The next morning, the forest guard came upon two hiding cubs. Seizing one up against his chest and shouting for help, he stumbled along in pursuit of the other. By now, Astafiev and his party had come across the third and fourth, backed into a hollow tree. They were duly extricated, with precocious roars and snarling, and the capture of the four cubs left everyone in the party either scratched or bitten. Two of the cubs died of natural causes shortly after capture, but a month later, in January, 1993, the two survivors were sent off on a five-thousand-mile journey to the United States, accompanied by Howard Quigley and his wife, Kathy, the project veterinarian. At the Omaha zoo, the cubs were placed in a captive-breeding program for endangered species, and a few months later one was transferred to Indianapolis, where the zoo staff, to commemorate her mother, named her Lena.
On January 18, 1996, when I returned to Primorski Krai, I was met at the Vladivostok airport by two of the wildlife biologists—Quigley, tall, trim-bearded, and soft-spoken, and the bearish Miquelle, now project field director. The Amur tiger, they told me, was more seriously endangered than ever. As a result of epidemic poaching, more than a third of the wild tigers were thought to have been destroyed since my last visit. Foreign enterprises—mining and timber interests in particular—had reportedly paid off officials for the right to ravage eastern Siberia. An assault on tiger country north of the reserve was under way, especially in the wild region of the Bikin River. However, neither Quigley nor Miquelle had given up hope for the tiger, or lost enthusiasm for the project. At present, they said, the Sikhote-Alin Reserve was being used as a significant part of their territory by twenty to twenty-five tigers. Most of the tigers, however, lived outside the reserve, and they had to be given protection if the Amur race was to survive. Besides helping the local government improve public education about tigers, the project was encouraging the acquisition of wild land by the reserve and the establishment of woodland corridors between the scattered sanctuaries to allow young animals dispersing from a litter to encounter other tigers all the way south from the roadless region of the Bikin River to the Lazovsky Reserve, northeast of Vladivostok.
The following morning, we flew with Anatoli Astafiev up the icebound coast to a new timber-export facility at Plastun, and from there we continued north to Terney on the coast road. Terney, a village of small wooden houses painted zinc green or faded blue, of gardens and picket fences, outhouses, and trim woodpiles, and of twisting birch-shaded mud lanes climbing uphill and inland, looked much as it had on my first visit, but its seeming tranquillity disguised some disturbing changes. In Soviet days, guns and travel, not to speak of commerce, had been severely restricted—a circumstance that helped spare the beleaguered tigers. But, with the advent of capitalism and a free market, everything had been put up for sale, including the forests and their wildlife. Soon what had been iron borders were laid wide open to international trade, and local hunters turned poachers and smugglers made the most of their opportunity to supply tiger parts for traditional medicines to the Chinas and Koreas. The mainland Chinese, in particular, were willing to pay as much as ten thousand dollars for a single tiger—more than a local man might hope to make in five years’ work—and were encouraging poaching in other tiger countries, especially India and Russia. They paid well not only for the beautiful striped pelt but for “medicine bones”—sinews, organs, glands, and even whiskers, which typically are ground to powder and consumed in the hope of curing mankind’s afflictions, and also of acquiring the tiger’s strength and its legendary potency, which permits it to mate vigorously over several days.
Thirteen tigers that had been collared and released since 1992 were being monitored biweekly from the air, and one morning, as the biplane used in project surveys crisscrossed an open valley and made a slow, grinding turn over a logging road, I saw the first wild tiger of my life, bounding swiftly across open ground through two feet of powder snow and whisking out of sight beneath a great lone spruce. Alerted, the pilot circled the spruce tighter and tighter. On that first sighting, with the low winter sun glancing off the snow, all I had seen was a leaping black silhouette, an emblematic tiger. (The image evoked a Tungus belief that stalking tigers use the sun to blind their prey, by springing out of the dawn light or the sunset like a spurt of flame.) But as the plane made a turn over the treetops, the tiger abandoned the lone tree and headed for a grove of pines nearby. I glimpsed a flash of bold color in the shifting greens, then the sunlit burnt orange and golden brown of a splendid creature moving purposefully but without haste over the snow; sheltered by the trees, it did not bound or hide but advanced unhurriedly down a sparkling white corridor between the pines.
