The Tiger (14 page)

Even after the Bolsheviks took control of the region, there was no peace, only a series of increasingly savage repressions by the victors. Some of Russia’s most notorious gulags, including the Kolyma gold fields, were located in the Far East and throughout the 1920s and 1930s their populations swelled steadily, as did their cemeteries. Already battered by what Alec Nove, an expert on the Soviet economy, described as “the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history,” Russian citizens in the late 1930s were now being arrested and executed on a quota system.15 It was an absolutely terrifying time: Russia was Wonderland, Stalin was the Queen of Hearts, and anyone could be Alice.

By 1937, the purges were peaking nationwide, and no one was safe: peasants, teachers, scientists, indigenous people, Old Believers, Koreans, Chinese, Finns, Lithuanians, Party members—it didn’t seem to matter as long as the quota was met. The invented charge in Primorye was, typically, spying for Japan, but it could be almost anything. Torture was routine. At the height of the purges, roughly a thousand people were being murdered every day. In 1939, Russia went to war (on several fronts), and this obviated the need for purging—just send them to the front. By one estimate, 90 percent of draft-age Nanai and Udeghe males died in military service. The rest were forced onto collective farms, and millions more Russians of all ethnicities were banished to the gulag.

Under Stalin, science was a prisoner, too—bound and gagged by a particularly rigid brand of Marxist ideology, which declared, in short, that in order for Mankind to realize His destiny as a superhuman, super-rational master of all, Mother Nature must be forced to bow and, in the process, be radically transformed. By the mid-1930s, most advocates of environmental protection had been silenced one way or another, and their ideas replaced by slogans like “We cannot expect charity from nature.16 We must tear it from her.” In 1926, Vladimir Zazubrin, the first head of the Union of Siberian Writers, delivered a lecture in which he proclaimed,

Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement armour of cities, armed with the stone muzzles of factory chimneys, and girded with iron belts of railroads.17 Let the taiga be burned and felled, let the steppes be trampled.… Only in cement and iron can the fraternal union of all peoples, the iron brotherhood of all mankind, be forged.*

Some hard-line Marxists sincerely believed that plants and animals unable to prove their usefulness to mankind should simply be exterminated. In the face of such hostile dogma, the tiger didn’t stand a chance. Falling squarely into the category of “harmful fauna,” it had become a kind of fur-bearing Enemy of the State. Those stripes might as well have been bull’s-eyes. There was no formal edict or bounty, but anyone was free to shoot tigers on sight (they were highly prized by army and navy officers stationed in Primorye), and there was a ready market across the border. Given this, and given the death toll among people who so much as looked sideways at the regime, it is incredible that anyone dared advocate for tigers at all. Nonetheless, Lev Kaplanov’s landmark study, “The Tiger in the Sikhote-Alin,” was completed in 1941, and in it he recommended an immediate five-year moratorium on tiger hunting.† That same year, Kaplanov’s colleague Yuri Salmin would go a step further: in a national magazine, he made an urgent plea for a total ban on tiger hunting in the Russian Far East. This was the first time in recorded history that anyone, anywhere, had made a public call for restraint with regard to the killing of these animals.

World War II, and the fact that it removed so many armed and able-bodied men from the forest, was a critical factor in turning the tide for the Amur tiger, but it took a heavy toll on the tiger’s champions. Only Abramov survived; a longtime apparatchik, he was able to mediate the deadly tensions between progressive science and Party membership. Yuri Salmin, however, was sent to the front, and he never returned. In 1943, at the age of thirty-three, Lev Kaplanov was murdered by poachers in southern Primorye where he had recently been promoted to director of the small but important Lazovski Zapovednik. His body wasn’t found for two weeks and, because it lay deep in the forest, it had to be carried out by hand. In order to do this, a litter was fashioned from cherry boughs; it was May so the trees were in flower, and the men who carried him recalled the blossoms on the branches around his body. Since then, Kaplanov has become a kind of local martyr to the cause of the Amur tiger.

There was an investigation into Kaplanov’s death, but there were also complications, made worse by a puzzling lack of interest on the part of the investigator who had come all the way from Moscow. As a result, people who are still alive and intimate with the case’s details feel quite sure that the wrong man went to jail and that Kaplanov’s murderer, who was well known around the town of Lazo, lived out his days a free man. Wisely, perhaps, he relocated to a small river town about twelve miles away. Looming over the floodplain there is an exposed ridge studded with eruptions of stone that form the enormous and unmistakable lower jaw of a tiger. The fang alone is more than a hundred feet high.

