• Cover
• Other Books by This Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Maps
• Prologue
• Part One  |  Markov
• Part Two  |  Pochepnya
• Part Three  |  Trush
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Translation
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Permissions Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Photo Inserts
• Copyright

Also by John VaillantThe Golden Spruce

To the memory ofJoanna and Ellis Settleviriditas
In the taiga there are no witnesses.V. K. ARSENIEV,Dersu the Trapper1 no easy bargainWould be made in that place by any manBeowulf2
ContentsCoverOther Books by This AuthorTitle PageDedicationEpigraphsMapsPrologue
Part One | MarkovPart Two | PochepnyaPart Three | TrushEpilogueAcknowledgmentsA Note on TranslationNotesSelected BibliographyPermissions AcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorPhoto InsertsCopyright
The Russian Far East
The Bikin River Valley
PrologueHANGING IN THE TREES, AS IF CAUGHT THERE, IS A SICKLEOF A MOON . Its wan light scatters shadows on the snow below, onlyobscuring further the forest that this man negotiates now as much by feelas by sight. He is on foot and on his own save for a single dog, which runsahead, eager to be heading home at last. All around, the black trunks ofoak, pine, and poplar soar into the dark above the scrub and deadfall, andtheir branches form a tattered canopy overhead. Slender birches, whiterthan the snow, seem to emit a light of their own, but it is like the coat ofan animal in winter: cold to the touch and for itself alone. All is quiet inthis dormant, frozen world. It is so cold that spit will freeze before itlands; so cold that a tree, brittle as straw and unable to contain itsexpanding sap, may spontaneously explode. As they progress, man anddog alike leave behind a wake of heat, and the contrails of their breathhang in pale clouds above their tracks. Their scent stays close in thewindless dark, but their footfalls carry and so, with every step, theyannounce themselves to the night.Despite the bitter cold, the man wears rubber boots better suited to therain; his clothes, too, are surprisingly light, considering that he has beenout all day, searching. His gun has grown heavy on his shoulder, as havehis rucksack and cartridge belt. But he knows this route like the back ofhis hand, and he is almost within sight of his cabin. Now, at last, he canallow himself the possibility of relief. Perhaps he imagines the lantern hewill light and the fire he will build; perhaps he imagines the burdens hewill soon lay down. The water in the kettle is certainly frozen, but thestove is thinly walled and soon it will glow fiercely against the cold anddark, just as his own body is doing now. Soon enough, there will be hottea and a cigarette, followed by rice, meat, and more cigarettes. Maybe ashot or two of vodka, if there is any left. He savors this ritual and knowsit by rote. Then, as the familiar angles take shape across the clearing, thedog collides with a scent as with a wall and stops short, growling. They
are hunting partners and the man understands: someone is there by thecabin. The hackles on the dog’s back and on his own neck rise together.Together, they hear a rumble in the dark that seems to come fromeverywhere at once.
PART ONE

MARKOV
1There are many people who don’t believe this actually happened. Theythink it’s some phantasm of my imagination. But it was real. There arethe facts.YURI ANATOLIEVICH TRUSHSHORTLY AFTER DARK ON THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER5, 1997, AN urgent message was relayed to a man named Yuri Trush athis home in Luchegorsk, a mid-sized mining town in Primorye Territoryin Russia’s Far East, not far from the Chinese border. Primorye (Pri- mor-ya) is, among other things, the last stronghold of the Siberian tiger, andthe official on the line had some disturbing news: a man had beenattacked near Sobolonye, a small logging community located in the deepforest, sixty miles northeast of Luchegorsk. Yuri Trush was the squadleader of an Inspection Tiger unit, one of six in the territory whosepurpose was to investigate forest crimes, specifically those involvingtigers. Because poachers were often involved, these included tigerattacks. As a result, this situation—whatever it might entail—was nowTrush’s problem and, right away, he began preparing for the trip toSobolonye.Early the following morning—Saturday—Yuri Trush, along with hissquadmates Alexander Gorborukov and Sasha Lazurenko, piled into asurplus army truck and rumbled north. Dressed in insulated fatigues andcamouflage, and armed with knives, pistols, and semiautomatic rifles, theTigers, as these inspectors are sometimes called, looked less like game
wardens than like some kind of wilderness SWAT team. Their twenty-year-old truck was nicknamed a Kung, and it was the Russian army’sfour-ton equivalent to the Unimog and the Humvee. Gasoline-powered,with a winch, four-wheel-drive, and wide waist-high tires, it is a popularvehicle in Primorye’s hinterlands. Along with a gun rack and brackets forextra fuel cans, this one had been modified to accommodate makeshiftbunks, and was stocked with enough food to last four men a week. It wasalso equipped with a woodstove so that, even in the face of totalmechanical failure, the crew could survive no matter where in thewilderness they happened to be.After passing through the police checkpoint on the edge of town, theTigers continued on up to a dirt road turnoff that led eastward along theBikin (be-keen) River, a large and meandering waterway that flowsthrough some of the most isolated country in northern Primorye. Thetemperature was well below freezing and the snow was deep, and thisslowed the heavy truck’s progress. It also allowed these men, all of whomwere experienced hunters and former soldiers, many hours to ponder anddiscuss what might be awaiting them. It is safe to say that nothing in theirexperience could have prepared them for what they found there.Primorye, which is also known as the Maritime Territory, is about thesize of Washington state. Tucked into the southeast corner of Russia bythe Sea of Japan, it is a thickly forested and mountainous region thatcombines the backwoods claustrophobia of Appalachia with the frontierroughness of the Yukon. Industry here is of the crudest kind: logging,mining, fishing, and hunting, all of which are complicated by poor wages,corrupt officials, thriving black markets—and some of the world’s largestcats.One of the many negative effects of perestroika and the reopening ofthe border between Russia and China has been a surge in tiger poaching.As the economy disintegrated and unemployment spread throughout the
