John Vaillant (2010) The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.

I’m going to read John Valliant’s latest book, Fireweather an account of how we’re destroying our planet. Before going forward, I looked backward to Valliant’s account of how an Amur tiger, sometimes known as a Siberian tiger, killed and ate a hunter Dmitri Markov in the Primorye territory in Russia’s Far East, near the Chinese border were temperatures plummeted  to 40-below zero Centigrade during the winter of December 1997. Few or any of us would be surprised the wild tiger population similarly plummeted to a handful of big cats. Yuri Anatolevich Trust was a squad leader of an Inspection Tiger Unit whose task was primarily to save such tigers from extinction, but 16^th December 1997 he received confirmation from Moscow that his and his colleagues’ job was to kill the man-eater before it killed again. The hunter becomes hunted is an old maxim.  

Nothing is straightforward in taiga country flanked by the native rivers: Devil, Fire, Joy. For natives such as Ivan Dunkai, a Nani elder, tigers were mythical creatures. The equivalent of weretigers, Egule, had to be appeased. The territory belonged to the tiger. Man, even with modern rifles, was there on sufferance. This was the natural order. Vladimir Markov had inverted that order.

Word was that he’d shot at the tiger and killed and eaten tiger cubs. Tigers, like elephants, never forget to remember a grudge. The tiger pushed in the window and sat inside his hut. It dragged his mattress outside and sat waiting for him and his dogs to return. Tigers snack on dogs the way we snack on burgers. Tigers will pretty much eat everything humans eat, including human shit. Markov knew the tiger was coming for him, but he was almost at his second home.

‘The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second-story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning.’

‘1991. Current estimates indicate a total wild population of 3200 and falling.’

Valliant compares conditions in the Far East and Sobolonye, in particular, like Appalachians in the Hungry Thirties, but with one difference: ‘it is possible to starve while watching television.’

Communism and Soviet rule guaranteed a minimum of security, education, employment and food. The old maxim they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work didn’t hold true in the taiga. What held true was a handful of Russians such as Roman Abromavich became almost instantly one or the richest people in the world, while those on the margins had their savings wiped out with the devaluation of the rouble and just as quickly employment disappeared.

Outside of logging which paid enough for food and vodka many became dependent on the taiga to feed themselves. In a hand-to-mouth existence with a return to bartering, a tiger was worth more than its weight in gold. The Chinese, just across the border, would buy fur and poppy and pine nuts were lucrative, but a tiger with its skin and meat used in traditional medicines could hold together a family and help them through the winter.    

Even with a proven maneater on the prowl, men were desperate enough to believe it wouldn’t happen to them because the tiger doesn’t come for you, unless you go for it.

When the natural order has been breached, all bets were off. Trust’s job was to kill the maneater before it killed again. And he was to find out, even with a band of hunters and ex-soldiers fully armed, the earie capacity of the tiger to fill the space where they were looking and not be there. Its roar, when it comes, is rarely reported or remembered. Too late, jaws open, its breath a furnace. A harbinger of death. Read on