The next day, with Quigley and Miquelle, I accompanied Anatoli Astafiev by car to the high-country logging village of Melnichnoye, where livelihoods were bound to be affected by a new western extension of the reserve.
At seven, the coast range was still locked in bitter darkness, and an hour later, though the sun had risen from the sea, the air remained transfixed by Arctic cold. At the Djigit River, a road led west over the mountains, following the southwestern boundary of the reserve in a gradual ascent into higher, colder country. Drab winter finches flitted across the white road and the ice-choked river like blown chips of bark, and a gray squirrel with handsome ear tassels cavorted up onto a snowbank and whisked down again. Twisting the bright-orange cones among white snow caps on the fir tops was a flock of crossbills, the males fire red and black, the females a flame yellow.
On the four-hour journey there were no settlements, and the only traffic on the roads were the great logging trucks bound east from Melnichnoye to Plastun. In midmorning, we crossed a high divide and headed out across Sikhote-Alin’s central plateaus, where the mountain air bit at the face like an ice tiger. Elk tracks wandered everywhere among snowy firs and bone-white birches, and we chased from the roadside a young elk, woolly brown in its thick winter coat: it struggled away over a rocky knoll, up to its brisket in the snow. Farther on, Astafiev pointed with pride at mountain landmarks of the new reserve addition. Soon the road crossed the Kolumbey River, which traverses a high plain before descending west to the Ussuri.
When Arseniev rode through here almost a century ago, Melnichnoye (then called Tsidatun, which is Chinese for “windy valley”) was a settlement of native Udege, a Tungus people. The community’s head forester, Nikolai Kosichko, an iron-haired man with melancholy eyes who welcomed us into his small house at the west end of town, told us that until 1971 the scattering of peasant cottages and sheds had remained “a pure forest village, and everybody was a hunter and trapper, with scarcely a hundred and fifty people all together.” Then logging arrived, at that time a state-run enterprise but now taken over by a private timber company. By 1985, the village population had become five times its former size, and today it shelters about a thousand souls.
“Most of our timber is shipped out through Plastun, and almost nothing comes back into our community,” Kosichko said. “We are supposed to receive thirty percent of any profit, but the federal government takes eighty percent and local officials take the other twenty. We can’t expect help from those officials, who have plenty of problems of their own—that is to say, no money.”
As we talked, men and women came in to hear the conversation. A forest guard named Vladimir Sharov, a handsome man in a green camouflage uniform who had bushy eyebrows, sideburns, and a black beard that gave him a slight resemblance to Fidel Castro, said that local sentiment ran strongly against the reserve and its new extension, and against him, as a consequence. Saying this, he offered a fine metallic smile. “Life is very different now,” he said. “It’s not just the economy. People are all living for the moment, and looking out only for themselves. Our life is out of control—it’s chaos.” This refrain is heard repeatedly in the new Russia. Before their world changed, there was an environmental-education program in the village, and tree planting, too, the guard recalled. “That’s all gone now. Before, the people volunteered to help, out of
enthusiasm. Today, nobody will lift a finger except for money.”
“If the Japanese ask for our Korean pine, we cut our pine, and if the Chinese want tiger bones we shoot our tigers,” Kosichko said ironically. “It’s not our fault!” And Sharov’s wife, Nina, cried in laughter and regret, “We have a democracy in Russia now! No rules at all!”
Miquelle had told me that tigers in Primorski Krai take about one human life each year, a fact that lends a certain edge to walking in the taiga. Last year, he said, a Melnichnoye trapper named Sergei Denisov was killed in the forest by a tiger, leaving a widow and two children. No, he had not made a mistake, said Sharov, who had been the dead man’s friend. “There is a critical distance with a tiger. He walked within it—that was that. Sergei did not intend to harm the tiger, therefore he made no mistake.” Anyway, he was not Melnichnoye’s first and only tiger victim. In 1958—the villagers consulted on this date—the head of the local weather station had been taken.
