The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

knew then that she’d got him. Right there, that fucking carrion eater’s got
her meat-head down, growling over him. So I stood for a little while, and
then I slowly turned around. I was thinking, the main thing was not to
start running because then she would run after me—eat me.”
Onofrecuk was unarmed. He made his way back to the cabin and
started a fire in the cold stove. He was in shock. “My head became
empty,” he recalled. “Like a vacuum. You know, it was hard to
understand—he was my friend, after all. So many years out there
together.”
He sat in Markov’s cabin, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, one
after the other, for a long time. It took him three tries before he could
summon the nerve to leave the cabin to go for help. Onofrecuk was ten
years younger than Markov and saw him as something of a mentor. While
he was fond of reading, he was not ambitious and he lacked the skill and
patience required for beekeeping or fur trapping. He was, primarily, a
meat hunter and fisherman—often under the supervision of Markov—and
he lived day to day. They shared the cabin and fought like brothers, but
they always made up. Markov had been his best friend.
Nonetheless, that night, it fell to their mutual friend, Danila Zaitsev, to
tell Tamara Borisova what had happened to her husband in the forest.
Markov had not been home in nearly a month and Borisova was eager to
see him. “The scariest thing was telling his wife,” recalled Onofrecuk. “I
was afraid to go to her house by myself, so I asked Zaitsev to come with
me. But I couldn’t go in. I stayed on the road. ‘Go,’ I told him. ‘Tell her.’
Because the image of him there—it was like I’d just seen him.”
Danila Zaitsev—skewed nose, furrowed brow, penetrating eye—is a
tough and steady man, and he went in to face Borisova alone. He tried to
be as gentle as he could, but who knows how to say such things? “I
wanted to choose the words carefully,” Zaitsev explained. “I told her that
a tiger had attacked him and, at first, she didn’t understand. She thought
he had survived.”
So Zaitsev tried again while Onofrecuk stood listening on the dark and
frozen road. He knew when Zaitsev told her by the screaming.
Borisova seemed to go out of her mind then: she was a maelstrom,