The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Living as an amateur in this sylvan purgatory is catch-as-catch-can, and one accident with a car, an animal trap, or a hunter—not to mention one bad stretch of deep snow and minus forty weather—could finish him off. Unfortunately, this combination of landlessness and semi-competence can often lead to dog and livestock killing: if the taiga doesn’t get him, a farmer may well. In any case, it can require several years of this dangerous, liminal existence before a male tiger acquires the skill—and the will—to stake out and defend his own territory. But as strong and able as he may be, the battle for that territory—even if he wins it—can leave him grievously injured. So lethally designed are these animals that a battle between them can be compared to a hand grenade contest: there is virtually no way to come away from that combination of points, blades, and combustive energy without incurring serious damage. In short, the gauntlet of trials and initiations a male tiger must endure is long, arduous, and deadly, and the survivors are truly formidable specimens.

  By Tuesday morning, December 9, the Markov attack was frontpage news. LAW OF THE JUNGLE, crowed the headline in the Primorye edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda (“Young Communist Truth”), a venerable but now ironically titled propaganda-organ-turned-tabloid. Next to a stock photo of a tiger’s face ran the subhead: “Tigress Avenges Dead Offspring.”

  The Markov investigation was barely three days old, but already fact, rumor, and human error had been woven into a tangled braid, the individual strands of which would be hard to tease apart. Inspection Tiger was trying to do the right things, but with conflicting information. Trush and his team had been patrolling the area, making inquiries, and mining established local informants, and the rumors they were hearing about Markov’s activities had the ring of truth. They also had a common theme—that, prior to the attack, Markov had been having trouble with a tiger: something had happened and it wouldn’t leave him alone. Confounding matters was the fact that there wasn’t just one tiger; nor was there just one story. Over the previous year, Markov had been spending progressively more time at his cabin in the Panchelaza, during which time he had had encounters with several tigers. Maybe they were attracted by his dogs, maybe it was something else, but it seemed that the Panchelaza was becoming a vortex of tiger activity.

  It was believed by some who knew him well, including a longtime resident of Yasenovie named Sergei Boyko, that Markov had killed a tiger cub recently. Boyko is a huge and bearded former logger, now in his mid-forties; though a teetotaler, he still manages to project the mass and manner of a Slavic Bacchus. “You cannot hide things in the taiga,” he explained in his driveway-barnyard. “The police might not find out about it, but we always do.” Boyko had worked with both Markov and Onofreychuk, and he knew the tayozhnik’s life firsthand. “I have lived in the taiga all my life,” he said. “I have been in many situations, including poaching. I won’t lie to you about that.”

  Boyko was luckier than most in that he had managed to find steady work on a maintenance crew at one of the new highway bridges about six miles west of Markov’s cabin. Tigers prowl around their flimsy barracks on a regular basis, and watchdogs don’t last long there. One of Boyko’s co-workers, a gaunt older man who could have stepped out of a daguerreotype, keeps an aluminum canteen pocked with finger-sized holes made by the fangs of an inquisitive tiger. Boyko believed there was a connection between the attack on Markov and an attempt by him and some other locals, including Onofreychuk, to wipe out an entire family of tigers earlier in the winter. “They were together there,” said Boyko. “One had a sixteen-gauge; another had a twelve [a more powerful shotgun]. They seriously injured the tigress and she ran away upriver, but it snowed and they couldn’t find her. The cub was left behind, and they killed it. They traded the skin for a Buran” (a brand of Soviet-era snowmobile).

  Dmitri Pikunov, the tiger researcher, who had extensive contacts along the Bikin, had heard this version, too, and found it credible. True or not, it formed a tidy narrative, much as Khomenko’s story had: Markov, a known poacher, blatantly hunting tigers in violation of federal law, kills a cub and is himself killed by the wounded and vengeful mother. Case closed. It was this version of events, provided by people close to the source, but not eyewitnesses, that inspired the headlines and raised Trush’s hopes for a peaceful resolution in which the tigress would simply disappear into the forest.

  There was an eerie reciprocity energizing this scenario, and it was that, prior to being eaten by the tiger, it seemed Markov had been eating them. “Tastes like chicken,” Markov had once quipped to Denis Burukhin.

