The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  Martin was continually impressed by the subtlety of interaction and awareness he witnessed all around him: rival zebra stallions spelling each other at the same hole as they pawed away stones to access water; an ostrich hen spreading her wings to block the progress of other ostriches after detecting a remote hazard; a baboon dismantling a pair of binoculars by carefully unscrewing all the component parts; a hyena giving way to a leopard on the trail and, once the leopard was safely past, shrieking and yelping after it like a coward hurling insults. “It struck me,” Martin observed, “that the ‘all too human’ behaviour of men was in reality ‘all too animal.’ ”

  However, Martin’s most surprising discoveries concerned the changes taking place in his own psyche: when they had first descended into the canyon, he found that his dreams focused on the people and places he had left behind. But as the months turned into years, “Animals began to play an increasing part in them and the distinction between human beings and animals became blurred.”19 Martin’s subconscious—his interior umwelt—was gradually recalibrating itself to match his new, if atavistic, reality. It was the kind of real-time immersion experiment that psychologists and anthropologists can only dream of, and it may shed some light on why the painted caves of southern Europe and the wall art of the Kalahari are so heavily weighted toward animals. “Perhaps,” speculated Martin, “this was the origin of mythology … in which human beings and animals mingle and merge into each other.”*20

  Considering that it took a German-born urban academic only two years to (re)discover this connection at an impressively deep level (in an African canyon, no less), one can only imagine the profound sense of intimacy and understanding an indigenous hunter like Ivan or Mikhail Dunkai would possess after a lifetime in his native taiga. When one adds to this the fact that the Dunkais are drawing on centuries of communal memory and experience with local animals, their interpretation of human-tiger dynamics takes on a certain weight. “The tiger is strong, powerful and fair,” Mikhail Dunkai declared. “You have to respect him. You think he doesn’t understand the language, but he understands everything; he can read a person’s mind. So, if you start thinking, ‘He’s a bad tiger; I am not afraid of him,’ well, something bad will happen to you, and you’ll have only yourself to blame. The tiger will warn you first, but if you still don’t understand, then he will seriously punish you.”

  Mikhail had an interesting take on the sharing of prey in the forest, and things might have gone better for Markov if he had known about it. “Once, a tiger killed a wild boar about ten yards from my cabin,” Mikhail began. “In the morning, I saw the dead boar and the tiger sitting nearby. So, I started talking to him: ‘The taiga is big,’ I said. ‘Why would you kill a boar right here? Go, enjoy the rest of the taiga, but don’t do this near my cabin.’ The tiger was sitting, listening, and then he left. Afterward, I saw that a part of the boar—the haunch—had been left for me; the rest of the boar was eaten and everything was cleaned by the tiger.

  “But I didn’t take the meat,” said Mikhail, “because, if you take it, then you are in debt and have to give something back. So I said, ‘Thank you, but I have meat now. Don’t be insulted that I don’t take it. It was good of you to share with me.’ If you take meat from the tiger,” Mikhail explained, “you will feel that you owe him, and then you will be afraid of the tiger.”

  The way Mikhail Dunkai saw it, accepting meat from a tiger is like accepting a favor from the Communist Party, or the mafia: once obligated, it can be very hard to extract oneself. Markov may not have fully grasped the nature of the contract he was entering into if, indeed, he helped himself to that tiger kill. Ivan Dunkai, being from an earlier generation, seemed to accept these rigorous terms, but his son clearly did not. That the tiger researcher Dmitri Pikunov was able to scavenge so successfully, and so safely, from tiger kills was most likely due to the fact that he didn’t go near a kill until he was sure the tiger was completely finished with it. The czar always eats first.

