The Tiger

by John Vaillant

work because he can be dangerous, too. Trush stands about six-foot-two with long arms and legs and a broad chest. His eyes are colored, coincidentally, like the semiprecious stone tiger’s eye, with black rings around the irises. They

He is a grabber, a hugger, and a roughhouser, but the hands initiating—and controlling—these games are thinly disguised weapons. His fists are knuckled mallets, and he can break bricks with them. As he runs through the motions of an immobilizing hold, or lines up an imaginary strike, one has the sense that his body hungers for opportunities to do these things in earnest.

Referring to a former colleague who went bad and whom he tried for years to catch red-handed, Trush said, “He knows very well that I am capable of beheading him with my bare hands.”

by sticking with a proven winner, they conserve energy and shift the odds of getting fed from If to When. When

Seven men have been stunned to silence. Not a sob; not a curse.

Still, Dvornik hesitated, and this is when Trush offered him his rifle. It was a bold gesture on several levels: not only did it imply an expectation of trust and cooperation, but Trush’s semiautomatic was a far better weapon than Dvornik’s battered smoothbore.

“We heard the sound of voices in the encampment, rising in volume and pitch like the hum of excited bees. Some people ran toward the hunters … some danced up and down, children squealed and ran about … I

In 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.

Wherever we go, whatever the medium or terrain, our concept of sanctuary remains essentially the same. Lacking height, we’ll make do with a hole. In this way, a cave, an igloo, a bunker, and a surplus Russian army truck would be universally recognizable across geography and time.

But whence came the race of man? I will make a guess. A change of climate killed the great northern forests, Forcing the manlike apes down from their trees … They had to go down to the earth, where green still grew And small meats might be gleaned. But there the great flesh-eaters, Tiger and panther and the horrible fumbling bear and endless wolf-packs made life A dream of death. Therefore man has those

dreams, And kills out of pure terror.

The colonel might as well have been describing peasants falling before berserkers. The most painful detail in this anecdote is the baboons’ resignation: with no hope of escape, they fashioned a refuge of last resort from the darkness in their own hands. The image is so poignant, in part, because those hands could so easily be ours.

thinking them into the world of unbeing,

It is striking, too, that, unlike so many other species—cats, for example—we are the only branch of our family (Hominidae) who survived the journey. In this sense, we are evolutionary orphans—a broken family of one, and it puts us in strange company: we share our genetic solitude with

Meanwhile, the tiger gathered himself, manifesting anticipation in its purest form: his eyes riveted on their target as he flexed and set his paws, compensating for any irregularity in the ground beneath; the hips rising slightly as he loaded and aimed the missile of himself, while that hawser of a tail twitched like a broken power line.

His face looks as if it could have been made there, too: above his salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, the crow’s-feet and brow furrows are so deeply incised that they seem more the result of tools than time. It

After wounding her, the inspectors tracked her, only to find she had doubled back and set up an ambush. This is where they found her, poised to attack, covered in a light dusting of snow. She had died waiting for them.

Mountains are the more beautiful After the sun has gone down And it is Twilight. Boy, Watch out for tigers, now. Let’s not Wander about in the field. YUN

Smirnov—lean, muscular, with a pale, rawboned face enlivened by piercing blue eyes

Smirnov ignored the list of carefully crafted questions and scrawled SHOW NO FEAR across the blank side. Smirnov approaches tigers the same way he approached hooligans in the back alleys of Moscow. “An animal is an animal,” he said simply. “A predator can smell fear very well. If you show fear, you’re finished. “I have

“Over time, I realized that if you have accumulated more anger inside yourself than a tiger has in him, the tiger will be afraid of you.

But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage. Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.

Fortunately, there was an escape clause when it came to tigers: god or no god, there were limits to what his subjects had to endure. It was clear that this tiger was an amba in its most destructive manifestation and, when such a creature began killing people, blood vengeance was an appropriate response.

In most places, including Russia, there is an inverted correlation between the rise of firearms and the fall of traditional beliefs. Firearms, especially those like the SKS, made certain kinds of shamanic intervention obsolete, and they did so by functioning much as shamans do—that is, by harnessing powerful natural forces and concentrating them into a supernatural form, which can then be channeled through the hands of a human being.

Now, despite a lifetime of training and a virtual eternity of instinct, the tiger was actively seeking them out.

the trees standing out on the ridges like stubble on a scalp. As the sun fell beyond the treetops, the upper branches seemed to gather mass, coming into high relief like the leading in a stained glass window. Briefly, the slivered voids between were lit in church glass shades of vermilion

Around the village, tree-lined ridges rose up against the deeper dark beyond and, along that wavering verge, stars moved imperceptibly in the treetops, encircling man and animal alike.

Summoning a Russian proverb, he added, “Hope dies last.”