the tiger a true story of vengeance and survival

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.

Photos.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. Vaillant (The Golden Spruce) has written a mighty elegy that leads readers into the lair of the tiger and into the heart of the Kremlin to explain how the Amur went from being worshipped to being poached. Over millennia of shared history, the indigenous inhabitants had worked out a tenuous peace with the Amur, a formidable hunter that can grow to over 500 pounds and up to nine feet long, but the arrival of European settlers, followed by decades of Soviet disregard for the wilds, disrupted that balance and led to the overhunting of tigers for trophies and for their alleged medicinal qualities.

Northeast of China lies Russia s Primorye province, 'the meeting place of four distinct bioregions' taiga, Mongolian steppes, boreal forests, and Korean tropics and where the last Amur tigers live in an uneasy truce with an equally diminished human population scarred by decades of brutal Soviet politics and postperestroika poverty.

The grisly rampage of a man-eating Amur, or Siberian, tiger and the effort to trap it frame this suspenseful and majestically narrated introduction to a world that few people, even Russians, are familiar with.

The tiger a true story of vengeance and survival