The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Primorye is also the meeting place of four distinct bioregions. Like their far-flung human counterparts, plants and animals from the Siberian taiga, the steppes of Mongolia, the subtropics of Korea and Manchuria, and from the boreal forests of the far north have all converged here, pushing the limits of their respective growing zones between coastline, alpine, floodplain, and forest. As a result, attempts by botanists to classify the region have produced marble-mouthed results: “Manchurian and Sakhalin-Hokkaido Provinces of the Eastern Asiatic Region” is one; “Transbaikalian Province of the Circumboreal Region” is another.5

  Here is an alternative suggestion: the Boreal Jungle.

  It sounds like an oxymoron, but it acknowledges the blended nature of this remote and slender threshold realm in which creatures of the subarctic have been overlapping with those of the subtropics since before the last Ice Age. There is strong evidence suggesting that this region was a refugium, one of several areas around the Pacific Rim that remained ice-free during the last glaciation, and this may help explain the presence of an ecosystem that exists nowhere else. Here, timber wolves and reindeer share terrain with spoonbills and poisonous snakes, and twenty-five-pound Eurasian vultures will compete for carrion with saber-beaked jungle crows. Birch, spruce, oak, and fir can grow in the same valley as wild kiwis, giant lotus, and sixty-foot lilacs, while pine trees bearing edible nuts may be hung with wild grapes and magnolia vines. These, in turn, feed and shelter herds of wild boar and families of musk deer whose four-inch fangs give them the appearance of evolutionary outtakes. Nowhere else can a wolverine, brown bear, or moose drink from the same river as a leopard, in a watershed that also hosts cork trees, bamboo, and solitary yews that predate the Orthodox Church. In the midst of this, Himalayan black bears build haphazard platforms in wild cherry trees that seem too fragile for the task, opium poppies nod in the sun, and ginseng keeps its secret in dappled shade.

  This region, which feels so like an island, could almost be described as one because it is nearly separated from the rest of Asia by two major rivers—the Ussuri and the Amur—and Lake Khanka, the largest lake in the Far East. The Amur, for which the local tigers are named, is northeast Asia’s mother river; the Chinese call it Heilongjiang: the Black Dragon. Rising from two different sources in Mongolia, it flows for nearly three thousand miles before terminating in the Tartar Strait opposite Sakhalin Island. It is the third longest river in Asia, and the longest undammed river in the world. An ecosystem unto itself, it nurtures scores of bird species and more than 130 kinds of fish. Here, sturgeon—some the size of alligators—work the river bottom along with pearl-bearing freshwater oysters, and taimen, an enormous relative of the salmon that was once hunted with harpoons from birch bark canoes.

  Primorye’s bizarre assemblage of flora and fauna leaves one with the impression that Noah’s ark had only recently made landfall, and that, rather than dispersing to their proper places around the globe, many of its passengers had simply decided to stay, including some we never knew existed. Within this waterbound envelope live unclassifiable species like the raccoon dog, as well as a bizarre tropical canid called a dhole that hunts in packs, and has been reputed to attack humans and tigers, along with more traditional prey. Here, too, can be found red-legged ibis, paradise flycatchers, and parrotlike reed sutoras, along with five species of eagle, nine species of bat, and more than forty kinds of fern. In the spring, improbable moths and butterflies like the Artemis Emperor, the Exclusive Underwing, and the as-yet unstudied Pseudopsychic hatch out to spangle and iridesce by the roadsides. In the dead of winter, giant ladybugs with reverse color schemes cruise the walls of village kitchens like animated wallpaper. This Boreal Jungle (for lack of a better term) is unique on earth, and it nurtures the greatest biodiversity of any place in Russia, the largest country in the world. It is over this surreal menagerie that the Amur tiger reigns supreme.

  Of the six surviving subspecies of tiger, the Amur is the only one habituated to arctic conditions. 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.”6 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.

  To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons on a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all of this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beast with a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet and cream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature. (The tiger is, literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin.) Able to swim for miles and kill an animal many times its size, the tiger also possesses the brute strength to drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for fifty or a hundred yards before consuming it.

  A tiger may greet a mate or a cub with a gentle nuzzle, but it meets its prey paws-first. The tiger’s forepaws differ from the hind ones in that they are larger with five claws arranged in an almost handlike spread. By contrast, the hind paws have only four claws. In addition to walking, running, and climbing, the forepaws can serve as twin maces, enabling a tiger to club its prey to death. And yet, they are also gentle and dextrous enough to catch a fly in the fold of a pad and release it, unharmed. Tigers tend to attack from the rear or the side, giving them the advantage of surprise, but they fight head-on, often rearing up on their hind legs. In this stance, with ears laid flat against a bull-necked head, a fighting tiger bears a startling resemblance to a fighting man, specifically a heavyweight boxer. Surprisingly delicate hind legs give way to slender hips and waist, which then swell dramatically into a deep chest hung with massively proportioned “arms” that flex much as ours do as they jab and parry.

