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

At its simplest, this is a tale of a tiger and two men. A Siberian tiger, huge, terrifying, beautiful, awe-inspiring. The two men: Vladimir Markov, an unemployed logger turned poacher, and Yuri Trush, a game warden whose job it is to catch poachers. They live within the tiger's range, the taiga or circumpolar boreal forest of the Russian Far East, which has been hard hit by perostroika (the locals refer to it as "katastroika"), a sort of post-industrial society in which the human inhabitants eke out an existence on the edge of starvation. The Siberian tiger lives on the edge of starvation too, and while it is protected by law, they are a great temptation to poachers, who can get as much as $50,000 for one on the black market. Markov crosses the path of a male tiger, wounds him and takes his kill. The tiger stalks him, stakes out his hunting cabin in the woods, waits at his doorstep for him to return one night, and kills him. But instead of returning to the forest and other prey, the injured tiger sets out on a path of destruction, which to those who are tracking it, as unbelievable as it seems, appears to be a journey to settle accounts. More broadly though the book is about our relationship (and responsibility) to the wild things of this earth, about the ancient, prehistoric ties between the big cats and us and the closeness between predator and prey, about human nature, animal nature, and animal intelligence. It's a fascinating story.