The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Some of these newcomers were Orthodox missionaries and though they were unarmed, their rigid convictions took a serious toll on native society. The word “shaman” is a Tungusic word, and in the Far East in the mid-nineteenth century, shamanism had reached a highly evolved state. For shamans and their followers who truly believed in the gods they served and in the powers they wielded, to have them disdained by missionaries and swept into irrelevance by foreign governments and technology was psychically devastating—a catastrophic loss of power and status comparable to that experienced by the Russian nobility when the Bolsheviks came to power.

  In Primorye, this traumatic process continued into the 1950s. The Udeghe author Alexander Konchuga is descended from a line of shamans and shamankas, and he grew up in their company. “Local authorities did not prohibit it,” he explained. “The attitude was, if you’re drumming at night, that’s your business. But the officials in the regional centers were against it and, in 1955, when I was still a student, some militia came to my cousin’s grandmother. Someone must have snitched on her and told them she was a shamanka because they took away her drums and burned them. She couldn’t take it and she hanged herself.” The drum is the membrane through which the shaman communicates with, and travels to, the spirit world. For the shaman, the drum is a vital organ and life is inconceivable without it.

  Along with spiritual and social disruption came dramatic changes to the environment. One Nanai story collected around 1915 begins, “Once upon a time, before the Russians burned the forests down …”6 In this and many other ways, Russia’s expansion into the Far East reflects the American expansion into the West. On both frontiers, it was fur traders, gold seekers, and explorers who led the way by land and sea, followed by settlers, soldiers, industrial resource extractors, the navy, and the railroad. However, Russia is almost twice the width of the United States, so even though Russians had a head start of more than a century, a combination of economics, politics, and sheer geographic enormity slowed the pace of progress. Nonetheless, by 1850, it was clear that nothing would ever be the same on either coast of the North Pacific.

  If one were able to unfold the globe and view the recent histories of Eurasia and the Americas simultaneously, one would see an explosion of ideological, technological, viral, and alcoholic energy radiating outward from Europe and sweeping across these regions. In Russia, the first vehicles for these world-changing forces were the Cossacks. They were the conquistadors of Eurasia, a legendary class of horsemen, warriors, and explorers who guarded the czars and endured extraordinary privations in order to open Siberia—first to the fur trade and later to colonization. The indigenous peoples they encountered on their epic journeys to the Arctic and Pacific coasts suffered enormously at their hands. Many natives, along with Manchus and Koreans, were simply killed outright while the survivors became victims of crippling extortion, mostly in the form of furs, but nothing was off limits: when Manchus got wind of a Cossack advance, their first response was to evacuate all the women.

  After Russia lost the Crimean War in 1856, the Far East was the only direction it had left to turn with its imperial ambitions, and it was the Cossacks who established settlements on the Amur River in direct violation of a two-hundred-year-old treaty with China. From these forward bases, or ostrogs, Russia launched its formal annexation of Primorye. By the turn of the last century, Cossack soldiers had gone on to occupy most of northern Manchuria. “They are semi-savages, black-eyed, fierce-browed, the finest horsemen in the world, caring little for your life, little for their own,” wrote Sir John Foster Fraser, a British correspondent who spent time among the Cossacks in 1901, en route to Harbin, a Russian-built city two hundred miles inside Chinese Manchuria.7 Fraser came away as moved by the soldiers’ hospitality as he was impressed by their headlong courage. “For a [cavalry] charge there are no troops that could equal them.… And who that has heard a Slav song, crooning, pathetic, weird, sung by a Cossack at night in the middle of a plain silent as death, can forget it?”

  Some Cossack leaders, so far removed from any law or consequence, degenerated into piratical warlords who would have given Cortés or Kurtz a run for his money. Even after something approximating the rule of law had been established in Primorye, extortion, shakedowns, cross-border banditry, and racially motivated murder remained common into the twentieth century (since perestroika, all of these problems have resurged).

  The few Russians who journey to Primorye voluntarily, or who stay and embrace it as Arseniev, Trush, and Markov did, tend to possess an adventurous curiosity that borders on the romantic. They feel their surroundings intensely and one reason they choose to live in Primorye is that, in Russia, there is no other natural environment that is so complex, exotic, or stimulating to the senses. But there is no question that the boreal jungle is an acquired taste, and it defeated people regularly. Many early settlers found life there so strange and difficult that they simply turned around and went back, a retreat, it must be remembered, that could take years. The leopard specialist Vasily Solkin, who was taught to hunt in western Russia, could appreciate the newcomers’ disorientation: “I had the feeling I’d walked into a botanical garden,” he said. “The forest did not look natural or normal to me; it was too exotic, there were all these different species. I felt like a child in kindergarten: the hunting skills I had were of no use to me here.”

