And yet, as counterintuitive as it may seem, the practice of gathering may offer deeper insight into our relationships with big cats than hunting ever could. In the course of their scavenging experiments, Schaller and Lowther observed a phenomenon that would have had far greater implications for early humans than chance discoveries of abandoned meat: “All of the seven lion groups that we encountered while we were on foot fled when we were at distances of 80 to 300 meters.”*7 If a pride of lions—lions—will flee at the sight of two unarmed human beings, what would they do if approached by a party of five or ten or twenty who were shouting, waving sticks, and throwing stones? Conceivably, such a group, emboldened by experience and empowered by growing brains and advancing technology, could have eaten their way across the Serengeti for hundreds of millennia without lifting a spear. Taking this a step further, imagine the self-concept of such creatures: barely five feet tall with neither claws nor fangs and a clear understanding of their potential as prey who were, nonetheless, able to intimidate and steal from the deadliest creatures in their world more or less at will. Early humans, pre-fire, may well have been Paleolithic Wizards of Oz—masters of illusion and psyops who eventually, amazingly, willed their “impersonations” of superiority into fact. If only during daylight hours.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the author of The Tribe of Tiger and The Old Way, is one of a privileged few who have been able to test this theory in situ. Thomas had the good fortune to spend extended periods of time among the Kalahari Bushmen before Boer and Tswana farmers subjugated and settled them. In 1950, when the Marshall family expedition arrived, the central Kalahari ecosystem was intact. Bushmen were the only humans around, and they had been living much as the Marshalls found them for millennia. For the !Kung Bushmen of the central Kalahari, it could be said that the Paleolithic period did not truly end until about 1965. Thomas was nineteen when she and her family first arrived there and, while her ballerina mother, Lorna Marshall, fashioned herself into a world-class ethnographer, and her eighteen-year-old brother, John, began work on what was to become a classic documentary film, she observed and wrote.
The Bushmen they lived beside and traveled with were small people, lightly clothed and armed, whose lives were structured around a series of dependable waterholes. Their diet was surprisingly varied, running the gamut from melons to meat, and one of their staples was the mongongo nut, which, like the Korean pine nut, was both plentiful and durable. Hunting was done most often with poisoned arrows, but, because this poison (one of the deadliest on earth) takes time to act, each hunt necessitated two rounds of tracking—the first to find the game, and the second to find the game again, once it had been shot. The process could take days, and sometimes a hunting party would arrive at their kill only to find that lions had gotten to it first. What struck Thomas was how these hunters dealt with such daunting competition: rather than abandoning the animal, or shooting arrows at the lions, the hunters would approach them calmly, telling them that this animal wasn’t theirs and that they needed to go away. If the lions resisted these firm but collegial requests, a couple of clods of dirt might be tossed in their general direction. That was all it took for these hunters, who were in some cases greatly outnumbered by lions, to reclaim their prey. The absence of drama might be a letdown for the modern reader, but it sheds a bright and different light on our historic relations with legendary predators.
What is important to keep in mind here is that everyone involved had known one another, effectively, “forever.” The lions had been raised—for millennia—with an awareness of Bushmen, and the Bushmen had been brought up with an understanding of lions. Each was part of the other’s larger community and whatever imbalances may have existed were calibrated long before the Pyramids were even imagined. In other words, there was a culture in place—what Thomas describes as “a web of socially transmitted behaviours”—and all participating parties had been habituated to their particular roles.9 For the Bushmen, one of these was a birdlike caution: they always watched their back; they didn’t wander around at night, the desert predator’s preferred time of operation; and they kept a fire going throughout the night. Constant vigilance—that is, awareness of the possibility of becoming prey—was a way of life. In this way, the Bushmen treated the desert much as we treat a dangerous road: metaphorically (and metaphysically) speaking, they knew when it was safe to cross. “The lions around here don’t harm people,” a senior hunter named ≠Toma explained to Thomas.10 “Where lions aren’t hunted, they aren’t dangerous. As for us, we live in peace with them.”
