The Tiger

by John Vaillant

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 periodically “to count us.” One of the most efficient 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 particular that leaped out from the others: those of Markov and boar meat, specifically, meat from the tiger’s last wild kill. Whatever was in there was rank and ruined, but the tiger considered it his, and he tore that outhouse down to get at it, board by shrieking board.