Trish's Reviews > The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

The Tiger by John Vaillant is more than a description of a hunt for a man-eating Amur tiger in a mountainous sliver of southeastern Russia that borders China, Korea, and Japan. In this book, Vaillant gives us the socio-political and environmental context of the tiger hunt, and introduces us to the lives of the men who did not survive the tiger and of those who finally chase the tiger down. The place where the tiger lived is memorably described as a mixture of “the backwoods claustrophobia of Appalachia with the frontier roughness of the Yukon.” The taiga or “forest sea” has a peculiar ecosystem where subartic and subtropic collide and collude to sustain the widest range of flora and fauna on earth.

While Vaillant must vilify the poaching, he gives us the context in which to understand it:

During the two decades prior to Markov’s birth, the Soviet Union lost approximately 55 million citizens—more than one fifth of its population—to manufactured famines, political repression, genocide, and war. Millions more were imprisoned, exiled, or forced to relocate, en masse, across vast distances. With the possible exception of China under Mao Zedong, it is hard to imagine how the fabric of a country could have been more thoroughly shredded from within and without. pp.57-58

The situation has grown more dire as the years have progressed:

Prior to the reopening of the Chinese border following Gorbachev’s rapprochement with Beijing in 1989, commercial tiger poaching was virtually unknown in Russia. Since, then, the export of Primorye’s natural resources—in all their forms and shades of legality—has exploded while local Russians have found themselves completely overmatched by the Chinese: their hustle, their business acumen, and their insatiable appetite for everything from ginseng and sea cucumbers to Amur tigers and Slavic prostitutes…In Asia today , wildlife trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry, and roughly three quarters of all trafficked wildlife ends up in China, which has become a black hole for many endangered species. pp.222-223

Many of the people living in the Primorye region nonetheless have a history of respect for tigers, the "czar" of animals and would live with them in harmony and respect. A telling story is related from an earlier time:

Caldwell, a Methodist, soon realized that tigers were… present and eating his parishioners. 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. p. 92

More than the story of a tiger hunt, this is the story of a part of the world in the midst of upheaval. It is a record of a time and place that we would not ordinarily access, and that is probably changing irreversibly.