Today, “The Tiger in the Sikhote-Alin” remains a milestone in the field of tiger research, and was a first step in the pivotal transformation of the Amur tiger—and the species as a whole—from trophy-vermin to celebrated icon. In 1947, Russia became the first country in the world to recognize the tiger as a protected species. However, active protection was sporadic at best, and poaching and live capture continued. In spite of this, the Amur tiger population has rebounded to a sustainable level over the past sixty years, a recovery unmatched by any other subspecies of tiger. Even with the upsurge in poaching over the past fifteen years, the Amur tiger has, for now, been able to hold its own.

There have been some hidden costs. Since the Amur tiger’s population crash, these animals no longer seem to grow as large as they once did. It wouldn’t be the first time this kind of anthropogenic selection has occurred: the moose of eastern North America went through a similar process of “trophy engineering” at roughly the same time. Sport hunters wanted bull moose with big antlers, and local guides were eager to accommodate them. Thus, the moose with the biggest racks were systematically removed from the gene pool while the smaller-antlered bulls were left to pass on their more modest genes, year after year. Scientists have speculated that something similar may have happened to the Amur tiger, with one result being that postwar specimens no longer seem to be much larger than their Bengal counterparts. In Primorye today one would be hard pressed to find an Amur tiger weighing more than five hundred pounds, but that is still a huge cat by any era’s measure. The tiger that killed Vladimir Markov was never weighed, but when he recalled it later, Trush’s number two, Sasha Lazurenko, said, “As long as I’ve worked here, I’ve never seen a tiger as big as that one.”

* Apparently, this is a timeless impulse: in the U.S. National Archives is a photograph of Marine Sergeant M. L. Larkins presenting the heart of an Indochinese tiger he has just killed to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel W. C. Drumwright, May 25, 1970.9

* As of 1997, the zapovednik has a much reduced area of about 1,500 square miles.

* Zazubrin was arrested and shot sometime in 1937–1938. Fifty years later, in 1988, the Kremlin’s chief ideologist, Vadim A. Medvedev, finally conceded that “ ‘universal values’ such as avoiding war and ecological catastrophe must outweigh the idea of a struggle between the classes.”18

† The study was not published until 1948 when it was included in his groundbreaking book, Tigr, izyubr, los (“Tiger, Red Deer, Moose”).

Men carry their superiority inside; animals outside.Russian Proverb

FOLLOWING THE DISCOVERY OF MARKOV’S REMAINS, INSPECTION TIGER conducted a series of interviews with the last people to see him alive. There were about a half dozen all told and, despite the fact that they lived a considerable distance from one another—some with no road access whatsoever—each of them claimed to have seen Markov within hours of his death. Not surprisingly, all of them were men: ethnic Russian loggers and native hunters, and one of them—the key witness, as it were—was Ivan Dunkai.

Dunkai was a Nanai elder from the native village of Krasny Yar (“Red Bank”), which lies fifteen miles downstream from Sobolonye. Situated on the left bank of the Bikin, it had no road access until a bridge was built in the 1990s. About six hundred Udeghe and Nanai residents live in the village, along with a handful of ethnic Russian* spouses, officials, and other transplants. Arseniev and Dersu are reported to have passed through the area in 1908 and, were they to return there today, they wouldn’t be surprised by what they found. Dugout canoes and slender, piroguelike omorochkas line the riverbank, livestock roam the tidy dirt streets, and virtually every structure, fence, and walkway is made of wood. Firewood is delivered in the form of a tree trunk, from which logs are sawed off and split as needed. Save for the predominance of Asiatic faces, Krasny Yar could be mistaken for the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof. The only obvious differences between then and now are the electric lights, a handful of cars and snowmobiles, and several fanciful houses designed by a Ukrainian artist, one of which looks like a snarling tiger.

Ivan Dunkai, it is fair to say, was a latter-day Dersu Uzala—a last link to a time when the native inhabitants of this region saw the tiger as the true lord of the forest. Dunkai died in 2006. In life he was a twinkly-eyed, elfin man who evoked a gentleness and wisdom that seemed from another age. He was a gifted woodsman of the old school, known and respected throughout the middle Bikin. He had a nickname that translates to “In the World of the Animals.” For Ivan Dunkai, the taiga was the source of all things, in which the tiger occupied a place of honor. In 2004, when Dunkai was about seventy-five years old, he was interviewed by a British documentary filmmaker named Sasha Snow. “The tiger is a sly but merciful creature,” Dunkai explained to Snow. “You know that he is there, but you cannot see him. He hides so well that one starts thinking he is invisible, like a god. Russians say, ‘Trust in God, but keep your eyes open.’ We [Nanai] rely on ourselves, but pray for Tiger to help us. We worship his strength.”

