The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Kruglov died in a freak accident in 2005. After surviving more than forty live tiger captures, not to mention the gauntlet of other hazards that take Russian men before their time, Kruglov was killed at the age of sixty-four when a tree fell on him. His legacy lives on in the form of the thirteen-thousand-acre Utyos Rehabilitation Center for Wild Animals in southern Khabarovsk Territory, which he founded in 1996, and which is now managed by his son and daughter. Few foreigners have attempted to bag live game in the Far East—for good reason—but a British explorer and sinophile named Arthur de Carle Sowerby recounted the following live capture in his five-volume opus, The Naturalist in Manchuria (1922): “When I got it it was in a paroxysm of rage, snapping furiously, biting itself and everything that came within reach of its sharp teeth,” he wrote without a trace of irony.13 “I have always found this the case with moles.”

  In 1925, Nikolai Baikov calculated that roughly a hundred tigers were being taken out of greater Manchuria annually (including Primorye and the Korean Peninsula)—virtually all of them bound for the Chinese market. “There were cases in [mating season],” he wrote, “when a courageous hunter would meet a group of five or six tigers, and kill them one by one, where he stood.”14

  Between trophy hunters, tiger catchers, gun traps, pit traps, snares, and bait laced with strychnine and bite-sensitive bombs, these animals were being besieged from all sides. Even as Baikov’s monograph was going to press, his “Manchurian Tiger” was in imminent danger of joining the woolly mammoth and the cave bear in the past tense. Midway through the 1930s, a handful of men saw this coming, and began to wonder just what it was they stood to lose.

  One of them was Lev Kaplanov. Born in Moscow in 1910, he was a generation younger than Arseniev, but cut from similar cloth. In a letter to a close friend, Kaplanov wrote that, as a boy in European Russia, he had dreamed of hunting a tiger one day, but when he found his calling in the Far East, he realized that bloodless pursuit, though less exciting, would be of greater benefit to tigers and to science. This was an unusual way to be thinking in the 1930s, when tiger research consisted solely of what might best be described as “gunbarrel zoology.” With the exception of the pioneering wildlife photographer (and former tiger hunter) Frederick Champion, Kaplanov was the first person ever to write an account of tracking tigers with no intention of killing them once he found them. This was, in its way, a truly radical act—all the more so because it occurred in a remote corner of a traumatized country with restricted access to the outside world. While the notion of conservation and national parks was not new, the idea of focusing specifically on a nongame species, and a dangerous one at that, was unheard of. But Kaplanov could not have done it without the counsel and support of Konstantin Abramov, the founding director of Primorye’s largest biosphere reserve, the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik (“forbidden zone”), and Yuri Salmin, a gifted zoologist and zapovednik cofounder.

  There is a famous quote: “You can’t understand Russia with your mind,” and the zapovednik is a case in point. In spite of the contemptuous attitude the Soviets had toward nature, they also allowed for some of the most stringent conservation practices in the world. A zapovednik is a wildlife refuge into which no one but guards and scientists are allowed—period. The only exceptions are guests—typically fellow scientists—with written permission from the zapovednik’s director. There are scores of these reserves scattered across Russia, ranging in size from more than sixteen thousand square miles down to a dozen square miles. The Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik was established in 1935 to promote the restoration of the sable population, which had nearly been wiped out in the Kremlin’s eagerness to capitalize on the formerly booming U.S. fur market. Since then, the role of this and other zapovedniks has expanded to include the preservation of noncommercial animals and plants.

  This holistic approach to conservation has coexisted in the Russian scientific consciousness alongside more utilitarian views of nature since it was first imported from the West in the 1860s. At its root is a deceptively simple idea: don’t just preserve the species, preserve the entire system in which the species occurs, and do so by sealing it off from human interference and allowing nature to do its work. It is, essentially, a federal policy of enforced non-management directly contradicting the communist notion that nature is an outmoded machine in need of a total overhaul. Paradoxically, the idea not only survived but, in some cases, flourished under the Soviets: by the late 1970s, nearly 80 percent of the zapovednik sites originally recommended by the Russian Geographical Society’s permanent conservation commission in 1917 had been protected (though many have been reduced in size over the years).

  In Kaplanov’s day, the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik covered about seven thousand square miles* of pristine temperate forest—the heart of Primorye. That there were tigers in there at all became evident only when guards and scientists noticed their tracks while trying to assess more commercially relevant populations of sable and deer. It was here that Abramov, Salmin, and Kaplanov conceived and conducted the first systematic tiger census ever undertaken anywhere. Kaplanov, a skilled hunter and the youngest and strongest of the three, did the legwork. During the winters of 1939 and 1940, he logged close to a thousand miles crisscrossing the Sikhote-Alin range as he tracked tigers through blizzards and paralyzing cold, sleeping rough, and feeding himself from tiger kills. His findings were alarming: along with two forest guards who helped him with tracking, estimates, and interviews with hunters across Primorye, Kaplanov concluded that no more than thirty Amur tigers remained in Russian Manchuria. In the Bikin valley, he found no tigers at all. With barely a dozen breeding females left in Russia, the subspecies now known as Panthera tigris altaica was a handful of bullets and a few hard winters away from extinction.