1990s, professional poachers, businessmen, and ordinary citizens alikebegan taking advantage of the forest’s wealth in all its forms. The tigers,because they are so rare and so valuable, have been particularly hard hit:their organs, blood, and bone are much sought after for use in traditionalChinese medicine. Some believe the tiger’s whiskers will make thembulletproof and that its powdered bones will soothe their aches and pains.Others believe its penis will make them virile, and there are many—fromTokyo to Moscow—who will pay thousands of dollars for a tiger’s skin.Between 1992 and 1994, approximately one hundred tigers—roughlyone quarter of the country’s wild population—were killed. Most of themended up in China. With financial assistance (and pressure) frominternational conservation agencies, the territorial government createdInspection Tiger in the hope of restoring some semblance of law andorder to the forests of Primorye. Armed with guns, cameras, and broadpolice powers, these teams were charged with intercepting poachers andresolving a steadily increasing number of conflicts between tigers andhuman beings.In many ways, Inspection Tiger’s mandate resembles that of detectiveson a narcotics detail, and so does the risk: the money is big, and theplayers are often desperate and dangerous individuals. Tigers are similarto drugs in that they are sold by the gram and the kilo, and their valueincreases according to the refinement of both product and seller. Butthere are some key differences: tigers can weigh six hundred pounds; theyhave been hunting large prey, including humans, for two million years;and they have a memory. For these reasons, tigers can be as dangerous tothe people trying to protect them as they are to those who would profitfrom them.The territory covered by Yuri Trush’s Inspection Tiger unit in the mid-1990s was centered on the Bikin River. You can drive a truck on theBikin in winter, but in summer it has a languid bayou feel. For many ofthe valley’s jobless inhabitants, the laws imposed by the river and theforest are more relevant than those of the local government. While mostresidents here poach game simply to survive, there are those among themwho are in it for the money.
In 1997, Inspection Tiger had been in existence for only three years;given the state of the Russian economy in the 1990s, its members werelucky to have jobs, particularly because they were paid in dollars byforeign conservation groups. Four hundred dollars a month was anenviable wage at that time, but a lot was expected in return. Whether theywere doing routine checks of hunters’ documents in the forest, searchingsuspect cars en route to the Chinese border, or setting up sting operations,most of the people Inspection Tiger dealt with were armed. As often asnot, these encounters took place in remote areas where backup wassimply not available, and they never knew what they were going to find.Following perestroika, virtually everything in Russia went on sale, andvast quantities of military ordnance disappeared from local armories. Inthe course of their raids on the many anonymous hunting cabins that dotthe forest here, Trush and his men confiscated plastic explosives, TNT,and 12mm (.50 caliber) machine guns, robbed from armored vehicles.Trush could not imagine what one would do with guns that size in theforest, but the explosives were easier to explain: they were used in creeksto kill fish en masse, or to blow bears out of their dens. The Asian marketis less interested in the intact skins or carcasses of bears than it is in theirpaws and gall bladders; the paws go into soup, and the gall bladders areused for medicinal purposes. In Primorye, in the mid-1990s, life, for manand animal alike, was cheap, and corruption was widespread at everylevel of government. During these years, Trush made busts involvinghigh-ranking police officers and members of parliament, and these weredangerous enemies for a person to have. Trush, however, was well suitedto this work because he can be dangerous, too.Trush stands about six-foot-two with long arms and legs and a broadchest. His eyes are colored, coincidentally, like the semiprecious stonetiger’s eye, with black rings around the irises. They peer out from a frankand homely face framed by great, drooping brows. Though frail andsickly as a boy, Trush grew into a talented athlete with a commandingpresence, a deep resonant voice, and an ability to remain composed under
highly stressful circumstances. He is also immensely strong. As a youngsoldier in Kazakhstan, in the 1970s, Trush won a dozen regional kayakingchampionships for which he earned the Soviet rank Master of Sports, adistinction that meant he was eligible to compete at the national level. Itwas a serious undertaking: he wasn’t just racing against Bulgarians andEast Germans. “I was,” he said, “defending the honor of the MilitaryForces of the USSR.” In his mid-forties, when he joined Inspection Tiger,Trush won a territory-wide weightlifting competition three years running.This was not the kind of weightlifting one is likely to see in theOlympics; what Trush was doing looks more like a contest devised bybored artillerymen during the Napoleonic Wars. It consists of hefting akettlebell—essentially a large cannonball with a handle—from theground over your head as many times as you can, first with one hand, andthen the other. Kettlebells are a Russian invention; they have been aroundfor centuries and their use clearly favors the short and the stocky. So it issurprising to see someone as attenuated as Trush, who has the Law of theLever weighted so heavily against him, heave these seventy-poundspheres around with such apparent ease.Trush learned to shoot, first, from his father and, later, in the army. Healso studied karate, aikido, and knife handling; in these, his rangy buildworks to his advantage because his long reach makes it nearly impossibleto get at him. He is so talented at hand-to-hand fighting that he was hiredto teach these skills to the military police. Trush’s physicality is intenseand often barely suppressed. He is a grabber, a hugger, and aroughhouser, but the hands initiating—and controlling—these games arethinly disguised weapons. His fists are knuckled mallets, and he canbreak bricks with them. As he runs through the motions of animmobilizing hold, or lines up an imaginary strike, one has the sense thathis body hungers for opportunities to do these things in earnest. Referringto a former colleague who went bad and whom he tried for years to catchred-handed, Trush said, “He knows very well that I am capable ofbeheading him with my bare hands.” This tension—between the kind andplayful neighbor, friend and husband, and the Alpha male wilderness copready to throw down at a moment’s notice—energizes almost every
