The Tiger

But Markov was a man—a close friend—and now it was as if he had exploded, shattered into pieces by this brutal, frigid life. The task of gathering, of re-membering, was almost too much to bear so the men worked slowly, numb and mechanical. “Try to get all the bones,” mumbled Onofrecuk, more to himself than anyone else. “Let’s try to get as many as

But it is the tracks that are most unsettling: the way they lead, mile after mile, down the Amba and through the taiga, directly into the path of the tiger. This, and the way the tiger did not hunt him, but waited patiently outside his door, as if he was expecting him, like a dog—or a hit man. A human being could not have engineered a more bitter r

Bengal tigers have been observed breaking the necks and skulls of buffalo with paw strikes. Reginald Burton, a British hunter, author, and longtime India hand, observed a tiger clubbing a beater (hunting assistant) so hard that its claws penetrated the heavy brass dish suspended from the man’s back.

Early humans, pre-fire, may well have been Paleolithic Wizards of Oz—masters of illusion and psyops who eventually, amazingly, willed their “impersonations” of superiority into fact.

The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.

Clark Barrett, a professor in the anthropology department at UCLA and an expert on predator-prey dynamics, describes the deer’s advantage as the anywhere but here principle: all a prey animal needs to do is be anywhere the predator isn’t—it doesn’t matter if it’s a foot away, or a hemisphere—and it will live another day. The predator, on the other

Many encounters, including those observed by scientists and captured on video, seem lifted from myth or fiction. The occurrence, and subsequent recounting, of such incidents over dozens of millennia has embedded the tiger in our consciousness. The tiger has been a fellow traveler on our evolutionary journey and, in this sense, it is our peer.

When Sokolov’s boss came to the hospital to explain what had actually happened—that he had stumbled on mating tigers—he ribbed him, saying, “You’re lucky that tiger didn’t try to fuck you instead of the tigress.” “Well, he should have proposed it to me,” Sokolov replied. “I’d have let him have his way with me if it would have kept him from biting.”

It was believed in Dersu’s time that if you killed a tiger without just cause, you in turn would be killed. Likewise, if a tiger were to kill and eat a human, it would be hunted by its own kind. Both acts were considered taboo and, once these invisible boundaries had been crossed, it was all but impossible to cross back. There was an understanding