The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  * In November 1918, at the height of the looting, six members of Arseniev’s family, including his father, were murdered for their property by local peasants.

  * This quote, often attributed to Marx, is Engels’s paraphrasing of Hegel: “The truth of Necessity, therefore, is Freedom.”7

  8

  How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?

  SHAKESPEARE,

  Sonnet 65

  IT IS GENERALLY UNDERSTOOD THAT THE ANIMAL WE RECOGNIZE AS A tiger has been with us at least since the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million to 10,000 years BCE). The oldest definitively identified tiger fossils date to roughly two million years ago and were found in China, which is where many scientists believe the species first evolved and then disseminated itself across Asia. The tiger’s historic range was vast, spanning 100 degrees of longitude and 70 degrees of latitude, and including virtually all of Asia with deep inroads into Siberia and the Middle East. Five hundred years ago, large predators that were almost certainly tigers were reported in the Volga and Dnieper river valleys, just a few days’ travel from Kiev, Ukraine.

  Fossil evidence of tigers has also been found further north and east, in Japan and on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, and it raises the question: why didn’t this skillful and adaptable predator simply keep going? The mixed broadleaf and conifer forests of the Ussuri valley share a lot in common with historic European and American forests; it is unnerving to imagine a tiger at home in such a landscape because it implies that tigers could have infiltrated Europe and the New World. Given time and opportunity, tigers could—in theory—have emerged from Asia to rule every forest from the Bosphorus Strait to the English Channel, and from the Yukon to the Amazon. But for some reason, they didn’t. Why they failed to colonize the Americas is a mystery: something about that northern land bridge—Too cold? Not enough cover to stage an ambush?—barred their way. Perhaps it was the cave lions that stopped them.

  Life in the higher latitudes has always been precarious and, by some estimates, the Russian Far East has never supported more than a thousand tigers. Due to the extreme climate and its impact on prey density, large mammals, in general, are more sparsely distributed in the taiga than in the tropics. As a result, Amur tigers must occupy far larger territories than other subspecies in order to meet their needs for prey. In Primorye, these territories can be so large that, after trying to follow several tigers on their winter rounds, a pioneering tiger researcher named Lev Kaplanov speculated in the early 1940s that Amur tigers were simply wanderers. “The entire winter life of a solitary tiger takes place as a sequence of long journeys,” wrote Kaplanov, the Amur tiger’s most famous early advocate.1 “The tiger is a born nomad.”

  The tiger was first classified as a distinct species of cat in 1758. The subspecies known variously as the Korean, Manchurian, Siberian, Ussuri, Woolly, or Amur tiger was first designated Felis tigris altaica in 1844. Since then, the taxonomic scent tree has been marked and marked again, to the point that this subspecies has been reclassified seven times. The last man to stake his claim was Nikolai Baikov, a lifetime member of the Society for Study of the Manchurian Territory, and of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In his monograph “The Manchurian Tiger,” Baikov begins by paying homage to the explorer Vladimir Arseniev and to the novelist Mayne Reid (The Headless Horseman, etc.). He then proceeds to go out on a limb that both of those brave romantics would have appreciated: in Baikov’s opinion, the creature he reclassified as Felis tigris mandshurica was no ordinary tiger but a living fossil—a throwback to the Pliocene worthy of designation as a distinct species. “Its massive body and powerful skeletal system are reminiscent of something ancient and obsolete,” wrote Baikov in 1925.2 “The Far East representative of the giant cat is … extremely close, both in its anatomical structure, and in its way of life, to the fossil cave tiger, Machairodus, a contemporary of the cave bear and the wooly mammoth.”

  Baikov supported his claim with detailed drawings comparing the skulls of these two animals, which, based on his rendering, do bear a strong resemblance. Machairodus was a genus of large saber-toothed cat, which lived between two and fifteen million years ago and overlapped with our protohuman ancestors. Specimens have been found all over the world. This thrilling if misguided notion of a feline missing link surviving in the mountain fastness of Manchuria caused a stir among museums and zoos of the period and helped drive the market for live specimens. Baikov did his best to promote this view, and, to some extent, his efforts are still bearing fruit (and sowing confusion) to this day.

