The Tiger

by John Vaillant

“He looked a little scared,” Isayev recalled. “Usually he was very chatty, but not this time. He wasn’t in a good mood.”

It is hard to overemphasize their importance, especially when the hunter is destitute. Dogs are the poacher’s assistants, colleagues, companions, and guards.

Sakirko alone remembered Markov mentioning his concerns about a tiger and saying, “I’d better get home because the dogs will get killed.”

They and most others in the Bikin valley lived by the motto “If I don’t touch her, she won’t touch me.” Such was the stability of human-tiger relations in the Panchelaza that the possibility of a person getting attacked—much less eaten—by a tiger was, literally, laughable—like getting hit by a meteorite.

unbeknownst to Trush, something went awry: it seems now that the interview never took place.

seemed to Dunkai that the dogs were searching for Markov: “What was curious,” Dunkai noted, “was that, after he left, his dog came by. It was strange because a dog usually stays with its master, and that one was a hunting dog.”

When one considers the keen senses of a good hunting dog, its familiarity with its home territory, and its loyalty to its master, it becomes clearer just how difficult it would be for one of them, much less all three, to “lose” not only their master but one another. In the Panchelaza, there was really only one thing that could cause this to happen.

Kopchony (“Smokey”) was about fifty years old and barely five feet tall, with a hairstyle and mustache identical to Joseph Stalin’s.

Markov took tea there on occasion, and at least one of his dogs went there to look for him.

In such cases, you should not suddenly turn tail because the scent of fear passes quickly. You must back off slowly, slowly—especially if the tiger has a kill, or if she’s a mother with cubs: she makes a step, you make a step—you must not run away.

the attack on Markov was far more sinister. It resembled something closer to a first-degree murder: premeditated, with malice aforethought, and a clear intent to kill.

“if a tiger decides to hunt somebody, you’re not going to stop her.”

By the time Trush got back to Luchegorsk and typed up his notes on Sunday afternoon, the tiger was hunting again.

There had always been stories and tracks and missing dogs, but now the tiger’s presence was personal, visceral—as if the animal had reached some kind of critical mass whereby it shifted into a new and more immediate dimension.

Even as his friends and neighbors lowered that disturbingly light coffin into the ground, Markov’s flesh and blood were driving a hungry, wounded tiger through the forest, directly toward Sobolonye.

Tigers on the prowl may look like the embodiment of lethal

competence, but looks are deceiving: in order to survive, they need to kill roughly one large animal each week, and they miss their mark between 30 and 90 percent of the time. This relative inefficien...

As a result, injured or not, there is no rest for a tiger—no hibernation as there is for bears, no division of labor as with lions, and no migration to lush pastures as there is for many ungulates. Time, for the tiger, especially the male, is more like time is for the shark:

A hoofed mammal

a largely solitary experience of hunting and digesting followed by more hunting, until he dies.

By the time tigress and cubs go their separate ways, the cubs will be nearly adult-sized though still a couple of years away from sexual maturity. Some cubs will stay close by, but these are usually the females who control smaller territories and are more likely to be tolerated by their mother, and by the area’s dominant male. A two- or three-year-old male, however, is on his own; for both genetic and competitive reasons, the mother doesn’t want him around. A male cub’s exile is comparable to sending a barely pubescent boy out onto the street to fend for himself: he might make it, but there’s a good

chance he won’t for any number of reasons. He could be gored by a boar or have his jaw broken by an elk; he could be attacked by a large bear. The dominant male tiger may kill him outright or run him off and, with no territory of his own, he will have to make his living on the margins. Living as an amateur in this sylvan purgatory is catch-as-catch-can, and one accident with a car, an animal trap, or a hunter—not to mention one bad stretch of deep snow and minus forty weather—could finish him off. Unfortunately, this combination of landlessness and semi-competence can often lead to dog and livestock killing: if the taiga doesn’t get him, a farmer may well. In any case, it can require several years of this dangerous, liminal existence before

male tiger acquires the skill—and the will—to sta...

his own territory. But as strong and able as he may be, the battle for that territory—even if he wins it—can leave him grievously injured. So lethally designed are these animals that a battle between them can be compared to a hand grenade contest: there is virtually no way to come away from that combination of points, blades, and combustive energy without incurring serious damage. In short, the gauntlet of trials and initi...

