The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  3: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

  In 1857, when Primorye was still technically Chinese territory, the governor of East Siberia (who was the czar’s, and therefore heaven’s, agent in the Far East) said much the same thing to a crowd of outbound settlers: “God be with you, children!12 You are free now. Work the land, make it Russian, and start a new life.” The Yankovskys, like so many other pioneers, took these words to heart and applied them to the forests of Primorye. This was unfortunate, because the tigers had already claimed these gifts for themselves. It is only in the past two hundred years—out of two million—that humans have seriously contested the tiger’s claim to the forest and all it contains. As adaptable as tigers are, they have not evolved to accommodate this latest change in their environment, and this lack of flexibility, when combined with armed, entitled humans and domestic animals, is a recipe for disaster.

  This may well be what got Markov into trouble. It is safe to say that had he not been carrying a firearm, he would still be alive. And had he not been so tightly linked to animals that trigger the tiger’s wolf-killing instincts, the likelihood of conflict would have dropped to nil. Remove guns and dogs from the equation and Markov would not have felt as bold, while the tiger would not have felt as threatened or protective. Even if there had been a dead boar lying in the snow between them, both parties would have responded to the situation very differently. Tigers will bluff-charge the same way bears do and, in most cases, all the tiger wants is an indication of submission. Under those circumstances, Markov would have deferred to the czar, and everyone would have lived to hunt another day. But guns and dogs are central to the tayozhnik’s identity; for someone like Markov, life here would be impossible without them. Furthermore, submission of this kind doesn’t come naturally to European Russians. Even had Markov wished to avoid a conflict with the tiger, seeing his dogs threatened or injured may have been too much to bear. Ivan Dunkai might be willing to sacrifice his dogs to the tiger, but not Markov.

  A graphic example of the lengths to which a hunter can go to protect his dogs occurred in October of 2008, in south-central British Columbia. There, in the forest outside the town of 100 Mile House, a forty-five-year-old hunter and tree faller named Jim West was out with his two Labrador retrievers, searching for moose sign. West explained to Carole Rooney of the 100 Mile House Free Press that he was unarmed and traveling upwind when “All of a sudden I heard a kind of a huff and a growl off to my right, and when I turned around there was a bear six feet away.”13 It was a black bear with two cubs. Caught by surprise, the bear, which weighed about 250 pounds, attacked. “I had no opportunity to hit the ground like I should,” West explained, “so I just started to kick her in the face. She jumped up and took a snap at my face, split my upper lip, and then I hit the ground, and she jumped on top of me, tore my scalp and bit my left arm.”

  At this point, the dogs entered the fray and attempted to draw the bear off. The bear abandoned West to pursue them, but as soon as West attempted to rise, the bear turned and attacked him again, this time biting his right arm. Again, the dogs intervened, and again, the bear went after them. Lying on the ground, bleeding from his head and arms, West tried to fathom what to do next. It was his dogs that gave him the motive and clarity to act: “I heard one of my dogs yelp,” said West, an intense and wiry man who stands about five-foot-nine (shorter than the bear, had she been standing upright). “I thought, ‘Well, you’re not gonna kill my dog.’ So I stood up; there was a stick at my feet. As I picked it up and looked, the bear was running at me full tilt and I in effect said, ‘Let’s go, bitch.’ So I swung the stick, hit her between the ears, stopped her dead in her tracks. And she shook her head and she was stunned, and I realized that if I didn’t continue, that bear would attack me again because I knew if I went down a third time I would never stand up. So, I just pretended I was driving spikes with a sledgehammer ’til that bear hit the ground, I saw blood coming out her nose. I then dropped the stick, wrapped my shirt around my head and told my dogs, ‘It’s time to go, kids.’ ”

  West was treated for shock and required sixty stitches in his scalp, face, and arms.

  “None of us had ever heard of anything remotely like this,” said Darcy MacPhee, the field supervisor who oversaw the investigation with British Columbia’s Predator Attack Team.14 “A bear is a pretty robust animal so we approached this from a very skeptical point of view.”

