The Tiger

by John Vaillant

Early the following morning—Saturday—Yuri Trush, along with his squadmates Alexander Gorborukov and Sasha Lazurenko, piled into a surplus army truck and rumbled north. Dressed in insulated fatigues and camouflage, and armed with knives, pistols, and semiautomatic rifles, the Tigers, as these inspectors are sometimes called, looked less like game wardens than like some kind of wilderness SWAT team. Their twenty-year-old truck was nicknamed a Kung, and it was the Russian army’s four-ton equivalent to the Unimog and the Humvee.

One of the many negative effects of perestroika and the reopening of the border between Russia and China has been a surge in tiger poaching. As the economy disintegrated and unemployment spread throughout the 1990s, professional poachers, businessmen, and ordinary citizens alike began taking advantage of the forest’s wealth in all its forms. The tigers, because they are so rare and so valuable, have been particularly hard hit: their organs, blood, and bone are much sought after for use in traditional Chinese medicine. Some believe the tiger’s whiskers will make them bulletproof and that its powdered bones will soothe their aches and pains. Others believe its penis will make them virile, and there are many—from Tokyo to Moscow—who will pay thousands of dollars for a tiger’s skin.

In many ways, Inspection Tiger’s mandate resembles that of detectives on a narcotics detail, and so does the risk: the money is big, and the players are often desperate and dangerous individuals. Tigers are similar to drugs in that they are sold by the gram and the kilo, and their value increases according to the refinement of both product and seller. But there are some key differences: tigers can weigh six hundred pounds; they have been hunting large prey, including humans, for two million years; and they have a memory. For these reasons, tigers can be as dangerous to the people trying to protect them as they are to those who would profit from them.

The first sign of trouble was the crows. Carrion crows will follow a tiger the same way seagulls follow a fishing boat: by sticking with a proven winner, they conserve energy and shift the odds of getting fed from If to When.

Save for the movements of the dog and the men, the forest has gone absolutely still; even the crows have withdrawn, waiting for this latest disturbance to pass. And so, it seems, has the tiger. Then, there is a sound: a brief, rushing exhale—the kind one would use to extinguish a candle. But there is something different about the volume of air being moved, and the force behind it—something bigger and deeper: this is not a human sound. At the same moment, perhaps ten yards ahead, the tip of a low fir branch spontaneously sheds its load of snow. The flakes powder down to the forest floor; the men freeze in mid-breath and, once again, all is still.

Because so much of life here is governed by a kind of whimsical rigidity—a combination of leftover Soviet bureaucracy and free market chaos—even simple interactions with officialdom can leave you feeling as if you have wandered into an insane asylum. To this day, the Russian Far East is a place where neither political correctness nor eco-speak have penetrated, and patriotism is vigorous and impassioned.

In addition to having a larger skull than other subspecies, it carries more fat and a heavier coat, and these give it a rugged, primitive burliness that is missing from its sleeker tropical cousins. The thickly maned head can be as broad as a man’s chest and shoulders, and winter paw prints are described using hats and pot lids for comparison. As the encyclopedic reference Mammals of the Soviet Union puts it, “The general appearance of the tiger is that of a huge physical force and quiet confidence, combined with a rather heavy grace.” But one could just as easily say: this is what you get when you pair the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator.

The most valuable timber in the Far East grows in Primorye, and a person can be murdered here for showing too much interest in the means by which southbound railcars and freighters are loaded with the perfectly symmetrical cylinders of aspen, oak, larch, and poplar that the Asian market demands. Much of what China makes from this Russian wood finds its way into American big box stores. The reason chain store prices—e.g., $20 for a solid oak toilet seat—seem too good to be true is because they are. Stolen hubcaps are cheap for the same reason. In the Far East, paying protection money to the mafia and bribes to customs officials is cheaper than legitimate timber licenses and export duties. On a late night drive through the snowbound woods of the Bikin valley, it is not unusual to meet the black-market night shift—a Toyota van loaded with fallers and their saws, followed by a flatbed crane truck—heading in to work.