They also had a common theme—that, prior to the attack, Markov had been having trouble with a tiger: something had happened and it wouldn’t leave him alone.

aspic,”

aspic /ˈaspik/ I. noun a savory jelly made with meat stock, set in a mold and used to contain pieces of meat, seafood, or eggs • chicken in aspic • ‹figurative› a world preserved in aspic, far removed from mass unemployment. – origin late 18th cent.: from French, literally ‘asp,’ from the colors of the jelly as compared with those of the snake.

The confusion centered on a crucial inconsistency between the emphatic but fallible accounts he was hearing from informants and the far steadier record kept by the snow. The

truth lay in the paw prints: soon, it would become painfully clear that the tracks around Markov’s cabin were far too big to have been made by a female.

The Amur tiger’s territoriality and capacity for sustained vengeance, for lack of a better word, are the stuff of both legend and fact. What is amazing—and also terrifying about tigers—is their facility for what can only be described as abstract thinking. Very quickly, a tiger can assimilate new information—evidence, if you will—ascribe it to a source, and even a motive, and react accordingly.* Sergei Sokolov is a former hunting inspector who now works as a researcher for the Institute for Sustainable Resource Management in Primorye. “Based on the scientific approach,” Sokolov explained, “you can say that the more diverse the food of an animal, the more developed his intelligence is.”

The caveat here is that each of these eight cases met the following conditions: namely, that the tiger was able to identify its attacker, had the opportunity to hunt him, and was temperamentally disposed to do so. In its brief reference to tiger attacks on humans, Mammals of the Soviet Union states that “Usually animals shot and wounded or

chased by hunters attacked, and only very rarely did an attack occur without provocation.” Such responses are, in themselves, examples of abstract thinking: tigers evolved to respond to direct physical attacks from other animals; they did not evolve to respond to remote threats like guns. Nor do they innately understand what guns are or how they work. So to be able to make the multistep connection between a random explosion in the air, a pain it can feel but often cannot see, and a human who may be dozens of yards away is, almost by definition, an abstraction. While many higher animals are capable of making this association, very few will respond like a tiger. If you combine this with a long memory, you can have a serious problem on

your ...

Tigers, particularly males, are well known for their intense

reflexive possessiveness;

Fights between animals are rarely to the death because killing a powerful adversary is dangerous and takes an enormous amount of energy. Death for its own sake is seldom an objective in nature

anyway: the reason prey is killed is not to kill it per se, but to keep it still long enough to be eaten. Likewise, in the case of a territorial dispute, the goal is not to terminate but to establish dominance and persuade your competitor to go elsewhere.

animals (including tigers) avoid conflicts whenever possible because fighting hurts, and the margins in ...

In addition to his Herod-like response to other cubs and young males, he may even kill his own.

Amur tigers will occasionally kill bears solely on something that we might recognize as principle.

In Primorye, tigers attack and eat both black and brown bears on a fairly regular basis; this is striking because, ordinarily, no animal in its right mind would take on a bear.

American grizzlies and can weigh a thousand pounds; their ferocity and power are legendary. In spite of this, they have been known to flee at the sight of a tiger.

So why would a tiger pick a fight with such a dangerous opponent? And why would it then prosecute the battle—as sometimes happens—to the point of tearing the bear limb from limb and scattering its appendages across the battleground? While the motives can never be fully understood, the discovery and description

of such scenes would go a long way toward explaining why indigenous people like Ivan Dunkai’s son Mikhail refer to the tiger—not the larger brown bear—as the “Czar of the Forest.”

They feel their surroundings intensely and one reason they choose to live in Primorye is that, in Russia, there is no other natural environment that is so complex, exotic, or stimulating to the senses.

However, more often than not, once a Russian had made it to the coast—often as an exile—this was where he would remain; everything he had previously known would exist in memory only.

These newcomers arrived as entitled conquerors with no understanding of, or particular interest in, the local culture—human or otherwise. Like their New World counterparts across the Pacific, theirs, too, was a manifest destiny: they had a mandate, in many cases from the czar himself, and they took an Orthodox, Old Testament approach to both property and predators.

have personally seen cabins there with the doors knocked in by tigers, and I have heard of tigers digging up fresh graves, but I never witnessed it.

this lack of flexibility, when combined with armed, entitled humans and domestic animals, is a recipe for disaster.

Even had Markov wished to avoid a conflict with the tiger, seeing his dogs threatened or injured may have been too much to bear. Ivan Dunkai might be willing to sacrifice his dogs to the tiger, but not Markov.

Another term for autopsy

Because of the early evidence supporting the theory that Markov’s death was an act of revenge by a tigress, Trush had not given much thought to the possibility that this attack