  Despite the fact that local opinion and state ideology were weighted heavily against tigers at the time, these men understood that tigers were an integral part of the taiga picture, regardless of whether Marxists saw a role for them in the transformation of society. Given the mood of the time, this was an almost treasonous line of thinking, and it is what makes this collaborative effort so remarkable: as dangerous as it was to be a tiger, it had become just as dangerous to be a Russian.

  Following the Revolution of 1917, the former “Far East Republic” was the last place in Russia to fall to the Bolsheviks, and it did so only after a vicious civil war that dragged on until 1923. Initially, the conflict involved a veritable bazaar of nations, including Czech, Ukrainian, Korean, Cossack, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, British, and American troops, along with assorted foreign advisors. However, as the embattled region grew more and more to resemble a vast and dangerous open-air asylum, most of the foreigners abandoned the cause. By 1920, three armies—the Bolshevik Reds, the anti-Bolshevik Whites, and the Japanese—had been left to fight it out on their own. Next to the Russians, the infamously brutal Japanese looked like models of restraint. In the spring of 1920, after a particularly gratuitous massacre in which the Bolsheviks slaughtered thousands of White Russians and hundreds of Japanese, and burned their homes to the ground, the Whites managed to capture the Bolshevik commander of military operations in the Far East. After stuffing him into a mail sack, his captors took him to a station on the Trans-Siberian where they delivered him into the hands of a sympathetic Cossack named Bochkarev. Bochkarev commandeered a locomotive and burned his captive alive in the engine’s firebox, along with two high-ranking associates (the latter, also delivered in mail sacks, were shot first).

  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.15 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. The invented charge in Primorye was, typically, spying for Japan, but it could be almost anything. Torture was routine. At the height of the purges, roughly a thousand people were being murdered every day. In 1939, Russia went to war (on several fronts), and this obviated the need for purging—just send them to the front. By one estimate, 90 percent of draft-age Nanai and Udeghe males died in military service. The rest were forced onto collective farms, and millions more Russians of all ethnicities were banished to the gulag.

  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.16 We must tear it from her.” In 1926, Vladimir Zazubrin, the first head of the Union of Siberian Writers, delivered a lecture in which he proclaimed,

  Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement armour of cities, armed with the stone muzzles of factory chimneys, and girded with iron belts of railroads.17 Let the taiga be burned and felled, let the steppes be trampled.… Only in cement and iron can the fraternal union of all peoples, the iron brotherhood of all mankind, be forged.*

  Some hard-line Marxists sincerely believed that plants and animals unable to prove their usefulness to mankind should simply be exterminated. In the face of such hostile dogma, the tiger didn’t stand a chance. Falling squarely into the category of “harmful fauna,” it had become a kind of fur-bearing Enemy of the State. Those stripes might as well have been bull’s-eyes. There was no formal edict or bounty, but anyone was free to shoot tigers on sight (they were highly prized by army and navy officers stationed in Primorye), and there was a ready market across the border. Given this, and given the death toll among people who so much as looked sideways at the regime, it is incredible that anyone dared advocate for tigers at all. Nonetheless, Lev Kaplanov’s landmark study, “The Tiger in the Sikhote-Alin,” was completed in 1941, and in it he recommended an immediate five-year moratorium on tiger hunting.† That same year, Kaplanov’s colleague Yuri Salmin would go a step further: in a national magazine, he made an urgent plea for a total ban on tiger hunting in the Russian Far East. This was the first time in recorded history that anyone, anywhere, had made a public call for restraint with regard to the killing of these animals.

  World War II, and the fact that it removed so many armed and able-bodied men from the forest, was a critical factor in turning the tide for the Amur tiger, but it took a heavy toll on the tiger’s champions. Only Abramov survived; a longtime apparatchik, he was able to mediate the deadly tensions between progressive science and Party membership. Yuri Salmin, however, was sent to the front, and he never returned. In 1943, at the age of thirty-three, Lev Kaplanov was murdered by poachers in southern Primorye where he had recently been promoted to director of the small but important Lazovski Zapovednik. His body wasn’t found for two weeks and, because it lay deep in the forest, it had to be carried out by hand. In order to do this, a litter was fashioned from cherry boughs; it was May so the trees were in flower, and the men who carried him recalled the blossoms on the branches around his body. Since then, Kaplanov has become a kind of local martyr to the cause of the Amur tiger.

