The Tiger by John Vaillant

Author:John Vaillant [Vaillant, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59379-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

In Primorye, between 1970 and 1994, there were six recorded tiger attacks that were classified as “unprovoked”; in four of them, the tiger appeared to hunt the victims as if they were prey. However, it is difficult to ascertain from the data how the prior history, or momentary desperation, of these animals might have predisposed them to hunt people. According to Suvorov, attacks on patrolling border guards were “entirely ordinary occurrences” during this period.

Earlier data—from mid-century and back—is patchy at best, but for what it’s worth no incidents of man eating were recorded anywhere in the Russian Far East from the 1920s through the 1950s (probably because the Amur tiger population was at an all-time low). In any case, most early attack reports are anecdotal accounts collected by travelers and, with the exception of the German lepidopterist whose remains were identified only by his butterfly net and jacket buttons, they tended to involve solitary Russian hunters, or Korean and Chinese ginseng collectors and railway workers, some of whom were reportedly snatched from their own beds. Chinese gold miners would also have been among the victims of an atypical rash of attacks reported by the famed Russian explorer Nikolai “Give me a company of soldiers and I’ll conquer China” Przhevalski. According to Przhevalski, twenty-one men were killed and six more were wounded by tigers on the Shkotovka River in southern Primorye in 1867.

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Regardless of whether Trush’s, Smirnov’s, or Vasily Dunkai’s scenario is closer to the truth, Markov had reason to believe the tiger might pursue him. It is not known exactly how long he remained sequestered after shooting the tiger, but on the morning of December 3, something emboldened—or compelled—Markov to leave his cabin and make the risky journey over to the Amba River, three and a half miles away. Perhaps he was searching for his dogs, or he may have been looking for backup to finish off the tiger. Whether the profit motive entered into his calculations is not known. However, Markov did not go immediately to see his friend Ivan Dunkai, but instead went northeast, to visit Dunkai’s son (and Vasily’s brother) Mikhail. Mikhail was never interviewed by Inspection Tiger, but in May 2008 he described the last time he saw Markov.

Mikhail Dunkai is in his early fifties, and he is a hunter and trapper like his father and brother. He is short and thickly set with a shock of black hair that falls across his forehead in bangs, the only straight line on an otherwise round face. Dark eyes glimmer through folded lids. Like his father, he had a good relationship with Markov and, over the years, they had shared meals, vodka, and each other’s cabins. Markov arrived at Mikhail’s cabin on the Amba shortly before noon on the 3rd, and he was clearly upset. “He was angry with the tiger,” Mikhail recalled as he stood in a recently thawed dirt track dotted with puddles and cow pats that serves as one of Krasny Yar’s main streets. “He was swearing at him; he was saying that we should kill, destroy, and wipe out the tigers.

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