Prologue

Hanging in the trees, as if caught there, is a sickle of a moon.  Its wan light scatters shadows on the snow below, only obscuring further the forest that this man negotiates now as much by feel as sight.  He is on foot and on his own save for a single dog, which runs ahead, eager to be heading home at last.  All around, the black trunks of oak, pine, and poplar soar into the dark above the scrub and deadfall, and their branches form a tattered canopy overhead.  Slender birches, whiter than the snow, seem to emit a light of their own, but it is like the coat of an animal in winter; cold to the touch and for itself alone.  All is quiet in this dormant, frozen world.  It is so cold that spit will freeze before it lands; so cold that a tree, brittle as straw and unable to contain its expanding sap, may spontaneously explode.  As they progress, man and dog alike leave behind a wake of heat, and the contrails of their breath hang in pale clouds above their tracks.  Their scent stays close in the windless dark, but their footfalls carry and so, with every step, they announce themselves to the night. 

Despite the bitter cold, the man wears rubber boots better suited to the rain; his clothes, too, are surprisingly light, considering that he has been out all day, searching.  His gun has grown heavy on his shoulder, as have his rucksack and cartridge belt.  But he knows this route like the back of his hand, and he is almost within sight of his cabin.  Now, at last, he can allow himself the possibility of relief.  Perhaps he imagines the lantern he will light and the fire he will build; perhaps he imagines the burdens he will soon lay down.  The water in the kettle is certainly frozen, but the stove is thinly-walled and soon it will glow fiercely against the cold and dark, just as his own body is doing now.  Soon enough, there will be hot tea and a cigarette, followed by rice, meat, and more cigarettes.  Maybe a shot or two of vodka, if there is any left.  He savors this ritual and knows it by rote.  Then, as the familiar angles take shape across the clearing, the dog collides with a scent as with a wall and stops short, growling.  They are hunting partners and the man understands: someone is there by the cabin.  The hackles on the dog’s back and on his own neck rise together. 

Together, they hear a rumble in the dark that seems to come from everywhere at once.

Thus begins the masterpiece that is The Tiger:  A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.  The man is Markov.  We will learn a great deal more about him before Vaillant is through, for Markov is the tiger’s first victim.

The Amur River watershed, its ridgelines, valleys and tributaries, is the setting for the events that follow.  Located in the Russian Far East, bordered by China along its west and the Sea of Japan and Straits of Tartar to its east, it is a spit of lush, sub-arctic forest (boreal jungle, in Vaillant’s words) where the tiger commonly known as Siberian gets its proper name, the Amur Tiger.  The events of Vaillant’s true story take place along the Bikin River, a tributary of a tributary of the Amur that rises in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains just inland from the Sea of Japan and drains west and north to meet the Takhala that then flows north to the Amur.

There may have been 75,000 Amur tigers when the Treaty of Aigun demarcated portions of the Amur River as the border between Russia and China in 1858.  The by-then weak Qing Dynasty had more pressing worries than the northeastern reaches of Manchuria, leading to the territorial concessions of the treaty and an influx of European Russians.  After the wholesale slaughter of tigers during the heady days of the Tzars’ imperial expansionism, followed by a ban on hunting after the Bolsheviks took over, followed by the anarchy following the Soviet collapse, there might today be 400 Amur tigers left.  It’d be hard to conjure a more potent example of mankind’s avaricious, rapacious nature and the effect it has had on the world in which he lives than the tale of what happened to the Amur tiger.  But that’s not what Vaillant’s story is about.  It’s about what an Amur tiger that felt it had been wronged did to man.  It’s hard in the circumstances not to root for the tiger.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy for more than just Vladimir Putin.  It put people out of work, people who in Russia’s Far East often moved to the taiga, the sub-arctic forest, to scrape a living from the land as their frontiersmen ancestors had done under the Tzars.  There were logging and mineral extraction industries in Russia’s Far East, but not enough to keep employed the legions of the redundant that the collapse created. Markov went to the taiga.

The Udeghe, Nanai, and Orochi, (native tribes of the Amur watershed who suffered much the same from eastward European expansion as their North American counterparts suffered from its westward version), revere the tiger, acknowledging its supremacy in the taiga. They do not try to eliminate the threat of the tiger by killing it; instead, they seek a peaceful détente with the beast, allowing it a wide berth whenever they encounter its tracks (people, even indigenous people, almost never see a tiger in the wild, though it can be assumed the tiger always sees them), and offer sacrifices to the tiger as if it were a god, leaving a portion of meat from a successful hunt of boar or deer. From years of experience coexisting with the tiger, they understand that getting crosswise with a tiger in the taiga, as Markov learned, rarely ends well.

These are just tidbits of what one will learn of the apex predator of the Amur, of its habitat and habits, of the impact mankind’s activities, particularly in the political realm, have had on its welfare, and of the people who live and die with the tiger in the taiga.  As with any great book, the expansion of the mind comes effortlessly and almost unwittingly, as Vaillant’s exquisite prose immerses one in the taiga where the greatest cat stalking the earth roams.  One almost feels the tiger’s presence as Trush and his companions sweep out from their single-file line of march just in time for the tiger to pounce from seemingly nowhere.  This is a great book about a marvelous animal, one which has been so finely honed by natural selection until it seems as if God handcrafted the creature himself.

The Amuri Tiger isn’t threatened by climate change.  It is threatened by mankind, in all his various activities, many of which are purported to be causing the Earth’s whole climate to change.  To focus conservation efforts on an abstraction like climate change while ignoring the real and immediate danger of extinction mankind’s discrete activities in the tiger’s realm impose is to see the forest but fail to recognize it is comprised of trees.

Shortly after finishing the book, I found myself in Columbus, Ohio on a cold late-March weekend with nothing much to do, so decided upon a visit to the Columbus Zoo.  Amongst a bounty of other animals displayed in habitats as natural as could be conjured under the circumstances (especially the gorillas), the Zoo had two Amur tigers.  One of the tigers was pacing back and forth along a fence maybe four feet from us. It reminded me of a poem by Valerie Worth I used to read to my kids from Carle’s Animals Animals:

The tiger has swallowed a black sun.

In his cold cage he carries it still.

Black flames flicker through his fur.

Black rays roar from the centers of his eyes.

<God, but I love tigers.>

The other tiger at the Zoo, as photographed from about 50 yards away, in a separate area from where the pacing tiger was kept.