  Unlike wolf or bear claws, which are designed primarily for traction and digging, a cat’s claw is needle-sharp at the end, and bladed along a portion of its inside length. With the exception of a snake’s fang, it is about as close to a surgical tool as one can find in nature. When extended, the claws of the forepaw become slashing blades with the result that the victim is not so much sliced as flayed. But this is almost incidental to the forepaws’ most important purpose, which is to plant a pair of virtually unshakable anchors in an animal’s flesh. Once the forepaws are fully engaged, a tiger can literally ride its prey into the ground.

  In the final nanoseconds of an airborne attack, a tiger’s tail will become rigid, balancing and stabilizing the hindquarters almost like the tail fin on an airplane. Meanwhile, the tiger’s forepaws, combined with its fangs, form a huge three-point grappling device, as if, for a moment, the claws had become extensions of the jaws. Working together in this way, they can cover an area of a square yard or more to manifest a gathering and gripping capability comparable to the mouth of a much larger creature—something more on the order of a saltwater crocodile or an allosaurus. The interplay of paws and jaws shifts according to the task at hand, and one way to envision their fluid and complementary roles is as a basketball team: the jaws are the center—the big star around which the action revolves; the forepaws are, of course, the forwards, driving and rebounding in the midst of t
he fray, while the smaller hind paws, which set up and then assist on the periphery of the attack, are the guards. The hind legs provide the power for the attack leap, or drive, but, once launched, they become levers and stabilizers, supporting the larger players. Once the prey is down, these same assault weapons can become the most delicate scalpels and clamps, able to disembowel an animal, organ by organ.

  For all these reasons, there is no creature in the taiga that is off limits to the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will. Amur tigers have been known to eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears. There are few wolves in Primorye, not because the environment doesn’t suit them, but because the tigers eat them, too. The Amur tiger, it could be said, takes a Stalinist approach to competition. It is also an extraordinarily versatile predator, able to survive in temperatures ranging from fifty below zero Fahrenheit to one hundred above, and to turn virtually any environment to its advantage. Though typically a forest dweller, Amur tigers may hunt on the beaches as well, using sea fog as a cover for stalking game, and driving animals into heavy surf before subduing them. One young male was observed subsisting exclusively on harbor seals, going so far as to stack their carcasses like logs for future use.

  Unlike most cats, tigers are skilled, even avid, swimmers, and there are hunters and fishermen on the Bikin River who have had tigers crawl into their boats. Many encounters, including those observed by scientists and captured on video, seem lifted from myth or fiction. The occurrence, and subsequent recounting, of such incidents over dozens of millennia has embedded the tiger in our consciousness. The tiger has been a fellow traveler on our evolutionary journey and, in this sense, it is our peer. In Asia, there is no recess of human memory in which there has not—somewhere—lurked a tiger. As a result, this animal looms over the collective imagination of native and newcomer alike.

  Within every major ecosystem nature has produced, she has evolved a singularly formidable predator to rule over it. In Primorye, the Amur tiger is the latest, most exquisitely lethal manifestation of this creative impulse. The indigenous peoples of Primorye—the Udeghe, Nanai, and Orochi—have always understood and acknowledged the tiger’s supremacy, and some clans claimed the tiger as a direct ancestor as much to placate it as to share its power. There appears to be no ritual of tiger killing here (as there is for bears), but there are many stories of tigers taking human wives—and husbands—and of tigers killing humans who dared to challenge them. The tiger, as indigenous peoples know it, is a consummate hunter and the undisputed lord of the taiga, possessing the ability to change shape or disappear at will. Shrines were erected in the tiger’s honor, and some of these remain; hunters would lay their weapons down and beg forgiveness if they crossed its path. The native population is now small and dilute, having suffered from the same imported diseases and depredations that wreaked havoc on their North American counterparts. Nonetheless, many veteran Russian hunters learned much of what they know about Primorye’s taiga from their Udeghe and Nanai counterparts, just as the famous Russian explorer and author Vladimir Arseniev did from Dersu Uzala, a Nanai hunter and trapper who enjoys a potent legacy here to this day.