  However, more often than not, once a Russian had made it to the coast—often as an exile—this was where he would remain; everything he had previously known would exist in memory only. In 1870, Vladivostok had a population of about seven thousand from all over Russia and the Pacific. In those days, the future capital resembled a smaller, more primitive San Francisco: not only was it beautifully situated, but natural resources were abundant, the Pacific offered access to the world, and grandiose dreams were encouraged. A number of those dreamers came from overseas. In addition to China, Russia had managed to beat out England, France, and the United States in its race to lay claim to this strategically situated and physically perfect port where, it was said, all the navies of Europe could be safely hidden. It was a harsh but hopeful time. It was also an inebrious time. In 1878, tax revenue from alcohol sales in the Maritime Territory exceeded all other sources combined by a factor of twenty.

  As in all frontier towns, the gender ratio in Vladivostok was hopelessly skewed, so surplus bachelors were forced to find alternative amusements for themselves. One of these resembled a cross between Duck, Duck, Goose and Russian Roulette. Around 1895, an elderly survivor of this game was interviewed by a Russian researcher and travel writer named Dmitri Shreider whose book, an early profile of the region entitled Our Ussuri, was “approved by the Czar’s censors” in 1897. The following excerpt makes Gogol look like a documentarist.

  “Some years ago [c. 1870], at the time of all those fruitless hopes for unity and cohesion, an institution appeared here, ‘The Lancepupov Club.’ ”8

  “What kind of club was it, and what were its goals?”

  “Goals? Why, to combat the fragmentation and alienation in our society, and to gather its members for conversation and the exchange of ideas. But it wasn’t long before the Lancepupov Club degenerated into something absurd, something that is shameful to remember.”

  My companion was quiet for a time, and then, hesitantly, he continued: “For example, how do you suppose you would like to play a game called ‘Tiger Hunting’?”

  “Tiger Hunting? I didn’t know such a game existed.”

  “I didn’t either, but after I lived here for a while, I found out about it. I remember that game very well, especially when it rains or snows …”

  The narrator rolled up the sleeve of his frock-coat and bared his arm. I looked at it and noticed traces of a large wound above the elbow. The wound had obviously been inflicted by a firearm and, for the first time, I noticed that my companion could not move his arm very well. “Listen,” I said to him, “so far, all this doesn’t explain anything. And what do tigers have to do with
it?”

  “You don’t understand? Of course,” he muttered in embarrassment, “how can you … games like this don’t exist elsewhere. I was the Tiger!” he exclaimed suddenly, and a broad smile lit his sincere face.

  “You?!”

  “Yes. You seem surprised, but it’s all very simple: first, we would appoint someone—let’s say me—to be the ‘Tiger.’ Then, we would take all the furniture out of the room, cover the windows with mats, and turn out the lights. The other club members would be the ‘Hunters,’ and they would sit in the middle of the room (facing outward), armed with revolvers. Thus arranged, they would shoot in any direction where they heard the Tiger (that is, me). Obviously, I’d taken my shoes off and emptied my pockets of anything that might jingle. I would be running along the walls in my socks, trying to step as softly as I could—like a tiger. But one time, the rôle proved too much for me: I stumbled and got a bullet in my arm. I was lucky it wasn’t my heart.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “Listen,” I said, “this is not a game. It’s murder! To cover the windows, turn out the lights and shoot at a human being? You could have been killed.”

  “Not exactly. As you can see, I’m still alive. Anyhow, we saw it differently: it was amusing, in its way. Of course, with the lamps lit, death was a real possibility, but, in the dark, the Tiger could become ‘the Tiger!’ Besides, according to the rules, you could only shoot at the legs.”

  “But you were shot in the elbow.”

  “It was an accident—I fell down.”

  “How could you agree to participate—forgive me for saying so—in such an insane game?”

  “How? Now, of course, I can’t think about it without feeling terrified. But back then, it was nothing. Back then, life was cheap.”

  “And were your other pastimes so … amusing?”

  “No, they were more what you’d expect.”

  At the same time that members of the Lancepupov Club were hunting human tigers, the Yankovsky family were after the real thing. Mikhail Yankovsky was a descendant of Polish nobility who had fought on the wrong side of the Polish Rebellion of 1863. For his crimes, he was sentenced to eight years in Siberia, the first eighteen months of which were spent walking to prison. At that time, the railroad was still forty years away, and the road was barely passable—at any time of year. It was essentially a caravan route, only with fewer camels and none of the romance. Processions of exhausted, lice-infested exiles could be seen slogging eastward, while wagon trains bearing Chinese tea trundled west, wheels often buried to the hubs in mud, the horses and drivers alike besieged by mosquitoes and biting flies. During the winter, it was so cold that the horses’ nostrils would become clogged with ice from their own breath, and drivers had to stop periodically to clear them in order to keep the animals from suffocating. Even so, horses died and axles broke on a regular basis. “It is heavy going,” wrote Chekhov during his own cross-country journey in the spring of 1890, “very heavy, but it grows heavier still when you consider that this hideous, pock-marked strip of land, this foul smallpox of a road, is almost the sole artery linking Europe and Siberia!”9