  That Markov had become so entangled with this tiger seemed genuinely to surprise Mikhail Dunkai. “Markiz was a strong, good man,” he said in sum. “He was always optimistic, always kept his spirits up. He was honest. It’s hard to understand how it happened, but this situation with the tiger diverted him from the path of life. I tried to tell him that he should stay overnight, that he should take it easy, stop worrying, and think it over. I said, ‘If you didn’t do anything bad to him, he won’t do anything to you. Just don’t do anything bad to him. Remember: you are living in the taiga. He can crush you.’ ”

  But by then, the die was cast, and a facet of Markov’s own character may have sealed his fate. “If Markiz started something,” Mikhail said, “he usually finished it.”

  “Look at it from the tiger’s point of view,” Trush said later. “The tiger challenged Markov. From his point of view, either you leave, or you sort it out face-to-face and see what happens. Markov accepted that challenge. Volodya Markov had a chance to leave the taiga; had he done so, he would still be alive. He had that choice.”

  The question remains: why did Markov go for a long walk in the forest, alone, if he knew there was an angry tiger looking for him? Was it pride? Was it concern for his dogs? Or was he intending to finish what he had started? Mikhail Dunkai believed it was something else altogether. He had the sense that Markov was already in the tiger’s thrall when he saw him that morning. “The tiger had already taken his soul,” he said. “I had this dog once,” he explained, “and one day the dog became nervous, angry, irritated; it started to bite me, and was running away. The next day, a tiger killed him. The dog was angry, irritated, and scared because the tiger influenced his mind: the dog didn’t see the tiger, but the tiger attracted him from a distance—like a magnet. It’s like hypnosis: putting thoughts in somebody’s head. The person, or the dog—they don’t understand what is happening or what they are doing. They are going somewhere without thinking clearly.”

  There are other explanations, but none more satisfactory for why Markov behaved as he did: why he struck everyone who saw him as “not himself,” why he refused their food and shelter, why he walked alone, in darkness, back to a place the tiger knew well. But it is the tracks that are most unsettling: the way they lead, mile after mile, down the Amba and through the taiga, directly into the path of the tiger. This, and the way the tiger did not hunt him, but waited patiently outside his door, as if he was expecting him, like a dog—or a hit man. A human being could not have engineered a more bitter revenge scenario.

  * It was closed in 1960. In 2004, an archive of the institute’s holdings was established at the university.

  * In remote areas like the Bikin, antifreeze is hard to come by, so at night the radiators in heavy machinery will simply be drained into a bucket. The following morning, before dawn, a worker will build a fire, thaw the water out, and refill the radiators for the workday.

  * Slang term for strong, loose tobacco.

  * In September 1942, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn were forced to return to civilization when Korn became seriously ill with beri-beri (caused by a deficiency of vitamin B). Although they faced multiple charges, the presiding judge was impressed by their story and they were not interned. Instead, the authorities put them back to work, using their intimate knowledge of the land to locate water sources for farmers. Korn died in a car accident in 1946, but Martin lived until 1998, during which time he did pioneering work in geology, including plate tectonics, taught as a university professor, published several more books and monographs, and was awarded numerous international honors. A road has since been built through the Kuiseb canyon, which is now part of the Namib-Naukluft National Park.

  14

  When we look at nature, we are only looking at the survivors.

  STEPHEN BUDIANSKY,

  If a Lion Could Talk1

  THE TERMS OF THE BIG CAT-PRIMATE RELATIONSHIP HAVE BEEN amazingly consistent over time: it doesn’t matter if the primates in question are gun-wielding tayozhniks
, !Kung hunters, preverbal australopithecines, or baboons through the ages. As far as our immanent fear of predatory cats goes, virtually nothing has changed in five million years beyond our techniques for managing it. Because of this, there are striking similarities between the behavior of Trush’s Inspection Tiger team at Markov’s cabin and that of a troop of baboons on the African savanna: formed into defensive groups by day, both man and monkey will travel in the open, even going so far as to confront predatory cats. But as soon as the sun goes down, each group will retreat to safe quarters where they huddle together until dawn.