interaction. It is under the latter circumstances that Trush seems mostalive.The deeper Trush and his men drove into the forest, the rougher the roadbecame. Once past Verkhny Pereval, their route took them through thesnowbound village of Yasenovie, a sister logging community of the samesize and vintage as Sobolonye. Here, they picked up a young deputysheriff named Bush, but his presence on this mission was more formalthan practical. Bush was a cop, and tiger attacks were beyond hispurview; however, if there was a body, he was required to witness it.With Bush onboard, they trundled on upriver.It was already afternoon by the time they reached Sobolonye, animpoverished village of unpainted log houses that at first glance seemedbarely inhabited. Gorborukov was behind the wheel, and here he steeredthe truck off the main road, such as it was, and plunged into the forest ona track wide enough for only a single vehicle. Several inches of new snowhad fallen earlier in the week and, as they drove, Trush scanned theroadside for fresh tracks. They were about fifty miles from the nearestpaved road and a couple of hard-won miles east of Sobolonye when theycrossed a wide and improbably located gravel highway. This road hadbeen conceived during Soviet times as an alternative to Primorye’s onlyexisting north—south throughway, which follows the Ussuri River northto Khabarovsk (the same route used by the Trans-Siberian Railway).Despite handling every kind of traffic, including transcontinental freighttrucks, the Ussuri road is poorly maintained and only as wide as aresidential street; it was also considered vulnerable to Chinese attack.This new highway, though safer, wider, and ruler-straight, was neverfinished and so it is essentially a highway to nowhere—in the middle ofnowhere. The only people who benefit from it now are loggers, poachers,and smugglers—pretty much the only people around who can afford avehicle. But sometimes tigers use this highway, too.
There is an unintended courtesy in the winter forest that occurs aroundpathways of any kind. It takes a lot of energy to break a trail through thesnow, especially when it’s crusty or deep, so whoever goes first, whetheranimal, human, or machine, is performing a valuable service for thosefollowing behind. Because energy—i.e., food—is at a premium in thewinter, labor-saving gifts of this kind are rarely refused. As long as thefootpath, logging road, frozen river—or highway—is going more or lessin the desired direction, other forest creatures will use it, too, regardlessof who made it. In this way, paths have a funneling, riverlike effect on thetributary creatures around them, and they can make for some strangeencounters.The last three miles of the journey were on a logging track so tortuousand convoluted that even a veteran Russian backcountry driver is movedto shout, in a torrent of fricatives and rolling Rs, “Paris—Dakar! CamelTrophy!” The road contoured east through the rolling woods, crossingcreeks on bridges made of log piles stacked at right angles to the road.Two miles short of a privately owned logging camp, Gorborukov took anunmarked turn and headed north. After a few minutes, he pulled up at aclearing, on the far side of which stood a cabin.The cabin belonged to Vladimir Markov, a resident of Sobolonye, anda man best known for keeping bees. The crude structure stood by itself onthe high side of a gentle south-facing slope, surrounded by a thick forestof birch, pine, and alder. It was a lonely spot but a lovely one and, underdifferent circumstances, Trush might have seen its appeal. Now there wasno time; it was three o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was already inthe southwest, level with the treetops. Any warmth generated during thisbrief, bright day was quickly dissipating.The first sign of trouble was the crows. Carrion crows will follow atiger the same way seagulls follow a fishing boat: by sticking with aproven winner, they conserve energy and shift the odds of getting fedfrom If to When. When Trush and his men climbed down from the Kung,they heard the crows’ raucous kvetching concentrated just west of theentrance road. Trush noted the way their dark bodies swirled andflickered above the trees and, even if he hadn’t been warned ahead of
time, this would have told him all he needed to know: something big wasdead, or dying, and it was being guarded.Parked in front of Markov’s cabin was a heavy truck belonging toMarkov’s good friend and beekeeping partner, Danila Zaitsev, a reservedand industrious man in his early forties. Zaitsev was a skilled mechanicand his truck, another cast-off from the military, was one of the fewvehicles still functioning in Sobolonye. With Zaitsev were Sasha Dvornikand Andrei Onofreychuk, both family men in their early thirties whooften hunted and fished with Markov. It was evident from their haggardappearance that they had barely slept the night before.Judging from the density of tracks, there had clearly been a lot ofactivity around the cabin. Several different species were represented andtheir trails overlaid each other so that, at first, it was hard to sort themout. Trush approached this tangled skein of information like a detective:somewhere in here was a beginning and an end, and somewhere, too, wasa motive—perhaps several. Downhill from the cabin, closer to theentrance road, two tracks in particular caught his attention. One settraveled northward up the entrance road at a walking pace; the othertraveled south from the cabin. They approached each other directly, as ifthe meeting had been intentional—like an appointment of some kind. Thesouthbound tracks were noteworthy, not just because they were made by atiger, but because there were large gaps—ten feet or more—between eachset of impressions. At the point where they met, the northbound tracksdisappeared, as if the person who made them had simply ceased to exist.Here the large paw prints veered off to the west, crossing the entranceroad at right angles. Their regular spacing indicated a walking pace; theyled into the forest, directly toward the crows.Trush had a video camera with him and its unblinking eye recorded thescene in excruciating detail. Only in retrospect does it strike one howsteady Trush’s hand and voice are as he films the site, narrating as hegoes: the rough cabin and the scrubby clearing in which it stands; the pathof the attack and the point of impact, and then the long trail of horrificevidence. The camera doesn’t waver as it pans across the pink andtrampled snow, taking in the hind foot of a dog, a single glove, and then a
