The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  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.

  However, Pikunov’s father, a highly regarded metallurgist in a tank factory, had other plans and urged his son to follow him into the industry. Had Pikunov done so it would have all but guaranteed him a secure and privileged life, but he found shooting and the hunt so compelling that he applied to the Irkutsk Institute’s hunting management program instead. Tuition was free in those days, so the competition was fierce, but Pikunov excelled. Once out of school, he was hired to manage the Pacific Fleet’s five-thousand-member hunting association in Primorye. From there, he was invited to join the Far East Division of the Environmental Protection Department as a researcher. “I was spending six months a year in the taiga then,” explained Pikunov in a battered office with a commanding view of the ice-covered Amur Bay. “Even when I was on vacation, I would get a rifle, sign a contract to hunt for boar or deer, and sell the meat.”

  In an effort to express the depth of his obsession, Pikunov cited a Russian proverb usually reserved for wolves: “No matter how much you feed him, he keeps looking at the forest.” Nonetheless, it would be ten years before Pikunov laid eyes on a tiger. When he finally did it was on a riverbank, by flashlight. “His eyes were fiery—greenish white,” Pikunov recalled. “He was huge, but not aggressive at all. He just stood there, his eyes on fire the whole time.”

  One of Pikunov’s responsibilities was to gather census data on game animals, a task most easily accomplished in winter when the tracks are easy to follow and count. Of course, tigers and leopards were following these tracks, too, and this is how Pikunov discovered what would become a lifelong fascination. Starting in 1977, he began tracking tigers cross-country over extended periods in order to determine how many kills they were making—crucial information for agencies trying to manage habitat, game species, and hunters. “Whenever I do field work, I always have a gun on me,” Pikunov explained. “It makes me feel more secure, psychologically. But I have a subconscious feeling that if I have not hurt a tiger, he will not be aggressive toward me.” Once, Pikunov tracked a single tiger continuously for six weeks, literally sleeping in its tracks, just as Kaplanov had done forty years earlier. “Even when I was on tiger tracks all the time,” he explained, “and scavenging meat from their kills, none of those tigers demonstrated aggressive behavior toward me.”

  Today, even after a serious heart attack, Pikunov still has surprisingly powerful hands—and opinions to match. Among his colleagues, he elicits no neutral feelings, but his chin-first demeanor softens when he recalls the man he knew as “Vanya” Dunkai. Pikunov speaks of him with the same respect and affection Arseniev did of Dersu, and for many of the same reasons. Over the course of thirty years, the two men spent many months together in the taiga, tracking big game, and Pikunov paid close attention. To this day, tayozhniks typically go into the winter forest with very basic equipment consisting of felt-soled, wool-lined boots, woolen pants, jacket, and mittens. Incidentals are carried in a floppy canvas rucksack; if they know they’ll be packing something heavy, like meat, they might mount it on a bentwood maple pack frame, Udeghe-style. Instead of snowshoes, winter travelers here use short, broad traditional skis called okhotniki (“hunters”). Many tayozhniks (including Markov) make these themselves.

  In the winter of 1974, Dunkai and Pikunov were in the Bikin valley, tracking bears, when a blizzard came up. There had been little snow on the ground when they had set off that morning so they had left their skis back in camp. By the time the blizzard hit, they were a long way from home and ill-equipped for severe weather. Visibility is already limited in
the forest and when driving snow and wind are added, it is easy to become disoriented. With the snow deepening by the minute, both men understood that they needed to get out of there fast. While Pikunov was preparing to simply race back along their rapidly filling tracks, Dunkai stopped and pulled a hatchet from his rucksack. Finding a tree about as thick as his leg, he chopped it down, cut the trunk to ski length and then split it into slender boards. “The snow was up to our waists,” recalled Pikunov. “There was no way out of there without skis, and Vanya made them without any proper tools; all he had was a knife and an axe. He was a master of all trades.”

