Such tigers, he suggests, think and conspire the one that killed Markov did so because Markov had plundered one of its kills, triggering a vendetta that also resulted in the deaths of several other men in the area. Vaillant’s insights into animal behavior – he writes as if he’s inside the tiger’s head – make “The Tiger” particularly enthralling. It also is about the relationship between Umwelt and Umgebung, German words for, respectively, the world each being occupies individually and the greater world we all share.Ĭalibrating that balance is critical though man and tiger battle each other in Primorye, they also need each other, Vaillant suggests in his epilogue, noting that as of December 2009, “fewer than four hundred tigers may remain in the Russian Far East.” That tracking is the frame of Vaillant’s stark, curiously noble probe of a fragile balance between man and nature that has been grievously disrupted in the Primorye territory. Yuri Trush, the head of a Russian federal Inspection Tiger unit, is charged with tracking down the suspected beast. One of these tigers killed Vladimir Markov, a poacher attempting to profit from the trade in illegal tiger parts that blossomed between Russia and China in the early 1990s. “The Tiger” brings us into the heart of Primorye, a “remote and slender threshold realm in which creatures of the subarctic have been overlapping with those of the subtropics since before the last Ice Age.” Dotted with tiny, barely surviving communities, it is about the size of Washington State and the crossroads of four distinct bioregions – what Vaillant calls a Boreal Jungle, where timber wolves and reindeer share terrain with poisonous snakes, and the Amur tiger, an “apex predator,” rules. It’s nonfiction as riveting as any detective story. The Tiger is nature writing of the highest order and more it’s also a meditation on perestroika gone wrong, what it takes to keep a region going, and the relationship between predator and prey. John Vaillant connects us to the primitive and the primeval in his mesmerizing account of a tiger killing in far eastern Russia in the depths of winter 1997.
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