bloodstained jacket cuff before halting at a patch of bare ground about ahundred yards into the forest. At this point the audio picks up a sudden,retching gasp. It is as if he has entered Grendel’s den.The temperature is thirty below zero and yet, here, the snow has beencompletely melted away. In the middle of this dark circle, presented likesome kind of sacrificial offering, is a hand without an arm and a headwithout a face. Nearby is a long bone, a femur probably, that has beengnawed to a bloodless white. Beyond this, the trail continues deeper intothe woods. Trush follows it, squinting through his camera while his squadand Markov’s friends trail closely behind. The only sounds are the icycreak of Trush’s boots and the distant barking of his dog. Seven men havebeen stunned to silence. Not a sob; not a curse.Trush’s hunting dog, a little Laika, is further down the trail, growingincreasingly shrill and agitated. Her nose is tingling with blood scent andtiger musk, and she alone feels free to express her deepest fear: the tigeris there, somewhere up ahead. Trush’s men have their rifles off theirshoulders, and they cover him as he films. They arrive at another meltedspot; this time, a large oval. Here, amid the twigs and leaf litter, is all thatremains of Vladimir Ilyich Markov. It looks at first like a heap of laundryuntil one sees the boots, luminous stubs of broken bone protruding fromthe tops, the tattered shirt with an arm still fitted to one of the sleeves.Trush had never seen a fellow human so thoroughly and gruesomelyannihilated and, even as he filmed, his mind fled to the edges of thescene, taking refuge in peripheral details. He was struck by the poverty ofthis man—that he would be wearing thin rubber boots in such bitterweather. He reflected on the cartridge belt—loaded but for three shells—and wondered where the gun had gone. Meanwhile, Trush’s dog, Gitta, isracing back and forth, hackles raised and barking in alarm. The tiger issomewhere close by—invisible to the men, but to the dog it is palpably,almost unbearably, present. The men, too, can sense a potency aroundthem—something larger than their own fear, and they glance about,unsure where to look. They are so overwhelmed by the wreckage beforethem that it is hard to distinguish imminent danger from the presenthorror.
Save for the movements of the dog and the men, the forest has goneabsolutely still; even the crows have withdrawn, waiting for this latestdisturbance to pass. And so, it seems, has the tiger. Then, there is asound: a brief, rushing exhale—the kind one would use to extinguish acandle. But there is something different about the volume of air beingmoved, and the force behind it—something bigger and deeper: this is nota human sound. At the same moment, perhaps ten yards ahead, the tip ofa low fir branch spontaneously sheds its load of snow. The flakes powderdown to the forest floor; the men freeze in mid-breath and, once again, allis still.Since well before the Kung’s engine noise first penetrated the forest, aconversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is notin a language like Russian or Chinese, but it is a language nonetheless,and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; thetiger speaks it, and so do the men—some more fluently than others. Thatsingle blast of breath contained a message lethal in its eloquence. Butwhat does one do with such information so far from one’s home ground?Gitta tightens the psychic leash connecting her to her master. Markov’sfriends, already shaken to the core, pull in closer, too. The tiger’s latestcommunication serves not only to undo these men still further, but todeepen the invisible chasm between them—poachers to a man—and thearmed officials on whom their liberty and safety now depend. Markov’sfriends are known to Trush because he has busted them before—forpossessing illegal firearms and hunting without a license. Of the three ofthem, only Zaitsev’s gun is legal, but it is too light to stop a tiger. As forthe others, their weapons are now hidden in the forest, leaving them morehelpless than Trush’s dog.Trush is unarmed, too. There had been some back-and-forth at theentrance road about who was going to follow that grisly trail, andcomments were made implying that Trush and his men didn’t have whatit took. Fear is not a sin in the taiga, but cowardice is, and Trush returnedthe challenge with a crisp invitation: “Poshli”—“Let’s go.” One ofMarkov’s friends—Sasha Dvornik, as Trush recalled—then suggestedthat Trush’s team could handle it themselves. Besides, he said, they had
no weapons. Trush called his bluff by urging him to fetch his unregisteredgun from hiding. “This is no time to be confiscating guns,” he said.“What’s important now is to protect ourselves.” Still, Dvornik hesitated,and this is when Trush offered him his rifle. It was a bold gesture onseveral levels: not only did it imply an expectation of trust andcooperation, but Trush’s semiautomatic was a far better weapon thanDvornik’s battered smoothbore. It also short-circuited the argument: now,there was no excuse, and no way that Dvornik—with six men watching—could honorably refuse. It was this same mix of shame, fear, and loyaltythat compelled Zaitsev and Onofrecuk to go along, too. Besides, therewas safety in numbers.But it had been a long time since Dvornik was in the army, and Trush’sweapon felt strangely heavy in his hands; Trush, meanwhile, was feelingthe absence of its reassuring weight, and that was strange, too. He stillhad his pistol, but it was holstered and, in any case, it would have beenvirtually useless against a tiger. His faith rested with his squad matesbecause he had put himself in an extremely vulnerable position: eventhough he was leading the way, he did so at an electronic remove—in thisdrama but not of it, exploring this dreadful surreality through thecamera’s narrow, cyclopean lens. Because Zaitsev and Dvornik couldn’tbe counted on, and Deputy Bush had only a pistol, the Tigers wereTrush’s only reliable proxies. Those with guns had them at the ready, butthe forest was dense and visibility was poor. Were the tiger to attack, theycould end up shooting one another. So they held their fire, eyes dartingback and forth to that single, bare branch, wondering where the next signwould come from.Behind the camera, Trush remained strangely calm. “We clearly seethe tiger’s tracks going away from the remains,” he continued in hisunderstated official drone, while Gitta barked incessantly, stiff-leggedand staring. “… the dog clearly indicates that the tiger went this way.”Up ahead, the tiger’s tracks showed plainly in the snow, brought intosharp relief by the shadows now pooling within them. The animal wasmaneuvering northward to higher ground, the place every cat prefers tobe. “It looks like the tiger’s not too far,” Trush intoned to future viewers,
