resource-rich and industry-poor: to this day, pelts gathered here are
shipped 1,500 miles west to Irkutsk, Siberia, for processing, just as they
were three hundred years ago. Irkutsk is located near Lake Baikal, which
once marked the western boundary of the Amur tiger’s range. Until about
a century ago, the provincial coat of arms featured a tiger bearing a sable
in its jaws.
In addition to being a robust singer and life of the party, Markov liked to
read, and Tamara Borisova remembers a number of his favorites,
including Arseniev’s Dersu the Trapper, but there was one in particular
that he couldn’t seem to get enough of. Based on a true story, the book
was called The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas. It was first
published in 1866 by the best-selling Irish-American author Captain
Mayne Reid, a journalist and adventurer who also fought in the Mexican-
American War. Reid’s works have been largely forgotten by English
readers, but they remained popular in Russia through the Brezhnev era.
Theodore Roosevelt and Vladimir Arseniev were both fans, and so was
Vladimir Nabokov, who, as a boy, particularly liked The Headless
Horseman, going so far as to translate part of it into twelve-syllable
alexandrine verses. Reid’s prose is thick, florid, and long-winded by
today’s standards and, in Russian, his books run to five and six hundred
pages. They combine Victorian romance with red-blooded action and
have titles like No Quarter! and Tracked to Death. Another was called
The Tiger-Hunter. Borisova couldn’t explain why The Headless
Horseman captured her husband’s imagination, but she recalls him
reading it at least three times. “Soon, you will know it by heart,” she told
him.
The 1980s were good years for Markov: the work was steady and he led
what some might call a balanced life. His wife adored him. But when he
was off hunting and trapping in the taiga, she worried. Sometimes, he
would be gone for weeks at a time. “He would come home and tell me he