  Mikhail Yankovsky won an early release when Czar Alexander II declared an amnesty, but only on the condition that he never return to western Russia. Yankovsky honored this restriction and went on to lead an extraordinary life in the czar’s most recent acquisition, first managing a gold mine on an island in the Sea of Japan, and then traveling down to Korea by junk and returning up the coast on horseback where he discovered a windswept (and mosquito-free) peninsula south of Vladivostok. Not long after staking his claim there, he became involved in a turf war with Manchurian bandits known as the hong huzi (“Red Beards”) who had burned down the home of another recent settler, hung his wife’s corpse on a lamp hook, and kidnapped his son. Yankovsky and his grieving neighbor banded together with local Korean hunters and pursued the gang to the Chinese border where a gunfight took place in which Yankovsky killed the bandit chief. He then went on to build a virtual fortress with bulletproof adobe walls, and began breeding horses and deer.*

  In addition to the meat, young, soft deer antlers (pantui) are highly prized by Koreans for their rejuvenating properties; some took it to such an extreme that they would stand in line by the Yankovskys’ paddock while the antlers were sawed off live deer in order to suck the blood directly from the pulsing stumps. A tiger’s appetites are not so different, and the Yankovsky family hadn’t lived in their new home a year before they registered their first losses. Between 1880 and 1920, tigers killed scores of the Yankovskys’ animals—everything from dogs to cattle. Once, a tiger dragged one of their hired men from his horse.

  In the eyes of Russian settlers, tigers were simply four-legged bandits, and the Yankovskys retaliated accordingly.* Unlike the animist Udeghe who were native to the region, or the Chinese and Korean Buddhists who pioneered there, the Christian Russians behaved like owners as opposed to inhabiters. As with lion-human relations in the Kalahari, the breakdown began in earnest with the introduction of domestic animals. But it wasn’t just the animals, it was the attitude that went with them. These newcomers arrived as entitled conquerors with no understanding of, or particular interest in, the local culture—human or otherwise. Like their New World counterparts across the Pacific, theirs, too, was a manifest destiny: they had a mandate, in many cases from the czar himself, and they took an Orthodox, Old Testament approach to both property and predators.

  Accompanying this was a siege mentality that was exacerbated by the real threats posed by bandits and predatory animals. In addition to killing livestock, wolves really do kill people in Russia, and no one who had made it as far as the Pacific coast was going to put up with them, or with tigers either. They had been through too much already.

  Over the course of sixty years, three generations of Yankovskys hunted tigers in Russia, Manchuria, and North Korea, where some of the family fled after the Russian Revolution. They began by hunting them in self-defense and, in later years, they hunted for sport, sometimes working as guides for other hunters. When they could, they sold the carcasses and the buyers were invariably Chinese. Mikhail Yankovsky’s grandson Valery participated in some of these expeditions and, in 2008, at the age of ninety-seven, he still recalled them vividly. Like the long-dead veteran of the Lancepupov Club, Valery Yankovsky offers a keyhole view into a world that no longer exists. “The Russians were probably the most aggressive tiger hunters out there, but after us it was the Koreans,” he explained in a candid letter recalling his early days on the coast.11

  We hunted in winter, using dogs and carbines, never traps or poison.* But tiger hunting was incidental rather than intentional; it wasn’t a stable trade. When we had a tiger, Chinese apothecaries would buy it from us whole; they were particularly interested in the meat, heart, and bones. Of course, it was believed that the tiger’s meat had supernatural powers; the heart, especially, was thought by all to make one more courageous. We didn’t eat the meat ourselves, but I did try it once in 1943—boiled and cooked with miso. It was fatty and surprisingly tasty—a bit like mutton.

  In Korea, tigers would occasionally kill people in the deep forest, and when that happened the hunter’s family would abandon the area. I have personally seen cabins there with the doors knocked in by tigers, and I have heard of tigers digging up fresh graves, but I never witnessed it.

  The tiger’s character is very wily, cautious, and bloodthirsty; when walking in a tiger’s tracks, you could always feel his presence, his menacing danger. Once, my father was attacked by a wounded tiger, and my brother saved him by shooting it. In those early days around Vladivostok, they were the principal killers of livestock. [Like my grandfather,] my father declared war against the tigers, and he bagged seven of them on his own. They were our vicious enemies.

  Yankovsky’s is a worldview caught in amber. Although he was born in the generation between Dersu Uzala and Ivan Dunkai, his experience of tigers is so radically different that he might as well be describ
ing another animal. Even a hundred years later, Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily’s description of his relationship to the local tigers stands in stark contrast to a Russian settler’s: “You know, there are two hunters in the taiga: a man and a tiger,” he explained in March 2007. “As professional hunters, we respect each other: he chooses his path and I choose mine. Sometimes our paths intersect, but we do not intrude on each other in any way. The taiga is his home; he is the master. I am also a master in my own home, but he lives in the taiga all the time; I don’t.”

  This disparity between the Yankovskys and the Dunkais is traceable to a fundamental conflict—not just between Russians and indigenous peoples, but with tigers—around the role of human beings in the natural world. In Primorye, ambitious Russian homesteaders operated under the assumption that they had been granted dominion over the land—just as God had granted it to Noah, the original homesteader:

  1: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

  2: And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.

  Implicit in these lines from Genesis 9 is the belief that there is no room for two on the forest throne. And yet, in a different context, these words could apply as easily to tigers as they do to humans. In so many words, God puts the earth and all its creatures at their disposal: