The Tiger

by John Vaillant

practical level, fact checking and the documentation of sources is pursued much less rigorously in Russia than in many Western countries. But there is a more serious problem and that is that the notions of “truth” and “fact” have been so aggressively stifled in Russia since czarist times that its effects have impacted the collective psyche of the country, including writers, who, if they told the truth, did so at considerable risk. As a result, many “factual” Russian narratives should probably be approached as memoirs: subjective interpretations

bound. This was not an animal they followed, but a contradiction, a silence that was at once incarnate and invisible. Track and scent were the only signs it couldn’t disguise. Trush had stalked tigers before, and he had also been stalked by them, so he understood what was going on: the tiger was controlling the situation now, bending the future to its will.

“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?

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the author of The Tribe of Tiger and The Old Way,

Dunkai explained to the filmmaker Sasha Snow,

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

fact, the ability to step inside the umwelt “bubble” of another creature is not so much a newfound skill as it is a lost art. Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on 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.

this large, pungent, extraordinarily charismatic animal must achieve a state of virtual nonexistence while operating inside the sphere of its 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.

Martin recounted in great detail in his memoir, The Sheltering Desert