The Tiger

by John Vaillant

I’ve read a tiger’s not dangerous,

They say the tiger won’t attack

But one thing’s not clear to me. Has he read this, t...

you spend most of your life in a natural environment, intimately connected with, and dependent upon, the animals around you, you will undoubtedly—necessarily—feel a certain kinship with those creatures, even if you have no conscious intention of doing so.

trinity of basic needs: safety, food, and water.

Martin and Korn developed a sense of deep, empathic familiarity with their cohabitants: “We learnt to recognise their mood and intentions from the way they held their

heads, or set their hooves.

The longer we lived with animals the clearer it became to us that human and animal behaviour were very closely related.”

atavistic,

Reverting to something ancient or ancestral

“The tiger is strong, powerful and fair,” Mikhail Dunkai declared. “You have to respect him. You think he doesn’t understand the language, but he understands everything; he can read a person’s mind. So, if you start thinking, ‘He’s a bad tiger; I am not afraid of him,’ well, something bad will happen to you, and you’ll have only yourself to blame. The tiger will warn you first, but if you still don’t understand, then he will seriously punish you.” Mikhail had an interesting take on the sharing of prey in the forest, and things might have gone better for Markov if he had known about it. “Once, a tiger killed a wild boar about ten yards from my cabin,” Mikhail began. “In the morning, I saw the dead boar and the tiger sitting nearby. So, I started talking to him: ‘The taiga is big,’ I said. ‘Why would

you kill a boar right here? Go, enjoy the rest of the taiga, but don’t do this near my cabin.’ The tiger was sitting, listening, and then he left. Afterward, I saw that a part of the boar—the haunch—had been left for me; the rest of the boar was eaten and everything was cleaned by the tiger.

“But I didn’t take the meat,” said Mikhail, “because, if you take it, then you are in debt and have to give something back. So I said, ‘Thank you, but I have meat now. Don’t be insulted that I don’t take it. It was good of you to share wit...

will feel that you owe him, and then you will be afra...

BIG CAT-PRIMATE RELATIONSHIP

Evidence suggests that the reason tigers and their kind continue to capture our attention is because, over time, this has proven the most effective way to prevent them from capturing us. Maybe this is why it is impossible not to wonder what Markov and Khomenko saw and

felt in their last moments—an experience so aberrant and alien to us, and yet strangely, deeply familiar: there is a part of us that still needs to know.

Ongoing in the debate about our origins and our nature is the question of how we became fascinated by monsters, but only certain kinds. The existence of this book alone is a case in point. No one would read it if it were about a pig or a moose (or even a person) who attacked unemployed loggers. Tigers, on the other hand, get our full attention. They strike a deep and resonant chord within us, and one reason is because, as disturbing as i...

long as they are carnivorous and/or humanoid, the monster’s form matters little. Whether it is Tyrannosaurus rex, saber-toothed tiger, grizzly bear, werewolf, bogeyman, vampire, Wendigo, Rangda, Grendel, Moby-Dick, Joseph Stalin, the Devil, or any other manifestation of the Beast, all are objects of dark fascination, in large part because of their capacity to consciously, willfully destroy us.

Taphonomy is the study of an organism’s decay and related processes over time, including its fossilization.

the residents of Sobolonye had great respect for their intelligence and hunting prowess, and the idea that these powers might be directed against them—at random—was terrifying. This tiger’s presence had cast a pall over the village, not just for its own sake, but for what it implied: the forest was Sobolonye’s sole reason for being, and Mother Taiga was the closest thing to a deity its inhabitants had. When all else failed—and it had—she alone had stood by them. If the taiga should turn against them, too, where else

could they go?

palpable /ˈpalpəb(ə)l/ I. adjective 1. (of a feeling or atmosphere) so intense as to seem almost tangible • a palpable sense of loss. 2. plain to see or comprehend • to talk of dawn raids in the circumstances is palpable nonsense. 3. able to be touched or felt • the palpable bump at the bridge of the nose. II. derivatives palpability /ˌpalpəˈbilədē / noun – origin late Middle English: from late Latin palpabilis, from Latin palpare ‘feel, touch gently.’