If one were to substitute “tigers” for “lions,” these words could have been spoken by Dersu Uzala, Ivan Dunkai, or, for that matter, Dmitri Pikunov and any resident of Sobolonye.
The Bushmen’s détente with the Kalahari lions, as ancient as it may have been, was still tenuous in the moment, and close encounters would often crackle with a primal electricity. “Beyond our fire were their shining eyes,” wrote Thomas on one occasion, “which were so high above the ground that we thought at first we were seeing donkeys.”11 The !Kung word for lion—n!i—was used as carefully as a god’s and was seldom uttered in the daytime (why summon the beast when it is safely asleep?). Some individuals appeared to have supernatural relationships with these animals, and it was generally believed that werelions stalked the desert floor: some could leap enormous distances or cause an eclipse by covering the sun with a paw. The Bushmen, like the indigenous peoples of Primorye, lived among their gods. During an encounter with a lion, a Bushman would refer to it respectfully as “Big Lion,” or “Old Lion,” just as the Udeghe (and Manchus) referred to the tiger as “Old Man,” or “Old Tiger.” In Chinese, “old tiger” translates to laohu () which is still the Chinese name for tiger.
That these beliefs and relationships are ancient and time-tested is without doubt, and the Paleolithic cave paintings at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in the Ardèche valley of southern France illustrate this vividly. These images, which were made in charcoal and ocher more than thirty thousand years ago, are twice as old as their more famous counterparts at Lascaux. They are noteworthy, not just for their startling accuracy but for their emphasis on big cats: Chauvet contains seventy-three confirmed images of lions, more than all the other known European caves combined. Cave lions were bigger than any living cat and yet what is clear from these works is that the artists who rendered them spent a lot of time observing these creatures in an uninhibited state, apparently from very close range. The attention to detail—down to the patterning of whisker spots and the depiction of subtle but specific leonine behaviors—translates to the present day. And yet, alongside these strictly literal representations one can see a lion with hooves instead of paws, and a possibly shamanic proto-Minotaur, or werebison. Seen together, these lavishly illuminated walls resemble the pages of a protean narrative form in which Beowulf, The Book of Kells, and National Geographic were elided into a cascading, fire-powered zootrope. While it is only natural to be impressed by such modern-seeming feats of artistic skill and interpretive nuance, one could argue that it is also condescending. After all, these artist/hunter/storyteller/shamans were Homo sapiens, too: our direct ancestors, equipped with the same brains and the same bodies. Only the knowledge base and circumstances differed.
These so-called cavemen, who lived much as the so-called Bushmen did in the 1950s, also shared the same motives and opportunities for observation and, no doubt, many of the same emotions (some Bushman groups made wall art as well). Thirty millennia is not that long on the Paleolithic scale of time, and there is no reason to suppose—other things being equal—that our relations with big cats would have changed much. Based on the accumulated evidence, it is not a stretch to suggest that the Chauvet cave artists, the Kalahari Bushmen, and the indigenous peoples of Primorye all perceived their enormous feline neighbors in similar ways: as fearsome, fascinating, supernaturally potent beings who charged their lives with meaning, and sometimes provided meat. Predation appeared to be a secondary concern
.
But in the Bikin valley, in 1997, this primordial understanding had been disrupted, and the risk of attack had become paramount. This situation was so out of phase with the norm for this region that it led Trush’s teammate, Sasha Lazurenko, to pose the following question over Markov’s remains: “Why,” he wondered aloud, “is the tiger so angry at him?”
* “Ethnic Russian” refers to the country’s Slavic majority, which accounts for about 80 percent of the population and tends to be concentrated in western, or “European,” Russia.
* “Amba” is a Tungus word from a language family that includes the Manchu, the Udeghe, and the Nanai, among others. Its original meaning is similar to “Great.” The Manchus (as in “Manchuria”) invaded Beijing in 1644 and ruled China under the Qing Dynasty until 1911. In some cases, they used “Amba” to denote the titular rank of a leader.
