The Tiger

by John Vaillant

tigers use this highway, too. There

somewhere in here was a beginning and an end,

It was this same mix of shame, fear, and loyalty that compelled Zaitsev and Onofrecuk to go along, too. Besides, there was safety in numbers.

For all these reasons, there is no creature in the taiga that is off limits to the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will. Amur tigers have been known to eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears. There are few wolves in Primorye, not because the environment doesn’t suit them, but because the tigers eat them, too.

Dersu Uzala

“The tiger will see you a hundred times before you see him once.

There is a costly wisdom in this, the stoic execution of deeds that must be done. It is a survival skill that is closely linked to Fate, and Fate has always been a potent force in Russia, where, for generations, citizens have had little control over their own destinies. Fate can be a bitch, but, as Zaitsev, Dvornik, and Onofrecuk had discovered, it can also be a tiger.

“The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation,” he explained. “A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really?

Many people reach a point where they realize that the shape their life has taken does not square with the ambitions they once had for it.

In an effort to express the depth of his obsession, Pikunov cited a Russian proverb usually reserved for wolves: “No matter how much you feed him, he keeps looking at the forest.

As with the unintended etiquette of winter trail breaking, this passive sharing of food is an integral part of coexistence in the wild. In this sense, the hunting “culture” of predators and scavengers bears a strong resemblance to Karl Marx’s communist ideal: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

“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.

“There are two categories of people when it comes to extreme situations,” said the leopard specialist Vasily Solkin. “One gets scared first and then starts thinking; the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter survive in the taiga.”

such a challenging environment would have provided the necessary selection pressures for us to evolve, a prime and primal example of what Arnold Toynbee called the “optimum challenge.”

this is why young children continue to be fascinated by dinosaurs and other monstrous creatures. He calls this “Jurassic Park syndrome”; the implication is that, in ages past, this was information one absolutely had to take an interest in if one was to survive to breeding age.

away. The tiger’s speed, agility, and jumping distance were off—not by much, but margins in the taiga are tight to begin with; when measuring a missed kill, an inch might as well be a mile.

based products, it has a long and honored history in Asia. As the