Summary

An exciting, albeit drawn-out, retelling of man vs man-eating tiger in Russia’s Far East. Reads like good fiction.

Key Takeaways

• Carrion crows will follow a tiger the same way seagulls follow a fishing boat: by sticking with a proven winner, they conserve energy and shift the odds of getting fed from If to When.
• It is always better to warn a person first; if he does not understand that warning, take action.
• Many people reach a point where they realize that the shape their life has taken does not square with the ambitions they once had for it. In Russia, there are entire generations for whom this is the case.
• Fights between animals are rarely to the death because killing a powerful adversary is dangerous and takes an enormous amount of energy.
• There are two categories of people when it comes to extreme situations. One gets scared first and then starts thinking; the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter survive in the taiga.
• The ability to step inside the umwelt “bubble” of another creature is not so much a newfound skill as it is a lost art.
• 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. 
• “Jurassic Park syndrome”: the implication is that, in ages past, this was information one absolutely had to take an interest in if one was to survive to breeding age.
• This skill, the reading of tracks in order to procure food, or identify the presence of a dangerous animal, may in fact be “the oldest profession.”
• Effective predators excel at engineering situations that skew the odds in their favor.
• In nature, versatility equals viability.
• Captivity is a one-way trip. There is a poignant irony in this because, at one time or another, all of us have been in the tiger’s situation.
  • Worth asking here is: Where does this trend ultimately lead? Is there a better way to honor the fact that we survived?

What I got out of it

I’m not sure what to make of The Tiger.

It’s a story that could easily be told in 10 pages. On the other hand, John Vaillant fleshes out the characters, the setting, the history, the culture and, of course, the tiger so well that it’s an enthralling read from start to finish.

So, what did I take away from this book?
I learnt a ton about the Amur tiger and – told in a story – how nature operates, adapts and self-regulates. Otherwise, The Tiger was nothing more than an exciting, albeit drawn-out, retelling of man vs man-eating tiger in Russia’s Far East.

Summary Notes

Part One – Markov

Tigers are similar to drugs in that they are sold by the gram and the kilo, and their value increases according to the refinement of both product and seller. But there are some key differences: tigers can weigh six hundred pounds; they have been hunting large prey, including humans, for two million years; and they have a memory. For these reasons, tigers can be as dangerous to the people trying to protect them as they are to those who would profit from them.

Carrion crows will follow a tiger the same way seagulls follow a fishing boat: by sticking with a proven winner, they conserve energy and shift the odds of getting fed from If to When.

This Boreal Jungle is unique on earth, and it nurtures the greatest biodiversity of any place in Russia, the largest country in the world. It is over this surreal menagerie that the Amur tiger reigns supreme.

Amur tigers have been known to eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears. There are few wolves in Primorye, not because the environment doesn’t suit them, but because the tigers eat them, too. The Amur tiger, it could be said, takes a Stalinist approach to competition. It is also an extraordinarily versatile predator, able to survive in temperatures ranging from fifty below zero Fahrenheit to one hundred above, and to turn virtually any environment to its advantage. Though typically a forest dweller, Amur tigers may hunt on the beaches as well, using sea fog as a cover for stalking game, and driving animals into heavy surf before subduing them. One young male was observed subsisting exclusively on harbor seals, going so far as to stack their carcasses like logs for future use.

Animals, he feels, should have a sporting chance; the field should be level between hunter and prey.

Tiger poaching is the most visible symptom of an environmental problem the size of the continental United States: Siberia’s forests represent an arboreal subcontinent covering 2.3 million square miles; altogether, they account for a quarter of the world’s total wood inventory and more than half of its coniferous forests. They are also one of the planet’s biggest carbon sinks, helping to mitigate one of the chief causes of climate change. While tigers were being stolen from the forests, the forests were also being stolen from the tigers, and from the country. The combination of a desperate need for hard currency, lax forestry regulations, and vast markets that lay only a border crossing away set loose a monster in the woods, which is wreaking havoc to this day.

The most valuable timber in the Far East grows in Primorye, and a person can be murdered here for showing too much interest in the means by which southbound railcars and freighters are loaded with the perfectly symmetrical cylinders of aspen, oak, larch, and poplar that the Asian market demands. Much of what China makes from this Russian wood finds its way into American big box stores.