apiary /ˈāpēˌerē/ I. noun a place where bees are kept; a collection of beehives. II. derivatives 1. apiarian /ˌāpēˈe(ə)rēən / adjective 2. apiarist /ˈāpēərəst / noun – origin mid 17th cent.: from Latin apiarium, from apis ‘bee.’ apical

Then, there wasn’t an alternative, but the expectations for what life can and should be have changed radically in the past twenty years. Under communism, there was room, albeit strictly controlled, for aspiration, and there was a State guarantee of basic security in terms of education, employment, housing, and food. But most of these assurances disintegrated after perestroika. Replacing them, along with crime, alcoholism, and despondency, were satellite dishes offering multiple channels that allowed you to see just how far behind you really were. Nowadays, in many parts of the world—not just Sobolonye—it is possible to starve while watching television.

“Those folks are tougher than nails and hardened from horrors.”

Russian-American author once quipped that what Russians needed after perestroika wasn’t economic aid but a planeload of social workers, and this seems painfully true. One reason people find it so difficult to describe how they feel is that they have never been asked.

The tiger had eaten Markov over a three-day period, but that had been more than a week ago and, once again, the animal was ravenous. His routine had also been disrupted; he was no longer making his usual rounds. Instead, he was moving in a linear fashion, steadily downstream. In doing so, he may well have been poaching on other tigers’ territories. Though this tiger was in his prime, and large, he was now seriously wounded and vulnerable to attack by another dominant male. The tiger was hunting constantly as he moved down the valley toward Sobolonye, and every step was painful. In the tiger’s

forepaw was a deep, fresh laceration through the pad—possibly sustained when the tiger destroyed the outhouse. Far worse, though, was the wound to his other leg. A small handful of pea-sized buckshot had raked his right paw and foreleg, separating it at the cubital joint (the equivalent of our elbow). The only way buckshot could be so tightly concentrated is for it to have been shot from point-blank range. A factory load shot from that distance would have shattered the tiger’s leg and crippled him fatally, but Markov’s homemade shell, possibly compromised by condensation, didn’t have the same punch. It had only succeeded in making the tiger extraordinarily dangerous.

The tiger’s wounds were also becoming infected, but this was a mere inconvenience compared to a ...

problem: the damage to the joint was impacting the tiger’s ability to hunt. Over and over again, he caught fresh scent, stalked viable game, and set up ambushes that, a week earlier, would have produced life-sustaining results. Now, the boar and deer were getting away. The tiger’s speed, agility, and jumping distance were off—not by much, but margins in the...

It is hard to say if it was injury, hunger, or some kind of primordial rage that changed his behavior, but ever since being shot by Markov, the tiger had been acting with a kind of calculated audacity that is not typical of these creatures.

When Pochepnya arrived, as the tiger somehow knew he would, it would have been around two in the afternoon. Hunters are vigilant of necessity, and a four-hundred-pound tiger sitting sphinxlike on a mattress is hard to miss. But Pochepnya was not aware of the tiger until he launched himself off his bed from ten yards away.

Pochepnya’s rifle would have been slung over his left shoulder with the trigger facing upward. This arrangement enables a hunter (or a soldier) to grasp the barrel with his left hand and bring the gun up to his right shoulder in one fluid motion. Pochepnya, fresh out of the army and a hunter all his life, was trained to do this in a fraction of a second—and he did. But when he pulled the trigger nothing happened. ——

Very rarely is there anyone in their immediate vicinity who fully appreciates what happened to them out there and, in this way, the lives of tiger attack survivors resemble those of retired astronauts or opera divas: each in their own way has stared alone into the abyss.

What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

Nor had Sokolov realized that there was more than one tiger. The tigress he was tracking was in heat and a large male had been tailing her; while backtracking on the trail of the female, Sokolov had run into the male. When a tigress comes into estrus, a kind of pheromone-induced insanity follows wherever she goes, and this tiger was out of its mind with lust. He had probably fought for his position and he had a lot to look

forward to: once the tigress has reviewed and accepted a suitor, the two may copulate twenty times a day for a week or more. Individual encounters are brief and loud and, once consummated, the tigress may wheel around and club her mate savagely in the face. It is hard to tell from the human vantage whether this is a sign of irritation or tigerish affection. When the tiger spotted Sokolov, it may have perceived him as a competitor, a threat, or simply as an obstacle, but by the time Sokolov realized his mistake, it was too late. “The tiger roared again,” he said. “He was about forty yards away and I saw him running toward me. The word ‘fear’ doesn’t really describe the feeling in that situation. It’s more like an animal horror—a terror

that’s genetically inherent in you. Something happened to me then: I went into a stupor; I was paralyzed, and I had only one thought: I am going to die right now. Very...

