The Tiger

by John Vaillant

pi·rogue /pēˈrōɡ/ noun a long, narrow canoe made from a single tree trunk, especially in Central America and the Caribbean.

Omorochka Omorochka is a Russian-language name for a boat traditionally used by small indigenous peoples of the Far East - Nanais and Udege. Nanais used two types of boats: ▪ A large kayak type boat, the frame of which is made of longitudinal and transverse wooden chipped planks, covered with birch bark outside. In Nanai language such a frost is called omoochin. Omorochka-omoochin was used mainly for trips to other camps, transportation of people, cargo. ▪ Small chopped dinghy, cut down by axes from solid tree trunk, preferably from Korean cedar, poplar, linden.

Panchelaza. The name is a holdover from the days of Chinese possession, and it refers to a tract of choice game habitat about one hundred miles square. Almost box-shaped, the Panchelaza is framed by three rivers—the Amba to the east, the Takhalo to the west, and the Bikin to the south.

before Markov arrived, this beautiful and dangerous sanctuary had been identified, at least in name, as a kind of empyrean frontier, a threshold between Heaven and Hell.

Taiga Dweller

They were both easygoing, personable men who knew and loved the taiga and were engaged in similar pursuits. They were also good friends: when Markov was first getting to know the Panchelaza, Dunkai had allowed Markov to stay with him for weeks at a time.

But I have a subconscious feeling that if I have not hurt a tiger, he will not be aggressive toward me.”

“Even when I was on tiger tracks all the time,” he explained, “and scavenging meat from their kills, none of those tigers demonstrated aggressive behavior toward me.”

But “difficulties” is a relative term: over the years, he did lose a number of dogs. Dogs seem to trigger the tiger’s wolf-killing instincts, and they also seem to relish the taste. Many is the Far Eastern hunter, farmer, or dacha owner who has risen in the morning to find nothing but a broken chain where his dog had been.

When one former dog owner was asked what these attacks sounded like, he answered acidly, “It’s more of a silence.” But this is the price of doing business in the tiger’s domain; it is a form of tribute, and it has ancient precedents. Ivan Dunkai

“The tiger will help me,” Dunkai once said, “because I’ve asked him.”

By regularly bringing down large prey like elk, moose, boar, and deer, the tiger feeds

countless smaller animals, birds, and insects, not to mention the soil. Every such event sends another pulse of lifeblood through the body of the forest. These random but rhythmic infusions nourish humans, too, and not just wolfish hunter-biologists like Dmitri Pikunov. Udeghe and Nanai hunters occasionally scavenge from

tiger kil...

so do their Russian n...

key discovery: after following one male lion for three weeks straight, they noted that “it killed nothing but ate seven times, either by scavenging or by joining other lions on their kill.”

Their attention shifted then to scavenging behavior, leading them to wonder whether our ancestors could have survived on leftovers alone.

“If among all the members of our primate family the human being is unique, even in our noblest aspirations, it is because we alone through untold millions of years were continuously dependent on killing to survive.”

Killer Ape theory)

a million years: but the race of man was made By shock and agony … … a wound was made in the brain When life became too hard, and has never healed. It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood-sacrifice, It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter men, And hate the world

The original sin

Jeffers’s original “wound,” whatever its cause, was probably not inflicted by big cats during the Paleolithic period.

ethnography /eTHˈnäɡrəfē/ I. noun the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures. II. derivatives ethnographer /eTHˈnäɡrəfər / noun

“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.”§ 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?

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...

observed and...

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 pro...

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 ...

What is important to keep in mind here is that everyone involved had known one another, effectively, ...

socially transmitted behaviours”—and

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.

“Where lions aren’t hunted, they aren’t dangerous. As for us, we live in peace with them.”

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.” 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.

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.

“Why,” he wondered aloud, “is the tiger so angry at him?”

about 80 percent of the population and tends to be concentrated in western, or “European,” Russia.

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 was also strangely secretive.

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.’

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.

Their entrance bore an uncanny resemblance to the hunters’ theme in Peter and the Wolf:

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.

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.

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.

Although the Russian Orthodox Church had been repressed for eighty years, many of its traditions still persisted around key ceremonies, including funerals.

(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.)

Isayev recalled that Markov had left his gun somewhere outside, which was standard operating procedure for a poacher, particularly at that time of year, and noted that he was wearing a knife and cartridge belt.