  Even now, it is taken as a given that the Amur tiger is the biggest cat of them all and, based on samplings of numerous tiger skulls from all over Asia, the measurements bear this out. Viewed on a graph, the Amur skulls show up as outliers, occupying a territory all their own. Seen in this context, it is easier to understand the impulse to classify them as a separate species. The fact that they seem to thrive in conditions that would kill most other tigers is another reason, and it is here that size and climate have conspired to give the impression of an Ice Age throwback. Much has been made of the Amur tiger’s massive size by Baikov and others, and extraordinary dimensions have been claimed: lengths up to sixteen feet and weights up to nine hundred pounds have been quoted in reputable publications. It reveals more about us than it does about these animals that we wish them to be larger than life, but anyone who has been close to an Amur tiger will tell you that these creatures need no embellishment; they are big enough as is. The snarling specimen in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity is nearly the same size as the polar bear in the adjacent Hall of Ocean Life.

  One reason Amur tigers grew so big in the popular mind is that, when Baikov and his contemporaries were describing them, there were many more to choose from, and among this larger population there certainly would have been some huge individuals. But there is also a lot of extra footage to be found in a tiger’s tail, which can comprise a third of the total length, and a further 10 percent (or more) can be gained by staking out a fresh, wet hide. In 1834, the Bengal Sporting Magazine described this technique in a how-to article that, had it been written today, could have been titled: “Turn Your Ten-Footer into a Twelve-Footer!” Such practices, combined with the trophy-hunting mind-set, the exotic locale, and a dearth of reliable recording equipment, created fertile ground for mythmaking. But when all is said and done, the record breakers, like so many of the best stories, always seem to come secondhand.

  In spite of this, sincere attempts were made to fix these cats in real space. Ford Barclay, writing in The Big Game of Asia and North America (1915), the last in a deluxe four-volume compendium of hunting information from around the world, estimated the length of a tiger shot in the Vladivostok area to be thirteen feet, five inches, nose to tail. Barclay also interviewed the famous British taxidermist and author Rowland Ward, who assured him that a skin sold in London, also from that area, “must have belonged to an animal that measured 14 feet.”3 That is roughly the length of a compact car. If this is accurate, it would make the Amur tiger the longest (if not the heaviest) carnivorous land mammal that ever lived. Ward, a conscientious and detail-oriented man, wrote The Sportsman’s Handbook to Practical Collecting and Preserving Trophies, which went through a dozen editions between 1880 and 1925, the peak years of big game hunting. Ward saw and stuffed scores of tigers throughout his long career, and his size estimate should be judged accordingly. However, if such behemoths once roamed the boreal jungles of the Far East, they do so no longer. Baikov and Barclay, both hunters themselves, were making their audacious claims when tiger hunting was a cresting wave, about to break forever.

  Tigers, it must be said, have taken a ferocious toll on humans as well. In India, some legendary man-eaters killed and ate scores of people before being hunted down. A number of these cases have been documented by the famous tiger hunter and conservationist Jim Corbett. It would be impossible to accurately tally the tiger’s collective impact on humans through hi
story, but one scholar estimated that tigers have killed approximately a million Asians over the last four hundred years.4 The majority of these deaths occurred in India, but heavy losses were suffered across East Asia.

  Throughout Korea, Manchuria, and southeast China, tigers were considered both sacred and a scourge. Until around 1930, tigers continued to pose such a risk that, in North Korea, the bulk of offerings made to some Buddhist shrines were prayers for protection from these animals. Nonetheless, tigers were held in high esteem in part because it was believed that they, too, made offerings to heaven. In the tigers’ case, these gifts took the form of the severed heads of their prey, a determination made, presumably, by the beheaded state of many tiger kills. Ordinary people were reluctant to retaliate against a predatory tiger for fear it would take offense, not to mention revenge, and so their day-to-day lives were shaped—and sometimes tyrannized—by efforts to at once avoid and propitiate these marauding gods.