  In order to get an idea of how we coped with big cats and other predators prior to the acquisition of tools and fire, some paleoanthropologists have looked to savanna baboons for comparison. One of the most diligent and respected of these researchers is the South African paleontologist Charles K. Brain. In the course of his work excavating hominid and animal fossils from caves in the Transvaal’s Sterkfontein valley during the 1960s and ′70s, Brain spent time observing a troop of cliff-dwelling baboons that lived nearby. On particularly cold nights, the troop of about thirty baboons would retire to the caves that run deep inside the cliffs. One night, Brain did something no modern human had ever done: “I hid inside the cavern,” he wrote, “making my presence known only after the baboons had taken up their sleeping places.2 Although pandemonium broke out in the cave, the baboons could not be induced to leave the place in the dark.”

  Brain did not go into much detail about that wild night, and this may be because the experience of being trapped in a dark, confined space with dozens of fear-crazed baboons is something best left to the imagination. But he came away with some valuable information. Brain was struck by the fact that darkness and whatever it contained was, for these baboons, so frightening that it overrode their panicked response to a large intruder in their midst. What, one wonders, did they think was out there? In the mid-twentieth century, when Brain paid his surprise visit, it would have been leopards, lions, and hyenas. Three million years earlier, however, an even more daunting array of predators would have awaited them—and our own ancestors—beyond the mouth of that cave. Hunting both by day and night, these would have included several species of wolf and hyena, some of which were the size of lions. Out there, too, were big cats and catlike predators—saber-toothed and otherwise—all in far greater numbers and variety than exist today. As if that wasn’t enough, there were also eagles that preyed on the young until they reached three or four years old when they would have been too heavy to carry off, but not to kill.

  Another detail that Brain found noteworthy was the stark corollary between savanna baboons and safe sleeping areas: where there were no cliffs or caves, there were no baboons. When one compares the baboon’s idea of safety with a Hopi pueblo, a medieval castle, or an apartment building, the similarities are uncanny. Wherever we go, whatever the medium or terrain, our concept of sanctuary remains essentially the same. Lacking height, we’ll make do with a hole. In this way, a cave, an igloo, a bunker, and a surplus Russian army truck would be universally recognizable across geography and time.

  C. K. Brain is significant, not just for the baboons he has observed and the fossils he has found, but for the fact that, in doing so, he refuted the Killer Ape theory. He challenged Ardrey and many of his own colleagues with his seminal work, The Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy* (1981). In it, Brain described his exhaustive study of fossils he and others found in the Sterkfontein valley, a place that has since been dubbed the “Cradle of Humankind.” Brain’s conclusions were radical for the time: our ancestors were neither hunters nor gratuitously homicidal; if we were fighting, he asserted, it was for our very lives against a host of predators far better equipped than we were.

  From a paleoanthropologist’s point of view, the Sterkfontein and neighboring Swartkrans valleys represent the motherlode; for nearly a century now, paleontologists have been excavating the caves and quarries that pock these arid valleys west of Johannesburg. Over the years, hundreds of fossils of baboons and early hominids have been found here, including nearly intact skeletons, some of which are more than three million years old. The region, which is now a World Heritage site, has also yielded some of the oldest known evidence of controlled fire (one million years BCE). Of particular interest to Brain was the fact that many of these fossilized bones, hominid and otherwise, bear evidence of predation. Big cats and hyenas haunted these caves, too; they still do, and they offer valuable clues to our formative experiences with large, dangerous animals.

  There is no question that the world inhabited by our hominid forebears was a perilous place at ground level: we were smaller and just about everything else was bigger than today. Our carnivorous neighbors, in whose eyes we would have been considered relatively small game, were superior to us in every way that mattered. This long and precarious phase in our early development, before we mastered tools and fire, may well have inflicted the “wound” Robinson Jeffers alluded to in his untitled poem, which also begged the pressing question:

  But whence came the race of man?3 I will make a guess.

