The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Boyko ignored them and strode across the lot, went inside, and had a cup of tea. He knew what it was to have tiger trouble, but he had no issue with this tiger, so in his mind there was no possibility of a conflict. Many of his neighbors felt the same way. But his hosts, being city dwellers from Khabarovsk, weren’t aware of this unspoken agreement; in this case, their ignorance probably saved their lives.

  During the previous four days, the tiger had crossed over into a realm from which there was no returning. This was a one-way trip through uncharted territory—for the tiger and for the humans around him. A new model had been created; whatever bonds had held this tiger in relationship to his human neighbors, indeed, to his own nature, were broken. Now, anything was possible. When a domestic animal goes wild—a sheep-killing dog, for example—it is referred to as feral, but there is no name for what happens when a wild animal goes in the other direction and becomes dangerously familiar with the world of domesticated creatures. What should one call it when a tiger starts eating people and shit, and injures itself demolishing man-made things? Is it rage? A loss of bearing? Or simply adaptation to a new order? Perhaps some things are best left unnamed.

  In any case, this tiger was now linked to the world of men in a way no animal should ever be. In the metabolic sense, at least—contaminated by both the bullets and the blood of his enemy—he had become something that doesn’t exist in the West, something, if one had to put a name to it, akin to a weretiger. In the narrative canon of the southern Udeghe, whose current population is centered on Krasny Yar, there exists a kind of specialized amba called an egule. An elder named Martina Nedezhda described it as an enormous fur-covered creature, “like a tiger,” that eats people.2 It is impossible to say now whether entities of this kind are recognized in the environment and given a name, or conceived by the collective imagination to serve a particular purpose, but suffice to say that things are described and named for a reason. In the Udeghe tale, “Uza and the Egule,” Uza and his older brother, both of whom were legendary heroes, were hunting on the Bikin when they were attacked by an egule in the river; their boat was destroyed and Uza was eaten. Miraculously, Uza survived and managed to escape from inside the egule. He then killed the beast, fashioned a tent from its skin and bones, and made it his home.

  But Uza was a hero and, in the Panchelaza, in the 1990s, heroes were in short supply. And so, this latter-day egule roamed at will. Stranded between the worlds of animals and men, at once fixated and unhinged, there was no law to hold such a creature, and no known words to recall it. When the tiger left the road workers’ camp on Sunday, the 7th, he crossed the gravel highway, and made his way down the Takhalo toward the Bikin. In this animal’s chest was a heart the size of a child’s head, and it was pounding away, blending the bad blood with the good and driving the tiger on.

  13

  But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee.

  Job 12:7

  If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.

  LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN1

  Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animal, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

  CHARLES DARWIN2

  Him all same man, only different shirt. Him know everything, know traps, know angry, know all around … all same man.

  DERSU UZALA3

  IN 1909, AN ESTONIAN-BORN BARON-TURNED-PHYSIOLOGIST NAMED Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of Umwelt to the world. Uexküll is considered one of the fathers of ethology, which is also known as behavioral ecology. It is a young discipline whose goal is to study behavior and social organization through a biological lens. “To do so,” wrote Uexküll in “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” “we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar … is transformed.”4 Uexküll called this bubble the umwelt, a German word that he applied to a given animal’s subjective or “self-centered” world. An individual’s umwelt exists side by side with the Umgebung—the term Uexküll used to describe the objective environment, a place that exists in theory but that none of us can truly know given the inherent limitations of our respective umwelten. In addition to being delightful words to say, umwelt and umgebung offer a framework for exploring and describing the experience of other creatures.

