Long Way Home

Marc Orlov had a list of credentials that were unique. He’d been born in the rugged mountains of Idaho’s Salmon River country some forty years earlier. His mother was a no-nonsense, practical, hardworking ball of fire, trying to eke out a living on a 240-acre boulder patch in the wilds of the South Fork of the Salmon River. His father, a Russian forest ecologist who had unfortunately been politically naïve, had escaped from his exile to a Siberian settlement, stowing away on an oil exploration and research vessel bound for America. After a two-year period of contending with various bureaucracies in Seattle, he’d been granted a permanent visa by the United States government, and he’d wandered the Pacific Northwest. He’d been plucked from the raging waters of the Salmon River, looking more like a drowned rat than a human being, when his homemade raft had disintegrated halfway through his solo trip down the river. His plucky benefactor had been intrigued by the handsome features, stout build, and boyish inability to speak clear English. Shortening a long story in itself, they had fallen in love, were married the following spring, and, within two years, produced Marc, their first of two boys. Growing up on the homestead was difficult, entailing seemingly endless hours of physical labor during a large part of the year. Winter months, however, were largely devoted to academic study interspersed with regular outings in search of mountain lion tracks, which were studied and followed, sometimes for a week or more at a time. This passive pursuit helped Marc develop an early interest in wildlife and the complex interrelationships between animals and their environment. It was experience just like this that prepared Marc for one of his true passions in life, tracking and collaring Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East for wildlife research. Well over 750 pounds of consummate killer. The ultimate predator . . . Every hair and muscle of the mature male Siberian tiger emanated defiance toward the man moving through the light underbrush a scant thirty yards distant. Under normal circumstances the aggression would have been one-sided, with the great cat stalking the human. In this case, however, roles were reversed, with the more powerful of the two restrained by a five-eighths-inch aircraft cable tightly cinched to his left front foot, the other end double-wrapped and bolted around the base of a huge oak. Armed only with a blow-gun tube and a couple of drug-filled darts, the man cautiously moved to within fifteen yards of the growling tiger, crouched behind another large tree, and tried to steady his pounding heart and nerve-ravaged breathing. He inserted a dart into the mouthpiece and peered around the tree. The tiger lunged, but was upended as he reached the end of the short cable. He knew that the next ten or twelve minutes was simply a waiting game. Waiting for the drug to act to narcotize the huge animal to the point where the man could manage his business without fear of being attacked. He’d done it a thousand times on various species of animals over the past twenty years. With an animal as fierce and as rare as a Siberian tiger, however, his adrenaline was rushing.