They lived in Kaliningrad, the diminutive province wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea that was formerly a German territory. Most of the capital city, Königsberg, and its strategic port were still in ruins after being heavily bombed by the British during the summer of 1944 and then shelled relentlessly by the Soviets during the winter and spring of 1945. After the war, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad. It became the base for the Soviet Baltic Fleet and, like Vladivostok, its Pacific counterpart, the city was declared off limits to outsiders. This occurred at the same time that George Orwell’s 1984 was introducing Western readers to a terrifying new reality, one that resembled the nascent Kaliningrad more closely than Orwell could have imagined. As Kaliningrad crawled to its feet out of the rubble and ash of Königsberg, it did so in the Stalinist image of urban development and social control. Replacing medieval towers, parapets, and gargoyles were bleak and poorly built concrete apartment blocks enlivened only by statues and murals of Lenin’s goateed visage that oversaw one’s every move and bannered slogans that intruded on one’s private thoughts. Lenin may have envisioned it, but Stalin mastered it: the ability to disorient and disconnect individuals and large populations, not just from their physical surroundings and core communities but, ultimately, from themselves. Kaliningrad was a case in point. After being flattened, purged, and renamed, both city...

The stresses began to tell in the late 1950s, after Mao accused Stalin’s more moderate successor, Nikita Khrushchev, of betraying Marx’s vision. China, then in the throes of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, was mimicking some of Lenin’s and Stalin’s most disastrous policies and programs with one result being that the country suffered the worst famine in its history—perhaps in all of history. Between 1958 and 1962, China strove to create an illusion of industrial progress by producing ton upon ton of useless low-grade steel, but it did so at the expense of basic food production. Not only did the massive project draw countless workers away from the fields, it claimed their tools as well: in a futile effort to reach unattainable production quotas, even shovels and plowshares were melted down. Hoping to save face and conceal the true costs of this Great Leap Forward, China continued to export grain (to Russia, among other countries) with the result that tens of millions of peasants starved to death.

Because Primorye and southern Khabarovsk Territory were effectively sandwiched between China and the Pacific coast (which was deemed vulnerable to Japanese and American infiltration), security was particularly tight there. As a result, Markov was going from one forbidden zone to another; this was a place that he and many of his fellow draftees may not have even known existed. Despite nearly two decades of relative openness, this is apparently still the case, if for different reasons. When a literate young Muscovite, bound for a prestigious American music school, was asked about Primorye in July of 2008, he said he hadn’t heard of it. “Maybe it’s near Iran,” he guessed. To the more straightforward question, “Are there tigers in Russia?” he answered, “I think only in the circus.” For many Russian urbanites, “Russia” stops at the Urals, if not sooner. Beyond that is Siberia—a bad joke, and after that, well, who really cares? In the minds of most Russians, the Far East lies over the edge of the known world and is, itself, a form of oblivion. For any European Russian, whether ordinary worker or privileged member of the nomenklatura,* a one-way ticket like Markov’s was tantamount to banishment. His was the same route undertaken by hundreds of thousands of exiles dating back to Czarist times. Some of the country’s most notorious prisons and labor camps were located there, including the dreaded and, for many years, unmentionable Sakhalin Island, a frigid and lonely sub-planet from...

the two men had agreed to meet there to do some ice fishing. But Onofrecuk had gotten drunk and was late—by about a day.

In the chaos following the privatization cum fire sale of the Soviet Union’s most valuable assets, one ambitious and well-connected young man named Roman Abramovich effectively acquired the vast Far Eastern autonomous region of Chukotka, along with its staggeringly lucrative oilfields. By the time he was thirty, Abramovich had become one of the richest men in the world, which he remains to this day (he resigned as governor in 2008). But he is only one example. In 2008, nineteen of the world’s one hundred richest people were Russians. This statistic is all the more remarkable when you consider that most major fortunes are either inherited or built systematically, over the course of a lifetime. Russia’s oligarchs, on the other hand, became multibillionaires virtually overnight, many while still in their thirties.

Making matters worse was the inflation rate, which, by 1993, was approaching 1,000 percent, rendering the ruble virtually worthless. In subsequent years, it settled down somewhat, but only in relative terms; throughout the mid-1990s, Russians were seeing annual price increases of 200 and 300 percent. Then, in 1997, the Russian ruble went into free fall, much as the deutsche mark had done prior to World War II. A ruble, which, a decade earlier, could have bought a pack of cigarettes, five ice cream cones, or a cafeteria lunch for two, was now worth about one one-hundredth of a U.S. cent and could not cover the price of a nail. On January 1, 1998, a month after Markov’s death, Russia’s currency was “revised” with the introduction of the so-called new ruble. While this radical measure stabilized the currency and brought the exchange rate back onto a recognizable scale, it wiped out whatever remained of most people’s savings.