The tiger closed the gap in a matter of seconds and, in that moment of arrested consciousness, Sokolov didn’t even see the final leap. “I stepped back,” he said, “and closed my eyes for an instant—because of my nerves. They say that when a person is in this type of critical situation his whole life rushes through his mind. Well, that didn’t happen to me. I remembered Sergei Denisov [a hunter he had known who...

suffer to...

“The tiger knocked me down; my left leg was bent and he bit into my knee. For an instant, he and I were looking in each other’s eyes—his eyes were blazing, his ears were pressed back; I could see his teeth, and I thought I saw surprise in his eyes—like he was seeing something he hadn’t expected to see. He bit me once, twice. My bones were cracking, crushing; everything was crackling. He was holding my leg sort of like a dog, shaking his head from side to side, and there was a sound like heavy cloth ripping. I was in excruciating pain. He was eating me, and there was nothing I could do t...

had for Jim West when he heard the bear attacking his dog. “I just got mad,” said Sokolov. “Instinctively, I punched the tiger in the forehead, between the eyes. He roared an...

In the act of coming to his senses, and tapping that deep and ancient vein of self-preservation that flows through all of us, Sokolov had brought the tiger to its senses, too. The tiger had no particular issue with Sokolov; he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But for Sokolov, this was just the beginning. “As soon as the tiger left, I under...

Immediately after the attack, Inspection Tiger examined the site and determined that it was an unfortunate accident and chalked it up to human error; no attempt was made to pursue the tiger. When Sokolov’s boss came to the hospital to explain what had actually happened—that he had stumbled on

mating tigers—he ribbed him, saying, “You’re lucky that tiger didn’t try to fuck you instead of the tigress.” “Well, he should have proposed it to me,” Sokolov replied. “I’d have let him have his way with me if it would have kept him from biting.”

Infected by the tiger in mysterious ways, Sokolov found himself stirred by powerful impulses he had no wish to control. As soon as he was able to hobble around, he was overcome by sexual desire. “For a year and a half I had to use crutches,” he said. “After that I had to use a cane. Maybe some strength came from the ...

trade in tiger-based supplements. The brandname Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.

then south to Primorye, a path similar to Yuri Trush’s. Zaitsev was a rarity in Sobolonye, having stayed sober and kept the same job maintaining the village’s diesel generator for twenty years. Whatever his other failings, Zaitsev was a calm and sturdy soul whose presence alone was a bulwark against the crushing circumstances of both the era and the moment.

The gun had misfired. Andrei Pochepnya’s last fully realized thought may well have been the sickening realization that his father’s gun had betrayed him. Burukhin cleared the snow from the barrel, reloaded the same bullet, and pulled the trigger. This time, it fired perfectly. Pochepnya’s father was standing next to Burukhin, and there is no way to know now what went through his mind, or his heart, as that deafening report echoed through the forest. But he took the gun from Burukhin and, after walking a short distance, heaved it into an open stretch of the Takhalo where the water ran deep and fast. Then he went to look for his eldest son. What Alexander Pochepnya found is something no parent is equipped

to see. Fifty yards into the snowy forest lay a heap of blood-blackened clothing in a circle of exposed earth. It looked more like a case of spontaneous combustion than an animal attack. There was nothing left but shredded cloth and empty boots. Nearby, a watch and crucifix lay undamaged on the ground. The remains of Pochepnya himself were so small and so few they could have fit in a shirt pocket. It is normal for a tiger to leave extremities as the tiger did with Markov, but Pochepnya was gone, and this was—like the ransacking of the outhouse—unprecedented. One need only imagine Udeghe hunters discovering a scene like this two hundred years ago—their astonishment and terror at the bloody tracks and empty clothes—to understand how the