I picked it up and looked, the bear was running at me full tilt and I in effect said, ‘Let’s go, bitch.’ So I swung the stick, hit her between the ears, stopped her dead in her tracks. And she shook her head and she was stunned, and I realized that if I didn’t continue, that bear would attack me again because I knew if I went down a third time I

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

Though typically a forest dweller, Amur tigers may hunt on the beaches as well, using sea fog as a cover for stalking game, and driving animals into heavy surf before subduing them. One young male was observed subsisting exclusively on harbor seals, going so far as to stack their carcasses like logs for future use.

The experiment was elegant in its simplicity. Using a toy lion and a toy zebra, Barrett asked each child, “When the lion sees the zebra, what does the lion want to do?” The results were surprising: 75 percent of the three-year-olds in both groups answered with some variation of “The lion wants to chase/bite/kill the zebra.” (It must be remembered

Arseniev’s account of his adventures with Dersu Uzala reflects a tendency among many Russian writers to use facts not as inflexible units of information, but as malleable elements that may be arranged, elaborated on, or added to as the author sees fit. Evidence of this can be found throughout the country’s nonfiction and journalism. On a practical

Snow has a muffling effect on all sounds, but in the case of a tiger, especially one making an effort to avoid detection, this effect is absolute. Meanwhile, Trush and Lazurenko announced themselves with every step; despite their best efforts, they might as well have been on radar. Their disadvantage was striking; it was as if the tiger had removed

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

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

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.”