The Tiger

by John Vaillant

might have stemmed from a confrontation between a tiger and Markov’s dogs.

For example, tigers are adept at distinguishing between the engine sounds of airplanes and helicopters; the former are no threat and are ignored, while the latter may be used for tracking and are responded to with evasive or aggressive action.

The only beasts that enter the myth complex are those that kill the hunter and those into which he is transformed.

“Orion: The Myth of the Hunter and the Huntress”

FROM THE START, THERE HAD BEEN NO QUESTION IN THE MIND OF Trush’s squad mate, Sasha Lazurenko, that the tiger was a male—not just any male, but an exceptionally large one.

Born shortly after perestroika, the tiger was roughly six years old—just entering his prime mating years—and wherever he chose to live he would likely be the dominant male. After a good feed, he could weigh close to five hundred pounds, and yet he had the explosive power to make a standing leap over a ten-foot fence, or across a residential street.

This was the winter tiger: not the svelte, languorous creature of long grass and jungle pools, but the heavy-limbed sovereign of mountains, snow, and moonlight, resplendent and huge in his cool blue solitude.

modus vivendi /ˌmōdəs viˈvendē ˌmōdəs viˈvendī/ I. noun — [usu. in sing.] 1. an arrangement or agreement allowing conflicting parties to coexist peacefully, either indefinitely or until a final settlement is reached. 2. a way of living. – origin Latin, literally ‘way of living.’

The tiger was following a human trail, but he was also, intentionally or not, reconstructing a story—a crime of sorts.

Markov had been a regular at the road workers’ camp just as he had been at Zhorkin’s. Both bases had resident crews and were stocked with supplies that Markov needed: cooking oil, rice, potatoes, and cigarettes; perhaps a little vodka. What these remote camps lacked was a steady

supply of fresh meat, so when Markov bagged something big he would pack a haunch down the trail to barter. Trush interviewed the watchmen, and according to them, Markov had come by earlier in the month with some boar meat. Trush had a strong suspicion that Markov had robbed it from a tiger kill.

One of a tiger’s jobs as keeper of a territory is to take inventory; a tiger needs to know who is around and “available.” When speaking of local tigers, Andrei Onofreychuk described them coming by ...

ways to do this is at an outhouse. It may reek to high heaven, but it is precisely because of this that it is a gold mine of information. Tigers mark their territories in a variety of ways: by clawing trees, scratching the ground, defecating, and also by spraying a durable and redolent combination of urine and musk. When doing the latter, they often select sheltered areas—the undersides of bushes, leaning trees, and angled rocks—to ensure their sign lasts as long as possible. A camp latrine is a kind of human equivalent: a communal scent tree, and it is to a tiger what a compressed personnel file is to a CEO. From its concentrated off-gassings a creature so attuned may glean the latest information about who is present, how many, their gender, disposition, health, and, of course, their diet. In the midst of that olfactory cacophony at the road workers’ camp there may well have been two scents in p...

to get at it, board by shrie...

Under normal circumstances, a tiger’s menu is based on a handful of local prey species, but it can expand...

lizards, snakes, turtles, frogs, crocodiles, crabs, fish, seals, grass, berries, pine nuts, livestock, eggs, monkeys, cow dung, bones, carrion, maggots, termites, locusts, birds, porcupines, pangolins, badgers, sables, squirrels, cats, dogs, dholes, wolves, rats, mice, rabbits, bears, lynxes, leopards, an...

would compel a tiger to rip the walls off a locked outhouse and devour the contents. This is a decidedly strange thing for a tiger to do. It may even be unprecedented. But if one of the last people to use it was Markov, and Markov and others had been ea...

Trush, for one, felt sure the tiger had scented Markov or its stolen meat. The tiger researcher Dmitri Pikunov believed the tiger was driven to such an extreme by hunger, but the tiger had been gorging o...

left by his cabin were ropey with boar hair. This tiger wasn’t starving—not yet anyway. A sick or injured tiger can lay up for a week or two without food if it has to, and there was other potential prey around. With this in mind, the notion that the tiger smelled something in there that belonged to him, that enraged him, becomes more plausible. “Throughout the investigation,” said Trush, “we kept wondering why the tiger w...