  In addition to having what Russians call “golden hands,” Dunkai had an extraordinary rapport with his surroundings. In many ways, his daily routine bore a strong resemblance to the tiger’s: both are built around a routinized practice of observing, deciphering, and mental cataloguing, often over well-trodden routes. Just as we might be familiar with certain cats and dogs in our neighborhood, Dunkai knew his neighbors, too, including the tigers. And they knew him. Despite spending more than seventy years in the taiga, much of it on foot or in a tent, Dunkai never had serious difficulties with a tiger. But “difficulties” is a relative term: over the years, he did lose a number of dogs. Dogs seem to trigger the tiger’s wolf-killing instincts, and they also seem to relish the taste. Many is the Far Eastern hunter, farmer, or dacha owner who has risen in the morning to find nothing but a broken chain where his dog had been. When one former dog owner was asked what these attacks sounded like, he answered acidly, “It’s more of a silence.”1 But this is the price of doing business in the tiger’s domain; it is a form of tribute, and it has ancient precedents.

  Ivan Dunkai understood this: he knew that dog killing is in a tiger’s nature, and he also knew that, in time, he would be compensated. Udeghe and Nanai hunters in particular made efforts to propitiate the tiger, first and foremost by staying out of his way, but also by leaving him a cut of the spoils. On occasion, these favors would be returned. Local people, Russian and native alike, told stories of how tigers would leave meat for “Uncle Vanya”—sometimes an entire carcass. An occurrence like this might easily be ascribed to chance by an outsider, or simply dismissed as a folktale, but when seen from a traditional tayozhnik’s point of view it is only logical because, in his way, he has done the same for the tiger. For Dunkai, such an arrangement made perfect sense; after all, he was a person for whom skis literally grew on trees and could be summoned forth at will. When the creatures around you are keeping you alive, it necessarily changes the relationship; survival—both physical and psychic—demands it. “The tiger will help me,” Dunkai once said, “because I’ve asked him.”

  There is, in a healthy forest, an almost tidal ebb and flow of resources and reciprocation. As with the unintended etiquette of winter trail breaking, this passive sharing of food is an integral part of coexistence in the wild. In this sense, the hunting “culture” of predators and scavengers bears a strong resemblance to Karl Marx’s communist ideal: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Thus, what the bulldozer is to communal trail breaking, the tiger is to the food chain: among animals in the taiga, there is no more efficient or bountiful provider. By regularly bringing down large prey like elk, moose, boar, and deer, the tiger feeds countless smaller animals, birds, and insects, not to mention the soil. Every such event sends another pulse of lifeblood through the body of the forest. These random but rhythmic infusions nourish humans, too, and not just wolfish hunter-biologists like Dmitri Pikunov. Udeghe and Nanai hunters occasionally scavenge from tiger kills, and so do their Russian neighbors.

  In 1969, George Schaller, the author of The Deer and the Tiger, a seminal study of predator-prey relations, took a series of walks through Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park with an anthropologist named Gordon Lowther. While most students of early man seek to understand our ancestors through a combination of the fossil record and comparison with modern primates, a handful, including Schaller and Lowther, speculated that, by observing the behavior of other cooperative predators like lions, hyenas, and wild dogs, they might gain insights into how we evolved as communal hunter-gatherers. Initially, the two men were focused on hunting techniques, communications, and food sharing and so hadn’t anticipated what ended up being a key discovery: after following one male lion for three weeks straight, they noted that “it killed nothing but ate seven times, either by scavenging or by joining other lions on their kill.”2 Their attention shifted then to scavenging behavior, leading them to wonder whether our ancestors could have survived on leftovers alone.