  Due to the extraordinary circumstances, an exhaustive necropsy was done and, in the end, it confirmed that West had indeed crushed the bear’s skull. “In that sort of situation, you only have one choice,” West said later. “It’s live or die. Most people are too scared to think about living.”

  There is every reason to suppose that, in the heat of the moment, Markov believed he faced a similarly stark choice. It was well known that Markov loved his dogs, and the motive to act decisively may have been identical. Had Jim West been in Markov’s situation with a loaded gun, there is no question what he would have done. “There are two categories of people when it comes to extreme situations,” said the leopard specialist Vasily Solkin. “One gets scared first and then starts thinking; the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter survive in the taiga.”

  Markov was certainly one of the latter, but sometimes that isn’t enough.

  Because of the early evidence supporting the theory that Markov’s death was an act of revenge by a tigress, Trush had not given much thought to the possibility that this attack might have stemmed from a confrontation between a tiger and Markov’s dogs. But he had his hands full: following his investigation of the Markov site on Saturday the 6th, and his return to Luchegorsk, Trush spent the 8th and 9th fielding reporters’ questions and issuing bulletins on radio and television, warning people who lived in the Bikin valley to be on their guard, and urging everyone else to stay away. However, once this was done, Trush went back to work, patrolling and responding to calls in other parts of his district.

  Meanwhile, life in Sobolonye had changed dramatically. In addition to being in mourning, many residents were justifiably terrified: who was going to be next? “Will the tigress leave the area, having completed her revenge?”15 wondered the news commentator on a local television station. “Or, God forbid, will she inflict more sorrows?”

  * For example, tigers are adept at distinguishing between the engine sounds of airplanes and helicopters; the former are no threat and are ignored, while the latter may be used for tracking and are responded to with evasive or aggressive action.

  * Tigers notwithstanding, the bear occupies a place of high honor in the pantheon of Primorye’s first peoples. The Nivkh (aka Gilyak), a coastal tribe whose historic lands abut those of the Udeghe and the Nanai, took this reverence the furthest by developing an elaborate bear cult in which a bear would be captured alive, housed, and fed—sometimes for years—and then ritually killed and eaten. There is no record of any indigenous people attempting to do this with a tiger.

  * Mikhail Ivanovich Yankovsky (Jankowski) was also an amateur naturalist who discovered many species of Far Eastern bird, beetle, and butterfly, some of which bear his name to this day, and many more of which he sold to European museums and collectors. His son, Yuri, made a name for himself as a tiger hunter and published two memoirs, including Fifty Years of Tiger Hunting (in Russian, 1944).

  * “Sixty-five tigers were said to have been killed in the [Vladivostok] district the year before my arrival,” wrote the British evangelist and traveler Henry Landsdell in 1879.10

  * As some Asian hunters did and do.

  12

  The only beasts that enter the myth complex are those that kill the hunter and those into which he is transformed.1

  JOSEPH FONTENROSE,

  “Orion: The Myth of the Hunter and the Huntress”

  FROM THE START, THERE HAD BEEN NO QUESTION IN THE MIND OF Trush’s squad mate, Sasha Lazurenko, that
the tiger was a male—not just any male, but an exceptionally large one. He had deferred to Trush, his superior, and to the circumstantial evidence pointing toward the avenging tigress because, initially, the tiger’s gender hadn’t seemed that important. The most reliable way to determine the size of a tiger without the tiger being present is by the paw prints. Typically, hunters and biologists will measure the forepaw, specifically, the relatively narrow “heel” which in Russian is called the pyatka (pyat-kuh). The value of a pyatka measurement lies in its consistency: physiologically, it is composed of a single heavy pad so it won’t spread or clench from step to step the way the broader and more flexible toes can. The pyatka also takes the most concentrated weight of each step and thus leaves the deepest and clearest impression. A large female Amur tiger will have a pyatka measurement of three and a half to four inches across the back of the heel, while males will start there and can go as high as five inches or more. Six inches is, at least by the standards of modern Amur tiger data, a giant. A tiger with a pyatka that size could only be a male and would probably weigh in the neighborhood of five to seven hundred pounds—bigger than any wild lion.