  “I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not,” Burukhin said. “It was always hard to tell with Markiz.”

  But Evgeny Smirnov, a hunting inspector living in Krasny Yar, had also heard this rumor, and it didn’t strike him as odd at all. According to Smirnov, tiger is delicious—not quite as good as lynx, but a bona fide forest delicacy for those so inclined. Yuri Trush even has a recipe. When he and some local villagers were skinning out the Khomenko tiger, the understanding had been that they could keep the meat, but Trush would take the skin and bones. However, when he turned away to attend to something, someone made off with the tiger’s head. When Trush found out who it was, he confronted the man in his home and asked him what he was doing. “I was going to make an aspic,” the man said sheepishly.

  Those were lean years in Primorye, and they still are. Many of the people who live on the Bikin are hungry—and resourceful—in ways that can be hard to imagine. For someone in Markov’s situation, it is totally reasonable—righteous, even—to eat what you kill, whatever it may be. “I’ve tried tiger,” said Trush. “My whole family tried it. It’s quite unusual—slightly sweet, but I don’t care for it anymore—not since I saw a tiger eat a rotten cow in 2000. He ate the meat with worms and everything.”

  In addition to the story of the avenging tigress, there were other, equally plausible rumors involving Markov and tigers circulating through the valley, but at this early stage of the investigation, Trush ignored them. It was here that Trush’s combination of authority and lack of extensive tiger tracking experience betrayed him, if only briefly. The confusion centered on a crucial inconsistency between the emphatic but fallible accounts he was hearing from informants and the far steadier record kept by the snow. The truth lay in the paw prints: soon, it would become painfully clear that the tracks around Markov’s cabin were far too big to have been made by a female.

  Nonetheless, the avenging tigress theory gained traction when a tiger trap was discovered a quarter mile east of Markov’s cabin. The device was all business and whoever built it had known exactly what he was doing. It consisted of a sturdy wooden corral six feet high, four feet wide, and twenty feet long. At the closed end was a stake with a chain, and this was for the bait: a live dog. Between the entrance and the bait was a series of buried wolf traps, rigged in conjunction with heavy cable snares. In the taiga, such a contraption has only one conceivable purpose, and its discovery confirmed for Trush and many others that Markov had made the jump from subsistence poaching to the big leagues of black market tiger hunting.

  When Ivan Dunkai found out what had happened to Markov, he was flabbergasted: “After he hadn’t showed up for four days, I decided to go look for him,” Dunkai explained. “I arrived there [Zhorkin’s camp], and they told me: ‘Markov’s been eaten by a tiger.’ How could that happen? It seemed such nonsense to me! We’ve never heard of such a thing! What do you mean ‘eaten’? Literally, eaten?”

  Sergei Boyko, however, wasn’t so surprised, and this may be because he knows what it is to run afoul of a tiger. “Another hunter and me, we once took some of a tiger’s kill,” he began. “We saw the tiger running away and cut some meat for ourselves. We didn’t take it all because you can’t take everything. It’s a law in the taiga: you have to share. But when we came to check the next day, the tiger hadn’t touched what we’d left for him. After that, we couldn’t kill anything: the tiger destroyed our traps, and he scared off the ani
mals that came to our bait. If any animal got close, he would roar and everyone would run away. We learned the hard way. That tiger wouldn’t let us hunt for an entire year. I must tell you,” Boyko added, “the tiger is such an unusual animal: very powerful, very smart, and very vengeful.”

  Boyko’s experience is not unique. The Amur tiger’s territoriality and capacity for sustained vengeance, for lack of a better word, are the stuff of both legend and fact. What is amazing—and also terrifying about tigers—is their facility for what can only be described as abstract thinking. Very quickly, a tiger can assimilate new information—evidence, if you will—ascribe it to a source, and even a motive, and react accordingly.* Sergei Sokolov is a former hunting inspector who now works as a researcher for the Institute for Sustainable Resource Management in Primorye. “Based on the scientific approach,” Sokolov explained, “you can say that the more diverse the food of an animal, the more developed his intelligence is.”