“around forty yards.” The snow wasn’t deep and, under those conditions,a tiger could cover forty yards in about four seconds. This may have beenwhy Trush chose that moment to shut off his camera, reclaim his gun, andstep back into real time. But once there, he was going to have to make adifficult decision.In his professional capacity as senior inspector for Inspection Tiger,Trush acted as a medium between the Law of the Jungle and the Law ofthe State; one is instinctive and often spontaneous while the other iscontrived and always cumbersome. The two are, by their very natures,incompatible. When he was in the field, Trush usually had no means ofcontacting his superiors, or anyone else for that matter; his walkie-talkieshad limited range (when they worked at all) so he and his squad mateswere profoundly on their own. Because of this, Trush’s job required a lotof judgment calls, and he was going to have to make one now: the tiger isa “Red Book” species—protected in Russia—so permission to kill had tocome from Moscow. Trush did not yet have this permission, but it wasSaturday, Moscow might as well have been the moon, and they had anopportunity to end this now.Trush decided to track it. This had not been part of the plan; he hadbeen sent to investigate an attack, not to hunt a tiger. Furthermore, histeam was short a man, dusk was coming on, and Markov’s friends were aliability; they were still in shock and so, for that matter, was Trush. But atthat moment, he was poised—equidistant between the tiger and theharrowing evidence of what it had done. The two would never be so closeagain. Signaling Lazurenko to follow, Trush set off up the trail, knowingthat every step would take him deeper into the tiger’s comfort zone.
2“You’re from Russia?”“Yes, from Russia.”“I’ve never been there at all.”ANTON CHEKHOV, From Siberia1IF RUSSIA IS WHAT WE THINK IT IS, THEN TIGERS SHOULDNOT BE POSSIBLE there. After all, how could a creature so closelyassociated with stealth and grace and heat survive in a country so heavy-handed, damaged, and cold? The nearest jungle is two thousand milesaway. For these and other reasons, neither Russia the Idea nor Russia thePlace are useful ways of describing the home of the Siberian tiger, whichis, itself, a misnomer. This subspecies is known locally—and formally—as the Amur tiger, and it lives, in fact, beyond Siberia. Sparsely inhabited,seldom visited, and poorly understood, the “far side” of Russia is not somuch a frontier as a margin for error. The humans who share space withthe Amur tiger—who fear it, revere it, tolerate it, and sometimes hunt it—will tell you their tiger lives in the Far East, in the taiga,* and this istrue enough, but still, no coherent picture emerges. A biologist might saythat this animal occupies a geographical range bounded by China, NorthKorea, and the Sea of Japan. This may be so, but a foreigner will be hard-pressed to understand what that means, even after consulting a map.The Russians have had trouble making sense of it, too. When therailroad and telegraph engineer Dmitry Romanov arrived on Primorye’ssouth coast aboard the steamship Amerika in the summer of 1859, he wasastonished by what he saw: “The area around these harbors is coveredwith lush sub-tropical forests, woven by lianes,” he enthused in a St.Petersburg newspaper,2
where oaks have a diameter of one sagene [over six feet]. Some otherexamples of gigantic vegetation are marvelous. We have seen thembefore in tropical America. What a wonderful future this place canhave with prehistoric forests and the most splendid harbors in theworld! … It is appropriate that the best port here is called Vladivostok[“Power in the East”], because it will be home to our navy in thePacific, and the beginning of Russian influence over a vast oceanterritory.The Chinese knew this country as the shuhai, or “forest sea.” It mayhave been marvelous to contemplate from the deck of a ship, but on theground, it took a savage toll on humans and animals alike. When youweren’t battling arctic cold, or worrying about tigers, there were insectson a scale that is hard to imagine. Sir Henry Evan Murchison James, amember of the Royal Geographical Society and no stranger to jungles orarthropods, was astounded: “There are several kinds,” he wrote in 1887,3one striped yellow and black, like a giant wasp; and the rapidity withwhich they can pierce a mule’s tough hide is inconceivable. In a fewmoments, before one could go to its assistance, I have seen a wretchedbeast streaming with blood.… When we went to bed or when marchingin the early morning, and at meals we enveloped ourselves withsmoke.… If there be a time when life is not worth living, I should sayit was summer in the forests of Manchuria.More than one poor soul has been bound to a tree here and consigned to ahideous death from insect bites, and even Yuri Trush has used thismethod to make stubborn poachers more compliant.Once considered part of Outer Manchuria, Primorye, or Primorskii Krai,is Russia’s southeasternmost territory; it is the man-made container for