It is not overstating the case to say that Korean pine nuts, as small and innocuous as they are, represent the hub around which the wheel of life here revolves. Whoever isn’t eating the nuts themselves is eating the creatures who do. And yet, so well disguised are they that a visitor could walk the length and breadth of Primorye and never notice them. After all, who eats pinecones? This is both wonderful and frightening to consider: that, in the absence of something so small and so humble, an entire ecosystem—from tigers to mice—could collapse.

The combination of Russia’s current hunting regulations and gun licensing policy has effectively re-created the medieval laws that forbade peasants to own weapons or to hunt.

Trush has been threatened many times, and his attitude is: “A barking dog doesn’t bite.” He knows how things are done in Russia, and that if someone powerful wanted him killed there would be little he could do to prevent it (in the taiga, the same is said to be true of a tiger when it has set its sights on a victim).

“In situations like this, my rule is from the Bible,” Trush explains: “ ‘First, there was the word and then a deed.’ It is always better to warn a person first; if he does not understand that warning, take action. That’s the principle that I follow.

Lenin may have envisioned it, but Stalin mastered it: the ability to disorient and disconnect individuals and large populations, not just from their physical surroundings and core communities but, ultimately, from themselves. Kaliningrad was a case in point. After being flattened, purged, and renamed, both city and province were repopulated with ethnic Russians.

Confucius said, “Remember that, my students. Callous government is more ravenous than tigers.”

“Once you have passed the solitude test,” continued Solkin, “you have absolute confidence in yourself, and there is nothing that can break you afterward. Any changes, including changes in the political system, are not going to affect you as much because you know that you can do it yourself. Karl Marx said that ‘Freedom is a recognized necessity.’

Many people reach a point where they realize that the shape their life has taken does not square with the ambitions they once had for it. In Russia, there are entire generations for whom this is the case.

There is a famous quote: “You can’t understand Russia with your mind,” and the zapovednik is a case in point. In spite of the contemptuous attitude the Soviets had toward nature, they also allowed for some of the most stringent conservation practices in the world. A zapovednik is a wildlife refuge into which no one but guards and scientists are allowed— period. The only exceptions are guests—typically fellow scientists—with written permission from the zapovednik’s director.

This holistic approach to conservation has coexisted in the Russian scientific consciousness alongside more utilitarian views of nature since it was first imported from the West in the 1860s. At its root is a deceptively simple idea: don’t just preserve the species, preserve the entire system in which the species occurs, and do so by sealing it off from human interference and allowing nature to do its work. It is, essentially, a federal policy of enforced non-management directly contradicting the communist notion that nature is an outmoded machine in need of a total overhaul.

“Men carry their superiority inside; animals outside.” – Russian Proverb

With a few exceptions like the Inuit, and the whalers of Lamalera in Indonesia, fresh meat has typically been more of a supplement than a staple in the hominid diet.

“There is something hypnotic in a tiger,” he explained. “She has that quality. She treads so softly that there is no sound, and you won’t know she’s there at all. But if she doesn’t like something, she’ll stop and hold your gaze. There’s a kind of psychological ballet: who will outstare who? In such cases, you should not suddenly turn tail because the scent of fear passes quickly. You must back off slowly, slowly—especially if the tiger has a kill, or if she’s a mother with cubs: she makes a step, you make a step—you must not run away. And only when you leave the territory she thinks is hers, only then can you run.”

Tigers on the prowl may look like the embodiment of lethal competence, but looks are deceiving: in order to survive, they need to kill roughly one large animal each week, and they miss their mark between 30 and 90 percent of the time. This relative inefficiency is extremely costly in terms of energy expenditure. As a result, injured or not, there is no rest for a tiger—no hibernation as there is for bears, no division of labor as with lions, and no migration to lush pastures as there is for many ungulates. Time, for the tiger, especially the male, is more like time is for the shark: a largely solitary experience of hunting and digesting followed by more hunting, until he dies.

Once the cubs are born the tigress must keep hunting on her own, only twice as hard now because she has cubs to feed—and to protect from infanticidal males. A tiger’s taste for meat may be innate, but its ability to acquire it is not, so the tigress must also teach her cubs how to hunt. Tigresses typically bear from one to four cubs in a litter, and they will spend one to two years with the mother, during which time she must keep them warm, safe, and fed.