  In an effort to demonstrate the sophistication of the tiger’s thought process, Sokolov described the following incident involving a hunter in his management area on the upper reaches of the Perevalnaya River, due south of Tiger Mountain in central Primorye:

  “There was little food for wild boar there so boar were scarce,” Sokolov began. “In addition, a tiger was visiting the hunter’s territory on a regular basis, scaring away any boar that were left. So the hunter decided to kill this tiger by installing a gun trap. The first time, the rifle was not installed properly and it fired but didn’t kill the tiger—just grazed his fur. The hunter reset it, and later, based on the tracks, observed that the tiger touched the tripwire, heard the sound of the gun misfiring, stepped slowly backward, and immediately went after the hunter. The tiger understood who was there, who installed the trap, and who was trying to kill him. He didn’t even follow the hunter’s tracks; he went directly to the hunter’s cabin—like he was using a compass.

  “The hunter told me, ‘I was near the cabin, chopping wood, when all of a sudden I felt like somebody was watching me. I turned around and saw the tiger about a hundred feet away with his ears back, ready to attack.’ The hunter ran into his cabin and, for three days, didn’t go out, not even to pee—he had to do it in the basin. The hunter was not an educated man and usually didn’t write even a letter to anybody, but during those three days, as the hunter said, he became a writer ‘like Lev Tolstoy—writing a whole novel about what happened,’ because he thought that the tiger was definitely going to kill him and, at the very least, he wanted to let people know what had happened to him. After three days, the hunter finally ventured out, checked the area, and found the spot where the tiger had been waiting. Based on the amount of melted snow, he guessed the tiger had been there for several days. After that, the tiger left his territory.”

  Vladimir Schetinin, the former head of Inspection Tiger, and an expert on Amur tiger attacks, has accumulated a number of stories like this over the past thirty years. “There are at least eight cases that my teams and I investigated,” he said in March of 2007, “and we all arrived at the same conclusion: if a hunter fired a shot at a tiger, that tiger would track him down, even if it took him two or three months. It is obvious that tigers will sit and wait specifically for the hunter who has fired shots at them.”

  The caveat here is that each of these eight cases met the following conditions: namely, that the tiger was able to identify its attacker, had the opportunity to hunt him, and was temperamentally disposed to do so. In its brief reference to tiger attacks on humans, Mammals of the Soviet Union states that “Usually animals shot and wounded or chased by hunters attacked, and only very rarely did an attack occur without provocation.”3 Such responses are, in themselves, examples of abstract thinking: tigers evolved to respond to direct physical attacks from other animals; they did not evolve to respond to remote threats like guns. Nor do they innately understand what guns are or how they work. So to be able to make the multistep connection between a random explosion in the air, a pain it can feel but often cannot see, and a human who may be dozens of yards away is, almost by definition, an abstraction. While many higher animals are capable of making this association, very few will respond like a tiger. If you combine this with a long memory, you can have a serious problem on your hands.

  Chris Schneider, an American veterinarian based in Washington state, has had personal experience with the tiger’s capacity for holding a grudge. Over the course of his career, Schneider has treated many circus animals, including tigers, sometimes giving them sedatives in the form of a painful shot in the rump. A year might go by before these tigers passed through town again; nonetheless, the moment he showed up, their eyes would lock on him. “I’d wear different hats; I’d try to disguise myself,” Schneider explained, “but when I’d walk into the room, the cat would just start following me, turning as I walked around them.4 It was uncanny.” He described the impact of these tigers’ gaze as “piercing.” “They looked right through you: a very focused predator. I think most of those cats would have nailed me if they could have.”

  John Goodrich and Dale Miquelle, the American field biologists who run the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Siberian Tiger Project in the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik, have had the opposite experience. For more than fifteen years, both men have been living and working in Terney, on the east coast of Primorye, and, over the years, they have caught, sedated, examined, and collared dozens of tigers, some of them numerous times. Despite the fact that both of these men have spent years in these tigers’ territories, there have been no cases of tiger vengeance. “As a biologist, I have a hard time believing it,” explained Miquelle when asked about such behavior, “but as a type of myth and local perspective on tigers I find it intriguing.”

