The Tiger

by Jahn Vaillant

I had read Fire Weather by John Vaillant last year. It was a difficult but incredible read. I decided to read everything he had written.

The Tiger follows an Amur Tiger, also known as the Siberian Tiger that is found in the easternmost provinces of Russia of Primorsky. The region is one of the hardest places to live and also one of the poorest. Many of the people who live in the rural areas have to forage the forest and hunt for a living.

The Amur Tiger is a protected species in Russia. At the same time, there is incredible demand for the tiger in China because of their belief that the Tiger provides great strength and virility; many parts of the Tiger are considered delicacies.

In a region that is populated by incredibly poor people, such demand naturally results in poaching.

An Amur Tiger is big! They are usually 10 feet long and weigh about 250 Kgs. Their paws are bigger than a human face and their heads are as big as a wash basin.

This book follows an incident from 1997 when an Amur Tiger turned maneater. It began with the death of Markov, a poacher, attacked and eaten by the tiger. By the time his fellow poachers found his body, there was nothing left to bury.

By the 1990s the Russian policy had shifted towards conservation of the Amur Tigers and the officers in charge in Primorsky wanted to avoid a situation where they had to kill the tiger.

The natives of the region, the Nanai have existed in a delicate balance with the tigers and tigers are not known to hunt humans. They often kill their livestock and dogs, if other wild animals are hard to come by. At the same time, Tigers have been known to leave their hunt half-eaten for humans to scavenge.

Within a week of the first attack, a second man is killed by the same tiger. The paw prints leave no doubts in the minds of the trackers.

Thus begins a search for this man-eating tiger. Yuri Trush, who is tasked with conserving the animal must take a call on whether to let it live or to kill it. But before that, he must wade across the Taiga and find the tiger as Winter Solstice approaches.

While the book revolves around this game of cat and human, it also provides a lot of background on the ecology, geo-politics, and the struggles of the region.

By the end of it, you have a growing appreciation for large cats and nature in general.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book.