The Tiger (13 page)

“According to the wisdom of the sages, the Chinese character [Wang: ] meaning ‘Lord’ or ‘Emperor’ must be found in the markings of the forehead of a tiger if it be a tiger of whom the devils and demons are afraid. Another of Father’s early kills, a magnificent male of which he was very proud, [was also] disqualified.… They announced that the animal could never have been born of tiger parents, but had come out of some strange metamorphosis from an animal or fish living in the sea.”

Up north, Manchu peasants endowed the tiger with similarly elusive and ineffable qualities, as did the Udeghe and Nanai, who would sometimes go so far as to abandon a village site if tigers were active in the area (which may help explain the rarity of attacks). But in Korea, when the Buddha, luck, and shamans all failed, there was still one place left to turn, and that was to the Tiger Hunters Guild. Long before the Russians started hunting tigers in the Far East, members of the Tiger Hunters Guild had made a name for themselves as the boldest hunter-warriors in Northeast Asia, and their feats of daring are legendary. The so-called guild, a military organization that came into being during the late Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), included both hunters and professional soldiers. In addition to their other feats, they are credited with repelling attacks by French and American forces in 1866 and 1871, respectively. The Koreans were much admired by the Western hunters who encountered them, in large part because they were still using matchlock rifles and pistols. Based on designs dating from the fourteenth century, these medieval Chinese weapons depended on a fuse to light the gunpowder, which allowed for only a single shot at suicidally close range. As one historian put it, “Those who missed … rarely lived to regret it.”7

When they weren’t defending their king, members of the guild pursued man-eaters and other troublesome tigers and leopards. Their devotion to the practice was almost cultlike, one of their prime objectives being to acquire a cat’s potency and courage through the act of killing and consuming it (though, when they could, they sold body parts to the Chinese as well). Yuri Yankovsky, a famous Russian tiger hunter, reportedly witnessed one of these rituals sometime around 1930: “Before long we came upon a startling scene.8 A Korean wearing the conical blue felt hat of the Tiger Hunters’ Guild was leaning against a tree, holding in his hand an old-fashioned matchlock.… [Another] was kneeling on the ground, drinking blood from a bowl which he held against the throat of a dead tiger.”*

This notion of self-enhancement by consumption cut both ways, however, and it was believed that a tiger could also make itself stronger by devouring both body and soul of a human being. Once consumed, the victim’s soul would become a kind of captive guide, aiding the tiger in its search for more human victims. As fanciful as such reasoning may sound, there is no question that the strength and knowledge gained from eating humans will inform and influence a man-eater’s subsequent behavior.

Relatively speaking, the tigers’ appetite for us pales before our appetite for them. Humans have hunted tigers by various means for millennia, but not long ago there was a strange and heated moment in our venerable relationship with these animals that has been echoed repeatedly in our relations with other species. It bears some resemblance to what wolves do when they get into a sheep pen: they slaughter simply because they can and, in the case of humans, until a profit can no longer be turned. For the sea otter, this moment occurred between 1790 and 1830; for the American bison, it happened between 1850 and 1880; for the Atlantic cod, it lasted for centuries, ending only in 1990. These mass slaughters have their analogue in the financial markets to which they are often tied, and they end the same way every time. The Canadian poet Eric Miller summed up the mind-set driving these binges better than just about anyone:

A cornucopia!10Bliss of killing without ever seeming to subtract

    from the tasty sum of infinity!

But infinity is a man-made construct that has no relevance in the natural world. In nature, everything is finite, especially carnivores. The order Carnivora (meat-eating mammals) represents approximately 10 percent of all mammal species, but only 2 percent of the total mammalian biomass. Apex predators like big cats represent a tiny fraction of this already small percentage and, between 1860 and 1960, big game hunters made it smaller still. In December of 1911, the freshly crowned King George V went on an elephant-borne shikar to Nepal, during which he and his retinue killed thirty-nine tigers in ten days. But they were amateurs compared to Colonel Geoffrey Nightingale, who, prior to his sudden death while attempting to spear a panther from horseback, shot more than three hundred tigers in India’s former Hyderabad state. The Maharaja of Udaipur claimed to have shot “at least” a thousand tigers by 1959. In a letter to the biologist George Schaller, the Maharaja of Surguja wrote: “My total bag of Tigers is 1150 (one thousand one hundred fifty only).”11