* With a few exceptions like the Inuit, and the whalers of Lamalera in Indonesia, fresh meat has typically been more of a supplement than a staple in the hominid diet.
* Schaller later speculated that this may have been due to the lions’ prior experience of being hunted by Masai tribesmen.7
10
Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.
NIKOLAI GOGOL, Dead Souls1
THE FIRST ANSWER TO LAZURENKO’S QUESTION ARRIVED ABRUPTLY from six feet away: “Who the hell knows? Why are you asking?”
It was Markov’s good friend Andrei Onofreychuk, and there was an edge in his voice. It would have been natural to chalk up such a brusque reply to frayed nerves and exhaustion, but a suspicious person might hear more in it. For one, it seemed almost too quick—more deflection than information. Given that it came from the same person who had found and hidden Markov’s illegal gun, it appeared that Lazurenko had touched a nerve of some kind. He didn’t pursue it, but the general feeling among Trush’s team on Saturday the 6th was that Markov’s friends had closed ranks. At the site of the attack, visible to all, remained the clear impression of Markov’s rifle in the snow, but no one seemed to know where it was. Neither Danila Zaitsev nor Sasha Dvornik was formally interviewed at the time, but Onofreychuk was—by Trush. Onofreychuk’s statement, though brief, was coherent and consistent within its limited scope, describing his discovery of the attack the previous morning, his aural encounter with the tiger, his paralysis in Markov’s cabin followed by his terrified foot journey to a nearby logging base where he sought help.
The logging base lay two miles southeast of Markov’s cabin through the forest. It bore a strong resemblance to a Gypsy encampment, being little more than a collection of portable wooden caravans like Markov’s, only with the wheels still attached. An early-twentieth-century American logger would have recognized it immediately and would have considered it primitive even then—what that generation called a “haywire outfit.” The owner, Pyotr Zhorkin, was a bluff and opinionated drinker who wouldn’t survive his fifties. His pay schedule was whimsical, and in this and other ways his business style exemplified post-perestroika private enterprise. Half a dozen men were based at the camp, where they worked twelve-hour shifts, twenty days on and five days off. Though they were paid literally millions of rubles, their wages barely covered groceries. Markov’s young friend Denis Burukhin had tried working there but quit after a month, realizing he could do better on his own living off the forest. Logging for Zhorkin made the 1980s look like the good old days.
The men there were all refugees from the national logging company; they were familiar with tigers and they knew Onofreychuk, but they had never seen him look the way he did when he showed up in camp shortly after noon on Friday, December 5. He was pale—still in shock. “I felt like I was dreaming,” he said as he went through the motions of getting help. But he was also strangely secretive. The men were eating lunch in the cook wagon when Onofreychuk arrived: “He came and called me outside,” recalled a powerful, barrel-chested faller named Sergei Luzgan whose otherwise perfect nose veers off at a startling angle. “He was acting kind of odd: he said, ‘Don’t mention this to anyone.’ Well, if someone’s been killed by a tiger, what’s there to hide? It’s not a normal reaction, and I said, ‘What the fuck do you mean “Don’t mention it to anyone”? A man is dead, for fuck’s sake. He’s not a dog—you can’t just throw dirt on him and forget about it. The police will have to be called. There’s no way around it.’ ”
Realizing there was no hope of keeping it quiet, Onofreychuk relented. Luzgan found Zhorkin and, after absorbing his visitor’s barely credible story, the three of them, along with another logger named Evgeny Sakirko, piled into Zhorkin’s little Niva four-by-four and drove back to Markov’s cabin. Sakirko was a faller like Luzgan, and his face shone with a hot, alcoholic rubescence behind a nose that had been crushed and stitched back together like a gunnysack. Because of the logging camp’s remoteness and the presence of both tigers and game, there were rifles on hand and the men brought a couple along. Markov’s weapon—wherever it was—was of no use because, at that point, all the ammunition for it was still strapped to his body.
