their jeeps, firing at
any animal without even bothering to check whether they killed it or not.