When Russians like the Yankovskys went hunting for tigers at the turn of the last century, they would plan to be away for weeks at a time, covering ten to twenty miles a day through mountainous country. In Russia, at least as far back as the late nineteenth century, four men have been considered the minimum for a tiger hunting expedition. The same went for tiger catching, a seemingly lunatic enterprise, which fell out of favor only in the early 1990s. Tiger catchers, equipped with little more than hunting dogs, tree branches, and rope, would track down and capture live Amur tigers, usually for zoos and circuses. For obvious reasons, they preferred to go after cubs, but full-grown tigers have also been caught this way. Needless to say, these men were largely self-taught, and the learning curve would have been unforgiving in the extreme. Their courage inspired one tiger biologist to write, “No, the bogatyri [mythic Russian heroes] have not died out in Russia.”12

One of the last and most famous of the tiger catchers was Vladimir Kruglov, who learned the trade from an Old Believer named Averian Cherepanov. Cherepanov’s method capitalized on one of the tiger’s greatest weaknesses: its low endurance at speed. A tiger can walk for days, but it can only run for short distances. For this reason, tiger catching was always done in the winter, preferably in deep snow, which shortened the chase dramatically. Once the dogs scented a tiger, they would be set loose to chase it until, too tired to run further, the animal would turn and fight. With the dogs holding the tiger at bay, the men would approach with long, forked tree branches and—somehow—pin the animal down. Then, in a quick and carefully choreographed operation, they would immobilize the tiger’s paws and head, hog-tie it, and stuff it in a sack. This, of course, is easier said than done. Nonetheless, in 1978, Kruglov used the stick and rope method to—literally—bag a tigress weighing more than three hundred pounds. He is one of the only human beings in the history of the species to grab wild tigers by the ears repeatedly and live to tell about it. “I have never let anyone else handle the ears,” he explained to Dale Miquelle in 2001. “You know, the ears are her steering wheel. You can turn off her teeth with the ears.”

Kruglov died in a freak accident in 2005. After surviving more than forty live tiger captures, not to mention the gauntlet of other hazards that take Russian men before their time, Kruglov was killed at the age of sixty-four when a tree fell on him. His legacy lives on in the form of the thirteen-thousand-acre Utyos Rehabilitation Center for Wild Animals in southern Khabarovsk Territory, which he founded in 1996, and which is now managed by his son and daughter. Few foreigners have attempted to bag live game in the Far East—for good reason—but a British explorer and sinophile named Arthur de Carle Sowerby recounted the following live capture in his five-volume opus, The Naturalist in Manchuria (1922): “When I got it it was in a paroxysm of rage, snapping furiously, biting itself and everything that came within reach of its sharp teeth,” he wrote without a trace of irony.13 “I have always found this the case with moles.”

In 1925, Nikolai Baikov calculated that roughly a hundred tigers were being taken out of greater Manchuria annually (including Primorye and the Korean Peninsula)—virtually all of them bound for the Chinese market. “There were cases in [mating season],” he wrote, “when a courageous hunter would meet a group of five or six tigers, and kill them one by one, where he stood.”14

Between trophy hunters, tiger catchers, gun traps, pit traps, snares, and bait laced with strychnine and bite-sensitive bombs, these animals were being besieged from all sides. Even as Baikov’s monograph was going to press, his “Manchurian Tiger” was in imminent danger of joining the woolly mammoth and the cave bear in the past tense. Midway through the 1930s, a handful of men saw this coming, and began to wonder just what it was they stood to lose.