  In the umgebung of a city sidewalk, for example, a dog owner’s umwelt would differ greatly from that of her dog’s in that, while she might be keenly aware of a SALE sign in a window, a policeman coming toward her, or a broken bottle in her path, the dog would focus on the gust of cooked meat emanating from a restaurant’s exhaust fan, the urine on a fire hydrant, and the doughnut crumbs next to the broken bottle. Objectively, these two creatures inhabit the same umgebung, but their individual umwelten give them radically different experiences of it. And yet these parallel universes have many features in common: both dog and mistress must be careful crossing the street, and both will pay close attention to other dogs, if not for the same reasons. One way to envision the differences between these overlapping umwelten is to mentally color-code each creature’s objects of interest as it moves through space; the graphic potential is vast and fascinating, and it can be fine-tuned by the intensity of the given color, the same way an infrared camera indicates temperature differences. For example, both dog and mistress would notice the restaurant exhaust fan, but the dog would attach a “hotter” significance to it—unless the mistress happened to be hungry, too.

  Uexküll had a broad romantic streak, but it was tempered by discipline and scholarship and, at the University of Hamburg, where he was a professor, he founded an environmental research institute (Institut für Umweltforschung) in 1926, which was the first of its kind to apply these methods.* The umwelten Uexküll sought to describe and illustrate covered the living spectrum from humans and jackdaws to ticks and sea cucumbers. Based on the latest information about these creatures’ biological processes, his narrative descriptions are not only fascinating reading but remarkable feats of empathic thinking: “The eyeless tick is directed to [her] watchtower by a general photo-sensitivity to her skin,” he writes.5 “The approaching prey is revealed to the blind and deaf highwaywoman by her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, that emanates from the skin glands of all mammals, acts on the tick as a signal to leave her watchtower and hurl herself downwards.” Uexküll was, through science and imagination, trying to put himself inside the body and experience of another creature, much as the wizard Merlin enabled the boy King Arthur to do by transforming him into different animals in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. Uexküll’s exhaustively detailed descriptions and analyses are all the more remarkable when one considers his contemporaries’ general lack of interest in, and understanding of, the subjective experience of other species. “These different worlds,” wrote Uexküll in 1934, “which are as manifold as the animals themselves, present to all nature lovers new lands of such wealth and beauty that a walk through them is well worth while, even though they unfold not to the physical but only to the spiritual eye.”6

  These ideas became more mainstream in the 1960s when, in the wake of the civil rights movement, the individual experience, and even the rights, of animals began to be considered more seriously (one result being the Animal Welfare Act of 1966). Nonetheless, there remains a schism between strict behaviorists and ethologists. The former reject the notion of animal consciousness and firmly believe that they are merely biological machines: bundles of instinct and base reaction that are all but unconscious in any measurable sense of the word. It is here that language, arguably the signal difference between us and our fellow creatures, becomes our greatest liability. As the science writer Stephen Budiansky wrote in If a Lion Could Talk, “we have no means of describing cognitive processes that do not involve words.”7 Ultimately, the problem comes down to umwelt; we are such prisoners of our subjective experience that
it is only by force of will and imagination that we are able to take leave of it at all and consider the experience and essence of another creature—or even another person.

  In fact, the ability to step inside the umwelt “bubble” of another creature is not so much a newfound skill as it is a lost art. Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey—even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior. It was our ancestors’ skill at not only analyzing and imitating the nature of a given animal, but identifying with it, that enabled them to flourish in dangerous environments, both physically and psychically. In hunting societies, such as the Udeghe, the !Kung, the Haida, or the Sioux, animals were not merely food, they were seen as blood relatives, spiritual companions, hunting guides, and sources of power and connection to the surrounding world. The boundaries between the umwelten of humans and animals were, of necessity, much less rigidly defined. Many residents of the Bikin valley maintain these skills and relationships to this day; there are hunters there who speak with tigers and who can identify game by scent alone. In the predominantly Russian village of Yasenovie, a random winter scene in 2007 revealed a circle of men in forest green and camouflage, in the center of which a man charged and wheeled while holding a rack of elk antlers to his head.

