The Tiger

by John Vaillant

The scenario was identical: the open field; the alert, armed man; the tiger who is seen only when he chooses to be seen, erupting, apparently, from the earth itself—from nowhere at all—leaving no time and no possibility of escape. Trush was going to die exactly as Markov and Pochepnya had. This was no folktale; nonetheless, only something heroic, shamanic, magical could alter the outcome. Trush’s semiautomatic loaded with proven tiger killers was not enough. Trush was a praying man, and only God could save him now. But in that clearing, there was only Yuri Pionka and Vladimir Shibnev. If divine intervention occurred, Shibnev was the vehicle: it was he who had been visited with the sudden impulse to reposition the men, which had placed him and Pionka broadside to the tiger and out of each other’s line of fire. Because there was no time for thought, or even fear, Shibnev’s and Pionka’s collective response was mainly one of instinct and muscle memory. And yet, somehow, both of these men found the wherewithal to think; they stole it out of time and space the same way gifted athletes wrest opportunities from inches and fractions of seconds. Even in the face of a flying tiger and a man about to die—a scene that would leave most people staring in dull surprise, as Gorborukov was from beside the Kung—both Shibnev and Pionka understood they could not shoot when the tiger was on top of Trush because their hyper-lethal bullets would kill him, too. They had to kill the tiger in the ai...