The Tiger (12 page)

It was from these hunting grounds that Markov started poaching game in earnest. His guns, of course, were unregistered, his bullets homemade. He was desperately poor. When he managed to bag a deer or a boar, he would often barter the meat for essentials like sugar, tobacco, gunpowder, and tea. (This, incidentally, is exactly how Dersu Uzala was making his living when Arseniev first encountered him in 1906.) It was the taiga, and the creatures it contains, that kept him and his family alive. But by 1997, this hand-to-mouth existence was taking its toll. A heavy smoker, Markov was approaching fifty in a country where the average life expectancy for men was only fifty-eight. For his demographic, it was even lower than that. When Yuri Trush encountered him the previous year, he recalled being struck by the unhealthiness he saw in Markov’s eyes: they were badly bloodshot and had a yellow cast to them. Trush couldn’t tell if this was the result of a recent drinking binge, or something more serious, but Markov had other problems as well: ever since taking a bad fall on his hunting skis several years earlier, he had acquired a permanent limp. No longer able to cover the ground or carry the weight he once could, something had to change, but without money—a lot of it by Sobolonye standards—there was no way to leverage himself out of his situation.

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. Since 1989, though, a whole new frontier of opportunity has opened up, much of it on the black market. Oil, timber, humans, and tigers all have their niche here, and the line between politicians and mafia, and between legitimate business and crime, has blurred almost beyond recognition. This is the Wild East, and business is booming. You can see the affluence enjoyed by these “New Russians” parading down Aleutskaya and Svetlanskaya streets along Vladivostok’s Golden Horn: leggy women in spike-heeled boots, barely visible beneath sumptuous, ankle-length coats of sable and mink, their carefully made-up faces hidden in voluminous cowls; the men in sharp European suits, speeding by in fleets of right-hand-drive Toyota Land Cruisers fresh off the boat from Japan.

Markov didn’t witness this explosion of wealth firsthand, but he certainly heard about it and saw it on television, and he already knew what it felt like to drive a fine car. There are a lot of people in Primorye who cook with wood and draw water from community wells who wonder how they might get a piece of this new and glamorous pie. Some of them believe the answer lies in making what, in urban terms, might be called a big score. In the forest, there is really only one thing that qualifies, and that is a tiger. After a game warden named Yevgeny Voropaev was ordered to shoot an aggressive tiger on the outskirts of Vladivostok, he was approached by a Russian gang member. “He made an offer to me,” Voropaev said. “Fifty thousand American dollars for the whole tiger—meat and skin and all.”

He let that number sink in.

“Fifty thousand dollars if I got it to the border.”

Markov had heard these stories, too, and, while they may have been part fact and part urban myth, it was well known that the Chinese had strange appetites, and some of them had lots of money. They also had ready access to the Bikin, which flows directly to the Chinese frontier. For someone as broke and isolated as Markov, even a fraction of this kind of money would represent a spectacular payoff, but it was a payoff that would come with a unique set of complications and liabilities—kind of like selling a briefcaseful of stolen cocaine.

* In November 1918, at the height of the looting, six members of Arseniev’s family, including his father, were murdered for their property by local peasants.

* This quote, often attributed to Marx, is Engels’s paraphrasing of Hegel: “The truth of Necessity, therefore, is Freedom.”7

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?SHAKESPEARE,

Sonnet 65

IT IS GENERALLY UNDERSTOOD THAT THE ANIMAL WE RECOGNIZE AS A tiger has been with us at least since the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million to 10,000 years BCE). The oldest definitively identified tiger fossils date to roughly two million years ago and were found in China, which is where many scientists believe the species first evolved and then disseminated itself across Asia. The tiger’s historic range was vast, spanning 100 degrees of longitude and 70 degrees of latitude, and including virtually all of Asia with deep inroads into Siberia and the Middle East. Five hundred years ago, large predators that were almost certainly tigers were reported in the Volga and Dnieper river valleys, just a few days’ travel from Kiev, Ukraine.

