Boy, Watch out for tigers, now. Let’s not Wander about in the field.YUN SÇ’N-DO (1587–1671),“Sunset”1 HERDED TOGETHER IN THE DARK LIKE BISON, WOODSTOVES BLAZING, the Kungs seemed like conveyances from another age. Just down the road was the village, still but for the chimney smoke and the anxious pacing of the dogs. Behind locked doors, their owners’ lives were suspended, minds awash in unsettling thoughts. Meanwhile, in the river below, fish hung motionless in the dark, countering the current beneath two feet of ice, and finding in that dense and steady resistance a perfect equilibrium. But there was more down there besides—subtle disturbances passing through on their serpentine journey out of the mountains: Takhalo to Bikin, Ussuri to Amur, and on to the ice-choked bottleneck of Tartar Strait, past Sakhalin to the open sea. Along with Andrei Pochepnya’s rifle was the rippled memory of a tiger Sasha Dvornik once sought to disorient and drown with his motorboat.