“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? Sometimes, this brings staggering discoveries. Because nobody’s watching, you can easily become an animal: it is not necessary to shave, or to wash, or to keep your winter quarters clean—you can live in shit and no one will see. You can shoot tigers, or choose not to shoot. You can run in fear and nobody will know. You have to have something—some force, which allows and helps you to survive without witnesses.

“When the majority of people have no means of defense (i.e., firearms) tigers figure that out and include them on the list of potential prey,” he explained. “However, where you have a heavily armed populace (e.g., Russia) tigers also figure that out and ‘take people off the list.’ The implication is that you have to teach tigers that people are dangerous. I think this holds for most large carnivores.”

The order Carnivora (meat-eating mammals) represents approximately 10 percent of all mammal species, but only 2 percent of the total mammalian biomass. Apex predators like big cats represent a tiny fraction of this already small percentage and, between 1860 and 1960, big game hunters made it smaller still.

Even after the Bolsheviks took control of the region, there was no peace, only a series of increasingly savage repressions by the victors. Some of Russia’s most notorious gulags, including the Kolyma gold fields, were located in the Far East and throughout the 1920s and 1930s their populations swelled steadily, as did their cemeteries. Already battered by what Alec Nove, an expert on the Soviet economy, described as “the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history,” Russian citizens in the late 1930s were now being arrested and executed on a quota system. It was an absolutely terrifying time: Russia was Wonderland, Stalin was the Queen of Hearts, and anyone could be Alice.

By 1937, the purges were peaking nationwide, and no one was safe: peasants, teachers, scientists, indigenous people, Old Believers, Koreans, Chinese, Finns, Lithuanians, Party members—it didn’t seem to matter as long as the quota was met.

Under Stalin, science was a prisoner, too—bound and gagged by a particularly rigid brand of Marxist ideology, which declared, in short, that in order for Mankind to realize His destiny as a superhuman, super-rational master of all, Mother Nature must be forced to bow and, in the process, be radically transformed. By the mid-1930s, most advocates of environmental protection had been silenced one way or another, and their ideas replaced by slogans like “We cannot expect charity from nature. We must tear it from her.”

In 1947, Russia became the first country in the world to recognize the tiger as a protected species. However, active protection was sporadic at best, and poaching and live capture continued. In spite of this, the Amur tiger population has rebounded to a sustainable level over the past sixty years, a recovery unmatched by any other subspecies of tiger. Even with the upsurge in poaching over the past fifteen years, the Amur tiger has, for now, been able to hold its own.

Schaller and Lowther kept on walking, but this time, instead of viewing the vast herds of zebra, wildebeest, and gazelle as meat on the hoof that one must personally subdue, they imagined it as a movable feast, on the crumbs of which a band of small, unarmed early hominids might feed opportunistically—not by hunting but by gathering. They made some illuminating discoveries. It happened to be calving season so, first, they concentrated on calves and fawns. In the space of two hours, they spotted eighty pounds’ worth of meat in the form of easily caught young animals and abandoned carcasses. The next time they went out they focused on scavenging only from existing kills, an activity that, unlike calf and fawn hunting, could be pursued year-round. Over the course of a week, during which they walked for twenty hours (with the aid of a car to move between locations), they turned up nearly a thousand pounds of edible animal parts (alive and dead). Taking into account that a) there were only two of them, instead of an extended family or clan group, and b) this experiment was conducted in an area where the game closely resembled prehistoric concentrations of migratory animals, Schaller and Lowther concluded “that under similar conditions a carnivorous hominid group could have survived by a combination of scavenging and killing sick [and young] animals.”

As tempting as it may be to imagine spear-wielding Stone Age hunters squaring off against saber-toothed tigers, both parties were most likely too smart, too specialized, and too pragmatic by then to bother with each other. That said, predation has been a recurring theme throughout our shared time on this planet, and the need to manage this threat, along with hunger, thirst, climate, competition, and the perils of overland travel, has impelled us toward our current state. Members of the evolutionary subtribe Hominina, from whom we directly descend, have been differentiated from chimpanzees for approximately six million years. There is no doubt that cats have been eating us and them—at least occasionally—since our collective beginnings.