  “All species have been shaped by the forces of evolution to meet immediate needs,” wrote George Page in his companion to the television series Inside the Animal Mind.8 “The more a given species needs to be conscious of, the more it is conscious of. Either that or it becomes extinct.” Georges Leroy, a naturalist and gamekeeper to Louis XV at Versailles, had ample opportunity to observe predator-prey relations and he speculated that the reason wolves seemed so much smarter than deer was that they would starve to death if they weren’t. While deer forage is stationary and abundant, wolf prey, by contrast, is not only highly mobile but doing its utmost to avoid being eaten. In order to succeed, predators must actively—and consciously—contrive successful hunting scenarios by adapting to, and manipulating, random events within a constantly shifting environment. This, as any hunter or businessperson knows, is hard to do, and these conditions favor the prey almost every time.

  Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily, a lifelong hunter who has shared his territory with tigers all his life, has come to a similar conclusion. On a bitterly cold day in March 2007, he tried to put the tiger into a context an outsider could understand. “A hunter can only rely on himself,” he said. “If anything happens, there is no one to help him, and all of us who live this way have a very advanced intuition. We also carry the experience of our ancestors in our heads: that’s how a man functions in taiga. The tiger is a hunter, just the same as a man is a hunter. A hunter has to think about how to get his prey. It is different for boar and deer: if leaves or cones fall down from a tree, that’s what they eat; there is no need to think. Tigers think.”

  Clark Barrett, a professor in the anthropology department at UCLA and an expert on predator-prey dynamics, describes the deer’s advantage as the anywhere but here principle: all a prey animal needs to do is be anywhere the predator isn’t—it doesn’t matter if it’s a foot away, or a hemisphere—and it will live another day.9 The predator, on the other hand, must be exactly where its prey is, and at exactly the same moment, or it will starve. Thus, for a predator, mastery of both time and space—in addition to a thorough understanding of terrain and prey behavior—are crucial. Pack hunting, of course, increases the odds enormously, but unlike the wolf or the lion, the tiger is a solo stealth hunter and, thus, has a far more challenging task. Possessing neither the endurance to run its prey down, nor the numbers to surround and harry it, the tiger’s method must instead resemble that of the lone assassin: it must insert itself almost intravenously into its prey’s umwelt—an umwelt, it must be noted, that has evolved over millions of years to be exquisitely sensitive to the presence of felid predators. Making matters still more difficult is the fact that tiger prey typically travel in herds. With their dozens of eyes, ears, and nostrils, and their decades of collective tiger-evading experience, a herd of deer or boar can be as vigilant and jumpy as a Secret Service detail. In order to subvert this, the tiger must embody a contradiction: this large, pungent, extraordinarily charismatic animal must achieve a state of virtual nonexistence while operating inside the sphere of its prey’s highly attuned senses. Witnesses, native and Russian alike, agree that there is something almost metaphysical about the tiger’s ability to will itself into nonbeing—to, in effect, cloak itself. In the Bikin valley, it is generally believed that if a tiger has decided to attack you, you will not be able to see it. With the exception of the polar bear, which also hunts by stealth, there is no other land mammal this big whose survival depends on its ability to disappear.

  Yuri Trush appreciated and respected these qualities in the tiger. While investigating the site of the Markov attack, and while writing his report that weekend, he had made a sincere effort to understand this animal—to place himself inside the tiger’s umwelt and imagine his world as it pertained to Markov and those around him. He did the same with Markov, working hard to reconstruct both his umwelt and his last days. Trush is generally cautious and disciplined in his thinking and, when he is not sure, or just guessing, he is not afraid to say so. However, on one particular point, he was unequivocal: “I am one hundred percent sure,” he said, “that Markov shot at the tiger from the caravan at close range.”