most of the Amur tiger’s current range, and about two million people livethere. Protruding conspicuously from Russia’s vast bulk, Primorye isembedded in China’s eastern flank like a claw or a fang, and it remains asore spot to this day. The territory is an embodiment of the tensionbetween proximity and possession: the capital, Vladivostok, which ishome to more than half a million people, is just a two-day train journeyfrom Beijing. The trip to Moscow, on the other hand, is a week-long,5,800-mile epic on the Trans-Siberian. No other major city lies so farfrom its national capital; even Australia is closer.It is hard to express how far over the horizon this region lies in relationto Russia’s political, cultural, and economic centers, but a nickname canoffer insight to a place just as it can to a person. Many Siberians refer towestern Russia as the materik—the Mainland, which is similar to the wayAlaskans think of the Lower 48. But most of Siberia is thousands of milescloser to the capital than Russia’s Far East. In terms of sheer remoteness—both geographic and cultural—the Maritime Territory is more likeHawai’i. As a result, visitors will find themselves standing outconspicuously in a geographic vortex where the gravitational pulls ofEurope and North America are weak, and familiar landmarks are virtuallynonexistent. Primorye doesn’t get many visitors and, out here onEurasia’s ragged eastern rim, you are more likely to find kinship in yourforeignness with a North Korean “guest” worker than with a waywardGerman tourist.Vladivostok, which is the home base of Inspection Tiger, lies furthersouth than the French Riviera, but this is hard to reconcile with the factthat the bays here stay frozen until April. Tigers used to roam the wedge-shaped hills above the harbor, and one of these is still called Tiger Hill;down below is a Tigrine Street. In hard winters, their namesakes stillprowl the outskirts of the city, hunting for dogs; in 1997, one had to beshot after repeatedly charging cars by the airport. In this and other ways,Primorye represents a threshold between civilization and the frontier.This territory—and the Far East in general—occupies its own strangesphere, somewhere between the First World and the Third. That the trainsare clean and run on time is a point of honor and pride, but when they get
to the station there may be no platform and the retractable steps might befrozen shut, forcing you to simply heave your luggage into the darknessand jump out after it.Because so much of life here is governed by a kind of whimsicalrigidity—a combination of leftover Soviet bureaucracy and free marketchaos—even simple interactions with officialdom can leave you feelingas if you have wandered into an insane asylum. To this day, the RussianFar East is a place where neither political correctness nor eco-speak havepenetrated, and patriotism is vigorous and impassioned. Vladivostok isabout as far as one can be from the Eastern Front and still be in Russia,but huge monuments to the heroic fallen command the squares, alongwith an intermittently eternal flame. To get an idea how large the SecondWorld War’s legacy of sacrifice and heroism still looms in the popularmind, one need only stand on Svetlanskaya, one of the two principalshopping streets framing the harbor where the Pacific Fleet is berthed.Here, on an early-twenty-first-century Sunday, more than sixty yearsafter the Red Army took Berlin, two grandsons of that generation—pink-cheeked family men out for lunch with their wives and young children—will invoke the legacy of that time with a ferocity few Westerners couldmuster. After reasserting Russia’s indispensable role in the defeat of theNazis, and brushing aside the contributions of the Allies, one of theseyoung men will go on to say, “If you stand with us, we will protect youwith all our Russian soul.4 But if you are against us [a finger is jabbingnow], we will fight you with all our Russian soul. We will fight you to theend!”The speaker looks at his mate, and their eyes lock in solidarity; thenthey laugh, embrace, and knock their heads together so hard you can hearthe crack of bone on bone.In Primorye, the seasons collide with equal intensity: winter can bringblizzards and paralyzing cold, and summer will retaliate with typhoonsand monsoon rains; three quarters of the region’s rainfall occurs duringthe summer. This tendency toward extremes allows for unlikelyjuxtapositions and may explain why there is no satisfactory name for the
region’s peculiar ecosystem—one that happens to coincide with thenorthern limit of the tiger’s pan-hemispheric range. It could be arguedthat this region is not a region at all but a crossroads: many of theaboriginal technologies that are now considered quintessentially NorthAmerican—tipis, totem poles, bows and arrows, birch bark canoes, dogsleds, and kayak-style paddles—all passed through here first.Primorye is also the meeting place of four distinct bioregions. Liketheir far-flung human counterparts, plants and animals from the Siberiantaiga, the steppes of Mongolia, the subtropics of Korea and Manchuria,and from the boreal forests of the far north have all converged here,pushing the limits of their respective growing zones between coastline,alpine, floodplain, and forest. As a result, attempts by botanists toclassify the region have produced marble-mouthed results: “Manchurianand Sakhalin-Hokkaido Provinces of the Eastern Asiatic Region” is one;“Transbaikalian Province of the Circumboreal Region” is another.5Here is an alternative suggestion: the Boreal Jungle.It sounds like an oxymoron, but it acknowledges the blended nature ofthis remote and slender threshold realm in which creatures of thesubarctic have been overlapping with those of the subtropics since beforethe last Ice Age. There is strong evidence suggesting that this region wasa refugium, one of several areas around the Pacific Rim that remainedice-free during the last glaciation, and this may help explain the presenceof an ecosystem that exists nowhere else. Here, timber wolves andreindeer share terrain with spoonbills and poisonous snakes, and twenty-five-pound Eurasian vultures will compete for carrion with saber-beakedjungle crows. Birch, spruce, oak, and fir can grow in the same valley aswild kiwis, giant lotus, and sixty-foot lilacs, while pine trees bearingedible nuts may be hung with wild grapes and magnolia vines. These, inturn, feed and shelter herds of wild boar and families of musk deer whosefour-inch fangs give them the appearance of evolutionary outtakes.Nowhere else can a wolverine, brown bear, or moose drink from the sameriver as a leopard, in a watershed that also hosts cork trees, bamboo, andsolitary yews that predate the Orthodox Church. In the midst of this,