Schaller and Lowther observed a phenomenon that would have had far greater implications for early humans than chance discoveries of abandoned meat: “All of the seven lion groups that we encountered while we were on foot fled when we were at distances of 80 to 300 meters.”§ If a pride of lions—lions—will flee at the sight of two unarmed human beings, what would they do if approached by a party of five or ten or twenty who were shouting, waving sticks, and throwing stones? Conceivably, such a group, emboldened by experience and empowered by growing brains and advancing technology, could have eaten their way across the Serengeti for hundreds of millennia without lifting a spear. Taking this a step further, imagine the self-concept of such creatures: barely five feet tall with neither claws nor fangs and a clear understanding of their potential as prey who were, nonetheless, able to intimidate and steal from the deadliest creatures in their world more or less at will. Early humans, pre-fire, may well have been Paleolithic Wizards of Oz—masters of illusion and psyops who eventually, amazingly, willed their “impersonations” of superiority into fact. If only during daylight hours.

What is important to keep in mind here is that everyone involved had known one another, effectively, “forever.” The lions had been raised—for millennia—with an awareness of Bushmen, and the Bushmen had been brought up with an understanding of lions. Each was part of the other’s larger community and whatever imbalances may have existed were calibrated long before the Pyramids were even imagined. In other words, there was a culture in place—what Thomas describes as “a web of socially transmitted behaviours”—and all participating parties had been habituated to their particular roles.

Based on the accumulated evidence, it is not a stretch to suggest that the Chauvet cave artists, the Kalahari Bushmen, and the indigenous peoples of Primorye all perceived their enormous feline neighbors in similar ways: as fearsome, fascinating, supernaturally potent beings who charged their lives with meaning, and sometimes provided meat. Predation appeared to be a secondary concern.

“There is something hypnotic in a tiger,” he explained. “She has that quality. She treads so softly that there is no sound, and you won’t know she’s there at all. But if she doesn’t like something, she’ll stop and hold your gaze. There’s a kind of psychological ballet: who will outstare who? In such cases, you should not suddenly turn tail because the scent of fear passes quickly. You must back off slowly, slowly—especially if the tiger has a kill, or if she’s a mother with cubs: she makes a step, you make a step—you must not run away. And only when you leave the territory she thinks is hers, only then can you run.”

The Khomenko incident had been Trush’s first case involving the death of a person. As upsetting as it was, it had fit the typical profile of an animal attack on a hunter: clearly provoked, quickly resolved, and with no third parties attempting to conceal evidence. In human terms, Khomenko’s death was a third-degree murder: a spur-of-the moment defensive reaction in which death was incidental rather than intended. By contrast, the attack on Markov was far more sinister. It resembled something closer to a first-degree murder: premeditated, with malice aforethought, and a clear intent to kill.

Tigers on the prowl may look like the embodiment of lethal competence, but looks are deceiving: in order to survive, they need to kill roughly one large animal each week, and they miss their mark between 30 and 90 percent of the time. This relative inefficiency is extremely costly in terms of energy expenditure. As a result, injured or not, there is no rest for a tiger—no hibernation as there is for bears, no division of labor as with lions, and no migration to lush pastures as there is for many ungulates. Time, for the tiger, especially the male, is more like time is for the shark: a largely solitary experience of hunting and digesting followed by more hunting, until he dies.

Once the cubs are born the tigress must keep hunting on her own, only twice as hard now because she has cubs to feed—and to protect from infanticidal males. A tiger’s taste for meat may be innate, but its ability to acquire it is not, so the tigress must also teach her cubs how to hunt. Tigresses typically bear from one to four cubs in a litter, and they will spend one to two years with the mother, during which time she must keep them warm, safe, and fed. In addition to all her other tasks, she must engineer predation scenarios that demonstrate stalking and killing techniques and then allow the cubs to safely practice them without getting injured or starving due to their own incompetence, and while taking care of her own prodigious appetite. The learning curve is long and steep and, in the taiga, the combination of hard winters, hunting accidents, and hostile males takes a heavy toll on cubs, especially young males.

“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.”

