The Tiger (19 page)

Boyko’s experience is not unique. The Amur tiger’s territoriality and capacity for sustained vengeance, for lack of a better word, are the stuff of both legend and fact. What is amazing—and also terrifying about tigers—is their facility for what can only be described as abstract thinking. Very quickly, a tiger can assimilate new information—evidence, if you will—ascribe it to a source, and even a motive, and react accordingly.* Sergei Sokolov is a former hunting inspector who now works as a researcher for the Institute for Sustainable Resource Management in Primorye. “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.”

In an effort to demonstrate the sophistication of the tiger’s thought process, Sokolov described the following incident involving a hunter in his management area on the upper reaches of the Perevalnaya River, due south of Tiger Mountain in central Primorye:

“There was little food for wild boar there so boar were scarce,” Sokolov began. “In addition, a tiger was visiting the hunter’s territory on a regular basis, scaring away any boar that were left. So the hunter decided to kill this tiger by installing a gun trap. The first time, the rifle was not installed properly and it fired but didn’t kill the tiger—just grazed his fur. The hunter reset it, and later, based on the tracks, observed that the tiger touched the tripwire, heard the sound of the gun misfiring, stepped slowly backward, and immediately went after the hunter. The tiger understood who was there, who installed the trap, and who was trying to kill him. He didn’t even follow the hunter’s tracks; he went directly to the hunter’s cabin—like he was using a compass.

“The hunter told me, ‘I was near the cabin, chopping wood, when all of a sudden I felt like somebody was watching me. I turned around and saw the tiger about a hundred feet away with his ears back, ready to attack.’ The hunter ran into his cabin and, for three days, didn’t go out, not even to pee—he had to do it in the basin. The hunter was not an educated man and usually didn’t write even a letter to anybody, but during those three days, as the hunter said, he became a writer ‘like Lev Tolstoy—writing a whole novel about what happened,’ because he thought that the tiger was definitely going to kill him and, at the very least, he wanted to let people know what had happened to him. After three days, the hunter finally ventured out, checked the area, and found the spot where the tiger had been waiting. Based on the amount of melted snow, he guessed the tiger had been there for several days. After that, the tiger left his territory.”

Vladimir Schetinin, the former head of Inspection Tiger, and an expert on Amur tiger attacks, has accumulated a number of stories like this over the past thirty years. “There are at least eight cases that my teams and I investigated,” he said in March of 2007, “and we all arrived at the same conclusion: if a hunter fired a shot at a tiger, that tiger would track him down, even if it took him two or three months. It is obvious that tigers will sit and wait specifically for the hunter who has fired shots at them.”

The caveat here is that each of these eight cases met the following conditions: namely, that the tiger was able to identify its attacker, had the opportunity to hunt him, and was temperamentally disposed to do so. In its brief reference to tiger attacks on humans, Mammals of the Soviet Union states that “Usually animals shot and wounded or chased by hunters attacked, and only very rarely did an attack occur without provocation.”3 Such responses are, in themselves, examples of abstract thinking: tigers evolved to respond to direct physical attacks from other animals; they did not evolve to respond to remote threats like guns. Nor do they innately understand what guns are or how they work. So to be able to make the multistep connection between a random explosion in the air, a pain it can feel but often cannot see, and a human who may be dozens of yards away is, almost by definition, an abstraction. While many higher animals are capable of making this association, very few will respond like a tiger. If you combine this with a long memory, you can have a serious problem on your hands.

Chris Schneider, an American veterinarian based in Washington state, has had personal experience with the tiger’s capacity for holding a grudge. Over the course of his career, Schneider has treated many circus animals, including tigers, sometimes giving them sedatives in the form of a painful shot in the rump. A year might go by before these tigers passed through town again; nonetheless, the moment he showed up, their eyes would lock on him. “I’d wear different hats; I’d try to disguise myself,” Schneider explained, “but when I’d walk into the room, the cat would just start following me, turning as I walked around them.4 It was uncanny.” He described the impact of these tigers’ gaze as “piercing.” “They looked right through you: a very focused predator. I think most of those cats would have nailed me if they could have.”

John Goodrich and Dale Miquelle, the American field biologists who run the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Siberian Tiger Project in the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik, have had the opposite experience. For more than fifteen years, both men have been living and working in Terney, on the east coast of Primorye, and, over the years, they have caught, sedated, examined, and collared dozens of tigers, some of them numerous times. Despite the fact that both of these men have spent years in these tigers’ territories, there have been no cases of tiger vengeance. “As a biologist, I have a hard time believing it,” explained Miquelle when asked about such behavior, “but as a type of myth and local perspective on tigers I find it intriguing.”

“If tigers are vengeful,” said Goodrich, “I should be dead.”

It is not known if tigers are capable of distinguishing between humans who intentionally cause them pain or injury, and humans who trap them and manipulate them but release them into their home territory unharmed. Because of this, there is no tidy way to reconcile these differing views, all of which are based on extensive firsthand experience. In the end, it may simply come down to context and character—of all concerned. This, and the fact that, as Miquelle puts it, “What tigers usually do, and what they can do, are very different things.”

A more useful way to understand a tiger’s capacity for vengeful behavior may be in the context of territory and property, i.e., prey. As they are with human hunters, these are hard to separate in the tiger’s mind. 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. Nothing else ranks in the taiga, and this is why, if threatened or attacked, these animals have been known to climb trees to swat at helicopters and run headlong into gunfire.