In Dersu’s time, the tiger was revered as “the True Spirit of the Mountains,” a wilderness god and the protector of the precious ginseng root from mankind. The word amba is no longer used, nor have the villagers retained any Udege myths about the forest. “We have the Russian outlook now,” Kosichko said.
When I asked if there was any feeling that the community would be better off if the last tigers were exterminated, the villagers gave a heartfelt groan of assent. But almost immediately Sharov protested that the reserve would be “boring” without tigers, and Kosichko’s assistant, Sergei Zinoviev, a balding, bearded man with a sly humor, strongly agreed, but he granted that fewer tigers might be better, since the game animals they killed were needed by the community. “For me,” he asserted, “life is more interesting with tigers around, but most people here would never miss them.” Even the women present discounted any threat to village life, although ten years earlier—the same hard winter during which a tiger was killed at a Vladivostok trolley station—a tiger had entered the dirt lanes between rows of cottages, killed a dog, and mauled a colt. As for the reserve, Zinoviev said, local gatherers of ginseng and other wild foods walked the forest all summer without guns. A man should not go there if he was afraid.
Nowadays, I was informed, the fine for shooting a tiger was a million rubles, or two hundred times the state minimum salary, and half of that again was the fine for selling their parts. However, a man would not be sent to prison for failure to pay the fine; he would only have most of his belongings confiscated.
“If you’re going to save tigers, you have to have stiffer penalties or provide a better life,” Zinoviev said. “If people could make a decent living, they would not shoot tigers.” These days, he went on to say, the tiger was poached less often for its hide and bones, because the trade in tiger parts was being closed down by the anti-poaching patrol on the Plastun road—formerly a favorite haunt of gun traders and hunters—and by replacement of corrupt customs officials on the borders. He then astonished us by adding that tigers were sometimes killed these days for food. “A third of the people here have eaten tiger, though they might not admit it,” he said. He pointed toward a ridge north of the village. “A tiger used to travel along that hillside. Somebody saw him every year. But we don’t see him anymore, because we ate him.” Tiger meat was like pork, he said, but leaner, lighter. “Want to try some?” he asked, and everybody laughed.
Later, I asked Astafiev if this sly fellow was fooling us. Astafiev shook his head. Maybe Zinoviev had exaggerated—tiger was not to everybody’s taste—but, yes, some people ate tiger, that was true.
When the meeting broke up, Sharov led us to the house of the late Sergei Denisov’s hunting partner, a woolly-headed young man with a muffled voice, introduced as Sasha. He described how he and Denisov and Denisov’s brother-in-law Sergei Polishuk had been hunting and trapping on a tributary of the Kolumbey River. On the fourteenth of February in 1995, Denisov, who had gone upstream to check his sable traps, failed to return. On the sixteenth, Polishuk went to look for him, and that same day Sharov came through on his patrol, staying overnight in the trappers’ cabin. Returning on the seventeenth, Polishuk told them that all he’d found were a pair of legs and a few red traces in the snow, surrounded by the pugmarks of a tigress. A few days later, the tiger researcher Igor Nikolaiev came to investigate, accompanied by Dale Miquelle. Though the original tracks were by then quite old, and had been obscured by light fresh snow and also by the tracks of a second tiger, Nikolaiev went to work with a spruce whisk, uncovering sign. He soon concluded that the man-eater had been half starved, for not only had she attacked a man but the whitish color of her scat denoted an animal that had eaten insufficiently for a long time. The tigress had lain in a sheltered bed under the base of a fallen tree and had gathered herself for an attack when she heard something coming. Had Denisov seen the tigress, he would probably have stood his ground and shouted aggressively, and perhaps fired off his gun, and in all likelihood this would have saved his life, but to the end he remained unaware of her, to judge from the absence of any signs of flight or struggle. The chances are that, except for one blow of wild pain and terror in the impact, he never realized that his life was ending.