  Vladimir Arseniev was the son of an illegitimate former serf who did for Primorye what it took the combined efforts of Lewis and Clark and James Fenimore Cooper to do for the American West. Arseniev, who was born in St. Petersburg in 1872, volunteered for the czar’s army at eighteen and became a career military officer, bandit fighter, and ethnographer. Between 1900, when he was reassigned from Poland to the Far East, and his death in 1930, he led nine major expeditions during which he explored and mapped much of Primorye, in addition to the Commander Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula. A subtext of these missions was to assess these regions’ vulnerability to Japanese attack. Throughout his life and travels, Arseniev took a keen interest in indigenous culture, and he kept careful records of the flora, fauna, and peoples he came across. In the process, he conceived a literary style that managed to blend hard science and high adventure with subtle characterization and disarming honesty.*

  During his journeys, which lasted for months at a time, Arseniev encountered wild animals, Chinese bandits, typhoons, blizzards, hunger, and swarms of biting insects. He faced them all with a small retinue of Cossack soldiers and Siberian riflemen, guided by several different local hunters. It was the guides who kept him and his men alive and there was one in particular he grew to love—not as a father exactly, but as a wise and gentle protector. “Now I felt afraid of nothing,” wrote Arseniev in his perennial classic, Dersu the Trapper, “neither tigers nor brigands, nor deep snow or floods.7 Dersu was with me.”

  Dersu Uzala was a solitary and elderly Nanai hunter whose family had been killed by smallpox and whose world was disintegrating before his steadily weakening eyes. Both Dersu and Arseniev understood that the primeval jungle through which they sojourned was in a state of rapid and irrevocable transformation. The Ussuri leg of the Trans-Siberian Railway had just gone through and with it came immigrants and industry on a scale that had never been seen in the region before. When Dersu’s aim began to waver, Arseniev took him home to live with his wife and daughter in Khabarovsk, the capital of the neighboring territory. But life in a box did not suit Dersu: “The prohibition on shooting within the town was an unpleasant surprise for him,” Arseniev wrote.8 Later, he was arrested for felling a tree in a local park. “He realized that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish. Strangers surrounded him on every side and hampered him at every step.” It wasn’t long before Dersu returned to the forest, armed only with his increasingly unreliable rifle. Arseniev could not stop him, but he had a presentiment of dread.

  Two weeks later, word got back to Arseniev that Dersu had been murdered in the snow while he slept, his pockets emptied, and his gun stolen. Arseniev traveled to the site and oversaw his burial there in the forest. A pair of tall Korean pines stood nearby, and Arseniev took note of these for future reference, but when he returned some years later to visit the grave of his old friend, it was as if they had never been. “My … landmarks had vanished.9 New roads had been made. There were quarry faces, dumps, embankments.… All around bore the signs of another life.”

  “Arseniev,” wrote one biographer, “had the good sense not to live to be old.”10 By the time he died at age fifty-seven, there was a warrant out for his arrest and the remote imperial colony he had come to know more intimately than any man before or since had become a police state. Stalin had come to power, and the shadow he cast reached all the way to the Pacific; Arseniev was accused of spying for the Japanese, and his personal archives were ransacked. He died before he could be arrested, due to complications from a cold he caught on his final expedition. His widow, however, was punished in his stead: she was arrested and interrogated twice; in 1937, at the height of the purges that came to be known as the Great Terror, she was executed, also on suspicion of aiding the Japanese. According to the historian Amir Khisamutdinov, the total elapsed time from the beginning of her trial to her execution was sixteen minutes.11 The Arsenievs’ daughter, found guilty by association, spent the next fifteen years in prison camps, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered.

  Somehow, the legacy of the trapper Dersu survived this scourge and the others that followed: there exists at least one photo of him and Arseniev together, and somewhere may survive a wax recording Arseniev made of Dersu’s voice. There is also the book and, more recently, a film: Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975), which has itself become a classic. Between the Bikin River and a peak called Tiger Mountain is a village that bears his name. The tiger was the most potent being in Dersu’s world, an object of fear and reverence; as a young man, he had been mauled by one. He called the tiger amba, a word that lives in the language to this day. It was believed in Dersu’s time that if you killed a tiger without just cause, you in turn would be killed. Likewise, if a tiger were to kill and eat a human, it would be hunted by its own kind. Both acts were considered taboo and,
once these invisible boundaries had been crossed, it was all but impossible to cross back. There was an understanding in the forest then—an order. Judging from the following events, this order still exists in some places and it is not forgiving.

  * The mixed (broad leaf and conifer) forests of Siberia are generally referred to as taiga. While the forests of Primorye differ in some very significant ways, they go by this name as well.

  * Arseniev’s account of his adventures with Dersu Uzala reflects a tendency among many Russian writers to use facts not as inflexible units of information, but as malleable elements that may be arranged, elaborated on, or added to as the author sees fit. Evidence of this can be found throughout the country’s nonfiction and journalism. On a 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 of events that may not have occurred exactly as described. It is by no means unique to Russia, but the most egregious examples of this freewheeling approach to reportage are to be found in the State’s representation of itself, a tendency that transcends regime and political philosophy.