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. Most predators—leopards or solitary wolves, for example—will abandon a contested kill rather than risk an injury. But tigers are different: when dealing with its subjects, the male Amur tiger can be vicious, shrewd, and vindictive. In addition to his Herod-like response to other cubs and young males, he may even kill his own. Based on the observations of hunters and biologists, it appears that Amur tigers will occasionally kill bears solely on something that we might recognize as principle. Communal animals sometimes engage in wanton attacks, but it is hard to imagine any other solitary animal capable of a tiger’s ambitious and intelligent savagery.

In Primorye, tigers attack and eat both black and brown bears on a fairly regular basis; this is striking because, ordinarily, no animal in its right mind would take on a bear. Russian brown bears belong to the same species as American grizzlies and can weigh a thousand pounds; their ferocity and power are legendary. In spite of this, they have been known to flee at the sight of a tiger. “In January 1941, I encountered the prints of a very large brown bear,” wrote the tiger biologist Lev Kaplanov.5 “This animal, which had accidentally come across a tiger family on the trail, abandoned this path at a gallop.”

Practically speaking, even a modestly sized brown bear would be a match for any tiger. So why would a tiger pick a fight with such a dangerous opponent? And why would it then prosecute the battle—as sometimes happens—to the point of tearing the bear limb from limb and scattering its appendages across the battleground? While the motives can never be fully understood, the discovery and description of such scenes would go a long way toward explaining why indigenous people like Ivan Dunkai’s son Mikhail refer to the tiger—not the larger brown bear—as the “Czar of the Forest.”*

Prior to the arrival of Chinese gold miners and Russian settlers, there appeared to be minimal conflict between humans and tigers in what is now Primorye. Game was abundant, human populations were relatively small, and there was plenty of room for all in the vast temperate jungles of coastal Manchuria. Furthermore, the Manchus, Udeghe, Nanai, and Orochi, all of whom are Tungusic peoples long habituated to living with tigers, knew their place; they were animists who held tigers in the highest regard and did their best to stay out of their way. But when Russian colonists began arriving in the seventeenth century, these carefully managed agreements began to break down. People in Krasny Yar still tell stories about the first time their grandparents saw Russians: huge creatures covered in red hair with blue eyes and skin as pale as a dead man’s.

Some of these newcomers were Orthodox missionaries and though they were unarmed, their rigid convictions took a serious toll on native society. The word “shaman” is a Tungusic word, and in the Far East in the mid-nineteenth century, shamanism had reached a highly evolved state. For shamans and their followers who truly believed in the gods they served and in the powers they wielded, to have them disdained by missionaries and swept into irrelevance by foreign governments and technology was psychically devastating—a catastrophic loss of power and status comparable to that experienced by the Russian nobility when the Bolsheviks came to power.

In Primorye, this traumatic process continued into the 1950s. The Udeghe author Alexander Konchuga is descended from a line of shamans and shamankas, and he grew up in their company. “Local authorities did not prohibit it,” he explained. “The attitude was, if you’re drumming at night, that’s your business. But the officials in the regional centers were against it and, in 1955, when I was still a student, some militia came to my cousin’s grandmother. Someone must have snitched on her and told them she was a shamanka because they took away her drums and burned them. She couldn’t take it and she hanged herself.” The drum is the membrane through which the shaman communicates with, and travels to, the spirit world. For the shaman, the drum is a vital organ and life is inconceivable without it.

Along with spiritual and social disruption came dramatic changes to the environment. One Nanai story collected around 1915 begins, “Once upon a time, before the Russians burned the forests down …”6 In this and many other ways, Russia’s expansion into the Far East reflects the American expansion into the West. On both frontiers, it was fur traders, gold seekers, and explorers who led the way by land and sea, followed by settlers, soldiers, industrial resource extractors, the navy, and the railroad. However, Russia is almost twice the width of the United States, so even though Russians had a head start of more than a century, a combination of economics, politics, and sheer geographic enormity slowed the pace of progress. Nonetheless, by 1850, it was clear that nothing would ever be the same on either coast of the North Pacific.

If one were able to unfold the globe and view the recent histories of Eurasia and the Americas simultaneously, one would see an explosion of ideological, technological, viral, and alcoholic energy radiating outward from Europe and sweeping across these regions. 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. Many natives, along with Manchus and Koreans, were simply killed outright while the survivors became victims of crippling extortion, mostly in the form of furs, but nothing was off limits: when Manchus got wind of a Cossack advance, their first response was to evacuate all the women.

After Russia lost the Crimean War in 1856, the Far East was the only direction it had left to turn with its imperial ambitions, and it was the Cossacks who established settlements on the Amur River in direct violation of a two-hundred-year-old treaty with China. From these forward bases, or ostrogs, Russia launched its formal annexation of Primorye. By the turn of the last century, Cossack soldiers had gone on to occupy most of northern Manchuria. “They are semi-savages, black-eyed, fierce-browed, the finest horsemen in the world, caring little for your life, little for their own,” wrote Sir John Foster Fraser, a British correspondent who spent time among the Cossacks in 1901, en route to Harbin, a Russian-built city two hundred miles inside Chinese Manchuria.7 Fraser came away as moved by the soldiers’ hospitality as he was impressed by their headlong courage. “For a [cavalry] charge there are no troops that could equal them.… And who that has heard a Slav song, crooning, pathetic, weird, sung by a Cossack at night in the middle of a plain silent as death, can forget it?”