  A change of climate killed the great northern forests,

  Forcing the manlike apes down from their trees …

  They had to go down to the earth, where green still grew

  And small meats might be gleaned. But there the great flesh-eaters,

  Tiger and panther and the horrible fumbling bear and

  endless wolf-packs

  made life

  A dream of death. Therefore man has those dreams,

  And kills out of pure terror.

  These lines were written more than fifty years ago by a nonscientist; nonetheless, this secular story, combining banishment from Eden with a traumatizing fall from arboreal grace, remains consistent with what many paleontologists and paleobotanists believe today. Judging from discoveries made in the Transvaal, the Olduvai Gorge, and elsewhere, we landed hard, and there was no going back. Until about two and a half million years ago, when the australopithecines’ successors, Homo habilis, began using tools, we had few natural defenses beyond those we carried in our heads: stereoscopic vision, decent hearing, a reasonably sensitive nose, and a brain only a third the size of ours today. In other words, we weren’t all that far ahead of baboons or chimpanzees.

  Conceivably, there could have been generations—maybe thousands of generations—of cats that taught their cubs to hunt primates. Just as the lions Elizabeth Marshall Thomas encountered on the Kalahari appeared to have been “acculturated” to not eating humans, the reverse is equally possible. The most notorious modern case of inherent man-eating occurred in the Njombe district of present-day Tanzania between 1932 and 1947. During this period, a single pride of fifteen lions killed approximately 1,500 people before George Rushby, a legendary British elephant-hunter-turned-game-warden, exterminated the pride, one by one. It took him a year. “If a man-eater continues to kill and eat people for any length of time,” wrote Rushby in his memoir, No More the Tusker, “it develops an almost supernatural cunning.4 This often makes the hunting down and killing of such a lion a lengthy and difficult task.”

  There is a related phenomenon among predators, large and small, that is politely termed “surplus killing,” but which manifests as a kind of spontaneous, frenzied slaughter. This is not what the Njombe lions were engaged in, but lions have been known to do it. So have leopards, tigers, wolves, hyenas, polar bears, and killer whales, among others. Shortly after the Njombe man-eaters were killed, one of Rushby’s colleagues observed such an incident at the Kruger National Park, 250 miles east of the Sterkfontein valley. Colonel James Stevenson-Hamilton was working as a warden there when he witnessed what he described as a “massacre of baboons” by a pride of lions. Apparently, a baboon troop had been approaching a water hole and failed to notice the lions napping nearby. The lions awoke and two lionesses rose and quietly hid themselves by the trail. When they leaped out, the baboons panicked and fled—directly into t
he larger body of lions. “The baboons were apparently too terrified even to try to escape up any of the surrounding trees,” wrote Stevenson-Hamilton, “and hid with their faces in their hands while the lions simply struck them down right and left with blows from their paws.”5

  The colonel might as well have been describing peasants falling before berserkers. The most painful detail in this anecdote is the baboons’ resignation: with no hope of escape, they fashioned a refuge of last resort from the darkness in their own hands. The image is so poignant, in part, because those hands could so easily be ours. Perhaps it was the possibility of such catastrophes that kept the Sterkfontein baboons from fleeing that night when Brain frightened them so badly: better to lose one or two than risk the whole troop.

  Even from millions of years away, it is upsetting to visualize the fate of a family of australopithecines caught out on the veld, a bit too far from a climbable tree, and it wouldn’t have had to happen often to put a chill on everyone in the vicinity. To this day, entire districts have been paralyzed by the presence of a single man-eater, to the point that life-sustaining crops are left to rot in the fields. A similar kind of paralysis overcame the village of Sobolonye, even though most of the populace there was armed. When faced with threats of this kind, the loss of morale can be profound. If one imagines those hands over the face as a metaphorical hiding place, perhaps that is what sleep and shelter once meant to us: a more sustainable way of blocking out the horrors that stalked our waking lives, a way of thinking them into the world of unbeing, at least until the sun lit up the world again.