Fossil evidence of tigers has also been found further north and east, in Japan and on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, and it raises the question: why didn’t this skillful and adaptable predator simply keep going? The mixed broadleaf and conifer forests of the Ussuri valley share a lot in common with historic European and American forests; it is unnerving to imagine a tiger at home in such a landscape because it implies that tigers could have infiltrated Europe and the New World. Given time and opportunity, tigers could—in theory—have emerged from Asia to rule every forest from the Bosphorus Strait to the English Channel, and from the Yukon to the Amazon. But for some reason, they didn’t. Why they failed to colonize the Americas is a mystery: something about that northern land bridge—Too cold? Not enough cover to stage an ambush?—barred their way. Perhaps it was the cave lions that stopped them.

Life in the higher latitudes has always been precarious and, by some estimates, the Russian Far East has never supported more than a thousand tigers. Due to the extreme climate and its impact on prey density, large mammals, in general, are more sparsely distributed in the taiga than in the tropics. As a result, Amur tigers must occupy far larger territories than other subspecies in order to meet their needs for prey. In Primorye, these territories can be so large that, after trying to follow several tigers on their winter rounds, a pioneering tiger researcher named Lev Kaplanov speculated in the early 1940s that Amur tigers were simply wanderers. “The entire winter life of a solitary tiger takes place as a sequence of long journeys,” wrote Kaplanov, the Amur tiger’s most famous early advocate.1 “The tiger is a born nomad.”

The tiger was first classified as a distinct species of cat in 1758. The subspecies known variously as the Korean, Manchurian, Siberian, Ussuri, Woolly, or Amur tiger was first designated Felis tigris altaica in 1844. Since then, the taxonomic scent tree has been marked and marked again, to the point that this subspecies has been reclassified seven times. The last man to stake his claim was Nikolai Baikov, a lifetime member of the Society for Study of the Manchurian Territory, and of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In his monograph “The Manchurian Tiger,” Baikov begins by paying homage to the explorer Vladimir Arseniev and to the novelist Mayne Reid (The Headless Horseman, etc.). He then proceeds to go out on a limb that both of those brave romantics would have appreciated: in Baikov’s opinion, the creature he reclassified as Felis tigris mandshurica was no ordinary tiger but a living fossil—a throwback to the Pliocene worthy of designation as a distinct species. “Its massive body and powerful skeletal system are reminiscent of something ancient and obsolete,” wrote Baikov in 1925.2 “The Far East representative of the giant cat is … extremely close, both in its anatomical structure, and in its way of life, to the fossil cave tiger, Machairodus, a contemporary of the cave bear and the wooly mammoth.”

Baikov supported his claim with detailed drawings comparing the skulls of these two animals, which, based on his rendering, do bear a strong resemblance. Machairodus was a genus of large saber-toothed cat, which lived between two and fifteen million years ago and overlapped with our protohuman ancestors. Specimens have been found all over the world. This thrilling if misguided notion of a feline missing link surviving in the mountain fastness of Manchuria caused a stir among museums and zoos of the period and helped drive the market for live specimens. Baikov did his best to promote this view, and, to some extent, his efforts are still bearing fruit (and sowing confusion) to this day.

Even now, it is taken as a given that the Amur tiger is the biggest cat of them all and, based on samplings of numerous tiger skulls from all over Asia, the measurements bear this out. Viewed on a graph, the Amur skulls show up as outliers, occupying a territory all their own. Seen in this context, it is easier to understand the impulse to classify them as a separate species. The fact that they seem to thrive in conditions that would kill most other tigers is another reason, and it is here that size and climate have conspired to give the impression of an Ice Age throwback. Much has been made of the Amur tiger’s massive size by Baikov and others, and extraordinary dimensions have been claimed: lengths up to sixteen feet and weights up to nine hundred pounds have been quoted in reputable publications. It reveals more about us than it does about these animals that we wish them to be larger than life, but anyone who has been close to an Amur tiger will tell you that these creatures need no embellishment; they are big enough as is. The snarling specimen in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity is nearly the same size as the polar bear in the adjacent Hall of Ocean Life.

One reason Amur tigers grew so big in the popular mind is that, when Baikov and his contemporaries were describing them, there were many more to choose from, and among this larger population there certainly would have been some huge individuals. But there is also a lot of extra footage to be found in a tiger’s tail, which can comprise a third of the total length, and a further 10 percent (or more) can be gained by staking out a fresh, wet hide. In 1834, the Bengal Sporting Magazine described this technique in a how-to article that, had it been written today, could have been titled: “Turn Your Ten-Footer into a Twelve-Footer!” Such practices, combined with the trophy-hunting mind-set, the exotic locale, and a dearth of reliable recording equipment, created fertile ground for mythmaking. But when all is said and done, the record breakers, like so many of the best stories, always seem to come secondhand.