By the time tigress and cubs go their separate ways, the cubs will be nearly adult-sized though still a couple of years away from sexual maturity. Some cubs will stay close by, but these are usually the females who control smaller territories and are more likely to be tolerated by their mother, and by the area’s dominant male. A two- or three-year-old male, however, is on his own; for both genetic and competitive reasons, the mother doesn’t want him around. A male cub’s exile is comparable to sending a barely pubescent boy out onto the street to fend for himself: he might make it, but there’s a good chance he won’t for any number of reasons. He could be gored by a boar or have his jaw broken by an elk; he could be attacked by a large bear. The dominant male tiger may kill him outright or run him off and, with no territory of his own, he will have to make his living on the margins.

“Based on the scientific approach,” Sokolov explained, “you can say that the more diverse the food of an animal, the more developed his intelligence is.”

Tigers, particularly males, are well known for their intense and reflexive possessiveness; it is a defining characteristic, and it exerts a powerful influence on their behavior, particularly when it comes to territory, mates, and food. Both males and females can be ferocious boundary keepers, but a male tiger will guard his domain as jealously as any modern gangster or medieval lord. An Amur tiger’s sense of superiority and dominance over his realm is absolute: because of his position in the forest hierarchy, the only force a male will typically submit to is a stronger tiger or, occasionally, a large brown bear.

Fights between animals are rarely to the death because killing a powerful adversary is dangerous and takes an enormous amount of energy. Death for its own sake is seldom an objective in nature anyway: the reason prey is killed is not to kill it per se, but to keep it still long enough to be eaten. Likewise, in the case of a territorial dispute, the goal is not to terminate but to establish dominance and persuade your competitor to go elsewhere. In general, animals (including tigers) avoid conflicts whenever possible because fighting hurts, and the margins in the wild are simply too tight.

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.

It is only in the past two hundred years—out of two million—that humans have seriously contested the tiger’s claim to the forest and all it contains. As adaptable as tigers are, they have not evolved to accommodate this latest change in their environment, and this lack of flexibility, when combined with armed, entitled humans and domestic animals, is a recipe for disaster.

“There are two categories of people when it comes to extreme situations,” said the leopard specialist Vasily Solkin. “One gets scared first and then starts thinking; the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter survive in the taiga.”

Tigers mark their territories in a variety of ways: by clawing trees, scratching the ground, defecating, and also by spraying a durable and redolent combination of urine and musk. When doing the latter, they often select sheltered areas—the undersides of bushes, leaning trees, and angled rocks—to ensure their sign lasts as long as possible.

A sick or injured tiger can lay up for a week or two without food if it has to.

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.

“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. “The more a given species needs to be conscious of, the more it is conscious of. Either that or it becomes extinct.”

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.

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. 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.

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.

If you spend most of your life in a natural environment, intimately connected with, and dependent upon, the animals around you, you will undoubtedly—necessarily—feel a certain kinship with those creatures, even if you have no conscious intention of doing so.

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.

“When we look at nature, we are only looking at the survivors.” – STEPHEN BUDIANSKY, If a Lion Could Talk

What is remarkable about this experiment is that very young children, regardless of culture, learning, or living conditions, understand fundamental rules of predatory behavior, even when they have never seen a live lion or zebra and know nothing about life in sub-Saharan Africa. Barrett believes their innate grasp of these primordial relationships is a genetic legacy based on millions of years of hard-won experience, and that this is why young children continue to be fascinated by dinosaurs and other monstrous creatures. He calls this “Jurassic Park syndrome”; the implication is that, in ages past, this was information one absolutely had to take an interest in if one was to survive to breeding age.

As we get older, our skill at motive discernment grows increasingly sophisticated, and several studies have shown that we are adept at determining an animal’s behavior and intention simply by being shown spotlit portions of its limbs and joints with everything else blacked out.

This ability is crucial for distinguishing friend from foe and predator from prey when only fragmentary information is available, as is often the case in tall grass, dense forest, or at night. Today, this same visual acuity enables fighter pilots to distinguish between ally and enemy aircraft in a split second, and it is also what keeps us alive in heavy traffic. But the full perceptive range of these ancient gifts is most easily appreciated in a crowded bar as we assess potential mates, no matter what they may be wearing.

Taphonomy is the study of an organism’s decay and related processes over time, including its fossilization.

Part Two – Pochepnya 

Despite his rugged circumstances, Lopatin’s ability to articulate psychological and interpersonal nuance stands out among his blunt and forthright neighbors. In the West, a certain level of psychological awareness—and the language to go with it—is taken for granted now, but in Russia, with the exception of some in urban, educated circles, this is virtually nonexistent. Stoicism isn’t so much a virtue as it is a survival skill. Of the people in rural Primorye, a longtime expatriate said, “Those folks are tougher than nails and hardened from horrors.”