Vladimir Schetinin, the former head of Inspection Tiger, and an expert on Amur tiger attacks, has accumulated a number of stories like this over the past thirty years. “There are at least eight cases that my teams and I investigated,” he said in March of 2007, “and we all arrived at the same conclusion: if a hunter fired a shot at a tiger, that tiger would track him down, even if it took him two or three months. It is obvious that tigers will sit and wait specifically for the hunter who has fired shots at them.”

A more useful way to understand a tiger’s capacity for vengeful behavior may be in the context of territory and property, i.e., prey. As they are with human hunters, these are hard to separate in the tiger’s mind. Tigers, particularly males, are well known for their intense and reflexive possessiveness; it is a defining characteristic, and it exerts a powerful influence on their behavior, particularly when it comes to territory, mates, and food. Both males and females can be ferocious boundary keepers, but a male tiger will guard his domain as jealously as any modern gangster or medieval lord.

An Amur tiger’s sense of superiority and dominance over his realm is absolute: because of his position in the forest hierarchy, the only force a male will typically submit to is a stronger tiger or, occasionally, a large brown bear. Nothing else ranks in the taiga, and this is why, if threatened or attacked, these animals have been known to climb trees to swat at helicopters and run headlong into gunfire.

Fights between animals are rarely to the death because killing a powerful adversary is dangerous and takes an enormous amount of energy. Death for its own sake is seldom an objective in nature anyway: the reason prey is killed is not to kill it per se, but to keep it still long enough to be eaten. Likewise, in the case of a territorial dispute, the goal is not to terminate but to establish dominance and persuade your competitor to go elsewhere. In general, animals (including tigers) avoid conflicts whenever possible because fighting hurts, and the margins in the wild are simply too tight. Most predators—leopards or solitary wolves, for example—will abandon a contested kill rather than risk an injury. But tigers are different: when dealing with its subjects, the male Amur tiger can be vicious, shrewd, and vindictive. In addition to his Herod-like response to other cubs and young males, he may even kill his own. Based on the observations of hunters and biologists, it appears that Amur t...

In Primorye, tigers attack and eat both black and brown bears on a fairly regular basis; this is striking because, ordinarily, no animal in its right mind would take on a bear. Russian brown bears belong to the same species as American grizzlies and can weigh a thousand pounds; their ferocity and power are l...

IN 1909, AN ESTONIAN-BORN BARON-TURNED-PHYSIOLOGIST NAMED Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of Umwelt to the world. Uexküll is considered one of the fathers of ethology, which is also known as behavioral ecology. It is a young discipline whose goal is to study behavior and social organization through a biological lens. “To do so,” wrote Uexküll in “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” “we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar … is transformed.”

“All species have been shaped by the forces of evolution to meet immediate needs,” wrote George Page in his companion to the television series Inside the Animal Mind. “The more a given species needs to be conscious of, the more it is conscious of. Either that or it becomes extinct.” Georges Leroy, a naturalist and gamekeeper to Louis XV at Versailles, had ample opportunity to observe predator-prey relations and he speculated that the reason wolves seemed so much smarter than deer was that they would starve to death if they weren’t. While deer forage is stationary and abundant, wolf prey, by contrast, is not only highly mobile but doing its utmost to avoid being eaten. In order to succeed, predators must actively—and consciously—contrive successful hunting scenarios by adapting to, and manipulating, random events within a constantly shifting environment. This, as any hunter or businessperson knows, is hard to do, and these conditions favor the prey almost every time.

In the Bikin valley, it is generally believed that if a tiger has decided to attack you, you will not be able to see it. With the exception of the polar bear, which also hunts by stealth, there is no other land mammal this big whose survival depends on its ability to disappear.

“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 with me.’ If you take meat from the tiger,” Mikhail explained, “you will feel that you owe him, and then you will be afraid of the tiger.”

THE TERMS OF THE BIG CAT-PRIMATE RELATIONSHIP HAVE BEEN amazingly consistent over time: it doesn’t matter if the primates in question are gun-wielding tayozhniks, !Kung hunters, preverbal australopithecines, or baboons through the ages. As far as our immanent fear of predatory cats goes, virtually nothing has changed in five million years beyond our techniques for managing it. Because of this, there are striking similarities between the behavior of Trush’s Inspection Tiger team at Markov’s cabin and that of a troop of baboons on the African savanna: formed into defensive groups by day, both man and monkey will travel in the open, even going so far as to confront predatory cats. But as soon as the sun goes down, each group will retreat to safe quarters where they huddle together until dawn.

