The Tiger

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

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

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.”

“The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation,” he explained. “A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really? Sometimes, this brings staggering discoveri

In the Far East, paying protection money to the mafia and bribes to customs officials is cheaper than legitimate timber licenses and export duties. On a late night drive through the snowbound woods of the Bikin valley, it is not unusual to meet the black-market night shift—a Toyota van loaded with fallers and their saws, followed by a flatbed crane

In 2008, nineteen of the world’s one hundred richest people were Russians. This statistic is all the more remarkable when you consider that most major fortunes are either inherited or built systematically, over the course of a lifetime. Russia’s oligarchs, on the other hand, became multibillionaires virtually overnight, many while still in their th

When Russians wax eloquent about their homeland, they will often invoke Mother Russia, but Mother Russia is not the nation, and She is certainly not the leadership; She is the Land. The deep Russian bond to the earth—specifically, the soil—transcends all other affiliations with the exception, perhaps, of family. Likewise, the forest and its creatur

In the West, a certain level of psychological awareness—and the language to go with it—is taken for granted now, but in Russia, with the exception of some in urban, educated circles, this is virtually nonexistent. Stoicism isn’t so much a virtue as it is a survival skill. Of the people in rural Primorye, a longtime expatriate said, “Those folks are

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.