  It would have looked something like this: on December 1 or 2, a day or two before his death, Markov went out hunting with his dogs. He could have been alone or with Andrei Onofreychuk; the possibility of other people being present as well is not out of the question. The dogs would have been running up ahead, searching for a scent trail, and may well have been following one when they came upon a freshly killed boar. Markov is in hunting mode, so he is traveling with a gun, a rucksack, and perhaps a hatchet. When he catches up to the dogs, he sees the boar, and it is obvious that it has been killed by a tiger. He looks around, takes note of the dogs’ behavior, and decides the coast is clear. He can’t take the whole carcass, and he knows better than to do so, but he takes a haunch—maybe two, if he can carry that much. Then he hurries back to his cabin, feeling lucky: in the Panchelaza, this windfall was more fungible than mid-1990s rubles. Upon his return, Markov stores a portion of the meat in the beehive wellhead, which doubles as a food cache and is a safe distance from his cabin. Then he packs the rest of it down to the road workers’ camp to trade, returning home at dusk.

  Meanwhile, the tiger returns to his kill. It is clear that it has been tampered with, and the tiger takes umbrage. Perhaps the tiger has a feed and a rest, or he may set off immediately on the trail of these interloping competitors. There is no ambiguity about who the tiger seeks: the scent trail of several dogs and a man is easy to follow. The tiger arrives at Markov’s sometime after nightfall, which, in early December, means anytime after 4:30 in the afternoon. He approaches from the east, from the Amba River, and the first thing he comes across is the meat cache.

  When Trush investigated the meat cache wellhead in the stream, east of Markov’s cabin, he saw that it had been knocked over and that something had been dragged away from it, something that could have been a frozen boar leg. Trush didn’t spend a lot of time there, just long enough for him and Lazurenko to ascertain that the tiger had come from that direction and that the wellhead had been the first thing he investigated. However, they did note that this was the site of a resting place where the tiger spent a particularly long time—perhaps while he ate the recovered meat.

  Following this, the tiger continues on toward the cabin, stopping briefly by Markov’s log latrine. By now, the dogs, wherever they are, are sounding the alarm. The tiger makes his way down to the cabin where he scours the area, knocking over Markov’s belongings and chewing them up in his angry search for Markov, his dogs, the rest of the meat, or all of the
above (this damage could also have been done when the tiger returned later for the final stakeout). Meanwhile, Markov is inside, probably cooking up some of the boar meat (which the tiger may have scented already), and he may understand perfectly why the tiger is there. He realizes now that he has a serious problem on his hands. The tiger circles the caravan, searching for a way to get in, or at the dogs, which may be inside if they’re not hiding underneath. Markov is growing increasingly nervous; the caravan is a flimsy structure, sheathed only in boards, the cracks between them stuffed with rags to keep the wind out. By now, he may have realized that he has taken meat from the wrong tiger, and he is going to have to do something besides chain-smoke. Markov gets his gun.

  Here, a problem arises in this scenario: where does he get the gun from? Because of condensation issues, poachers’ guns are usually stored outside, in order to maintain a stable temperature. However, since it was late, and a patrol was unlikely, Markov may have simply leaned it up outside the door along with his cartridge belt. If that is the case, then he has a chance of retrieving it—so long as the tiger is on the far side of the caravan. Another possibility is that he has the gun inside on the floor. When it is this cold—minus thirty or so—poorly insulated cabins may stay ice-cold below knee height because the heat from the stove rises and dissipates so quickly. In any case, Markov now has his gun. His dogs are whining and barking, and he is going to have to do something decisive. However, as soon as he brings the gun up to window height, there is a significant change in temperature and the steel components start sweating, as do the brass shells. At this rate, it won’t take long for the gunpowder to be compromised, if it isn’t already. There is a new moon so visibility is poor, but Markov can hear the tiger, which at this point is making no effort to disguise its presence. Perhaps it has already killed one of his dogs, an offense many tayozhniks would consider just cause for shooting a tiger. At least one of his dogs is a trained hunter, a “breadwinner,” and his livelihood depends on it. Markov is frightened, angry, and maybe a little drunk. Humble as it is, this is his castle, and there is a tiger at the gate.