Denisov’s hunting partner nurtured no resentment against the reserve and its new addition—“Let it stay,” he said. Nor did he express either fear or bitterness about the presence of the tigers. He shrugged, fatalistic. “Let them be,” he said. As far as he knew, Denisov’s brother-in-law felt the same way, for on this frozen day in the high mountains Sergei Polishuk was “out in the forest,” where he belonged.
(illustration credit 13.4)
Before leaving Melnichnoye, we enjoyed a fine elk feast, prepared by the local women, then returned to Terney, arriving about midnight. The following day, in the afternoon, we stopped again on the icebound empty road where Lena’s collar had been found—not to commemorate Lena but because a tigress, Katia, which had taken over Lena’s territory two years earlier and was thought to have cubs, had adopted Lena’s troubling habit of hiding her litter in a den east of the road and crossing the road to hunt in the Kunalaika. Not fifty yards from where Lena had been killed—and this seemed eerie—we found Katia’s tracks in the deep snow where she had come down the ridge and crossed the road to make her way to the elk bottoms. Her radio signal—a pulsing beat, like the hard chipping of a bird, or like the rubbing of two stones together—was loud and fast, but that might mean only that her collar was rubbing on a frozen kill.
To verify the existence of the litter, we wanted to check the tiger tracks around the kill. While Katia was present we could not go down there, for the sake of the tiger and her cubs as well as for our own sake. But that same evening, toward dusk, according to a reserve assistant, Alyosha Kostnya, Katia recrossed the road and climbed the eastern ridge, apparently on her way back to her litter. (As it turned out, she had just one cub, and she brought it across the road a few days later.) The following day, her signal, still coming from the east, indicated that she was resting, which is usual in the middle of the day, and so we descended through the hillside woods to find her kill.
The snow in the woods was two feet deep and fluffy with dry cold. In the deep frost, a pea-green moth cocoon suspended from a twig was the solitary note of green. In the bottoms we followed the smooth white surface of the Kunalaika, which in this place might have been forty feet across. On the river ice, the snow left by the wind was light, and Katia’s pugmarks were sharp, as if incised in steel. In one place, the tigress had lain down and stretched, leaving a ghostly outline of the True Spirit of the Mountains, even to the great head and long tail, the leg crook, and the big, floppy paws—so clear that one could almost see the stripes.
Her ambush site was a river island of small, bent black saplings against snow—uncanny camouflage for the white accents of her mask and her vertical black markings. Not far away, the heart-shaped prints of a young elk broke the ice glaze on an oxbow off the river, and from the snow evidence we were able to reconstr
uct what had happened. The fore-prints came together where the elk stopped short, in a place of elms and cottonwoods, some seventy yards from the crouched tiger. Perhaps the elk listened, sniffed, and trembled for a moment, big dark eyes round. From this taut point, it suddenly sprang sidewise, attaining the far bank in one scared bound, as the tigress launched herself from hiding and cut across her quarry’s route in ten-foot leaps, leaving silent round explosions in the snow. Shooting through the dark riverine trees like a tongue of fire, she overtook the big deer and hauled it down in a wood of birch and poplar about thirty-seven yards (Miquelle paced it off) from where she’d started. Striking from behind, she’d grasped the throat, to suffocate her prey, for there was little blood—only the arcs of a bony elk leg sweeping weakly on the surface of the snow, and a last, sad spasm of the creature’s urine.
With logging trucks howling past perhaps sixty yards up the steep slope, this wood was much too close to the road. The tigress had dragged the elk some ninety yards farther back, across the oxbow and the swamp island to the western bank, where she had lain in hiding. And seeing the smooth drag mark, with its spots of blood, one unwillingly imagined the similar track left by the body of poor Sergei Denisov, who must have been close to the size and weight of this young carcass, with the same astonishment in his wide eyes.
The elk’s carcass was dropped beneath a thick-trunked alder with dry catkins. Here the tigress fed before moving the elk to a wiry thicket at the edge of a swampy meadow.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 23