  Schaller and Lowther kept on walking, but this time, instead of viewing the vast herds of zebra, wildebeest, and gazelle as meat on the hoof that one must personally subdue, they imagined it as a movable feast, on the crumbs of which a band of small, unarmed early hominids might feed opportunistically—not by hunting but by gathering. They made some illuminating discoveries. It happened to be calving season so, first, they concentrated on calves and fawns. In the space of two hours, they spotted eighty pounds’ worth of meat in the form of easily caught young animals and abandoned carcasses. The next time they went out they focused on scavenging only from existing kills, an activity that, unlike calf and fawn hunting, could be pursued year-round. Over the course of a week, during which they walked for twenty hours (with the aid of a car to move between locations), they turned up nearly a thousand pounds of edible animal parts (alive and dead). Taking into account that a) there were only two of them, instead of an extended family or clan group, and b) this experiment was conducted in an area where the game closely resembled prehistoric concentrations of migratory animals, Schaller and Lowther concluded “that under similar conditions a carnivorous hominid group could have survived by a combination of scavenging and killing sick [and young] animals.”3

  This approach might seem obvious now, but in the late 1960s when these journeys took place, it was revolutionary. Because most anthropologists and archaeologists working then were male, and because hunting is considered to be our ancestors’ primal drama—specifically, a man’s drama—a disproportionate amount of time, ink, and wishful thinking has been devoted to the subject.* Enthusiasm for what came to be known as the Hunting Hypothesis took a quantum leap in the 1960s and 1970s when Robert Ardrey, a playwright and screenwriter with a background in anthropology, published a series of influential books culminating in a bestseller called The Hunting Hypothesis (1976). In them, Ardrey popularized this volatile idea that had been circulating among social scientists for nearly a century: that of man-as-killer-ape. Ardrey, influenced in part by his own traumatic experiences reporting on the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, summed it up this way: “If among all the members of our primate family the human being is unique, even in our noblest aspirations, it is because we alone through untold millions of years were continuously dependent on killing to survive.”4

  Because of the environment we evolved in, and the stresses we faced, reasoned Ardrey, the act of hunting—killing—was central to our survival and has made us who we are today. In his view, virtually all our defining characteristics—from tools and language, to the division of labor between genders and our appetite for war—find their roots in this primal activity. The Hunting Hypothesis (also known as Killer Ape theory) was widely accepted at the time, not least because all of its proponents had lived through a period of unprecedented violence in the form of the Second World War; Vietnam, too, loomed large in the Western academic consciousness. As a result, many scholars were grappling with fundamental questions about human nature and wondering how men in particular had evolved into such ferocious hunter-killers. It wasn’t only anthropologists who were trying to plumb these depths: in the early 1950s, at the same time Ardrey was conceptualizing his first book on the topic, Robinson Jeffers, one of only six American poets to make the cover of Time magazine, limned it this way:

  Never blame the man: his hard-pressed5

  Ancestors formed him: the other anthr
opoid apes were safe

  In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed

  In a million years: but the race of man was made

  By shock and agony …

  … a wound was made in the brain

  When life became too hard, and has never healed

  It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood-

  sacrifice,

  It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter

  men,

  And hate the world

  Jeffers’s original “wound,” whatever its cause, was probably not inflicted by big cats during the Paleolithic period. As tempting as it may be to imagine spear-wielding Stone Age hunters squaring off against saber-toothed tigers, both parties were most likely too smart, too specialized, and too pragmatic by then to bother with each other. That said, predation has been a recurring theme throughout our shared time on this planet, and the need to manage this threat, along with hunger, thirst, climate, competition, and the perils of overland travel, has impelled us toward our current state. Members of the evolutionary subtribe Hominina, from whom we directly descend, have been differentiated from chimpanzees for approximately six million years. There is no doubt that cats have been eating us and them—at least occasionally—since our collective beginnings.

  Compared to such mythic encounters, scavenging, i.e., meat gathering, is far less evocative, but it was gathering, carnal and otherwise, that surely kept our ancestors alive. Describing the return of a successful hunting party in the Kalahari Desert, the ethnographer Lorna Marshall summed up the gatherer’s age-old dilemma: “We heard the sound of voices in the encampment, rising in volume and pitch like the hum of excited bees.6 Some people ran toward the hunters … some danced up and down, children squealed and ran about … I venture to say no women have been greeted this way when they returned with vegetables.”