They didn’t reach Sokolov until nine. By then, he had been on his own for eighteen hours, and he was on the threshold, wavering between the living and the dead. “While I was in that suspended, uncertain state,” he recalled, “my body understood that it should fight for life and I should be alert. I knew that there was nobody to rely on, except myself. But as soon as I saw familiar faces, all my strength left me. I felt very weak; I was very thirsty. I started to cry.

Infected by the tiger in mysterious ways, Sokolov found himself stirred by powerful impulses he had no wish to control. As soon as he was able to hobble around, he was overcome by sexual desire. “For a year and a half I had to use crutches,” he said. “After that I had to use a cane. Maybe some strength came from the tiger, or maybe I understood that I was really alive, but I started fucking around.” It is the wish to acquire this same form of potency, but at less personal cost, that drives much of the illegal trade in tiger-based supplements. The brand name Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.

if a person goes through a tough ordeal in his life, he either breaks down or becomes stronger than he used to be. In my case, it was the latter. After this incident, I became stronger —not physically, of course, but spiritually.

Today, the imbalance between Russia and China is a near total reversal of what it was a century ago when China was referred to as “the Sick Man of the Far East.” Now the same is said of the Russians, and it is they who live in fear of being overwhelmed. The hemorrhaging of natural resources from every port and border crossing is one reason Primorye still has the feel of a colonial outpost—one that, despite its wealth and ecological importance, gets short shrift from the distant capital.

Part Three – Trush 

For most of our history, we have been occupied with the cracking of codes—from deciphering patterns in the weather, the water, the land, and the stars, to parsing the nuanced behaviors of friend and foe, predator and prey. Furthermore, we are compelled to share our discoveries in the form of stories. Much is made of the fact that ours is the only species that does this, that the essence of who and what we understand ourselves to be was first borne orally and aurally: from mouth to ear to memory. This is so, but before we learned to tell stories, we learned to read them. In other words, we learned to track. The first letter of the first word of the first recorded story was written—“printed”—not by us, but by an animal. These signs and symbols left in mud, sand, leaves, and snow represent proto-alphabets. Often smeared, fragmented, and confused by weather, time, and other animals, these cryptograms were life-and-death exercises in abstract thinking. This skill, the reading of tracks in order to procure food, or identify the presence of a dangerous animal, may in fact be “the oldest profession.”

“Over time, I realized that if you have accumulated more anger inside yourself than a tiger has in him, the tiger will be afraid of you. Really, quite literally so. When a tiger is coming at you, you can gauge very well by his facial expression what he wants from you. You can judge by his eyes and ears. One cannot read bears like that. So, a tiger is coming toward you: if you see that his ears are down, that’s not a good sign. Then you have to look him in the eye with all the rage you can muster and the tiger will stop and back off. You don’t shout or scream—just look him in the eye, but with such hate that he would turn around and go away. After one, two, three times, they leave you alone.”

Such was the nature of this tiger and his “operating environment” that, even though the people hunting him had access to air and ground support, lethal weapons, radios, maps, and centuries of accumulated hunting experience, they were forced to proceed on the tiger’s terms. This wasn’t the fault of the hunters; it was because effective predators excel at engineering situations that skew the odds in their favor, and this is what the tiger had managed to do, even though he was injured and, most likely, in unfamiliar territory.

Epilogue

Making this situation more upsetting, especially for conservationists, is the fact that this cascading trend could be reversed tomorrow. Left alone, with enough cover and prey, there are two things tigers do exceptionally well: adapt and breed. In nature, versatility equals viability, and in this, tigers rival human beings.

Needless to say, once sheltered by a roof, carried in a car, and fed from a can, very few humans willingly return to sleeping on the ground, walking cross-country, and foraging with hand tools. The same is true of tigers: once they have been habituated to zoo conditions, there is no going back. To date, there has been no case of a captive tiger being successfully introduced, or reintroduced, to the wild. Captivity is a one-way trip.

There is a poignant irony in this because, at one time or another, all of us have been in the tiger’s situation. The majority of us live how and where we do because, at some point in the recent past, we were forced out of our former habitats and ways of living by more aggressive, if not better adapted, humans. Worth asking here is: Where does this trend ultimately lead? Is there a better way to honor the fact that we survived?