As a senior hunter in Krasny Yar, Dunkai oversaw a large hunting territory, which overlapped with an area known as the Panchelaza. The name is a holdover from the days of Chinese possession, and it refers to a tract of choice game habitat about one hundred miles square. Almost box-shaped, the Panchelaza is framed by three rivers—the Amba to the east, the Takhalo to the west, and the Bikin to the south. According to an Udeghe scholar named Alexander Konchuga, one of only two men to author books in the Udeghe language, the names of these rivers translate, respectively, to Devil, Fire, and Joy. The first two are tributaries of the latter. Well before Markov arrived, this beautiful and dangerous sanctuary had been identified, at least in name, as a kind of empyrean frontier, a threshold between Heaven and Hell. The concept of Amba—the same word Dersu uses to indicate “tiger”—refers both to the animal and to a malevolent spirit—a devil—and not simply because the tiger can be dangerous as hell.

The spirit worlds of the Nanai, the Udeghe, and their northern neighbors, the Orochi, are hierarchal (like those of most cultures), and the Amba inhabits one of the lower, earthier tiers. Should one have the misfortune to attract an Amba’s attention, it will tend to manifest itself at the interpersonal level, as opposed to the communal or the cosmic. Often, it will take the form of a tiger. So closely are these two beings associated that, in Primorye today, “Amba” serves as a synonym for tiger, even among those who have no awareness of its other meaning.* For some reason, probably because of its intactness, the area surrounding the Panchelaza supports an unusually high density of tigers. It was within this waterbound enclave, just west of the Amba River, that Markov had placed his hunting barracks with Ivan Dunkai’s blessing.

At the time, Dunkai was living in a cabin of his own about four miles to the southeast, at the boggy, braided confluence of the Amba and the Bikin. After his second wife died, Dunkai left his home in Krasny Yar and gave himself over to the taiga almost full time, much as Dersu had done after losing his family to smallpox. Because his hunting territory was far more than one man needed (one local Russian waggishly compared it to France), Dunkai shared it with his sons, one of whom—Mikhail—had a cabin right on the Amba, northeast of Markov. Neither Mikhail nor his brother, Vasily, who hunted further east, seemed to have a problem with Markov’s presence in their father’s hunting territory. As they saw it, Markov was just another tayozhnik trying to make a living; by their estimation, he was normalny—a regular guy, nothing out of the ordinary.

The details of their arrangement—if there were any beyond a request and a nod—were known only to Dunkai and Markov. They were both easygoing, personable men who knew and loved the taiga and were engaged in similar pursuits. They were also good friends: when Markov was first getting to know the Panchelaza, Dunkai had allowed Markov to stay with him for weeks at a time. Theirs was a close but casual friendship: if one needed a cup of tea, the loan of some supplies, or a place to stay for a while, the other would oblige. Like most forest encounters, their meetings were spontaneous affairs: there was no need to call ahead, nor was there the means to. For Ivan Dunkai, Markov was a familiar presence in the forest the same way the local tigers were: occasionally, he would run into him; more often, he would just take note of the tracks and factor them into the grand schematic in his head. “You can read the taiga as a book,” he explained. “The twig is bent—why? What animal has passed here? The twig is broken—this means that a person has passed. It is interesting! If an animal stops paying attention to you, maybe it sees another animal. So, you should find out what causes this attention. That is how we were taught, and that is how I teach my sons.”

On a sunny winter afternoon at the Far Eastern Institute of Geography, outside Vladivostok, a tiger biologist named Dmitri Pikunov told a story about Ivan Dunkai that could have been taken from the pages of Dersu the Trapper. Pikunov is a ruddy, robust man in his early seventies with piercing blue eyes and a dwindling silver crew cut, and he has spent decades studying and writing about tigers in the Bikin valley. It was he who first chronicled the Markov incident in 1998, in a local nature magazine called Zov Taigi (“Call of the Taiga”). Like Dunkai, Pikunov is a throwback to the old school and, like most early tiger advocates, he came to conservation through hunting. An expert marksman, he earned the rank of Master of Sports in skeet shooting and was invited to join Russia’s national shooting team, which he did. “I am incredibly good with guns,” he says, seeing no need for false modesty.