  According to Dale Miquelle, the American tiger researcher, the relatively low incidence of tiger attacks in Russia as compared to Korea at the turn of the last century, or in the Sundarbans today, is due to learning: “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.5 “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.”

  This logic holds up in many places, but in Primorye, the Udeghe and Nanai experience apparently defies it. Despite the fact that they made their home in a landscape regularly patrolled by tigers, there is no record—anecdotal or otherwise—of tiger attacks on a scale with their Chinese and Korean neighbors. Further south, along the China coast, tiger attacks and man-eating were common, and this combination of hazard and reverence made for some strange cultural collisions. In 1899, a tiger hunting missionary named Harry Caldwell relocated to Fujian province from the mountains of east Tennessee. Caldwell, a Methodist, soon realized that tigers were not only present and plentiful but that they were eating his converts. And yet, much to his dismay, his parishioners seemed to venerate these beasts almost as if they were sacred cows. Armed with a carbine and the 117th Psalm, Caldwell began shooting every tiger he saw, only to find that the large striped cats he and his coolies brought out of the hills were greeted with skepticism. Elders in his village claimed they lacked certain tigerish attributes, but the subtext seemed to be that if this foreign devil had been able to kill them then they couldn’t possibly be real tigers. “Father’s first two kills were immediately discredited on this score,” wrote his son, John, in his memoir, China Coast Family.6 “The sages announced to the assembled crowds that these were not tigers at all, but some other evil animal masquerading in tigers’ guise.

  “According to the wisdom of the sages, the Chinese character [Wang: ] meaning ‘Lord’ or ‘Emperor’ must be found in the markings of the forehead of a tiger if it be a tiger of whom the devils and demons are afraid. Another of Father’s early kills, a magnificent male of which he was very proud, [was also] disqualified.… They announced that the animal could never have been born of tiger parents, but had come out of some strange metamorphosis from an animal or fish living in the sea.”

  Up north, Manchu peasants endowed the tiger with similarly elusive and ineffable qualities, as did the Udeghe and Nanai, who would sometimes go so far as to abandon a village site if tigers were active in the area (which may help explain the rarity of attacks). But in Korea, when the Buddha, luck, and shamans all failed, there was still one place left to turn, and that was to the Tiger Hunters Guild. Long before the Russians started hunting tigers in the Far East, members of the Tiger Hunters Guild had made a name for themselves as the boldest hunter-warriors in Northeast Asia, and their feats of daring are legendary. The so-called guild, a military organization that came into being during the late Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), included both hunters and professional soldiers. In addition to their other feats, they are credited with repelling attacks by French and American forces in 1866 and 1871, respectively. The Koreans were much admired by the Western hunters who encountered them, in large part because they were still using matchlock rifles and pistols. Based on designs dating from the fourteenth century, these medieval Chinese weapons depended on a fuse to light the gunpowder, which allowed for only a single shot at suicidally close range. As one historian put it, “Those who missed … rarely lived to regret it.”7

  When they weren’t defending their king, members of the guild pursued man-eaters and other troublesome tigers and leopards. Their devotion to the practice was almost cultlike, one of their prime objectives being to acquire a cat’s potency and courage through the act of killing and consuming it (though, when they could, they sold body parts to the Chinese as well). Yuri Yankovsky, a famous Russian tiger hunter, reportedly witnessed one of these rituals sometime around 1930: “Before long we came upon a startling scene.8 A Korean wearing the conical blue felt hat of the Tiger Hunters’ Guild was leaning against a tree, holding in his hand an old-fashioned matchlock.… [Another] was kneeling on the ground, drinking blood from a bowl which he held against the throat of a dead tiger.”*

  This notion of self-enhancement by consumption cut both ways, however, and it was believed that a tiger could also make itself stronger by devouring both body and soul of a human being. Once consumed, the victim’s soul would become a kind of captive guide, aiding the tiger in its search for more human victims. As fanciful as such reasoning may sound, there is no question that the strength and knowledge gained from eating humans will inform and influence a man-eater’s subsequent behavior.