Himalayan black bears build haphazard platforms in wild cherry treesthat seem too fragile for the task, opium poppies nod in the sun, andginseng keeps its secret in dappled shade.This region, which feels so like an island, could almost be described asone because it is nearly separated from the rest of Asia by two majorrivers—the Ussuri and the Amur—and Lake Khanka, the largest lake inthe Far East. The Amur, for which the local tigers are named, is northeastAsia’s mother river; the Chinese call it Heilongjiang: the Black Dragon.Rising from two different sources in Mongolia, it flows for nearly threethousand miles before terminating in the Tartar Strait opposite SakhalinIsland. It is the third longest river in Asia, and the longest undammedriver in the world. An ecosystem unto itself, it nurtures scores of birdspecies and more than 130 kinds of fish. Here, sturgeon—some the sizeof alligators—work the river bottom along with pearl-bearing freshwateroysters, and taimen, an enormous relative of the salmon that was oncehunted with harpoons from birch bark canoes.Primorye’s bizarre assemblage of flora and fauna leaves one with theimpression that Noah’s ark had only recently made landfall, and that,rather than dispersing to their proper places around the globe, many of itspassengers had simply decided to stay, including some we never knewexisted. Within this waterbound envelope live unclassifiable species likethe raccoon dog, as well as a bizarre tropical canid called a dhole thathunts in packs, and has been reputed to attack humans and tigers, alongwith more traditional prey. Here, too, can be found red-legged ibis,paradise flycatchers, and parrotlike reed sutoras, along with five speciesof eagle, nine species of bat, and more than forty kinds of fern. In thespring, improbable moths and butterflies like the Artemis Emperor, theExclusive Underwing, and the as-yet unstudied Pseudopsychic hatch outto spangle and iridesce by the roadsides. In the dead of winter, giantladybugs with reverse color schemes cruise the walls of village kitchenslike animated wallpaper. This Boreal Jungle (for lack of a better term) isunique on earth, and it nurtures the greatest biodiversity of any place inRussia, the largest country in the world. It is over this surreal menageriethat the Amur tiger reigns supreme.
Of the six surviving subspecies of tiger, the Amur is the only onehabituated to arctic conditions. In addition to having a larger skull thanother subspecies, it carries more fat and a heavier coat, and these give it arugged, primitive burliness that is missing from its sleeker tropicalcousins. The thickly maned head can be as broad as a man’s chest andshoulders, and winter paw prints are described using hats and pot lids forcomparison. As the encyclopedic reference Mammals of the Soviet Unionputs it, “The general appearance of the tiger is that of a huge physicalforce and quiet confidence, combined with a rather heavy grace.”6 Butone could just as easily say: this is what you get when you pair the agilityand appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator.To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start atthe beginning: picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and thenimagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Addto this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teethcapable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: ahybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along theouter curve, a length comparable to the talons on a velociraptor. Now,imagine the vehicle for all of this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, andthree and a half feet high at the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beastwith a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet andcream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature.(The tiger is, literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripeswould still be visible, integral to its skin.) Able to swim for miles and killan animal many times its size, the tiger also possesses the brute strengthto drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for fiftyor a hundred yards before consuming it.A tiger may greet a mate or a cub with a gentle nuzzle, but it meets itsprey paws-first. The tiger’s forepaws differ from the hind ones in thatthey are larger with five claws arranged in an almost handlike spread. Bycontrast, the hind paws have only four claws. In addition to walking,running, and climbing, the forepaws can serve as twin maces, enabling a
tiger to club its prey to death. And yet, they are also gentle and dextrousenough to catch a fly in the fold of a pad and release it, unharmed. Tigerstend to attack from the rear or the side, giving them the advantage ofsurprise, but they fight head-on, often rearing up on their hind legs. Inthis stance, with ears laid flat against a bull-necked head, a fighting tigerbears a startling resemblance to a fighting man, specifically aheavyweight boxer. Surprisingly delicate hind legs give way to slenderhips and waist, which then swell dramatically into a deep chest hung withmassively proportioned “arms” that flex much as ours do as they jab andparry.Unlike wolf or bear claws, which are designed primarily for tractionand digging, a cat’s claw is needle-sharp at the end, and bladed along aportion of its inside length. With the exception of a snake’s fang, it isabout as close to a surgical tool as one can find in nature. When extended,the claws of the forepaw become slashing blades with the result that thevictim is not so much sliced as flayed. But this is almost incidental to theforepaws’ most important purpose, which is to plant a pair of virtuallyunshakable anchors in an animal’s flesh. Once the forepaws are fullyengaged, a tiger can literally ride its prey into the ground.In the final nanoseconds of an airborne attack, a tiger’s tail willbecome rigid, balancing and stabilizing the hindquarters almost like thetail fin on an airplane. Meanwhile, the tiger’s forepaws, combined withits fangs, form a huge three-point grappling device, as if, for a moment,the claws had become extensions of the jaws. Working together in thisway, they can cover an area of a square yard or more to manifest agathering and gripping capability comparable to the mouth of a muchlarger creature—something more on the order of a saltwater crocodile oran allosaurus. The interplay of paws and jaws shifts according to the taskat hand, and one way to envision their fluid and complementary roles isas a basketball team: the jaws are the center—the big star around whichthe action revolves; the forepaws are, of course, the forwards, driving andrebounding in the midst of the fray, while the smaller hind paws, whichset up and then assist on the periphery of the attack, are the guards. Thehind legs provide the power for the attack leap, or drive, but, once