In the West, a certain level of psychological awareness—and the language to go with it—is taken for granted now, but in Russia, with the exception of some in urban, educated circles, this is virtually nonexistent. Stoicism isn’t so much a virtue as it is a survival skill. Of the people in rural Primorye, a longtime expatriate said, “Those folks are tougher than nails and hardened from horrors.” A 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. It is understood that life is hard and men, especially, are expected to suck it up and gut it out. If you need a counselor, confessor, or escape hatch—that’s what vodka is for.

Prior to the reopening of the Chinese border following Gorbachev’s rapprochement with Beijing in 1989, commercial tiger poaching was virtually unknown in Russia. Since then, the export of Primorye’s natural resources—in all their forms and shades of legality—has exploded while local Russians have found themselves completely overmatched by the Chinese: their hustle, their business acumen, and their insatiable appetite for everything from ginseng and sea cucumbers to Amur tigers and Slavic prostitutes. In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: “Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”

Schetinin is a Cossack; his ancestors served in the Amur division of the Cossack army, which was instrumental in the annexation of Primorye. In return for their service and loyalty to the czars, the Cossacks enjoyed a special status among Russians and were rewarded with land and a large measure of autonomy, but all this changed under communism. After the Revolution, their independence, fighting skill, and tribal solidarity were seen as threats to the Soviet State, and Stalin added them to his long list of enemies. In 1934, Schetinin’s paternal grandfather was conscripted to dig a clandestine tunnel under the Amur River, and his family never saw him again. Schetinin’s father was next: in 1938, at the peak of the Great Terror, he was relieved of his duties as a village postmaster and charged with “harmful activities related to untimely mail deliveries.” For this he was shot. The rest of the family was banished to a concentration camp in the Jewish Autonomous Region, a little known creation of Stalin’s intended to serve, oxymoronically, as a Soviet Zion for Russian Jews. It still exists today. Located on the Amur River between China and Khabarovsk Territory, it is hard to imagine a place further removed from the Holy Land.

As the men pored over the White Book, Andrei Pochepnya’s last moments became as clear as if man and tiger alike had been taking notes: the tiger had approached from the east—the direction of the road workers’ camp—until he paused, catching wind or sound of Pochepnya. Anticipating Pochepnya’s plans to walk downriver—perhaps by scenting the bait in his traps—the tiger turned south, traveling parallel to Pochepnya’s future path, just far enough from the river so that Pochepnya failed to notice his tracks. Then the tiger made a loop into the forest, effectively removing any trace of himself from the area, and came up from behind (downstream), a standard stalking maneuver. From here, the tiger spotted Tsepalev’s hovel; after exploring it and having his way with it, much as he had done with Markov’s cabin and the road workers’ outhouse, the tiger found a comfortable, if oddly exposed, spot and settled down to wait for the inevitable.

The hunt—like love-making—occurs in a timeless zone where all external measures temporarily cease to apply. It is a ritual of concentration that determines life and death for all concerned.

Even as the men read his tracks, the tiger could have been nearby, reading them, deciding how or when to work them into the plot. Tigers, of course, are experts at this game, and they use the same methods humans do: pick up the trail of potential prey by scent, sight, or knowledge of its habits; follow it in order to get a feel for where it is going; and then, in effect, read ahead and wait for the prey to arrive. End of story.

“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.

At midnight, the generator was shut down, and then there was no sound but the dogs: a series of shrill and urgent calls and responses that ricocheted between the houses, each one trailing a faint echo behind it like a sonic shadow. Together, these sentinels formed a kind of predator positioning system: when one of them reached a certain pitch, or stopped transmitting altogether, dogs and humans alike would know, if only for a moment, where the tiger was. But this ancient and time-tested network of alarms was only that; it was no defense against the tiger. The night belonged to him. The dogs could bark and growl all they liked, but in the end they were helpless in the face of this creature they could sense but could not see. And this made the long night seem longer still.

AS OF 2008, THERE WERE AN ESTIMATED FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY tigers living in Primorye, southern Khabarovsk Territory, and their adjacent border regions—down from a postwar high of roughly five hundred in the late 1980s. (By comparison, the state of Texas, a place that has no natural history of tigers, has more than two thousand of them living in various forms of captivity.) This may sound like a lot of tigers, but it is nothing compared to what the wild population was a hundred years ago.