Unarmed and without a vehicle, the camp watchmen could do nothing but piss in a bucket, gape through the glass, and pray the tiger didn’t do to their caravan what it was doing to the stoutly built privy thirty yards away. In the end, the tiger held them hostage for about twenty-four hours after abandoning Markov on Saturday the 6th and making the six-mile trek east.

watchmen had neighbors at the nearby Takhalo bridge maintenance camp, but no way to communicate with them. However, Sergei Boyko was

on duty there that weekend and, having gotten wind of the Markov attack, paid a social call on Sunday. When the tiger heard Boyko’s vehicle approaching, he retreated into the trees to watch. The watchmen heard it, too, and they cracked the door, signaling Boyko to stay inside. “There is a tiger!” they shouted. Boyko ignored them and strode across the lot, went inside, and had a cup of tea. He knew what it was to have tiger trouble, but he had no i...

What should one call it when a tiger starts eating people and shit, and injures itself demolishing man-made things? Is it rage? A loss of bearing? Or simply adaptation to a new order?

any case, this tiger was now linked to the world of men in a way no animal should ever be. In the metabolic sense, at least—contaminated by both the bullets and the blood of his enemy—he had become something that doesn’t exist in the West, something, if one had to put a name to it, akin to a weretiger.

egule.

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee.

If a lion could talk, we would not understand him. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the

higher animal, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of...

Him all same man, only different shirt. Him know everything, know traps, know angry, know...

IN 1909, AN ESTONIAN-BORN BARON-TURNED-PHYSIOLOGIST NAMED Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of Umwelt to the

world.

Uexküll is considered one of the fathers of ethology, which is also known as behavioral ecology. It is a young discipline whose goal is to study behavior and social organization through a biological lens. “To do so,” wrote Uexküll in “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” “we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar … is transformed.” Uexküll called this bubble the umwelt, a German word that he applied to a given animal’s subjective or “self-centered” world. An indiv...

truly know given the inherent limitations of our respective umwelten. In addition to being delightful words to say, umwelt and umgebung offer a framework for exploring an...

a dog owner’s umwelt would differ greatly from that of her dog’s in that, while she might be keenly aware of a SALE sign in a window, a policeman coming toward her, or a broken bottle in her path, the dog would focus on the gust of cooked meat emanating from a restaurant’s exhaust fan, the urine on a fire hydrant, and the doughnut crumbs next to the broken bottle. Objectivel...

different experi...

yet these parallel universes have many features in common: both dog and mistress must be careful crossing the street, and both will pay close attention to o...

both dog and mistress would notice the restaurant exhaust fan, but the dog would attach a “hotter” significance to it—unless the mistress happened to be hungry, too.

jackdaw /ˈjakˌdô/ noun a small, gray-headed crow that typically nests in tall buildings and chimneys, noted for its inquisitiveness. [Genus Corvus, family Corvidae: two species, in particular the Eurasian C. monedula.]

Animal Welfare Act of 1966).

behaviorists and ethologists. The former reject the notion of animal consciousness

“we have no means of describing cognitive processes that do not involve words.” Ultimately, the problem comes down to umwelt; we are such prisoners of our subjective experience that it is only by force of will and imagination that we are able to take leave of it at all and consider the experience and essence of another creature—or even another person. In fact,

hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy:

how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey—even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior. It was our ancestors’ skill at not only analyzing and imitating the nature of a given animal, but identifying with it, that enabled them to flourish in dangerous environments,

“The more a given species needs to be conscious of, the more it is conscious of. Either that or it becomes extinct.” Georges Leroy, a naturalist and gamekeeper to Louis XV at Versailles, had ample opportunity to observe predator-prey relations and he speculated that the reason wolves seemed so much smarter than deer was that they would starve to death if they weren’t. While deer forage is stationary and abundant, wolf prey, by contrast, is not only highly mobile but doing its utmost to avoid being eaten. In order to succeed, predators must actively—and consciously—contrive successful hunting scenarios by adapting to, and manipulating, random events within a constantly shifting environment. This, as any hunter or businessperson knows, is hard to do, and these conditions favor the prey almost every time.

Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily, a lifelong hunter who has shared his territory with tigers all his life, has come to a similar conclusion. On a bitterly cold day in March 2007, he tried to put the tiger into a context an outsider could understand. “A hunter can only rely on himself,” he said. “If anything happens, there is no one to help him, and all of us who live this way have a very advanced intuition. We also carry the experience of our ancestors in our heads: that’s how a man functions in taiga. The tiger is a hunter, just the same as a man is a hunter. A hunter has to think

about how to get his prey. It is different for boar and deer: if leaves or cones fall down from a tree, that’s what they eat; there is no need to think. Tigers think.” Clark Barrett, a professor in the anthropology department at UCLA and an expert on predator-prey dynamics, describes the deer’s advantage as the anywhere but here principle: all a prey animal needs to do is be anywhere the predator isn’t—it doesn’t matter if it’s a foot away, or a hemisphere—and it will live another day. The predator, on the other hand, must be exactly where its prey is, and at exactly the same moment, or it will starve. Thus, for a predator, mastery of both time and space—in addition to a thorough understanding of terrain and prey behavior—are crucial. Pack hunting, of course, increases the odds enormously, but unlike the wolf or the lion, the tiger is a solo stealth hunter and, thus, has a far more challenging task. Possessing neither the endurance to run its prey down, nor the numbers to surround and harry it, the tiger’s method must instead resemble that of the lone assassin: it must insert itself almost intravenously into its prey’s umwelt—an umwelt, it must be noted, that has evolved over millions of years to be exquisitely sensitive to the presence of felid predators. Making matters still more difficult is the fact that tiger prey typically travel in herds. With their dozens of eyes, ears, and nostrils, and their decades of collective tiger-evading experience, a herd of deer or boar c...

felid /ˈfēlid/ I. noun [Zoology] a mammal of the cat family (Felidae); a wild cat. – origin late 19th cent.: from modern Latin Felidae (plural), from Latin feles ‘cat.’

prey’s highly attuned senses. Witnesses, native and Russian alike, agree that there is something almost metaphysical about the tiger’s ability to will itself into nonbeing—to, in effect, cloak itself. In the Bikin valley, it is generally believed that if a tiger has decided to attack you, you will not be able to see it. With the exception of the polar bear, which also hunts by stealth, there is no other land mammal this big whose survival depends on its ability to disappear.

He has just committed a federal offense, but it may not be his first and, if the tiger lives, federal laws will be the least of his problems; it is the tiger’s law he will need to worry about.

Boars are very susceptible to disease and the boar population was in decline. That was the main reason this tiger came down the river: he was forced to expand his turf because there was not enough food and, while chasing boars, he ended up in someone else’s territory. As it happened, the tiger killed this boar very close to a road. At the same time, Markov was passing by with his dogs. The dogs ran toward the tiger, the tiger killed a dog, and, either because he was scared or because he didn’t know what else to do, Markov shot at the tiger. The misfortune was that the tiger memorized the smell of that man and started hunting him. There were many people in the area—soldiers, loggers, beekeepers—but the tiger moved around them and did not touch anyone. He was looking for a particular person. When Markov realized that the tiger was pursuing him, he fled. “He was afraid to go home then because he knew that he had not killed the tiger. He ran four miles to Uncle Vanya’s, and stayed there, hoping the tiger would go away. Uncle Vanya saw that Markov was not himself: he was constantly deep in thought, and he seemed scared, but Uncle Vanya did not ask him any questions. Only after several days did Markov tell him that he had shot at a tiger and injured him. That’s when Uncle Vanya said, ‘Listen, you have to go to the village or somewhere else; you have to leave the taiga. The tiger will not let you live.’ And that’s when he left. “In the meantime, the tiger had finished off what wa...