launched, they become levers and stabilizers, supporting the largerplayers. Once the prey is down, these same assault weapons can becomethe most delicate scalpels and clamps, able to disembowel an animal,organ by organ.For all these reasons, there is no creature in the taiga that is off limitsto the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will. Amur tigers have beenknown to eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears.There are few wolves in Primorye, not because the environment doesn’tsuit them, but because the tigers eat them, too. The Amur tiger, it couldbe said, takes a Stalinist approach to competition. It is also anextraordinarily versatile predator, able to survive in temperatures rangingfrom fifty below zero Fahrenheit to one hundred above, and to turnvirtually any environment to its advantage. Though typically a forestdweller, Amur tigers may hunt on the beaches as well, using sea fog as acover for stalking game, and driving animals into heavy surf beforesubduing them. One young male was observed subsisting exclusively onharbor seals, going so far as to stack their carcasses like logs for futureuse.Unlike most cats, tigers are skilled, even avid, swimmers, and there arehunters and fishermen on the Bikin River who have had tigers crawl intotheir boats. Many encounters, including those observed by scientists andcaptured on video, seem lifted from myth or fiction. The occurrence, andsubsequent recounting, of such incidents over dozens of millennia hasembedded the tiger in our consciousness. The tiger has been a fellowtraveler on our evolutionary journey and, in this sense, it is our peer. InAsia, there is no recess of human memory in which there has not—somewhere—lurked a tiger. As a result, this animal looms over thecollective imagination of native and newcomer alike.Within every major ecosystem nature has produced, she has evolved asingularly formidable predator to rule over it. In Primorye, the Amur
tiger is the latest, most exquisitely lethal manifestation of this creativeimpulse. The indigenous peoples of Primorye—the Udeghe, Nanai, andOrochi—have always understood and acknowledged the tiger’ssupremacy, and some clans claimed the tiger as a direct ancestor as muchto placate it as to share its power. There appears to be no ritual of tigerkilling here (as there is for bears), but there are many stories of tigerstaking human wives—and husbands—and of tigers killing humans whodared to challenge them. The tiger, as indigenous peoples know it, is aconsummate hunter and the undisputed lord of the taiga, possessing theability to change shape or disappear at will. Shrines were erected in thetiger’s honor, and some of these remain; hunters would lay their weaponsdown and beg forgiveness if they crossed its path. The native populationis now small and dilute, having suffered from the same imported diseasesand depredations that wreaked havoc on their North Americancounterparts. Nonetheless, many veteran Russian hunters learned much ofwhat they know about Primorye’s taiga from their Udeghe and Nanaicounterparts, just as the famous Russian explorer and author VladimirArseniev did from Dersu Uzala, a Nanai hunter and trapper who enjoys apotent legacy here to this day.Vladimir Arseniev was the son of an illegitimate former serf who didfor Primorye what it took the combined efforts of Lewis and Clark andJames Fenimore Cooper to do for the American West. Arseniev, who wasborn in St. Petersburg in 1872, volunteered for the czar’s army ateighteen and became a career military officer, bandit fighter, andethnographer. Between 1900, when he was reassigned from Poland to theFar East, and his death in 1930, he led nine major expeditions duringwhich he explored and mapped much of Primorye, in addition to theCommander Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula. A subtext of thesemissions was to assess these regions’ vulnerability to Japanese attack.Throughout his life and travels, Arseniev took a keen interest inindigenous culture, and he kept careful records of the flora, fauna, andpeoples he came across. In the process, he conceived a literary style thatmanaged to blend hard science and high adventure with subtle
characterization and disarming honesty.*During his journeys, which lasted for months at a time, Arsenievencountered wild animals, Chinese bandits, typhoons, blizzards, hunger,and swarms of biting insects. He faced them all with a small retinue ofCossack soldiers and Siberian riflemen, guided by several different localhunters. It was the guides who kept him and his men alive and there wasone in particular he grew to love—not as a father exactly, but as a wiseand gentle protector. “Now I felt afraid of nothing,” wrote Arseniev in hisperennial classic, Dersu the Trapper, “neither tigers nor brigands, nordeep snow or floods.7 Dersu was with me.”Dersu Uzala was a solitary and elderly Nanai hunter whose family hadbeen killed by smallpox and whose world was disintegrating before hissteadily weakening eyes. Both Dersu and Arseniev understood that theprimeval jungle through which they sojourned was in a state of rapid andirrevocable transformation. The Ussuri leg of the Trans-Siberian Railwayhad just gone through and with it came immigrants and industry on ascale that had never been seen in the region before. When Dersu’s aimbegan to waver, Arseniev took him home to live with his wife anddaughter in Khabarovsk, the capital of the neighboring territory. But lifein a box did not suit Dersu: “The prohibition on shooting within the townwas an unpleasant surprise for him,” Arseniev wrote.8 Later, he wasarrested for felling a tree in a local park. “He realized that in a town aman cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish. Strangerssurrounded him on every side and hampered him at every step.” It wasn’tlong before Dersu returned to the forest, armed only with his increasinglyunreliable rifle. Arseniev could not stop him, but he had a presentimentof dread.Two weeks later, word got back to Arseniev that Dersu had beenmurdered in the snow while he slept, his pockets emptied, and his gunstolen. Arseniev traveled to the site and oversaw his burial there in theforest. A pair of tall Korean pines stood nearby, and Arseniev took noteof these for future reference, but when he returned some years later tovisit the grave of his old friend, it was as if they had never been.