This may just be one of best things I read this year. Although the cover looks pretty kitschy and the blurb which describes it as a "true story" of a man-eating tiger in Russia makes us want to start out with a big pinch of salt, The Tiger by John Vaillant held me from the get go.
Vaillant has previously written for the New Yorker, National Geographic and Outside. This is his second book.
The Tiger is pretty hard to describe, it is non-fiction at it's best. First there is a harrowing account of a man-eating tiger that has killed a man in the Russian Far-East in the middle of winter in 1997. This is the late 90s Russia, and boy is it a mess. Everything is in short supply; and the problems are only compounded by the weather, the remoteness, and the Chinese right across the border who have an appetite for anything remotely tiger (or bear or leopard or sable, they aren't too picky, mind). The poor subsistence poachers who live here have to eke out a living in the taiga after their government-run logging company disappears overnight. One of the poachers unfortunately goes too far and robs a tiger of it's dinner (when it's not there). And the tiger comes looking for him.
Vaillant presents a nuanced tale of the post-perestroika Russia, and what it meant to these people. But it is not just that, he also manages to pack in a lot of information about early Russian explorers who first started settling in the Amur region (i.e. Russia's Pacific coast and it's hinterland) in the mid 19th Century. Interactions between "ethnic Russians" and the "natives" who called the snowy taiga as their home is superbly described. And it's not lost on Vaillant just how similar the American colonization of it's West and the Russian colonization of it's East were. Remarkably, even the native tribes here are culturally and genetically similar to the native American tribes, they just didn't cross the Bering Strait. But they faced the same problems: small pox, extraordinary racism, relocation and now of course crushing poverty. But since this is such an inhospitable land, they've managed to cling on unlike the Americans. We get to read a little bit about their myths and how they make their livelihood, and no surprises that the tiger dominates both of them.
The Amur tiger is the centre-piece of the book. (The author inserts once, a little tongue-in-cheek, that nobody would buy the book otherwise.) And Vaillant spends quite a bit of time discussing why. Just what is our fascination with tigers, and other similar large predators? These to me were some of the strongest discussions in the book. We read about our deep connections to predators, what it meant to our ancestral forebears to first walk the savannah with big, sharp-toothed animals stalking them. He recounts accounts by researchers watching baboons hide out in caves or trees after dark, did our ancestors do the same? Some humbling thoughts flit about: did we proudly start out as pack-hunters, well organized and large-brained or as simple scavengers who kept a wary eye out for the rightful owners of the meat we were making off with? Why do children instinctively know about predation without it being explained to them? (I can attest here, and I come from a vegetarian family). And what it means to make a living of the land, having a deep connection to both the animals and plants that live there. This may actually sound a lot like hocus-pocus and Vaillant knows that, so he inserts an account of two German scientists who ran away from South Africa to the Namib desert during WWII so that they wouldn't be incarcerated as enemies. These scientists, made a living on edge of the desert with various animals for two years. They weren't experienced field hands, but the sheer will to survive taught them how to track, set traps and make rudimentary weapons. They weren't comfortable by any means, but they lived. (This story really stuck with me, one of the survivors wrote a book: The Sheltering Desert which is on my TBR list now.) I think I'm convinced that we're equipped to live out there in the wild, but most of us have lost it (or never learned it). So when "tribals" say they can read stories in the sand or snow thanks to animal tracks, or read the wind, I've a lot of time for them.
The bulk of the book of course deals with the man-eater and it's unfortunate victims. There are short sketches of their lives, what their neighbours and friends thought of them. And just what turned the normally human-shy tiger into a man-eater? Was it just the theft of the meat, or did the first victim shoot and wound it? Was the first victim poaching tigers? (This was never satisfactorily explained.) I've grown up reading Jim Corbett and his shikar stories so this was something like an 'old wine in new bottle' feeling for me except that it was in Russia rather than India. We also read about the Amur tiger ecology and behaviour (when they don't turn man-eater that is). Then there are the people who should be guarding the tiger from poachers but are now tasked with killing the man-eater. These driven people were characters you will simply not forget. There is also the ecology of the "boreal jungle", animal behaviour and the Russo-China relations in this part of the world, and the epilogue that tells us what is happening in Amur tiger conservation now, all incredibly interesting and riveting stuff.
The Tiger is powerfully written, sometimes it is easy to forget you're reading non-fiction. Vaillant is a great stylist, you can hardly complain about the prose. And even though I was getting goosebumps reading about the man-eater prowling the wilderness at the dead of the night, I just couldn't put it down during the finale.
There is something in our psyche that draws us to understand these animals and their victims, and if it doesn't draw you, well you're missing out on quite a bit. Highly recommended.
Read From: 27-08-2014 to 29-08-2014; ePub copy.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
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