In spite of this, sincere attempts were made to fix these cats in real space. Ford Barclay, writing in The Big Game of Asia and North America (1915), the last in a deluxe four-volume compendium of hunting information from around the world, estimated the length of a tiger shot in the Vladivostok area to be thirteen feet, five inches, nose to tail. Barclay also interviewed the famous British taxidermist and author Rowland Ward, who assured him that a skin sold in London, also from that area, “must have belonged to an animal that measured 14 feet.”3 That is roughly the length of a compact car. If this is accurate, it would make the Amur tiger the longest (if not the heaviest) carnivorous land mammal that ever lived. Ward, a conscientious and detail-oriented man, wrote The Sportsman’s Handbook to Practical Collecting and Preserving Trophies, which went through a dozen editions between 1880 and 1925, the peak years of big game hunting. Ward saw and stuffed scores of tigers throughout his long career, and his size estimate should be judged accordingly. However, if such behemoths once roamed the boreal jungles of the Far East, they do so no longer. Baikov and Barclay, both hunters themselves, were making their audacious claims when tiger hunting was a cresting wave, about to break forever.

Tigers, it must be said, have taken a ferocious toll on humans as well. In India, some legendary man-eaters killed and ate scores of people before being hunted down. A number of these cases have been documented by the famous tiger hunter and conservationist Jim Corbett. It would be impossible to accurately tally the tiger’s collective impact on humans through history, but one scholar estimated that tigers have killed approximately a million Asians over the last four hundred years.4 The majority of these deaths occurred in India, but heavy losses were suffered across East Asia.

Throughout Korea, Manchuria, and southeast China, tigers were considered both sacred and a scourge. Until around 1930, tigers continued to pose such a risk that, in North Korea, the bulk of offerings made to some Buddhist shrines were prayers for protection from these animals. Nonetheless, tigers were held in high esteem in part because it was believed that they, too, made offerings to heaven. In the tigers’ case, these gifts took the form of the severed heads of their prey, a determination made, presumably, by the beheaded state of many tiger kills. Ordinary people were reluctant to retaliate against a predatory tiger for fear it would take offense, not to mention revenge, and so their day-to-day lives were shaped—and sometimes tyrannized—by efforts to at once avoid and propitiate these marauding gods.

According to Dale Miquelle, the American tiger researcher, the relatively low incidence of tiger attacks in Russia as compared to Korea at the turn of the last century, or in the Sundarbans today, is due to learning: “When the majority of people have no means of defense (i.e., firearms) tigers figure that out and include them on the list of potential prey,” he explained.5 “However, where you have a heavily armed populace (e.g., Russia) tigers also figure that out and ‘take people off the list.’ The implication is that you have to teach tigers that people are dangerous. I think this holds for most large carnivores.”

This logic holds up in many places, but in Primorye, the Udeghe and Nanai experience apparently defies it. Despite the fact that they made their home in a landscape regularly patrolled by tigers, there is no record—anecdotal or otherwise—of tiger attacks on a scale with their Chinese and Korean neighbors. Further south, along the China coast, tiger attacks and man-eating were common, and this combination of hazard and reverence made for some strange cultural collisions. In 1899, a tiger hunting missionary named Harry Caldwell relocated to Fujian province from the mountains of east Tennessee. Caldwell, a Methodist, soon realized that tigers were not only present and plentiful but that they were eating his converts. And yet, much to his dismay, his parishioners seemed to venerate these beasts almost as if they were sacred cows. Armed with a carbine and the 117th Psalm, Caldwell began shooting every tiger he saw, only to find that the large striped cats he and his coolies brought out of the hills were greeted with skepticism. Elders in his village claimed they lacked certain tigerish attributes, but the subtext seemed to be that if this foreign devil had been able to kill them then they couldn’t possibly be real tigers. “Father’s first two kills were immediately discredited on this score,” wrote his son, John, in his memoir, China Coast Family.6 “The sages announced to the assembled crowds that these were not tigers at all, but some other evil animal masquerading in tigers’ guise.