When the men arrived at the cabin they announced themselves to the tiger with gunshots and shouts. One man found a pipe and started banging on it. Their entrance bore an uncanny resemblance to the hunters’ theme in Peter and the Wolf: somehow, Prokofiev correctly intuited the sonic melding of aggression and fear. Like this, the four men made their way into the forest, starting at the trampled patch of blood-spattered snow and following the broad, shallow drag trail that led away from it. Far more impressive to the men, though, were the symmetrical paw prints that lined each side: the tiger, whatever its gender, was of a size that it could walk easily while dragging a grown man between its legs. This time, the tiger offered no indication of its whereabouts. Painfully familiar with gunfire and understanding that the odds were not in its favor, it did not hold its ground but retreated silently from that first dark circle where it had been feeding and resting now for nearly two days. Still, the tiger watched, and the men had no sense of how near it was, or where, beyond a racketing of the nerves that was easily confused with adrenaline.
By Evgeny Sakirko’s recollection, they hadn’t walked ten yards from the entrance road before they ran across Markov’s knife, which he described as the kind one would use to chop vegetables. Onofreychuk quietly absconded with it as he had the gun. Its location, so close to the site of the attack, troubled Sakirko, leading him to wonder if it represented Markov’s last attempt to save himself as he was being dragged into the woods. When they came across a dog’s paw, Onofreychuk recognized it immediately: it belonged to Strelka (“Arrow”), Markov’s oldest and most experienced hunting dog. No one was able to determine whether she had been killed with Markov or sometime beforehand though it is reasonable to suppose that she may have died trying to protect him. Because of the deadfall and heavy brush, they did not see his body until they were almost upon it, and when they did, Onofreychuk’s slow and terrible dream took another turn. This was the first time he had actually set eyes on his friend Markiz: he was lying on his back—headless now, disemboweled and frozen solid. After the initial bolt of horror, the emptiness Onofreychuk felt within himself expanded like a private universe. Unable to help his friend, he felt the least he could do was cover for him—that, and collect his remains.
Although the Russian Orthodox Church had been repressed for eighty years, many of its traditions still persisted around key ceremonies, including funerals. One of the Church’s formal requirements for last rites is an intact body. This is important insofar as the body is an offering to God, but it is even more important for the family, as the dead are typically laid out in state for a couple of days before burial so that family and friends may hold a vigil and say their goodbyes. Onofreychuk had hoped to retrieve the body in order to protect it from further harm, but by then Zhorkin had assumed command of the situation, and he told the men not to touch anything. The authorities must be notified, he said. A formal investigation must be made. These
were simple men, raised under communism, and Zhorkin was the boss, so nobody argued; it was he who first notified the village clerk in Sobolonye, who in turn contacted Inspection Tiger later that same afternoon. (It was after Zhorkin and his men had left that the tiger dragged Markov’s corpse deeper into the forest to the location where Trush would find it the next day.) There was no established protocol for handling tiger attacks, and it may have been a relief that someone seemed to know what to do. However, all these men understood hunting, and each took note of the cartridge belt around Markov’s waist and the three missing shells. These men knew Markov, and they were familiar with his weapon: a 16-gauge single-barrel shotgun. This was a midsize field gun—suitable for game birds and even deer, but too light for tiger killing unless the shot was extraordinary. Assuming Markov had fired at all, he would have had only one chance; there would have been no time to reload. Only Markov’s friends, who had seen the gun, knew how those last frenzied moments had played out.
On the evening of Saturday, December 6, Trush interviewed the loggers at Zhorkin’s camp. The first one he spoke with there was a bulldozer operator named Viktor Isayev, a genial, easygoing man in his late thirties who seemed strangely untouched by his circumstances. Where many of his friends and neighbors bore visible scars and appeared many years older than they actually were, Isayev looked as trim and fit as if he’d just stepped out of a spa. His eyes were bright, his lips full, and his cheeks soft and flushed with health. His secret, whatever it was, was unknown even to him, for in every other way he resembled his co-workers: a marginally employed Bikin valley logger with neither plans nor means to leave.