One of them was Lev Kaplanov. Born in Moscow in 1910, he was a generation younger than Arseniev, but cut from similar cloth. In a letter to a close friend, Kaplanov wrote that, as a boy in European Russia, he had dreamed of hunting a tiger one day, but when he found his calling in the Far East, he realized that bloodless pursuit, though less exciting, would be of greater benefit to tigers and to science. This was an unusual way to be thinking in the 1930s, when tiger research consisted solely of what might best be described as “gunbarrel zoology.” With the exception of the pioneering wildlife photographer (and former tiger hunter) Frederick Champion, Kaplanov was the first person ever to write an account of tracking tigers with no intention of killing them once he found them. This was, in its way, a truly radical act—all the more so because it occurred in a remote corner of a traumatized country with restricted access to the outside world. While the notion of conservation and national parks was not new, the idea of focusing specifically on a nongame species, and a dangerous one at that, was unheard of. But Kaplanov could not have done it without the counsel and support of Konstantin Abramov, the founding director of Primorye’s largest biosphere reserve, the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik (“forbidden zone”), and Yuri Salmin, a gifted zoologist and zapovednik cofounder.

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. There are scores of these reserves scattered across Russia, ranging in size from more than sixteen thousand square miles down to a dozen square miles. The Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik was established in 1935 to promote the restoration of the sable population, which had nearly been wiped out in the Kremlin’s eagerness to capitalize on the formerly booming U.S. fur market. Since then, the role of this and other zapovedniks has expanded to include the preservation of noncommercial animals and plants.

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. Paradoxically, the idea not only survived but, in some cases, flourished under the Soviets: by the late 1970s, nearly 80 percent of the zapovednik sites originally recommended by the Russian Geographical Society’s permanent conservation commission in 1917 had been protected (though many have been reduced in size over the years).

In Kaplanov’s day, the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik covered about seven thousand square miles* of pristine temperate forest—the heart of Primorye. That there were tigers in there at all became evident only when guards and scientists noticed their tracks while trying to assess more commercially relevant populations of sable and deer. It was here that Abramov, Salmin, and Kaplanov conceived and conducted the first systematic tiger census ever undertaken anywhere. Kaplanov, a skilled hunter and the youngest and strongest of the three, did the legwork. During the winters of 1939 and 1940, he logged close to a thousand miles crisscrossing the Sikhote-Alin range as he tracked tigers through blizzards and paralyzing cold, sleeping rough, and feeding himself from tiger kills. His findings were alarming: along with two forest guards who helped him with tracking, estimates, and interviews with hunters across Primorye, Kaplanov concluded that no more than thirty Amur tigers remained in Russian Manchuria. In the Bikin valley, he found no tigers at all. With barely a dozen breeding females left in Russia, the subspecies now known as Panthera
tigris altaica was a handful of bullets and a few hard winters away from extinction.

Despite the fact that local opinion and state ideology were weighted heavily against tigers at the time, these men understood that tigers were an integral part of the taiga picture, regardless of whether Marxists saw a role for them in the transformation of society. Given the mood of the time, this was an almost treasonous line of thinking, and it is what makes this collaborative effort so remarkable: as dangerous as it was to be a tiger, it had become just as dangerous to be a Russian.

Following the Revolution of 1917, the former “Far East Republic” was the last place in Russia to fall to the Bolsheviks, and it did so only after a vicious civil war that dragged on until 1923. Initially, the conflict involved a veritable bazaar of nations, including Czech, Ukrainian, Korean, Cossack, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, British, and American troops, along with assorted foreign advisors. However, as the embattled region grew more and more to resemble a vast and dangerous open-air asylum, most of the foreigners abandoned the cause. By 1920, three armies—the Bolshevik Reds, the anti-Bolshevik Whites, and the Japanese—had been left to fight it out on their own. Next to the Russians, the infamously brutal Japanese looked like models of restraint. In the spring of 1920, after a particularly gratuitous massacre in which the Bolsheviks slaughtered thousands of White Russians and hundreds of Japanese, and burned their homes to the ground, the Whites managed to capture the Bolshevik commander of military operations in the Far East. After stuffing him into a mail sack, his captors took him to a station on the Trans-Siberian where they delivered him into the hands of a sympathetic Cossack named Bochkarev. Bochkarev commandeered a locomotive and burned his captive alive in the engine’s firebox, along with two high-ranking associates (the latter, also delivered in mail sacks, were shot first).