  Measurements were taken at the Markov site under favorable conditions; it wasn’t a heavy snow year, so everything, as the hunters say, was on the surface. The pyatka measurement that is burned into Lazurenko’s mind is 13.5 centimeters (about five and a half inches). Trush remembers the measurement as twelve centimeters. In the end, these differences would become moot. What mattered was that this was not only the biggest tiger in the Panchelaza, but for fifty miles around, and somehow Markov had crossed him.

  Born shortly after perestroika, the tiger was roughly six years old—just entering his prime mating years—and wherever he chose to live he would likely be the dominant male. After a good feed, he could weigh close to five hundred pounds, and yet he had the explosive power to make a standing leap over a ten-foot fence, or across a residential street.

  It is possible to determine a tiger’s gender, and even his identity, simply by looking him in the face; a male’s head is noticeably bigger and broader with a manelike ruff about the neck and tufty muttonchops running along the lower jaw. As with male humans, the male tiger’s nose is also bigger and heavier—in the case of some tigers, almost snoutlike. The Panchelaza tiger had a big nose, and, like a male athlete’s heavy brow and jaw, it was a clear indicator (among several) of this animal’s fully developed masculinity and natural inclination toward dominance. A tiger’s nose carries other clues, too: because the hair on it is so short and thin, it is one of the few places where battle scars will show, and this tiger’s nose was crisscrossed with them. He bore other wounds as well, and these would come to light in time. As young as he was, he was already a veteran and, as such, was perfectly poised to be the czar of his domain for years to come.

  When the tiger met Markov, he would have been in full arctic mode: thickly furred in a way that his southern counterparts would never be, he was insulated by a dense, woolly undercoat laid over with long, luxuriant guard hairs. From certain angles, he appeared as bushy as a lynx. His tail was a furry python as thick as a man’s arm. This was the winter tiger: not the svelte, languorous creature of long grass and jungle pools, but the heavy-limbed sovereign of mountains, snow, and moonlight, resplendent and huge in his cool blue solitude.

  Driven off Markov’s corpse by Trush and his men on December 6, the tiger limped eastward, halting periodically to nurse his wounded leg. Each time, he would lick and gnaw at the wound, cleaning away the blood and pus, but above all, trying to soothe that incessant, searing pain. A tiger’s tongue appears pink and soft from a distance, but it is actually covered in thornlike barbs, which are angled back toward the throat. They are so abrasive that they can pull out an animal’s hair and excoriate its hide like a rasp; it would have the same effect on the tiger’s own foreleg. Over the coming days, this cycle of travel and recovery would ebb and flow, but at this early stage, the tiger, crippled as he was, was otherwise perfectly fit. He had been well fed on forest game and could draw on the reserves he had built up during the fall and early winter before these latest encounters changed not only his diet but his modus vivendi.

  The tiger’s route led directly to the gravel highway and a road workers’ camp where the raucous stench of feces emanating from the outhouse would have manifested an almost physical presence in the still and icy air. To the tiger, it would have been as arresting as a siren. Because it was the weekend, the soldiers drafted to work on the highway had been trucked back to their base in Khabarovsk, and two watchmen had been left behind to look after the cabins and equipment. The outhouse was plainly visible from their caravan and they were terrified by what they saw.

  The tiger was following a human trail, but he was also, intentionally or not, reconstructing a story—a crime of sorts. This animal was now intimate with every nuance of Markov’s scent, an elemental mélange of blood, sweat, intestines, and dogs combined with gunpowder, woodsmoke, vodka, and cigarettes. In a very real sense, these two beings were now fully integrated. It wasn’t only Markov who had been irrevocably transformed; so, in his way, had the tiger: he had never had this kind of contact with a human before, and as a result he was no longer the same animal he once had been. His focus had shifted in a fundamental way. Now he was highly sensitized to the smallest trace of Markov, and to those who smelled like him, whatever form they might take.