  There was an investigation into Kaplanov’s death, but there were also complications, made worse by a puzzling lack of interest on the part of the investigator who had come all the way from Moscow. As a result, people who are still alive and intimate with the case’s details feel quite sure that the wrong man went to jail and that Kaplanov’s murderer, who was well known around the town of Lazo, lived out his days a free man. Wisely, perhaps, he relocated to a small river town about twelve miles away. Looming over the floodplain there is an exposed ridge studded with eruptions of stone that form the enormous and unmistakable lower jaw of a tiger. The fang alone is more than a hundred feet high.

  Today, “The Tiger in the Sikhote-Alin” remains a milestone in the field of tiger research, and was a first step in the pivotal transformation of the Amur tiger—and the species as a whole—from trophy-vermin to celebrated icon. 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.

  There have been some hidden costs. Since the Amur tiger’s population crash, these animals no longer seem to grow as large as they once did. It wouldn’t be the first time this kind of anthropogenic selection has occurred: the moose of eastern North America went through a similar process of “trophy engineering” at roughly the same time. Sport hunters wanted bull moose with big antlers, and local guides were eager to accommodate them. Thus, the moose with the biggest racks were systematically removed from the gene pool while the smaller-antlered bulls were left to pass on their more modest genes, year after year. Scientists have speculated that something similar may have happened to the Amur tiger, with one result being that postwar specimens no longer seem to be much larger than their Bengal counterparts. In Primorye today one would be hard pressed to find an Amur tiger weighing more than five hundred pounds, but that is still a huge cat by any era’s measure. The tiger that killed Vladimir Markov was never weighed, but when he recalled it later, Trush’s number two, Sasha Lazurenko, said, “As long as I’ve worked here, I’ve never seen a tiger as big as that one.”

  * Apparently, this is a timeless impulse: in the U.S. National Archives is a photograph of Marine Sergeant M. L. Larkins presenting the heart of an Indochinese tiger he has just killed to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel W. C. Drumwright, May 25, 1970.9

  * As of 1997, the zapovednik has a much reduced area of about 1,500 square miles.

  * Zazubrin was arrested and shot sometime in 1937–1938. Fifty years later, in 1988, the Kremlin’s chief ideologist, Vadim A. Medvedev, finally conceded that “ ‘universal values’ such as avoiding war and ecological catastrophe must outweigh the idea of a struggle between the classes.”18

  † The study was not published until 1948 when it was included in his groundbreaking book, Tigr, izyubr, los (“Tiger, Red Deer, Moose”).

  9

  Men carry their superiority inside; animals outside.

  Russian Proverb

  FOLLOWING THE DISCOVERY OF MARKOV’S REMAINS, INSPECTION TIGER conducted a series of interviews with the last people to see him alive. There were about a half dozen all told and, despite the fact that they lived a considerable distance from one another—some with no road access whatsoever—each of them claimed to have seen Markov within hours of his death. Not surprisingly, all of them were men: ethnic Russian loggers and native hunters, and one of them—the key witness, as it were—was Ivan Dunkai.

  Dunkai was a Nanai elder from the native village of Krasny Yar (“Red Bank”), which lies fifteen miles downstream from Sobolonye. Situated on the left bank of the Bikin, it had no road access until a bridge was built in the 1990s. About six hundred Udeghe and Nanai residents live in the village, along with a handful of ethnic Russian* spouses, officials, and other transplants. Arseniev and Dersu are reported to have passed through the area in 1908 and, were they to return
there today, they wouldn’t be surprised by what they found. Dugout canoes and slender, piroguelike omorochkas line the riverbank, livestock roam the tidy dirt streets, and virtually every structure, fence, and walkway is made of wood. Firewood is delivered in the form of a tree trunk, from which logs are sawed off and split as needed. Save for the predominance of Asiatic faces, Krasny Yar could be mistaken for the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof. The only obvious differences between then and now are the electric lights, a handful of cars and snowmobiles, and several fanciful houses designed by a Ukrainian artist, one of which looks like a snarling tiger.

  Ivan Dunkai, it is fair to say, was a latter-day Dersu Uzala—a last link to a time when the native inhabitants of this region saw the tiger as the true lord of the forest. Dunkai died in 2006. In life he was a twinkly-eyed, elfin man who evoked a gentleness and wisdom that seemed from another age. He was a gifted woodsman of the old school, known and respected throughout the middle Bikin. He had a nickname that translates to “In the World of the Animals.” For Ivan Dunkai, the taiga was the source of all things, in which the tiger occupied a place of honor. In 2004, when Dunkai was about seventy-five years old, he was interviewed by a British documentary filmmaker named Sasha Snow. “The tiger is a sly but merciful creature,” Dunkai explained to Snow. “You know that he is there, but you cannot see him. He hides so well that one starts thinking he is invisible, like a god. Russians say, ‘Trust in God, but keep your eyes open.’ We [Nanai] rely on ourselves, but pray for Tiger to help us. We worship his strength.”