attention, appeared content and relaxed until he spotted Trush, at which
point his demeanor changed suddenly. Liuty fixed his eyes on him and
then, with no warning or apparent motive, he growled, accelerated to a
run, and leaped at the fence as if trying to clear it. It was too high, and
five hundred pounds of tiger piled into the wire, striking it with so much
force that the fence bowed outward ominously, directly in front of Trush.
Trush recoiled and fell over backward as if he had been knocked down
solely by the projected energy of the tiger. Snow was nearby and went to
help him up. “His face was ashen,” he recalled.
Remembering the incident, Trush touched his chest and said, “I felt
cold in here.”
There was no obvious explanation for why this well-fed, well-
socialized tiger would do this, or why it would have picked Trush out of a
group. “Maybe some sort of a bio field exists,” Trush suggested
afterward. “Maybe tigers can feel some connection through the cosmos,
or have some common language. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”
Such an interpretation would not have surprised anyone in the Dunkai
or Pionka clans, and it is one of the principal reasons those who maintain
traditional beliefs avoid tigers. Lubovna Passar, a fifty-year-old Nanai
psychologist who uses a combination of shamanic practice and Western
psychology to treat patients addicted to drugs and alcohol, describes it as
“a centuries-old taboo that’s held in the genes.”
Yuri Pionka was concerned about this kind of postmortem fallout as
well. While skinning the tiger in Sobolonye, he had hit a blood vessel that
caused some of the tiger’s blood to spatter on him. He reacted, at the
time, as if he had been burned with hot embers, and he used his knife
blade to scrape the blood off as quickly as possible. “I can say one thing
about the tiger,” said Pionka, “he is definitely a very smart animal. He
has an intellect, and he will go after a specific person who offended him.
My father came back [from upriver] for the New Year and, when he
learned that I’d been involved in hunting a tiger, he said to me, ‘Throw
away the clothes you were wearing, and throw away the knife you used to
skin him.’ ”
That the tiger was physically dead didn’t seem to matter. In the elder
ron
(Ron)
#1