Reader’s Corner

Humans and large cats have circled one another for thousands of years. John Vaillant’s The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival rekindles the heat of this old relationship, and reminds us that a future for these animals demands not just our compassion, but our respect.

As the head of Inspection Tiger, a task force charged with enforcing poaching laws in the Russian taiga, Yuri Trush has confronted armed and desperate criminals alone in the woods, stumbled upon hunting accidents, and rescued lost humans from frozen Siberian winters. But what he found in the winter of ‘97, in the wilderness of Primorye, has stayed with him: the lean remains of a man, freshly killed and eaten by a tiger.

As Trush and his team investigate the killing, John Vaillant’s The Tiger—a true story—unspools into a tense and intricately researched telling of a few terrifying months in Sobolonye, a tiny settlement nestled deep in the taiga. Natural and human histories are here, too. We learn, for instance, that Siberian tigers possess an intelligence that borders on magic—magic that some believe can reel unlucky humans into a tiger’s ambit like a fish. In accounts of the tiger killing investigation, Vaillant re-creates the eerie fatefulness of the whole thing: there was evidence that the man who was eaten had been poaching—and eating—tigers himself. “He was doomed,” the dead man’s friend would later say. “You could tell by looking in his eyes.”

But this isn’t, finally, a book about tiger ferocity. It’s about two powerful animals—tigers and humans—who’ve learned to tiptoe around one another in tense but respectful relations. It’s when these careful relations are forgotten that teeth are bared and bullets are loosed. “It was men who were responsible for the aggression of this animal,” says Trush of the killing in Sobolonye. With human numbers growing and tiger habitat shrinking, these encounters are likely to increase—a bad thing for both species.

As of the book’s writing, fewer than four hundred wild tigers may remain in the Russian Far East—and if the tiger is permitted to go extinct in the wild, it will be the largest carnivore to do so since the American lion approximately ten thousand years ago. Numbers like these make a tiger attack on a human look like a bit part in a larger drama—one that has humans bound to nature in a big sweep of reciprocity, and headed, perhaps, for some other sort of dark confrontation in the woods.

About the Author
John Vaillant is also the author of The Golden Spruce. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic, and Men’s Journal, among others. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and children.

Learn More
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
By John Vaillant
Knopf, 2010. Kindle edition available.

Read an interview with the author.