  Markov had been a regular at the road workers’ camp just as he had been at Zhorkin’s. Both bases had resident crews and were stocked with supplies that Markov needed: cooking oil, rice, potatoes, and cigarettes; perhaps a little vodka. What these remote camps lacked was a steady supply of fresh meat, so when Markov bagged something big he would pack a haunch down the trail to barter. Trush interviewed the watchmen, and according to them, Markov had come by earlier in the month with some boar meat. Trush had a strong suspicion that Markov had robbed it from a tiger kill.

  One of a tiger’s jobs as keeper of a territory is to take inventory; a tiger needs to know who is around and “available.” When speaking of local tigers, Andrei Onofreychuk described them coming by periodically “to count us.” One of the most efficient ways to do this is at an outhouse. It may reek to high heaven, but it is precisely because of this that it is a gold mine of information. Tigers mark their territories in a variety of ways: by clawing trees, scratching the ground, defecating, and also by spraying a durable and redolent combination of urine and musk. When doing the latter, they often select sheltered areas—the undersides of bushes, leaning trees, and angled rocks—to ensure their sign lasts as long as possible. A camp latrine is a kind of human equivalent: a communal scent tree, and it is to a tiger what a compressed personnel file is to a CEO. From its concentrated off-gassings a creature so attuned may glean the latest information about who is present, how many, their gender, disposition, health, and, of course, their diet. In the midst of that olfactory cacophony at the road workers’ camp there may well have been two scents in particular that leaped out from the others: those of Markov and boar meat, specifically, meat from the tiger’s last wild kill. Whatever was in there was rank and ruined, but the tiger considered it his, and he tore that outhouse down to get at it, board by shrieking board.

  Under normal circumstances, a tiger’s menu is based on a handful of local prey species, but it can expand almost limitlessly to include lizards, snakes, turtles, frogs, crocodiles, crabs, fish, seals, grass, berries, pine nuts, livestock, eggs, monkeys, cow dung, bones, carrion, maggots, termites, locusts, birds, porcupines, pangolins, badgers, sables, squirrels, cats, dogs, dholes, wolves, rats, mice, rabbits, bears, lynxes, leopards, and other tigers. But even with such catholic tastes, it is hard to understand what would compel a tiger to rip the walls off a locked outhouse and devour the contents. This is a decidedly strange thing for a tiger to do. It may even be unprecedented. But if one of the last people to use it was Markov, and Markov and others had been eating meat that the tiger recognized as his, th
en there was a motive. Trush, for one, felt sure the tiger had scented Markov or its stolen meat. The tiger researcher Dmitri Pikunov believed the tiger was driven to such an extreme by hunger, but the tiger had been gorging on Markov and his dogs only a day earlier, and the scats left by his cabin were ropey with boar hair. This tiger wasn’t starving—not yet anyway. A sick or injured tiger can lay up for a week or two without food if it has to, and there was other potential prey around. With this in mind, the notion that the tiger smelled something in there that belonged to him, that enraged him, becomes more plausible. “Throughout the investigation,” said Trush, “we kept wondering why the tiger was pressuring the man so intensely, why he had been stalking him. It seemed that he wanted to settle accounts.” And, perhaps, to reclaim that which he knew to be rightfully his.

  Unarmed and without a vehicle, the camp watchmen could do nothing but piss in a bucket, gape through the glass, and pray the tiger didn’t do to their caravan what it was doing to the stoutly built privy thirty yards away. In the end, the tiger held them hostage for about twenty-four hours after abandoning Markov on Saturday the 6th and making the six-mile trek east. The watchmen had neighbors at the nearby Takhalo bridge maintenance camp, but no way to communicate with them. However, Sergei Boyko was on duty there that weekend and, having gotten wind of the Markov attack, paid a social call on Sunday. When the tiger heard Boyko’s vehicle approaching, he retreated into the trees to watch. The watchmen heard it, too, and they cracked the door, signaling Boyko to stay inside. “There is a tiger!” they shouted.