forest; while doing a routine document check, he discovered that
Khomenko’s gun was registered not in his own name but in his father’s.
Trush was within his rights to confiscate the weapon, but he had
sympathy for the man’s obvious poverty and was impressed that all his
other papers were in order, so he let him go.
Not long afterward, Khomenko hitched a ride up the Bikin in a logging
truck. He wore fleece-lined boots that were much better suited to town
use and, over these, he wore a green forester’s uniform. He was hunting,
as many in the taiga do, with a double-barreled shotgun. In the
backwoods of Primorye, these relatively light firearms tend to be old—
sometimes very old—and of dubious quality; their killing range is
usually under a hundred yards, and they are accurate only to around
seventy yards, which is almost laughable by the standards of modern
hunting weapons. Khomenko’s gun was loaded with a single large ball in
the right barrel, and with lead shot in the left; this way he would be
prepared for any kind of game, be it big or small. Khomenko was
traveling alone; there was about ten inches of snow on the ground, and it
was forty degrees below zero.
Save for one’s own breaths and footfalls, the forest at this temperature
is as silent and still as outer space and, to the barefaced Khomenko, it
may have felt almost as cold. Nothing moved. The white trunks of birch
trees rose almost seamlessly from the snow. The grays and browns of oak
and poplar and smaller shrubs provided contrast and reference points, but
they also offered places to hide. Around midday, Khomenko ran across
the trail of a tiger; the tracks were recent and he decided to follow them.
There was a logging camp nearby, and when the watchman there saw
Khomenko coming, he came out to greet him. The two men talked for a
while and, when Khomenko expressed interest in the tiger tracks, the
watchman said he had heard some kind of a fight in the woods the
previous night. He thought the tiger might have had a run-in with a huge
wild boar that he had been seeing around the camp. Ussurian boars can
grow to enormous size, some weighing in excess of five hundred pounds;
they usually travel in herds, but this one was strangely solitary. It was so
big that the watchman had given it a nickname: GAZ-66, after a large,
ron
(Ron)
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