  Relatively speaking, the tigers’ appetite for us pales before our appetite for them. Humans have hunted tigers by various means for millennia, but not long ago there was a strange and heated moment in our venerable relationship with these animals that has been echoed repeatedly in our relations with other species. It bears some resemblance to what wolves do when they get into a sheep pen: they slaughter simply because they can and, in the case of humans, until a profit can no longer be turned. For the sea otter, this moment occurred between 1790 and 1830; for the American bison, it happened between 1850 and 1880; for the Atlantic cod, it lasted for centuries, ending only in 1990. These mass slaughters have their analogue in the financial markets to which they are often tied, and they end the same way every time. The Canadian poet Eric Miller summed up the mind-set driving these binges better than just about anyone:

  A cornucopia!10

  Bliss of killing without ever seeming to subtract

  from the tasty sum of infinity!

  But infinity is a man-made construct that has no relevance in the natural world. In nature, everything is finite, especially 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. In December of 1911, the freshly crowned King George V went on an elephant-borne shikar to Nepal, during which he and his retinue killed thirty-nine tigers in ten days. But they were amateurs compared to Colonel Geoffrey Nightingale, who, prior to his sudden death while attempting to spear a panther from horseback, shot more than three hundred tigers in India’s former Hyderabad state. The Maharaja of Udaipur claimed to have shot “at least” a thousand tigers by 1959. In a letter to the biologist George Schaller, the Maharaja of Surguja wrote: “My total bag of Tigers is 1150 (one thousand one hundred fifty only).”11

  When Russians like the Yankovskys went hunting for tigers at the turn of the last century, they would plan to be away for weeks at a time, covering ten to twenty miles a day through mountainous country. In Russia, at least as far back as the late nineteenth century, four men have been considered the minimum
for a tiger hunting expedition. The same went for tiger catching, a seemingly lunatic enterprise, which fell out of favor only in the early 1990s. Tiger catchers, equipped with little more than hunting dogs, tree branches, and rope, would track down and capture live Amur tigers, usually for zoos and circuses. For obvious reasons, they preferred to go after cubs, but full-grown tigers have also been caught this way. Needless to say, these men were largely self-taught, and the learning curve would have been unforgiving in the extreme. Their courage inspired one tiger biologist to write, “No, the bogatyri [mythic Russian heroes] have not died out in Russia.”12

  One of the last and most famous of the tiger catchers was Vladimir Kruglov, who learned the trade from an Old Believer named Averian Cherepanov. Cherepanov’s method capitalized on one of the tiger’s greatest weaknesses: its low endurance at speed. A tiger can walk for days, but it can only run for short distances. For this reason, tiger catching was always done in the winter, preferably in deep snow, which shortened the chase dramatically. Once the dogs scented a tiger, they would be set loose to chase it until, too tired to run further, the animal would turn and fight. With the dogs holding the tiger at bay, the men would approach with long, forked tree branches and—somehow—pin the animal down. Then, in a quick and carefully choreographed operation, they would immobilize the tiger’s paws and head, hog-tie it, and stuff it in a sack. This, of course, is easier said than done. Nonetheless, in 1978, Kruglov used the stick and rope method to—literally—bag a tigress weighing more than three hundred pounds. He is one of the only human beings in the history of the species to grab wild tigers by the ears repeatedly and live to tell about it. “I have never let anyone else handle the ears,” he explained to Dale Miquelle in 2001. “You know, the ears are her steering wheel. You can turn off her teeth with the ears.”