  “If tigers are vengeful,” said Goodrich, “I should be dead.”

  It is not known if tigers are capable of distinguishing between humans who intentionally cause them pain or injury, and humans who trap them and manipulate them but release them into their home territory unharmed. Because of this, there is no tidy way to reconcile these differing views, all of which are based on extensive firsthand experience. In the end, it may simply come down to context and character—of all concerned. This, and the fact that, as Miquelle puts it, “What tigers usually do, and what they can do, are very different things.”

  A more useful way to understand a tiger’s capacity for vengeful behavior may be in the context of territory and property, i.e., prey. As they are with human hunters, these are hard to separate in the tiger’s mind. Tigers, particularly males, are well known for their intense and reflexive possessiveness; it is a defining characteristic, and it exerts a powerful influence on their behavior, particularly when it comes to territory, mates, and food. Both males and females can be ferocious boundary keepers, but a male tiger will guard his domain as jealously as any modern gangster or medieval lord. An Amur tiger’s sense of superiority and dominance over his realm is absolute: because of his position in the forest hierarchy, the only force a male will typically submit to is a stronger tiger or, occasionally, a large brown bear. Nothing else ranks in the taiga, and this is why, if threatened or attacked, these animals have been known to climb trees to swat at helicopters and run headlong into gunfire.

  Fights between animals are rarely to the death because killing a powerful adversary is dangerous and takes an enormous amount of energy. Death for its own sake is seldom an objective in nature anyway: the reason prey is killed is not to kill it per se, but to keep it still long enough to be eaten. Likewise, in the case of a territorial dispute, the goal is not to terminate but to establish dominance and persuade your competitor to go elsewhere. In general, animals (including tigers) avoid conflicts whenever possible because fighting hurts, and the margins in the wild are simply too tight. Most predators—leopards or solitary wolves, for example—will abandon a contested kill rather than risk an injury. But tigers are different: when dealing with its subjects, the male Amur tiger can be vicious, shrewd, and vindictive.
In addition to his Herod-like response to other cubs and young males, he may even kill his own. Based on the observations of hunters and biologists, it appears that Amur tigers will occasionally kill bears solely on something that we might recognize as principle. Communal animals sometimes engage in wanton attacks, but it is hard to imagine any other solitary animal capable of a tiger’s ambitious and intelligent savagery.

  In Primorye, tigers attack and eat both black and brown bears on a fairly regular basis; this is striking because, ordinarily, no animal in its right mind would take on a bear. Russian brown bears belong to the same species as American grizzlies and can weigh a thousand pounds; their ferocity and power are legendary. In spite of this, they have been known to flee at the sight of a tiger. “In January 1941, I encountered the prints of a very large brown bear,” wrote the tiger biologist Lev Kaplanov.5 “This animal, which had accidentally come across a tiger family on the trail, abandoned this path at a gallop.”

  Practically speaking, even a modestly sized brown bear would be a match for any tiger. So why would a tiger pick a fight with such a dangerous opponent? And why would it then prosecute the battle—as sometimes happens—to the point of tearing the bear limb from limb and scattering its appendages across the battleground? While the motives can never be fully understood, the discovery and description of such scenes would go a long way toward explaining why indigenous people like Ivan Dunkai’s son Mikhail refer to the tiger—not the larger brown bear—as the “Czar of the Forest.”*

  Prior to the arrival of Chinese gold miners and Russian settlers, there appeared to be minimal conflict between humans and tigers in what is now Primorye. Game was abundant, human populations were relatively small, and there was plenty of room for all in the vast temperate jungles of coastal Manchuria. Furthermore, the Manchus, Udeghe, Nanai, and Orochi, all of whom are Tungusic peoples long habituated to living with tigers, knew their place; they were animists who held tigers in the highest regard and did their best to stay out of their way. But when Russian colonists began arriving in the seventeenth century, these carefully managed agreements began to break down. People in Krasny Yar still tell stories about the first time their grandparents saw Russians: huge creatures covered in red hair with blue eyes and skin as pale as a dead man’s.