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There’s a tiger on the hunt in far eastern Russia looking to kill a particular poacher for revenge. That’s the story of a new book called ‘The Tiger’. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with the author. (Photo: digitalART2) Download MP3
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. There’s a tiger on the hunt in the far eastern regions of Russia. And it’s looking to kill a man. Not just any man. It’s looking for a particular poacher. It’s out for revenge. That is the true story told in a new book called The Tiger. Journalist John Vaillant is the author and he joins us from the CBC studios in Vancouver. John, tell us about the title character, this male Siberian or Amur tiger and why he’s after this particular poacher, Vladimir Markov?
JOHN VAILLANT: The story unfolds in the winter of 1997, so 30 below zero, very, very difficult living circumstances for human and tiger alike. The tiger ran into a poacher and the border with China is very close by. There’s an active market in the late ‘90s and now for tiger parts. The poacher shot this tiger, wounded it. The tiger identified this man and hunted him in a very systematic way.
WERMAN: Now, tell us how long it takes the tiger to kill Markov after it gets injured and kind of what this tiger goes through to actually kill Markov?
VAILLANT: So, the tiger has been wounded in the paw, which seriously compromises its ability to hunt. But it’s identified the man. Tigers have a decent sense of smell. It’s wintertime. It follows this man back to his cabin which is in a very remote area in the forest. He stakes his house out. Markov, the poacher, wasn’t present at the time yet I think he knew better than to go directly back to his cabin. The tiger went to his cabin, basically trashed all his stuff. Went from item to item sniffing for his scent. When he found something like an axe handle or a water dipper, which he used to get water from his well, he destroyed it and literally tore it apart. And then he killed Markov’s dogs and basically ringed his cabin in tiger tracks. And then waited. Waited by his door.
WERMAN: Now, it would sound as if this tiger had a vendetta, but I guess biologists might question whether the tiger is really capable of holding grudges. So to what extant can you really attribute a motive to the tiger if you will?
VAILLANT: There’s no way that I or anyone else can fully integrate oneself into the mindset of a tiger, but I spoke with many hunters, many tiger biologists who vetted this book and also with the investigators. And the way this tiger behaved, it had this kind of single-minded focus of this man. They did ballistics tests on the bullets that were in the tiger and they were indeed linked to this poacher.
WERMAN: Well let’s talk about where we are, the setting for this drama. The time is the late 1990s, and I imagine far eastern Russia, this remote part of the country, hasn’t changed much since the end of the cold war. Tell us where exactly we are and what life is like there.
VAILLANT: We’re in the extreme southeastern corner of Russia, right on the Pacific ocean, in a mountainous territory called Primorsky Krai, which is actually a kind of [SOUNDS LIKE] dulap-shaped piece of territory that hangs down between the Sea of Japan and China. And it’s a wild place. Heavily forested, very mountainous, very sparsely populated. It’s where the Pacific fleet is berthed, so it’s important to the Russian military, but most Russians have really no understanding of it. It’s really like Mars, even for Russians.
WERMAN: Now, that’s a good point. I mean in terms of economics, the locals hunt these tigers because there are few opportunities for them. If you can bag a tiger, you can feed your family or, as you write, you can buy a car.
VAILLANT: Well, this is the tragedy really. The Russians, in fact, during the Communist period did more to rehabilitate that tiger subspecies than any other country has done. The tiger rebounded from the brink of extinction around 1940 to roughly 500 individuals. A huge growth in population. And there when the perestroika coincided with the opening of the border with China and there’s a bottomless appetite for tigers and tiger parts in China. And the Chinese have killed all their tigers and suddenly you have destitute loggers and hunters who have been failed by Communism suddenly being approached by Mafia and by Chinese middlemen and Russian middlemen saying, here’s 10,000, here’s 20,000, here’s a Toyota truck, you get us a tiger. Get it to the border for us and we’ll take care of the rest.
WERMAN: Now, the Amur’s a subspecies of the tiger family, kind of a cousin of the Royal Bengal tiger, only bigger, or as you say, an industrial refrigerator crossed with a cat.
VAILLANT: That’s true. It’s the only tiger subspecies that’s habituated to arctic conditions. So these animals can survive in minus 50 temperatures. They have a much thicker coat, longer hair. They’re huge. So 450, 500 pounds isn’t out of the ordinary.
WERMAN: Is there a headcount on how many Amur tigers remain in the wild today and what is the current situation with humans and tigers cohabitating in that part of the world?
VAILLANT: It’s dicey because that border with China is open and it’s porous. Now, I don’t think anybody really knows but the estimate is probably in the high 300s to mid-400s. Theoretically, that’s a sustainable population for that region because it’s the north. Because prey is more widely dispersed in cold regions. That’s a potentially successful number of tigers to have. But I think you can really never have too many at this point because the population is so at risk.
WERMAN: Journalist John Vaillant, author of the new book The Tiger. Thanks very much for speaking with us.
VAILLANT: Thanks for having me on the show, Marco.
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